“Greet your visitors, it’s a search!” booms out of the dark blue night.
Gorelov rolls into the clubhouse holding a kerosene lamp in his extended hand and obligingly giving light for someone behind him. Two others enter, dressed so strangely and with such crimson faces that Ikonnikov doesn’t recognize them at first. Commandant Ignatov is wearing underclothes he’s pulled on haphazardly and he’s barefoot, with wet, tousled hair and a couple of birch leaves stuck to his forehead. Alongside him is Kuznets, the chief from the central office, but the only ordinary clothing he’s wearing is boots pulled onto bare legs covered with woolly black hair; his body is wound in a damp white sheet, over which he’s donned a reddish officer’s holster for some reason. Both men are carrying large wooden dippers that they click together zealously from time to time. They’re drunk, Ikonnikov understands, thoroughly smashed.
“Well?” Kuznets inquires with a threatening playfulness, lightly scratching at dark, tightly curled thickets of hair on a chest as broad as a sail. “What do you have here? Show me!”
Gorelov darts among the scaffolding like a mouse, making shadows from the lamp rush along the walls like a jumbled round dance.
“I can smell it,” he mutters. “I smell it, it has to be here.” Then there’s a sudden, triumphant, “Found it!”
Ignatov and Kuznets force their way toward his voice, entangling themselves in intersecting planks and knocking down some boards and tools.
In a yellow patch of kerosene light, several canvases stand haphazardly by the wall and on the windowsill. There are narrow, cobbled little streets with large, yellow crystal-like streetlights and café tables huddled together on crowded sidewalks; three-story buildings of bakeries and greengroceries wound in ivy and flowers, their first stories dressed up in awnings as if they were purple skirts; festive palaces with roofs covered in a noble emerald patina; and a river shackled to sand-gray embankments and steel bridges.
As Gorelov draws the lamp right up to one of the pictures, he sniffs at hardened, thick, glistening daubs of paint and digs at them with a fingernail.
“There it is,” he whispers, “absolutely pure, out-and-out anti-Soviet activity! Realest you’ll ever see!”
On the canvas is a long, narrow triangle, a tower of lacy metal set against a backdrop of malachite-green hills flowing toward the horizon.
“Hmm?” Kuznets’s face nears the tower and his overbearing gaze runs from the top of the tower’s head to its short-legged base, then back. One must admit that the look of this structure really is completely bourgeois.
“You’re dead meat!” Gorelov explodes, grabbing Ikonnikov by the jacket. “We excused him from work and didn’t spare the paints. There’s a whole container just of turpentine! And he’s doing this? Off to the logging site tomorrow! You’ll give me fifty percent over the quota, you louse!”
“As you were!” Ignatov swings broadly and whacks Gorelov in the chest with a dipper, as if asking him to hold it. Straining, he focuses his gaze on the canvas then shifts it to Ikonnikov, who’s skulking in the shadows. “What is it?” He asks this sternly, poking a calloused finger at the picture.
Ikonnikov looks at Ignatov’s hard fingernail that’s pinning the top of the Eiffel Tower to a transparent, dark blue Paris sky.
“That…” He feels his legs weaken, go numb, and scatter like sand as his insides sink down somewhere close to the ground. “That’s Moscow.”
Three pairs of eyes addled by alcohol fix their gaze on him.
“Moscow,” he repeats, throat dry. “The building of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.”
Eyes skip back to the canvas, attempting to discern some sort of inscription or placard on the tower’s wrought-iron veins.
“And here, at the bottom, see this? That’s administrative offices and there’s the Yauza River. Behind it is Sokolniki and the hills further away, that’s Elk Island.”
Ignatov exhales loudly, with a whistle, and shifts his gaze to Gorelov, whose legs are bent at the knees from bewilderment. He’s crouched and his mouth is agape.
Kuznets takes the lamp from Gorelov and illuminates another picture, where there’s a lively, festively lit street and a large windmill with bright, ruby-red sails.
“And this,” he asks, “is it Moscow?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I draw from memory. I’m a professional, my memory is almost photographic.” Ikonnikov’s feet are gradually starting to sense the floor and his insides are returning to their proper places. He turns the painting slightly and the Moulin Rouge flashes in all its red hues, from fiery red to purple. “That’s Sretenka Street, not far from the Kremlin. The red windmill is a symbol of the victory of the revolution – it was built back in 1927 for the tenth anniversary. And that…” He pulls another canvas into the circle of light to show an intersection of the green and gray rays of boulevards and residential blocks, where the Arc de Triomphe towers over the city like an imposing Greek letter pi. “These are the Nikitsky Gates. Right behind Tverskoi Boulevard, off to the left. Lenin spoke there in 1917, remember? Do you happen to have been to Moscow?”
“We’re Leningraders,” Gorelov says quietly and irately, through clenched teeth.
“Leningraders!” Ignatov grabs him by the scruff of his neck but can’t stay on his feet and drops to the floor, carrying Gorelov with him. Part of the scaffolding creaks, sways, and falls, scattering large pieces of debris on them both. Ikonnikov backs away, frightened, looking at the two muttering bodies bumbling around on the floor. Kuznets is laughing so hard he’s pressing his hands against his knees so he won’t fall, shaking his black head, and snorting from deep inside his gut.
Ignatov doesn’t have the strength to stand and he’s the first to crawl out, creeping on his belly.
“Let’s get out of here, Zin,” he mutters. “Gorelov, you fool, all we did was waste our time.” His gaze settles on an empty bathhouse dipper lying on the floor and he examines it in astonishment. “What, there’s nothing to drink?”
The guilty party writhes behind him, and the debris crunches.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Gorelov shouts eagerly. “Just ask Ikonnikov – he must have a supply!”
A supply really does turn up at the clubhouse and it’s not small. They drink right away, using the dippers. Kuznets forgets his squeamishness about local alcohol products and Ignatov’s mouth joyfully senses the sharp berry flavor he’s grown accustomed to. They’re sitting on the floor, scrutinizing spots on the future mural that’s flashing dimly on the ceiling; the spots sway and dance some sort of subtle, intricate tango or foxtrot.
“You’ll make me such agitational art,” Kuznets says, breathing the hot smells of vodka, fried fish, and home brew into Ikonnikov’s ear. “Such art that it makes people shiver! Their spines will tingle! To the very heels of their feet! You got that?”
Ikonnikov nods submissively. How could he not get it?
The tiredness that had been descending upon Ignatov suddenly eases after the home brew. He feels a wave of strong, furious joy rising from somewhere deep inside. He feels like laughing and now everything is funny: the scaffolding spinning in the nearly dark clubhouse, and Ikonnikov’s frightened, sober little face and his pendulous nose, and the hole Gorelov tore in his uniform jacket when he tumbled to the floor, and the sheet around Kuznets’s torso that keeps trying to slide off and bare the chief’s imposing loins. Ignatov jumps to his feet and sways but remains standing. He spreads his arms wide – “I feel so good, Zin!”
Kuznets is already rising, too. He’s regally tucking in the end of his sheet that had come loose so it’s under his holster, and he stomps to the exit, knocking over something heavy (maybe it’s crates, maybe it’s buckets) and booming along the way.