Boom! Boom! Boom! Something exploded in the dark night sky and tinkling sharp shards began to fall on us, and at once I felt cold and uncomfortable. There were machine guns firing! Again the guns rattled. “Down, Vousi,” I yelled, although I could not yet understand what was going on, and threw her down on the ground and covered her with my body against the bullets, whereupon blows began to rain on my face.
Bang, bang, rat-tat-tat-tat… around me people stood like wooden pickets. Some were coming to and rolling their eyeballs inanely. I was half reclining on a man’s chest, which was as hard as a bench, and right in front of my eyes was his open mouth and chin glistening with saliva… Blue-green, blue-green, blue-green… Something was missing.
There were piercing screams, cursing, someone thrashed and screeched hysterically. A mechanical roar grew louder over the square. I raised my head with difficulty. The panels were right overhead, the blue and green flashing regularly, while the red was extinguished and raining glass rubble. Rat-tat-tat-tat and the green panel broke and darkened. In the blue remaining light unhurried wings floated by, spewing the reddish lightning of a fusillade.
Again I attempted to throw myself on the ground, but it was impossible, as they all stood around me like pillars. Something made an ugly snap quite near me, and a yellow-green plume rose skyward from which puffed a repulsive stench. Pow! Pow! Another two plumes hung over the square. The crowd howled and stirred. The yellow vapor was caustic like mustard, my eyes and mouth filled, and I began to cry and cough, and around me, everyone began to cry and cough and yell hoarsely: “Lousy bums! Scoundrels! Sock the Intels!” Again the roar of the engine could be heard, coming in louder and louder. The airplane was returning. “Down, you idiots,” I yelled. Everyone around me flopped down all over each other. Rat-tat-tat-tat! This time the machine gunner missed and the string apparently got the building opposite us. To make up for the miss, the gas bombs fell again right on target. The lights around the square went out, and with them the blue panel, as a free-for-all started in the pitch-black dark.
Chapter SEVEN
I’ll never know how I arrived at that fountain. It must be that I have good instincts and ordinary cold water was exactly what I needed. I crawled into the water without taking off my clothes, and lay down, feeling better immediately. I was lying on my back, drops rained on my face, and this was unbelievably pleasant. It was quite dark here, and dim stars shone through the branches and the water. It was very quiet. For several minutes I was watching a brighter star, for some reason unknown to me, which was slowly moving across the sky, until I realized that I was watching the relay satellite Europa. How far from all this, I thought, how degrading and senseless to remember the revolting mess on the square, the disgusting foul mouthings and screechings, the wet phrumping of the gas bombs, and the putrid stench which turned your stomach and lungs inside out. Understanding freedom as the rapid satisfaction and multiplication of needs and desires, I recollected, people distort their natures as they engender within themselves many senseless and stupid desires, habits and the most unlikely inventions….
Priceless Peck, he loved to quote old pundit Zosima as he circled around a well-laid table, rubbing his hands. We were snot-nosed undergrads then and ingenuously believed that such pronouncements, in our time, were meant only to show off flashes of humor and erudition…. At this point in my reflections, someone noisily plunged into the water some ten paces from me.
At first he coughed hoarsely, spat and blew his nose, so that I hurried to leave the water, then he started to splash, finally became quiet, and suddenly discharged himself of a string of curses:
“Shameless lice,” he growled. “Whores, swine… on live people! Stinking hyenas, rotten scum… learned prostitutes, filthy snakes.” He hawked furiously again. “It bothers them that people are having a good time! Stepped on my face, the crud!” He groaned nasally and painfully, “The hell with this shiver business. That will be the day when I’ll go again.”
He moaned again and rose. I could hear the water running from his clothes. I could dimly perceive his swaying figure. He saw me too.
“Hey, friend, have a smoke on you?”
“I did,” I replied.
“Low-lifers! I didn’t think to take them out. Just fell in with everything on.” He splashed over to me and sat down alongside. “Some moron stepped on my cheek,” he informed me.
