Georgi Dmitryevitch Gulia, born 1913. His first novel, On The Incline, appeared in 1930. In his novel As Long As The Earth Turns, published in 1962, Gulia depicts the life and work of Soviet scientists.
It was Sunday and Matamey Larsanba could allow himself the luxury of staying in bed an extra half-hour. There were at least two reasons for that, first—youth, and second—his position as secretary of the village Soviet, either reason not being devoid of a certain sanctioned dose of country leisure.
His parents, with whom he lived, went out of their way to spoil him. The young man’s father never chided him for those extra moments in bed which he enjoyed lying idle and thinking of nothing, while his mother always brought him a glass of hot milk and a bowl of cold hominy right to his bedside, as if he were a decrepit old prince.
This morning, however, there was to be none of the traditional half-hour of leisure nor the usual meal by Mother’s job-weary hands. Somebody was calling—he had to dress in a hurry and go out onto the porch.
“Are you asleep?” asked Saat Chkok, the school janitor. He was quite excited.
“Not any more,” Matamey said. “Anything happen?”
“Yes,” Saat informed, coming up onto the porch.
There is nothing worse than living close to the village Soviet or the school, Matamey thought. Anything happens and there they come crawling to you as if you were holy Mecca. He yawned langorously.
Saat, unshaven and now looking easily over fifty, sat down on the bench and asked for a smoke. It was a hot July morning, and the chickens, turkeys and other fowl already seemed worn out. In the distance the mountains exuded a light greyish mist through cool ravines. The day promised to be sultry.
“You knew our principal, of course?” Saat asked.
“What do you mean, ‘knew,’? I know him very well.”
“I say ‘knew’ because I’m not sure he’s still alive.”
Matamey was flabbergasted. “Andrey Butba dead?” he exclaimed. “But I just saw him last night!”
“I don’t insist he’s dead,” Saat corrected himself. “But I can’t prove he’s alive either. Something strange happened to him. That’s why I came running to you so early in the morning. Were it not for that I’d be digging in my garden now. It’s just the right season to tie up the tomatoes and give the beds a good watering. Because if we have a drought I’ll have to toil in the garden every day from sunrise to sunset and maybe even nights.”
“We said, ‘goodbye’ about ten last night,” Matamey recalled aloud. “He told me he wanted to work a little longer in his office.”
“My woman saw him this morning. So pale he was! I bet he didn’t sleep the whole night. He sprinkled some water on his face at the well and told her not to look for him. ‘I can’t go on any longer,’ he said to her. He said he was running off into the mountains—maybe even farther.”
“Farther than the mountains?” Matamey wondered.
“That’s what he said.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Who can tell, Matamey? He wasn’t a bad fellow. Fooling around with his books all the time. Even nights. Now that’s carrying it to far,” Saat opined.
“All mathematicians are a little crazy,” Matamey said.
“Why should they go out of their minds?” Saat asked with a smile. “Maybe they figure each number is a ruble? Can you imagine, two million? Of what? Rubles? Every night?”
“But why just two million?”
“I don’t know,” Saat drew deeply on his cigarette. “Maybe a hundred and fifty. Maybe as many rubles as kilometers to the sun.”
Matamey washed in a hurry, combed his hair, and put on his walking slippers. “I am ready,” he declared. “Let’s go.”
His mother only managed to see his hat as he closed the squeaking gate. The milk remained untouched.
2
The principal’s office was locked. According to Selma, Saat’s wife, the light had been on all night in one of the classrooms, in the seventh grade, to be exact.
“How do you know?” Matamey asked. “Did you get up at night?”
“No,” Selma explained. “The office is clean but the classroom is smoky.”
“She has a nose like a hound,” Saat acknowledged. “If she says so, you may be sure it is so.”
The seventh grade classroom bore the marks of an all-night job: a blackboard motley with mathematical formulas, papers littered over the desk and on the students’ pulpits, cigaret butts on the floor, and an empty matchbox. The air was stuffy.
“He must have had the windows closed,” Matamey said.
“He never liked fresh air,” Selma pointed out.
“He was afraid of catching cold,” Saat added.
Matamey picked up several notebook leaves—nothing but formulas. On the desk—formulas too. Velocities in kilometer-hours, distances in thousands of kilometers, powers in H.P.’s, and on the globe there, dotted trajectories shooting out from some unknown point, each marked with Roman numerals. Beside the globe, a chart—apparently to measure distances and velocities.
“What was he figuring?” the secretary wondered.
“Who knows,” Saat said.
“Didn’t he ever tell you anything?” Matamey asked Selma.
Selma, a withering woman, first shook her head in denial. “He was a strange man, though,” she added cautiously.
“We know that.”
“Besides,” she went on, “I never listened to him much anyway. Only when he told me to light the fire in the oven or sweep the floor …”
“Yah, yah,” the secretary of the village Soviet became annoyed. “Yah, we know all about lighting fires or sweeping floors, but this here, dear Selma, is a matter of much greater importance.”
Selma frowned. What is of greater importance than floors or an oven? she thought. That young official thinks too much of himself.
“Please think, what else did he tell you?” the janitor prodded his wife. “Think harder.”
“If I think harder, there’s nothing really. All sorts of junk.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Matamey said while looking through papers and studying attentively the mathematical equations on the board, “I’ve no doubt that our principal was working on some complicated calculations. As I can see, he was doing some research on flights.”
“On flights, really?” Saat asked in astonishment.
“I remember now,” Selma suddenly cheered up. “Only yesterday morning Andrey was telling me that in a few minutes one could fly as far as … I just can’t remember how far …”
“Here’re the flight plans,” Matamey showed the couple a circle encompassed with dotted trajectories.
“Nothing but foolery,” Saat decided.
Selma remembered something else, something that had seemed to come in one ear and go out the other. “He said the earth we live on is crowded as a yard.”
“What kind of yard, esteemed Selma?”
“A schoolyard.”
Saat chuckled. “If you ask me, Andrey’s senses went farther than his mind. No man of reason will start claiming that the earth is small. Just try and hike around the earth by foot, why, even our district. You’ll get nothing but corns and wear out more than half a dozen shoes. To tell you the truth, I had been noticing something funny about our principal for quite some time.”
“What for instance?” Matamey wanted to know, still studying Andrey Butba’s notes.
The janitor recalled a conversation between himself and Andrey of about two weeks earlier. A huge moon had been hanging in the sky, and while his wife had been sleeping like “a sack of wheat,” he couldn’t doze off. The principal had seemed exhausted. In the moonlight he looked like a man made of clay. His eyes, two glowing embers on a pale face, had drawn Saat’s particular attention. Of course, the janitor started to speak about the weather, namely that on a beautiful night like this one felt like soaring up like a bird.
“Like what?” the principal had asked, as if he hadn’t heard.
Saat had repeated his thought about the bird.
The principal sat down on his haunches, pulled out a pencil and began to draw some lines on the ground. What he drew the janitor couldn’t remember now nor had he been giving them any special notice. As a true son of the soil, a man of beds and green stems, Saat was an alien to any abstraction or even romanticism once it tended to tear him away from his fenced-in vegetable garden.
