“Uh-huh… mmm…” said Andrei. Somehow he hadn’t thought of inviting Wang. “Apart from Izya, are you thinking of inviting anyone else from our crowd?” he asked cautiously.
“Our crowd? We could ask the colonel…” Selma said uncertainly. “He’s a really nice man… But anyway, if we do invite anyone from our crowd today, the Dolfusses should be first in line. We’ve been to their place twice already, it’s awkward.”
“If only it could be without his wife,” said Andrei.
“We can’t possibly invite him without his wife.”
“You know what,” said Andrei, “don’t call them yet, and we’ll see how things look this evening.” It was absolutely clear to him that there was no way Wang and the Dolfusses fitted together. “Maybe we ought to invite Chachua instead?”
“Brilliant,” said Selma. “We’ll set him on Madam Dolfuss. And everyone will have a good time.” She dropped her cigarette butt. “Shall we go?”
Raising dust, yet another crowd of Great Builders made its way from the foundation pit toward the shower block—sweaty, loud-voiced, chortling workers from the foundry.
“Yes, let’s,” said Andrei.
Following a grubby little sandy lane between two rows of puny, freshly planted lime trees, they came out at a bus stop, where two battered and peeling buses were still standing, absolutely packed. Andrei looked at his watch: there were seven minutes until the buses left. Red-faced women were pushing a drunk out of the first bus. The drunk was hollering in a hoarse voice, and the women were hollering too, in high, hysterical voices.
“Shall we ride with the louts or walk?” Andrei asked.
“Do you have time?”
“Yes. Let’s go. We’ll walk along the Cliff. It’s a bit cooler there.”
Selma took him by the arm and they turned left into the shade of a five-story building covered in scaffolding, then set off along a small, cobblestoned street toward the Cliff.
This was a desolate, abandoned district. The empty, shabby little houses stood at crooked angles; the roads were overgrown with grass. Before the Turning Point and immediately afterward, it wasn’t really safe to show your face here during the day, let alone at night—the whole area was full of thieves’ hangouts, shady dives, and dens of iniquity. It had been populated by moonshiners, fences handling stolen goods, professional gold hunters, prostitutes who fingered victims for muggers, and other lowlifes. And then measures had been taken: some of them were caught and sent to settlements in the swamps, to work as farm laborers; others—the petty riffraff—were simply scattered to the four winds. In the hurly-burly some of them were put up against the wall, and everything of value that was found here was requisitioned for the City. The city blocks were left deserted. At first, patrols still used to come in here, then they were canceled as unnecessary, and just recently it had been announced that the slums were due for demolition and would be replaced by a belt of recreational land running along the entire cliff edge within the city limits—a promenade and amusement park.
Selma and Andrei rounded the final tumbledown ruin and set off along the cliff top, walking up to their knees in tall, luscious grass. It was cool here—damp, cold air billowed up out of the Abyss. Selma sneezed, and Andrei put his arm around her shoulders.
The granite parapet didn’t extend as far as this stretch yet, and Andrei instinctively tried to keep a good distance away from the cliff edge—five or six steps.
Everyone felt strange on the cliff top. And apparently everyone got the same feeling here—that the world, if you looked at it from this spot, was clearly divided into two equal halves. Looking to the west, there was a boundless, blue-green void—not sea, and not even sky, but precisely a void of a bluish-greenish color. Blue-green Nothing. To the east, towering up vertically and blotting out the sky, was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow, with a narrow protruding terrace, along which the City stretched. The Yellow Wall. A solid, yellow Firmament.
Infinite Void to the west and infinite Solidity to the east. It was absolutely impossible to comprehend these two infinities. You could only grow accustomed to them. Those who couldn’t grow accustomed to them, who simply didn’t know how, tried not to come to the Cliff, so it was a rare thing to meet anyone here. Nowadays lovebirds were pretty much the only ones who came out here, and mostly at night. At night something in the Abyss glowed with a weak, greenish light, as if down there in the depths something was slowly rotting, century by century. This glow gave the black, ragged cliff edge a clearly defined outline, and everywhere here the grass was incredibly tall and soft…
“And when we build the airships,” Selma suddenly said, “what will we do then, go up into the air in them or go down into this Abyss?”
“What airships?” Andrei asked absentmindedly.
“You know, the airships!” Selma exclaimed in surprise, and Andrei realized what she meant.
“Ah, the airships!” he said. “Down. Down, of course. Into the Abyss.”
It was believed among the majority of the citizens working their daily hour at the Great Construction Site that a gigantic airship factory was being built. Heiger thought it best to encourage this opinion in every way that he could—without, however, specifically confirming anything.
“But why down?” Selma asked.
“Well, you see… We’ve tried sending up balloons—unmanned, of course. Something happens to them up there; they explode for some reason we don’t understand. So far not one has gone higher than a kilometer.”
“But what can there be down there? What do you think?”
Andrei shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Ah, you great scientist! Mr. Counselor.” Selma picked up a fragment of an old wooden board with a rusty nail in it out of the grass and tossed it into the Abyss. “To give someone down there a smack on the noggin,” she said.
“Don’t be such a hooligan,” Andrei said good-humoredly.
“But that’s the way I am,” said Selma. “Or had you forgotten?”
Andrei looked her over from head to toe. “No, I hadn’t forgotten,” he said. “Want me to tumble you over into the grass right now?”
“Yes,” said Selma.
Andrei looked around. Two characters in peaked caps were sitting and smoking on the roof of the nearest ruin, with their legs dangling. Right beside them, standing at a skewed angle on a mound of garbage, was a crudely made tripod with a wrecking ball dangling on a crooked chain. “They’re staring,” he said. “A pity. I’d have showed you, Mrs. Counselor.”
“Go on, tumble her over, stop wasting time!” someone shouted in a loud voice from the roof. “You young dork!”
Andrei pretended he hadn’t heard. “Are you going straight home now?” he asked.
Selma looked at her watch. “I’ve got to call in to the hair salon,” she said.
Andrei suddenly got an unfamiliar, exciting feeling. Suddenly he was very clearly aware that here he was, a counselor, an important member of the president’s personal chancellery and a highly respected man, who had a wife—a beautiful wife—and a gracious home, and here was his wife, about to go to the hair salon, because in the evening they would be receiving guests, and the guests would be not just anybody but all respectable and important people, the right kind of people, the best in the City. A sensation of sudden awareness of his own maturity, his own importance and responsibility—could that be it? He was a complete adult, a fully developed, independent individual, married. He was a mature man, standing firmly on his own two feet. The only thing missing was children—he had everything else that real adults had…