“They marched over me, too,” I said. “The people went ape.”
“But, you tell me, where do they get the tear gas?” he said. “And machine guns?”
“And airplanes,” I added.
“An airplane means nothing,” he contradicted. “I have one myself. I bought it cheap for seven hundred crowns…. What do they want, that’s what I don’t understand.”
“Hoodlums,” I said. “They should have their faces pulped properly, and that would be the end of that argument.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Someone did! For that you get worked over good…. You think they didn’t get beat up? And how they got beat up! But apparently that isn’t enough…. We should have driven them right into the ground, together with their excrement, but we passed up the chance…. And now they are giving us the business! The people got soft, that’s what, I tell you. Nobody gives a damn. They put their four hours in, have a drink and off to the shivers! And you can pot them like clay pigeons.” He slapped his sides in desperation. “Those were the times,” he cried. “They didn’t dare open their mouths! Should one of them even whisper, guys in black shirts or maybe white hoods would pay a night visit, crunch him in the teeth, and off to the camp he went, so there wouldn’t be a peep out of him again…. In the schools, my son says, everyone bad-mouths fascism: Oh dear, they hurt the Negroes’ feelings; oh dear, the scientists were witch-hunted; oh dear, the camps; oh dear, the dictatorship! Well, it wasn’t witch-hunting that was needed, but to hammer them into the ground, so there wouldn’t be any left for breeding!” He drew his hand under his nose, slurping long and loud.
“Tomorrow morning, I have to go to work with my face all out of shape…. Let’s go have a drink, or we’ll both catch cold.”
We crawled through the bushes and came out on the street.
“The Weasel is just around the corner,” he informed me.
The Weasel was full of wet-haired half-naked people. They seemed depressed, somehow embarrassed, and gloomily bragging about their contusions and abrasions. Several young women, clad only in panties, clustered around the electric fireplace, drying their skirts. The men patted them platonically on their bare flesh. My companion immediately penetrated into the thick of the crowd, and swinging his arms and blowing his nose with his fingers, began to call for “hammering the bastards into the ground.” He was getting some weak support.
I asked for Russian vodka, and when the girls left, I took off my sport shirt and sat by the fireplace. The barman delivered my glass and returned at once to his crossword in the fat magazine. The public continued its conversation.
“So, what’s the shooting for? Haven’t we had enough of shooting? Just like little boys, by God… just spoiling some good fun.”
“Bandits, they’re worse than gangsters, but like it or not that shiver business is no good, too.”
“That’s right. The other day mine says to me, ‘Papa, I saw you; you were all blue like a corpse and very scary’ — and she’s only ten. So how can I look her in the eyes? Eh?”
“Hey anybody! What’s an entertainment with four letters?” asked the barman without raising his head.
“So, all right, but who dreamed all this up — the shiver and the aromatics? Eh and also…”
“If you got drenched, brandy is best.”
“We were waiting for him on the bridge, and along he comes with his eyeglasses and some kind of pipe with lenses in it. So up he goes over the rail with his eyeglasses and his pipe, and he kicked his legs once and that was that. And then old Snoot comes running, after having been revived, and he looks at the guy blowing bubbles. “Fellows,” he says, “What the hell is the matter with you, are you drunk or something, that’s not the guy — I am seeing him for the first time…”
“I think there ought to be a law — if you are married, you can’t go to the shiver.”
“Hey somebody,” again the bartender, “What’s a literary work with seven letters — a booklet, maybe?”
“So, I myself had four Intels in my squad, machine gunners they were. It’s quite true that they fought like devils. I remember we were retreating from the warehouse, you know they’re still building a factory there, and two stayed behind to cover us. By the way, nobody asked them, they volunteered entirely by themselves. Later we came back and found them hanging side by side from the rail crane, naked, with all their appurtenances ripped off with hot pincers. You understand? And now, I’m thinking, where were the other two today? Maybe they were the very same guys to treat me to some tear gas, those are the types that can do such things.”