That night Andrey Butba had seemed to be reading some invisible letters. He had been talking in precise, clipped sentences, separating them by a fair amount of pauses. “Saat,” he had said, “let’s assume that the speed of flying machines in one year will increase by twenty to thirty percent. Now, the speed of three “M” gives already more than three-and-a-half thousand kilometers per hour. But that’s not the limit. Rocket planes can cover almost the whole earth in half an hour. But that’s not the limit either. Listen, Saat, don’t you think the earth is getting cramped?”
“Cramped? What do you mean, esteemed Andrey?”
“Very simple. Cramped like a prison cell. Only a few steps from corner to corner. Do you understand now?”
“No,” Saat had frankly admitted.
“Well, how else shall I explain it? It’s like, don’t you feel crowded on your vegetable plot?”
Saat had laughed out heartily. “Esteemed Andrey, on my vegetable plot I feel like on a shoreless sea—from one bed of tomatoes to the next planted with radishes its as far as from here to the Dardanelles. So help me. And why? Because I love my garden and adore the soil. I’m like a worm in the earth, so tiny, that sometimes I think I need a telescope.”
“Crazy.”
“I don’t care. Maybe I am. And what makes me crazy? The earth.”
“Listen Saat, how can you talk about a little spot of ground as if it were the universe?”
“And why not?”
“Come on, you’re not a worm.”
“And why not?”
“You just want to make me furious.”
“I’m not sure who’s doing which, esteemed Andrey.”
“It’s incredible, Saat. You call a plot of ground the universe, or even a planet. Our globe is a tiny part of the universe and that piece of earth growing five kilos of cucumbers and maybe that much of radishes …”
“Kindly do not insult my garden,” Saat interrupted. “To me it’s dearer than life.”
“And what about the universe?”
“What universe?”
“Our galaxy.”
“What the devil do I need it for? I’ve got enough of my few spans of earth where I feel like a king’s uncle.”
“Don’t you ever feel cramped, Saat?”
“Me cramped? Me? Never!” Saat had emphatically declared. “It’s amazing, when I enter my garden and the gate squeaks behind me like a kitten, I’m telling you, I feel very good … Very good indeed.”
Andrey Butba had shaken his head sadly. “Absolutely no co-ordination of space,” he had said, as if to himself. “A pitiful attachment to a two-dimensional world. A pithecanthropus view of reality …”
“I don’t understand you, Andrey.”
Saat hadn’t felt good that night. In the end it had dawned upon him that the principal was a sick man.
Selma agreed with her husband. “Andrey thought the whole world was too crowded for him,” she concluded.
“The whole world?” Matamey found it incredulous.
“Yes, the whole world.”
“Wait a moment, here’s a note,” Matamey picked up a slip of paper from the floor. He read it carefully, then looked from Selma to her husband. They’re telling the truth, he thought. Once again he read the note, unquestionably Andrey’s.
“All right,” he told Selma, “collect all these papers, everyone of them, and keep them in a safe place. The militia may want to look at them, and now, Saat, I think we ought to go and look for our principal.”
“Look for him where?”
“I don’t know myself where,” the secretary of the village Soviet said. “If one is to agree with what Andrey wrote on that note, the whole world is one big jail cell, and our principal might be at this moment even as far as the end of the world.”
The husband and wife glanced at each other.
“I’m sorry for him,” Selma said. “Thirty already and no living soul in the world. Always alone. And all those papers. That’s enough to make you lose your marbles.”
“With a wife he’d have gone off his head much sooner,” Saat observed. “Your family isn’t that much of a honey pot.”
The woman didn’t argue with her husband. This toiler drudging in his soil from morning to night, she thought, could also use some of God’s wisdom.
The men left.
3
It was a sweltering sun. Matamey and Saat crossed the schoolyard and took shelter under an acacia tree growing at the gate. It was cool in the shadow; one found it hard to believe that the great fire in the sky was still scorching the earth.
The secretary of the village Soviet was contemplating the plan of action. He was reluctant to stir up a commotion about the mysterious disappearance of the principal who, after all, was a co-villager and neighbor. Besides, Andrey might not have disappeared, he might have decided to go to town on a Sunday.
“Saat,” he suggested, “let’s for the time being keep the whole matter between the two of us.”
“Oh sure, sure,” the janitor agreed.
The village store was no more than a hundred paces away. It may be a good idea to stop in at the trading post and possibly pick up some news, Matamey thought.
“If we have no rain everything will burn out to a crisp,” Saat pondered aloud.
“Everything but your little garden,” Matamey countered.
“Yes, I’ll have to save it,” the janitor consented. “I’ll water it every night, even if I have to carry the water in my mouth. I won’t let it die.” They were slowly walking to the store.
“Saat,” Matamey asked, “is there anything in the world you love more than your garden?”
Saat considered the reply for a moment. “No,” he declared.
“That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
“It’s good that you’re like that, Saat.”
“You may laugh as much as you want, but my soul is in the garden.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“I’ll never understand that Butba,” the janitor went on. “Maybe he’s a saint and I’m an arrant sinner. It must be either or. There he goes climbing somewhere up to the skies and me, I feel blissful staying here on earth. Do you understand, Matamey? Fresh cheese, hot hominy and fresh fruit—what else does a soul need?”
“Nothing else, according to you. Isn’t that so?”
“Absolutely a null nil.”
“That’s a thought worth mulling over,” Matamey said, walking up onto the concrete step of the village store.
Behind the counter, as usual, stuck out the lean, lanky storekeeper Kadyr Eshba, a fellow who seemed not to belong to this village store where the ceiling was low and all the commercial activity limited to a trade of low finances. Eshba’s humped nose and thin neck might look good in a flourishing city univermag but never here in this shanty which always smelled of sour milk and household soaps.
“Good morning, Kadyr,” Matamey announced. “How’s life? How’s business?”
The storekeeper’s reply was curt but to the point—a raised index finger of his right hand.
“That’s good,” Matamey said. “It’s a pleasure to see a man who always greets you pleasantly and each time in a different way.”
“Our Kadyr will never cheat anybody,” Saat remarked obsequiously, sitting down on an empty nail box.
“You see,” Kadyr explained, “every time you’re about to cheat somebody you stop and think. And you refigure again and again. You’ve got to have a head for that … And you always ask yourself, what for? Do you really have to?”
It was a quiet morning, with no buyers around, and that had set Eshba in a philosophical frame of mind.
“I see they haven’t given you the jitters yet today,” Matamey said. “You’re still in a good mood.”
“Right you are,” the store manager agreed. “You’re my first customers if I’m not to count the school principal who showed up quite early, almost at daybreak.”
Matamey and Saat exchanged knowing glances. “What did he want so early in the morning?” the secretary of the village Soviet pretended indifference.
“Bread, sugar,” Kadyr said. “He also bought a knapsack, like the one tourists buy. I had it lying around for a whole year …”
“A knapsack?” Matamey perked up. “What did he want with that?”
“He said he was going up to the mountains.”
“Where?”
“Up to the mountains,” the storekeeper repeated. “Toward Suipsara.”
“For long?”
“That he didn’t tell me.”
Matamey leaned against the counter. “You see, Kadyr,” he confided, his head on his elbows, “our principal is not at school. Please tell us where he is; we need him desperately.”
Saat nodded in agreement.
“But I’ve told you where,” Eshba said. “He’s on Suipsara, that is, not there yet, on his way there.”
“What would he want there?” Matamey asked in a hollow voice.
The country Mercury did not know that. “It might be just for a little walk,” he suggested. “Something like a tourist, it’s quite fashionable nowadays …”
“A little walk?” Matamey couldn’t hide his astonishment. “By himself? Without telling anyone?”
“He was very absentminded,” Kadyr spread his stalklike arms. “Hadn’t brought any money with him. I had to give it to him on credit.”
“Why didn’t he run over for the money. It’s just next door.”
“Andrey was terribly rushed.”
“To climb the Suipsara? Without money? Didn’t you think that was rather strange, Kadyr?” the secretary of the village Soviet demanded.
“No. Now I do, though,” Eshba admitted.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Matamey said. “Between us, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”
Kadyr crossed his arms and gaped at Matamey.
“He wrote up a lot of little paper slips,” Saat remarked.
“What kind of paper slips?”
“Just paper slips, from a notebook.”
There was the noise of a car outside. The obese doctor Daj Bganba scrambled out of the vehicle. In spite of his forty years and generally-known gluttony, the doctor still looked spry and fit. People who ought to know maintained that it could have been worse, as a matter of fact so bad that no truck would have been able to hold him up.
“Greetings to an honest group,” the doctor boomed. “I’m at your mercy, Kadyr. Save me. A bottle of mineral, please, I beg you.”
“Doctor?” Matamey asked. “Which way are you going?”
“Into town.”
“Will you give us a lift to the mill?”
“Unquestionably.”
The doctor rinsed his throat, emptied two bottles of mineral (his usual ration), and after throwing a few coins on the counter, he wheelbarrowed his belly toward the car. Strangely enough, though, when the car rolled out onto the road, it moved rather smartly, without a hitch.
4
Saat dozed off at the end of the first kilometer. Matamey curiously watched the expression on the doctor’s face as he was swearing at each road bump. “Listen, Daj,” he asked the epicurean physician when they reached the asphalt highway, “was our school principal ever your patient?”
“You better ask who wasn’t.”
“Take me, for instance.”
The doctor gave him a wry look. “Just wait until you catch something and you’ll come running to me.”
“You’re sure?”
“You mean that you’ll catch something?”
“Yes.”
“Quite.”
“What are you going to do in town?”
“My friend,” the doctor bubbled, “I’m going to welcome the steamer Abkhazya. First, a few boys and myself are going to have some Odessa beer, then we’ll take a ride to the railroad station where they sell the best cognac, on the Moscow-Erevan express, you know.”
“Quite some program,” Matamey sighed.
“I should think so.”
Matamey returned to the original question. “So Audrey Butba was a patient of yours?”
“What do you mean ‘was’? He still is.”
“I’m asking you officially as the secretary of the village Soviet.”
“And I’m answering officially,” the doctor slowed down. “What happened?” he seemed worried.
Matamey found it difficult to believe that the doctor was worried about a patient. He had always thought there was not a humane vein in that mass of flesh of Daj’s. How could a physician be humane when he fleeced his patients out of eggs, live chickens, sour milk—apart from the money he took. He told the good doctor about the principal’s disappearance. “Any opinions?”
The doctor switched to high gear again. “A psycho, that’s what he is,” he declared, waving his arm.
Matamey was astonished.
“Why should you find it so strange?” Daj asked. “We’re all psychos. I’m a psycho, you’re a psycho, everybody … This is the atomic age, mind you. Psycho doesn’t necessarily mean insane, just well … as we say, a variety of a neurosis. Andrey, though, let me tell you, is a true psychopath. He racks his brains too much and thinks too hard. To a colleague I’d diagnose his sickness as agoraphobia.”
“Agoraphobia? What’s that Daj?”
“Fear of open spaces. A man suffering from this sickness locks himself in a closet …”
“Not at all, Daj, not at all,” Matamey interrupted.
Daj stopped the car on the road shoulder. “What not at all?” he asked, turning his thick-lipped face to the secretary.
“What I think, Daj, is that Andrey was not afraid of his house or the village.”
“Of what was he afraid then?”
“Of the earth. The earth began to look tiny to him.”
The doctor opened his mouth wide with astonishment. “In that case,” he shouted after a pause, waking Saat, “if what you say is true, his sickness is geophobia, fear of the earth. It is the sickness of our cosmic age. You see, man begins to feel cramped on this earth, he wants up, up through right there,” Daj stuck his finger into the ceiling of the car. “That reminds me, I’ll have to scrounge up a lamp for the ceiling.”
The doctor’s diagnosis seemed correct. Geophobia, this was something new. Was anybody else ever afflicted by it? Matamey asked himself. Hardly. Anyway neither Socrates nor Pythagoras could have had it. So where did this village scientist contract it? Apparently that thin, effeminate, semi-egghead semi-peasant was deluded by his own fantasies and calculations into a positive belief that his fantasy was not a legend but the reality. In the end, as the world became too crowded for him, or rather, for his thoughts, Andrey began to feel bad … That’s how it must have been.
“Where did you say you were going?” the doctor asked, stepping on the gas.
“To the grain mill,” Matamey replied. “We want to have a talk with Butba’s only relative.”
“I understand,” Daj bellowed. He handled the car as surely as he examined a patient’s heart or felt his pulse, driving in a detached way, not being distracted by anything approaching or overtaking him. “Don’t worry,” he comforted Matamey on parting, “we’re all psychos. Our Andrey Butba won’t get lost. Give him my regards.”
5
The mill was as busy as on a workday: the river roared, the grindstones grated, a thin flour dust hung in the air. The miller, Mas Bargandgia, sat on a big stone, smoking a pipe. Very likely in immemorial times of Homer, when the Argonaut plied toward the shore of Caucasus, the Colchice had mills like this; and then, too, like now, streams flowed down along clay beds in the shades of inaccessible blackberry bushes. In short, this place had the aura of antiquity, an antiquity that was lovable, a little melancholy but very dear to sentimental souls.
Sprinkled with corn powder, Mas appeared to be as antique an establishment as his rather crooked, rather musty, rather overworked millhouse. And yet, he was only sixty-five years young, young indeed by Abkhaz standards of age.
The heavy duty of reporting to the miller the highly unpleasant news of Butba’s disappearance was left to Saat. It was supposed that no matter how distant a relative Andrey was, Mas’ humanitarian heart would shrink at the first words of the grief-bearer, and Saat, being the senior by age, was more endowed to fulfill that mission than the younger village Soviet secretary.
Their arrival was a surprise to Mas—not too often did the secretary of the village Soviet visit a grain mill. He offered Matamey a seat on the stone while he let himself down onto the shaky steps leading to the oscillating mill yawn.
“God beware if this dry spell lasts a little longer,” the janitor opened the conversation, panting heavily.
“What if it does?” the miller asked.
“The crop will be lost.”
“It won’t, Saat,” Mas assured. “Nature knows its business. Nature is no mill. A mill needs someone to look after it, but nature can get along without us.”
“Easy to say,” Saat denied. “I say just take and mix things up and you won’t have anybody to blame but yourself.”
“It’s always like that,” Matamey observed. “If no rain is coming, there won’t be any. If there’s a hot spell, there will be one too. You might stand on your hands but you won’t change it.”
These somber thoughts brought to mind not only a man’s helplessness but our planet’s shortcomings as well. Hell, no wonder that Andrey didn’t feel well.
“See that accursed water,” the miller pointed his index finger over his shoulder toward the roaring stream. “That water will teach wisdom to any fool. You sit here day after day and listen to it bubbling to you all sorts of rigmarole. And yet, that thing there is not even alive. To be a good miller you’ve got to have a head on your shoulders—you need no hands at all. And what do you need not to worry about droughts or torrents? A heart. I’m serious. A heart will make you love the soil and this means everything—a good crop and riches. Because love comes from the heart! And from love comes good crops. So stop blaming nature. Nature hasn’t changed since creation and it’ll be the same on doomsday in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.”
“In other words that little river will take you to the Bible,” Matamey said.
“You mean you have read the Bible?”
“No.”
“But I studied it,” Mas went on. “In parish school. And why am I telling you all this? You’ve got to have wisdom, like an apostle. But we, all we’re concerned about is petty business, how to live through today … But do we think about tomorrow? Or what’s going to be a hundred years from now?”
“We think about it,” Matamey said hesitantly.
“Fiddlesticks! We don’t. Take Saat, for instance. What do you think about, Saat?”
Saat smiled. “You want an honest answer?”
“What else.”
“I think it would be nice to have a bite. Haven’t had a poppy seed to eat since early morning.”
Without a word in reply the miller went inside and brought out a few pieces of cold churek meat pie, cheese and a bottle of wine. Saat didn’t refuse. “Matamey and I are hungry like dogs,” he said, “How about a glass?”
The miller rinsed a glass in the stream and handed it to the janitor.
“The thing is this,” Saat resumed, “Matamey and I have been out since early morning on an unpleasant task. … To your health,” he took a sip of wine and poured some to Matamey who being the younger had politely refused it earlier. The miller had guessed that those two did not come just for a chat. And the conversation about the weather was not just chat either. Whoever heard of people traveling for hours then talking about the weather? Only fools would do such a thing and their number in the world was apparently getting smaller and smaller. Therefore, he was waiting patiently for his guests to broach the true topic. His patience was rewarded.
“Listen, Mas,” the janitor inquired. “Did Andrey Butba stop here this morning?”
“Andrey? I haven’t seen him in ages.”
“Strange!”
“You see, Mas, Andrey has disappeared somewhere. We’ve decided to ask you, in any case. After all, he’s a relative of yours, even if many times removed. …”
The village Soviet secretary broke into the conversation and nimbly, in a few words, presented the gist of the matter to Mas. The young man, being quite prudent for his age, was careful to leave out the guesswork and skip the geophobia bit, as well as their conversation with the doctor. It was absolutely necessary not to tax the old relative’s heart.
Listening with the utmost attentiveness of which only the ancient wise men were capable, the miller puffed on his pipe and stared at the tip of his slipper. Finally, after an agonizing pause, also according to the ways of the ancient, he uttered in a firm and decisive voice, “He was taken ill!”
“Why should you think so?” Matamey tried to comfort him.
Saat hastened to clarify: “Andrey began to feel cramped on this earth. He felt crowded like your grindstone in your little pantry. So he fled to Suipsara.”
“But why the Suipsara?”
Saat spread his arms.
“No doubt I, too, will have to set out to search for him,” Mas announced, as if the matter were settled. Then he rose, covered the dike to halt the grindstones, and hung up a barn lock on the door.
“I’m ready,” he exclaimed.
Saat emptied the wine bottle to the last drop, took a bite of cheese, and apparently having regained his strength, he, too, was ready to go to the end of the world. Using an old cliché, he said, “When the belly is full, the legs are ready.”
“What’s that sickness called, Matamey?” the miller asked. “Come on, tell me, don’t be shy.”
“It’s a new sickness. Andrey’s the first to have it.”
“In other words, there’s no cure for it yet.”
“That I don’t know,” Matamey was evasive. “A man begins to feel crowded on this earth, but he doesn’t run to do away with himself—he runs to the open spaces. He climbs mountains. He wants to be closer to the stars. He believes he has outgrown the cocoon he was born in. He wants the universe!”
A pensive mood overcame Mas. “He wants to go to the moon,” he finally said, after shaking off some flour dust.
“Maybe even farther.”
“How much farther can you go?”
“To the stars.”
“A bad sickness,” Mas diagnosed.
“What could be worse?” Saat consented. “You don’t have to crawl out of your skin to run away someplace. Let me tell you this: my garden is cleaner than any moon or any star. Just make a little hocus-pocus over your fruit and watch them fill up with juices. No friends, give me a million, and I still won’t leave this earth. I’m tied to the earth with such a strong navel cord that nobody can cut it.”
“Old wives’ tales,” Matamey waved his arm. “A mite’s philosophy.”
“Who needs giant philosophies?” Saat argued, “I’m teensy-weensy and so’s my philosophy. Isn’t one sick man enough?” he began to shout. “Go and get people back to earth!”
Matamey shuddered. Another one going off his mind, he thought glumly.
“Let’s go,” Mas suggested. “We’ll have time to argue on the way.”
6
Mas Bargandgia walked in silence, tilting out his torso as if he were spinning the terrestial globe with his feet. He was wondering what the farmers would think when they’d come at noon for their flour and wouldn’t be able to get it. And all because of that Andrey’s foolish obsession. He was always like that, even as a boy. In the privacy of his mind Mas had to admit to himself: kinship is kinship, no matter how far removed.
Without seeming to be tiring through chatter, Saat talked and talked. His words were flowing like the river that turned the waterwheel. However, his words never moved anyone to work—they were like the leaves in the wind. When it came to long-winded speeches, Saat was a master. Instead of saying simply, “I planted parsley,” he said, “I planted a great little grass which, so help me, adds aroma to any sauce and brings a good price on the bazaar so that, you see, it’ll not only pay for itself but even bring in a nice little profit too, that is if I nurse it through properly and don’t let it look like a withered grass on a dry summer.” Passing to tomatoes, he marveled, “Those little red globes that I planted on my beds, the ones that resemble gold, those things known by simple names, they’re quite expensive, quite expensive.” He went on telling how he’d crumble clumps of manure with his fingers, with greater solicitude and patience than that of Benvenuto Cellini in minting the medals for the pope. Saat was capable of quoting fruit prices for the last ten years faster than any cybernetic machine, although he had no conception whatsoever of logarithms, square roots, not to mention cubic roots. His knowledge in that area was limited to the multiplication table found on the students’ notebook covers. Fools like him were to be counted on one’s fingers in the whole of Abkhazia.
If only we could hitch a ride, Matamey thought. But that was out of the question; this dusty road was nothing but a mule track, and besides, who’d go up this way on a Sunday? He was getting quite hungry and couldn’t imagine how long they’d have to go on without food. “Listen, Saat,” he said, “your talk about fruit is giving me an appetite.”
“I know it does,” Saat said cheerfully, “my fruit will do even more than that.”
“Windbag,” Mas growled.
“What did you say?”
“I said you’re full of wind, Saat,” the miller told him. “What kind of rubbish are you telling about grasses? A grass is a grass, no matter how you look at it.”
Saat stopped as if he had bumped against an invisible wall. “Are you serious?” he shouted.
“Quite.”
Saat quickened his pace. “Oh grief,” he uttered like a stricken Hamlet. “The day you don’t have this grass around you may write off everything.”
“No I won’t. I won’t write off a single word.”
“No, you will!”
“To heck I won’t.”
“More than that. You will abandon your thousand-year-old mill and hurl yourself into the garden beds. You will cultivate this grass and praise God besides.”
“Wait,” Mas bellowed. “I’m tired of praising God for everything—for being born, for food, for water, and for the fact that I’m alive. I’ve had enough of it. In return for that much praise, God could have covered me from head to foot with gold, not flour.”
“What a man!” Saat thrashed his arms. “Are you trying to get me riled?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Get you riled.”
“Listen Matamey,” Saat requested, “You’d better arbitrate. It’s impossible to talk to him.”
At that moment, ahead loomed the little store of the geranium state farm. It looked so tidy under the canopy of weeping willows that the flaring tempers of the two men suddenly subsided. There was nothing to arbitrate any more apart from the empty flow of words which Matamey knew so well. From his own experience and from the experience of relatives.
7
Their guess was right—the store carried almost everything needed to convince one that this was the age tens of thousands of years removed from pithecanthropus. The three men passed a critical eye over the wooden shelves well stocked with displays of Moroccan sardines, Greek butter cookies, Murmansk cod, Iceland fillet, Pacific herring and sundries of this sort of food.
“I could eat buffalo cheese,” Saat went into a reverie.
“Cheese?”
“Naturally. Our own, Abkhazian.”
The salesman, one Eugen Chizmaa, made no reply. A trade graduate, just starting in this business, he was thin looking, that is, neither fat nor lean, the typical meritorious counterman, an artist by his own right. Glum-faced, shifty-eyed, he gave the impression of being busy doing something illegal, something one ought to be ashamed of. Finally, in reply to the janitor’s question, he mumbled something.
“I can’t hear you,” Saat said.
The other two travelers picked something from the foreign selection in addition to a bottle of Abkhazian wine and took it out to a shaded place not far from the store door. For a while Saat stained to extract from the salesman a kind word or at least a smile—in vain. Admitting failure, he joined his friends outside.
After a manly lunch, a meal that lasted exactly the time required for three cans of meat and two kilos of bread to be transposed to three stomachs, the men were ready to set out again.
“Eugen,” Matamey returned to the store, “did you by any chance see the principal of our school?”
“No.”
“They say he was walking up this road.”
“He hasn’t been here.”
“He was on his way up to the mountains, they say.”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean you haven’t heard anything about it?”
“About what?”
“About that he was seen on this road.”
“No.”
Matamey tried to inject some humor into the conversation. “When are you getting in Abkhaz cheese?” he asked.
“There’s none here.”
“But when is it going to be here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe your joint will some day be trading with churek. Can you imagine, churek and cheese? What a combination!”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do I talk in a way you don’t understand?”
“Yes.”
Matamey pitied the man—no sense of humor! What makes a man like that enter the services of Mercury? Fortune-hunting? Hardly—none here. So what then? A desire to do good? What good? So what then? This Abkhazian sphynx in the image of a salesman named Eugen Chizmaa defied understanding—he seemed more enigmatic than the Egyptian sphynx. There he was, staring at the counter, in total oblivion of everything around him. Matamey left without saying goodbye.
“Have you ever seen an owl in a tree hole?” Mas asked him when he joined the others.
No, the secretary of the village Soviet had never seen an owl in a tree-hole though he had seen once a stuffed owl in the Sukhumi museum.
“Too bad,” the miller shook his head. “You’re a country man, yet unacquainted with owls.”
“But I’m acquainted with papers, stacks and stacks of them,” Matamey replied with a twinkle in his eyes.
“They’re alive too,” the janitor added.
“And hot,” Matamey completed the sentence.
“Watch out that your soul doesn’t change into a paper,” the miller warned.
“I can’t vouch for that, after all I am a pen-pusher.”
They walked on in silence, quickening their steps. The miller, his face as grim as the hour before a storm, thought about the grindstones, about those marvelous creations of the human mind that turned tiny grains into flour. If one were to observe nature through the eyes of a wise man, he’d see life as grindstones and man as a tiny grain. What a pity that Andrey turned out to be one of those tiny grains. What a pity! This search might go on into infinity—searching for one man in the mountains was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The atavistic spirit spoke up in the janitor. In the fashion of his ancestors he began to spin a yarn of happenings far in the past with one sole purpose in mind: to kill traveling time. Matamey paid no heed. “The prince came and stopped at the door,” Saat narrated. “Shall I call the owner and have myself invited or pass by unnoticed, the prince asked himself. The prince didn’t want people to think he was furtive.”
“And why not?” Matamey asked without thinking.
“Quite simple. Because a prince is a prince,” Saat replied.
“Prince? What prince? What are you talking about?” Matamey couldn’t hide his annoyance.
“Can’t you see,” the janitor explained. “I’m telling a story of the far past.”
“What for?”
“To kill time.”
“What for?”
“What do you mean what for?”
“Why kill time?”
Saat decided that the young official was so preoccupied with Andrey that he couldn’t think straight. “Matamey,” he asked, “maybe we should sing a little marching song.”
“No. It’s best to walk in silence,” Matamey objected. “Especially on a Sunday. Hell, I was planning something for today.”
“Shame, Matamey,” the janitor chided. “Poor Andrey is in trouble and you’re doing some planning.”
“Why couldn’t he wait till tomorrow to disappear?”
“He couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Such thoughts come to a man only on holidays,” Saat said. “On workdays people don’t have the time to busy their minds with rubbish.”
“So help me, he’s right,” Mas let himself be heard. “A man potters only from too much fat or too much leisure. If he’d toil like an ant and carry bags of flour, his head wouldn’t be cluttered with junk.”
“What if Andrey is not pottering but is really sick?” Saat questioned.
“Make him plow two acres of soil and that’ll cure him,” Mas advised.
“I’d give a million to be transported on wings to my vegetable garden,” Saat expressed the wish.
“Listen, Mas, how well do you know this road?” Matamey wanted to know.
“Like my five fingers,” the miller replied, pointing at the sharp stones jutting out of the road dust.
“Where does it lead, to Suipsara?”
“Yes. And farther up no cars ever go either.”
The road coiled under a huge rock that seemed to have suddenly grown out from the fog. A reddish boulder it was, rising about fifty meters straight up. Behind the rock the road began to climb, crawling and twisting so tortuously that the travelers had to stop several times to catch their breath. At last they reached the level of the top of the rock. The view of a valley unfolded from there, and farther away loomed chains of white-capped mountains to which this path lead. Matamey was infatuated with the scenery. He wistfully admitted to himself that he’d never seen such beauty. Mas, apparently preoccupied with his thoughts about the two grindstones and the two bags of grain, didn’t express any emotion. Saat saw nothing interesting since he had no double-barrelled rifle and these were hunting grounds, not a vegetable garden.
“No one here as far as I can see,” the miller determined after scanning the scenery.
“And who’s there under that tree?” Matamey asked.
No more than a hundred paces from them lay what looked like a man or might have been a barked log of wood.
“A man,” Matamey confirmed.
“Looks like a log to me,” Saat quipped.
“Some people look like logs,” Mas muttered. “Let’s walk up another hundred paces instead of quibbling.”
They filed through amid blackberry bushes forming a narrow corridor along an overhanging cliff wall to their left.
“Ho, ho,” the janitor exclaimed, looking up. “What a fall. I don’t wish it on anybody.” He greedily eyed the blackberries resembling miniature grapes. They looked delectable!
“You’re not a goat, Saat,” the miller warned. “Stop ogling those berries. Wait till we’ve found Andrey then you can stuff yourself as much as you want.”
“All right, all right,” Saat growled. Still he managed to snatch a handful of berries without slackening his pace—just like a goat.
8
No, it wasn’t Andrey—merely a shepherd who had lain down and dozed off. He rubbed his eyes, apologized for some reason, and got up. He was a tall babe, about twenty-five, blue-eyed, red-haired, dressed in a worn-out military uniform. The boy cast a searching glance for his herd and having found it at the clearing, felt visibly relieved. About fifteen obviously poor milk-cows of the small-sized Abkhazian variety meekly grazed in the succulent grass.
“I was looking up at the sky and fell asleep,” the shepherd said apologetically.
“At the sky?” Matamey queried.
“Right there,” the shepherd stuck his finger at the sky.
“Why at the sky?”
“Where else? Everybody is a stargazer nowadays. Why not me?”
“Why not indeed,” Saat agreed.
“Maybe you’d like to fly in a rocket?” the miller sullenly investigated.
“And why not?” the shepherd flashed a freckle-faced smile. “I’d love to. Just think, to live in the twentieth century and not to fly a rocket!”
“You see?” the miller addressed Saat.
“I can’t see what a chap like him would do in a rocket,” Saat said. “I’d rather he knew how much milk each of his cows gave.”
“That’s no secret,” the shepherd took no offense. “Each one of them gives full five litres. Per day.”
Saat groaned with laughter—quite impolitely to be sure. “Five litres, imagine! That’s what a good goat gives. A goat climbing rocks and nibbling on dry leaves! All right, maybe a little less. … But a cow!! If a cow gives no more than five litres it should be sent to slaughter.”
“Why slaughter?” the shepherd angrily puffed up his cheeks.
“Very simple,” Saat lectured. “Because a cow is made to give milk and not to potter. And a good shepherd might also be of some help here. That is if he stops admiring the skies and looks instead at the grass, at the cows’ rumps and such. Young man, stars are beautiful at night, but a man always needs cows—day and night. If there’s no star he can turn on a wick lamp or make a campfire and admire it, but if there’s no milk—water won’t do. Do you understand, young man?”
“I understand things more complicated than that,” the shepherd retorted. “I understand every word of it and that’s just why I disagree with you. I see no sense in life without the sky or the stars. The earth and the sky—together. Do I make myself clear?”
Saat appraised his opponent from head to foot and came to the conclusion that he was facing an incorrigible dreamer. His pants in patches but his thoughts—in the skies.
Forewarned by his secretarial sense, Matamey realized that this contest could drag on—obviously both sides were too obstinate and opinionated: the janitor in his vegetable-plot element, the shepherd in his intergalactic spaces. What was needed was a Solomon’s decision. “I think they’re both right,” he addressed Mas. “They both adhere, each in his own right, to a just viewpoint.”
The miller nodded his head. He was absolutely uninterested in Saat’s much less in the shepherd’s viewpoint.
“We’ve come here to look for a man,” Matamey smiled at the shepherd. “Would you know, perhaps, our school principal?”
“You mean Butba?” the shepherd asked.
“Yes, him!”
“I know him. He climbed this road an hour ago.”
“An hour ago?” Matamey shouted out.
“Maybe even a little less.”
“This means he’s around here somewhere. Did he tell you anything?”
“About stars?” the janitor interposed.
“That’s right.”
“You hear, they talked about stars.”
“Was he absentminded?” Matamey continued the inquiry.
“I wouldn’t say that,” the shepherd replied after some thought. “I’d say he was worried for some reason.”
“What reason? Didn’t he tell you?”
“He was telling me about velocities.”
“What velocities?”
“Of carts, cars, trains … planes, rockets …”
“Didn’t I tell you!” Saat proudly exclaimed.
“Didn’t you tell me what?”
“Don’t you remember, Matamey?”
“You see,” the shepherd went on, “when we met he asked me, ‘Would you like to travel to the stars?’ And I said, ‘Of course.’ And that made him very happy. ‘Come with me,’ he suggested.”
“Where to?” the miller asked.
The shepherd pointed toward the mountains.
“What for?”
The shepherd shrugged his shoulders. “If you ask me he wanted to see how the earth looks from above.”
“What a strange desire,” Saat blurted.
“Nothing strange in that, esteemed one,” the shepherd snapped back. “A man is not made to crawl like a worm, he ought to soar above the earth—like an eagle.”
What a fellow, Matamey marveled. He couldn’t help admiring the shepherd’s deep inner conviction, his dignity without cockiness.
“A man ought to discover the secret of the universe,” the shepherd continued. “He ought to explore the moon, Mars … He ought to discover how new stars are born. Isn’t all that worthy of interest? Isn’t that why cosmonauts and astronauts are going up into space? Recently a heavy sputnik has been orbited; it relayed a great deal of interesting information.”
“How do you know all that?” Saat asked distrustfully.
Instead of a reply the shepherd pulled out a little transistor radio from his traveling bag.
“Are you listening to this?” Saat smirked.
“Of course.”
“To this instead of to the birds?”
“If it’s all right with you, esteemed one,” the shepherd retorted, “yes. Instead of.” He turned on the radio and handed it to Saat. Out came the melody of a gay Abkhaz song.
“Ho, ho,” Saat voiced elation, twisting the radio in his hands. He had not been expecting to hear a gay Abkhaz song to come out of a little box no larger than a box of matches.
The miller spoke up. He believed the conversation between the school principal and this shepherd was to the point. “Isn’t that so?” he asked.
“It was,” the shepherd confirmed.
“Was he making sense?”
“Certainly,” the shepherd expressed amazement. “As much as you and I. That man was highly interesting and intelligent. He had told me about his calculations, about his sleepless nights …”
“Poor Andrey,” the miller wailed.
“Just the opposite, esteemed one,” the shepherd assured him. “He was a very happy man. To be frank with you I envied him.”
“We’re wasting time,” Saat interrupted. “Instead of discouraging him from his crazy notion you chimed in with him. Let’s go.” The janitor hastily moved away.
Matamey took leave of the shepherd and, together with Mas, followed the janitor. The boy shrugged his shoulders and stretched out on the ground again. His stare fixed at the sky, the volume of the radio on his chest turned on, the body of the shepherd semed to be here on this sinful globe while his soul soared high in cosmic regions.
He was trying to forget the strange travelers. He had nothing in common with them.
9
The climb was slow and tedious. Matamey wheezed hard, although he was the youngest. Saat wondered why and came to the conclusion that it was because of too much paper work, too many conferences and too many heated speeches. One avoids that by gardening—after you’ve done some gardening you find it easy to climb slopes no matter how steep.
They had been walking for about an hour. The janitor was under the impression they were creeping right into the sky. Hell, that principal knew where to hide. How strange! Only about fifteen kilometers from the village and the wilderness here was inconceivable. Wherever you looked—virgin nature! Probably a breeding place for bisons. And every step took you higher and higher. The sun, incredibly hot, scorched you unbearably in the back of your head. You seemed to be swimming in hot water. And Matamey, he looked as if he was going to keel over any moment. Who the hell needed this idiotic chase? If a man wanted to go off his mind, he’d do it whether you watched him or not, and no matter how nobly hard you’d tried to help him.
Suddenly Matamey halted his fellow-travelers and pointed ahead. Saat and Mas strained their eyes. Was it real what they saw?
On the crest of the next boulder, one of many ungainly boulders that nature for some reason had wanted to accumulate here, sat a man. He appeared to be either reading a book or writing on paper.
“I swear by God that’s him,” the janitor exclaimed. “Where there’re papers or books there’s Andrey Butba.”
There was a brief consultation: to shout to him or get in closer and let Andrey notice them? It was decided not to draw his attention. He’ll see us and decide for himself what he wants to do.
“How did he get up there?” Saat wondered.
“The path leads to the right of that rock.”
“Much to the right.”
“Only for bisons,” Saat said. “Let’s say a prayer first before we start to climb,” he tried to quip.
The miller suggested that they keep on straight and look for another approach farther on. Andrey couldn’t have flown up there.
“Maybe we ought to take a little rest,” Matamey suggested.
“To hell with rest,” the janitor shouted, covering his head with a handkerchief and wiping off his sweat. “Let’s get through with it.”
He was seconded by the miller. Matamey had to succumb to the majority.
Shortly the path turned right into a small saddle. There was nothing left to do but start crawling to the left, along a stony slope not too abrupt for climbing.
“Follow me,” the secretary took the initiative. “And please livelier.”
Saat was grim. The miller was silent too. Matamey tried his darnedest best not to discredit himself in front of his seniors. Often he felt like lying down on the ground to catch his breath but kept pushing on.
Unexpectedly the travelers found themselves on the crest of a cliff, not far from Andrey Butba—literally a few steps from him. Andrey either hadn’t heard them come or pretended he hadn’t. There he was sitting like Pythagoras of old, drawing his “circles,” not on the ground though, but on an ordinary piece of paper. He did not ask them “not to cross his circles.” He simply nodded at them as if they had just come into his office. As if nothing had happened and he hadn’t run off.
“Hello,” Matamey simply greeted him.
“How are you,” the principal simply answered.
The miller was less tactful. “What are you doing here, Andrey?” he asked angrily.
“Where?”
“Here. On this accursed rock.”
“Accursed, why?” the principal waved toward the breathtaking panorama unfolding from this vantage point and dominating many kilometers around. Valleys and green hills, grey mountains and snow-white crests, reddish boulders and blue rivers, a whole seemingly separate and independent world, a strange, unpopulated galaxy. The rich variety of hues and colors made the janitor dizzy. He stepped aside from the edge of the cliff where Andrey was sitting.
Andrey, a tall, handsome dark-haired man with dark hazel eyes, was dressed in light woolen breeches and a white pique shirt. “Why do you, esteemed Mas, call this rock ‘accursed’?” he asked in a respectful, unhurried tone of voice. “Has this rock offended you in any way?”
“Very much so,” Mas snapped back. “What are you doing here, I’m asking you?”
“I?”
“Yes, you.”
“What do you expect a free man to do?”
Mas jumped up, as if scalded with hot water. “A free man works and doesn’t potter around in some mountains.”
“Who is pottering around?”
“You are, I believe.”
Butba, however, did not take offense. “Mas,” he said calmly, “I respect your opinion. But I’d like to know on what basis you declare that I’m pottering around.”
“I believe what I see,” the miller muttered.
“No, that’s no proof, Mas. If you intend to criticize my actions or the way I’m thinking, please do so rationally. Empty accusations do nothing to enhance a man’s arguments if the people involved are serious people. You accuse me of pottering which is a serious accusation. I could reply to it in all seriousness if my opponent’s arguments were fully rationalized.”
“We’ve been looking for you all day. Three people looking for one man a whole day. Do you understand the meaning of this, Andrey?”
“No, I don’t. Today is Sunday and I may avail of myself anyway I please.”
“True, true,” the miller admitted. “But you’ve got no right to worry us.”
“Worry you? Why?”
“What do you mean why? There you go running off …”
“Do you consider the fact of my being here running off? It doesn’t concern anybody but me.”
The miller spat out. Saat decided it was his turn to enter into the conversation. “Andrey,” he said, “excuse me for addressing you by your first name. You are younger and therefore I take the liberty. Tomorrow they may seize you down in the village. What can we tell everybody?”
The janitor’s argument seemed to have hit the mark. The principal became pensive.
“Well, Saat,” he finally answered, “tell them that Bowba will teach mathematics.”
“Why Bowba?” wondered the secretary of the village Soviet.
“Why not,” Andrey replied. “And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you taken a leave of absence or something? Or have you willfully decided to retire?”
“You’re guessing wrong, Matamey.”
“That’s not right, Andrey,” Saat resumed. “Why do you refuse to explain your conduct to us? I’d advise you to come home with us.”
“Home!” Butba repeated convincingly in all seriousness. “Home is a concept that can be stretched. In this cosmic age of ours Earth is home. I’d even say it is no more than a little house. So, I am home.”
“What do you mean you’re home?” Matamey demanded. “As the secretary of the village Soviet I officially order you to resume your duties.”
“I can’t,” Butba replied, raising his voice. “You may kill me but I won’t. Can’t you see, I’m crowded, cramped. I’m suffocating!”
“That’s all nonsense, Andrey,” Saat reasoned.
“Aren’t you crowded?” The principal asked with a smile. “Is it possible that you don’t have that suffocating closed-in feeling? We’ve been cheated, you and I. We’ve been misled into believing that we were born on a roomy planet but all we’ve got here is a spot the size of a ruble. Two steps from one end to the other. And you call this home?”
“A good home at that,” Matamey asserted.
“Wrong!” Butba exclaimed. “A tragic mistake! You’re living in a cell. You’ve acquiesced to that annihilating closed-in feeling while just next to you there’re vast spaces to be had.” His arm swept the sky, from horizon to horizon.
It’s useless to argue with him, Matamey thought.
He’s out of his mind, Mas told himself.
That man is finished, Saat decided.
“There’s no mystery here,” Butba stuck his papers under his opponents’ noses. “No more than half an hour to the east, west, north or south. Yet you’d like to remain on this miserable little globe. It’s sheer insult to a thinking man.”
It wasn’t apparent what it was that had possessed him—the faith of an apostle, self-confidence of a fanatic, or both?
“Andrey, you’ll come down now with us and we’ll finish the argument in school,” the miller suggested. “We’ve got to take him away from here by force,” he whispered to Matamey and Saat.
“What are you whispering about?” Butba asked in a threatening voice. “Kindly leave me in peace. I feel much better here than down there below. A lot more air to breathe here.”
The miller took a step forward.
“Don’t you dare,” Andrey shouted. “Don’t you dare come closer.”
Poor man, Andrey! Matamey was the first to withdraw. The others followed his example. What came next was a tedious, purposeless siege—Butba, however, was always on the alert, watchfully eyeing each of his three adversaries. Although his means of retreat were cut off, he showed no desire to surrender. They sensed it. He looked like a mountain buck driven into a corner.
“Please come down from that rock,” the miller pleaded. “If you want me to, I’ll beg you on my knees.”
“Have dignity for your gray hair, Mas.”
“If you want we’ll all beg on our knees.”
“You better leave. If you like that cell of yours, that’s your business. Had you come for me with a flying rocket, I’d have gone with you. But you have nothing to offer other than your tiny globe full of people swarming like ants …”
“Yes, we have something to offer,” the janitor coaxed. “A magnificent supper with wine.”
Butba deprecatingly waved his arm. “Don’t disturb me,” he suddenly shouted. “I’m preparing my annual balance sheet.”
The three travelers were dumbfounded. As twilight was moving in they had to decide on a course of action. Without delay! A lone man must not be left by himself in the mountains.
All three of them, their intentions obvious, moved in on the principal.
For a brief moment it appeared that Butba had given in. Abruptly, however, he darted up, set one foot over the rock, into the chasm. A little breeze could have blown him down. Another word and he might be gone. Saat cast a glimpse into the precipice shrouded with a light mist. He pointed his head and the others glanced too …
Butba’s eyes flashed like sunbeams. Those were the eyes of a man possessed, a man unbridled. It was amazing how he held his balance on the edge of the precipice!
The three travelers gave up. They stepped back—soundless, tight-lipped. “We have lost him,” Mas whispered.
They were gone. And Butba, he still stood on one foot, for a while held fast by the force of gravity.
10
The three men were stupefied. Just think, a man almost made a buck’s leap into the chasm right in front of their eyes. Was it all a delusion? Was it possible that the principal was now calmly sitting in his room, working on his calculations?
“I feel lousy,” the miller somehow recovered from the shock. “In heavens’ name, tell me it was all a bad dream.”
“I wish it were a dream.” The secretary of the village Soviet was completely crushed. As the representative of the authorities and at the same time a human being, he found his burden doubly heavy. “Saat,” he asked, “do you remember what the doctor told us this morning?”
“No, I don’t.”
“He called this sickness geophobia.”
“Is that fear?”
“Yes, fear of the planet; fear of Earth … It’s a new sickness.”
Saat felt sorry for the principal. He isn’t an inhabitant of this earth any more, he thought. But after all the exhausting experience Saat also felt ravenously hungry, as hungry as a winter wolf. He had to put something in his mouth, be it even a clump of earth, or he’d lose his mind. “I’m dying from hunger,” he voiced an elementary cry.
“How can you think of food at a moment like this?” Matamey asked.
“I can and I ought to,” Saat shouted. “I’m about to gnaw the bark off that tree.”
They descended lower and walked along the cliff edge. The only thoughts the janitor had were about food. His hunger pangs were so strong that he chewed up a few leaves. “If we hurry,” he said, “we may be able to forage some berries. It’s not too far from here. I marked the place in my mind.”
“Let’s go.” They moved down faster, as fast as it was possible to lumber down on the narrow path winding between stones and bushes.
“Please, wake me up,” the miller moaned. “We couldn’t have seen the last of Andrey. Isn’t it possible, perhaps, that a man may fly and still be rational? Please, isn’t it?” He was almost in tears. Were it not for Saat, he’d have punched himself in his forehead.
“What are you trying to do to yourself?” the janitor scolded. “Take pity on your poor head. It’s not your fault—the man was incurably sick. Better ask me or my woman, or the doctor who explained the sickness to us. It’s like this, a man grows out of his diapers, so to say, feels drawn to the sun, moon and all those damn spots, and instead of digging in the garden like me, he starts to climb walls. It’s not your fault, or Matamey’s or mine.”
“We ought to save him,” Mas implored.
“Impossible!” Saat was positive. “Don’t you see, there’s no cure for it. Writing numbers on papers is one thing, but trying to jump off a rock—that’s something else.”
“I can see that too,” Mas wailed. “But listen, maybe he’s really preparing his annual balance sheet?”
Matamey spread his arms.
“And I tell you a man is born to the earth,” the janitor insisted. “He’s bound to it by a navel cord and whoever tries to cut it will end where Andrey did. A few more steps and I’ll treat you all to nice berries. I’m dying from hunger.”
Saat walked ahead, followed by Mas and Matamey. The setting sun was in their eyes, lying in long stalk-like shades of yellow on each leave, each pebble, and each grain of sand.
I hope we meet that shepherd boy again, Saat thought. He might have something to chew. He, too, is a little queer, not a bad fellow, though. A picture of health! No doubt keeps a nice supply of food on hand. A few berries in the meantime won’t hurt. “Stop!” he suddenly roared out, as if he were leading a whole regiment. “Stop and look to your right. Ought one pass by that berry clump?”
“One ought,” Mas decided.
“One should,” Matamey seconded.
“You oddballs,” Saat remonstrated. “Wait a minute and I’ll treat you. A man alive needs food. Kindly arm yourselves with patience.” The janitor pressed his chest against the thorny bush and fearlessly reached for the berries. He brought out a handful.
The miller categorically refused. He couldn’t get down a swallow, he said. Matamey tried a few.
Saat kept forcing himself against the pricky bushes like a fearless he-goat, stuffing in his mouth berries almost with their stems, stilling his hunger like an animal. Mas and Matamey still overcome by disbelief paid him no attention. “Maybe Andrey will soar into the very heaven like an angel and repeat the evangelical miracle,” the miller said. “No, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe,” he added. Matamey felt depressed by guilt: he shouldn’t have let down a human being, especially a sick one.
“Have you had enough,” he called out to the janitor.
“Oh, those berries, they’re delicious,” the janitor’s response came back from amid the greenery. “Black and ripe, simply out of this world! First I’ll fill my belly full, then I’l cram my pockets full and then, so you see, we might stay here an hour and maybe two …”
“What shall we do?” Mas pulled Matamey aside. They needed and couldn’t do without each other.
“Let’s get away from here. I can’t look at that glutton. He won’t stop until he bursts.”
“And leave Andrey on that rock?”
“What can we do?” Mas rubbed his forehead. “He won’t listen to us.”
Matamey shrugged his shoulders. He still had no idea what explanation they were going to give to the people in the village. Something, no doubt, would have to be said.
To say nothing, was not possible.