Without Lifting A Finger

Have you seen any of our friends around recently?” “I see Grisha pretty often,” said Andrei. “He’s got lots of money now. And I saw Sergei just recently. He’s changed a lot. Doesn’t drink or smoke. He’s become a bedeist.” “What’s that?” “It’s a religion, a very beautiful one. They believe we’re being pulled along by a ‘B.D. 3’ locomotive—sometimes they just call it a ‘Number 3,’ and we’re traveling toward a Bright Dawn. Those who believe in the ‘B.D. 3’ will pass over the final bridge, but the others won’t.”

“Where are we? What can you hear?” Andrei pulled Khan’s hands off his jacket and gave a puzzled frown, then he realized he could hear the regular rhythmic hammering of steel on steel, which had been there all the time, even though he wasn’t consciously aware of it. “What is the ‘Yellow Arrow’?” Khan repeated. “Where are we?” He turned Andrei to face the window, and Andrei saw the tops of the trees hurtling past the window from left to right. “Well?” “Hang on,” said Andrei, “hang on.” He clutched his head in his hands and sat down on the bunk bed. “I remember,” he said. “The ‘Yellow Arrow’ is a train traveling toward a ruined bridge. The train we’re riding in.”

Watching the hot sunlight falling on the tablecloth covered with sticky blotches and crumbs, Andrei was suddenly struck by the thought of what a genuine tragedy it was for millions of light rays to set out on their journey from the surface of the sun, go hurtling through the infinite void of space and pierce the miles-thick sky of Earth, only to be extinguished in the revolting remains of yesterday’s soup. Maybe these yellow arrows slanting in through the window were conscious, hoped for something better—and realized that their hopes were groundless, giving them all the necessary ingredients for suffering.

Closing the door behind him, Andrei turned on the tap, and glanced at his face in the mirror. In the last five years, he thought, rather than maturing or growing old, it had simply gone out of style, along with flared trousers, transcendental meditation and Fleetwood Mac.

Katerina Lvovna was trembling. Her roving gaze became fixed and wild. Her arms reached out somewhere into space once or twice and dropped again. Another moment—and she suddenly began to sway all over, not taking her eyes from the dark waves, bent down, seized Sonetka by the legs, and in one sweep threw the girl and herself overboard. Everyone was petrified with amazement. Katerina Lvovna appeared at the top of a wave and sank again; another wave tossed up Sonetka. “A hook! Throw them a hook!” they shouted on the ferry. A heavy hook on a long rope soared up and fell into the water. Sonetka could no longer be seen. Two seconds later, borne away from the ferry by the swift current, she again flailed her arms; but at the same moment, out of another wave, Katerina Lvovna rose up almost to the waist, threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft-finned little roach, and neither of them appeared again.

In the evening, Boris Timofeich ate a bit of kasha with mushrooms and got heartburn; then suddenly there was pain in the pit of his stomach; he was seized with terrible vomiting, and towards morning he died, just as the rats died in his storehouses, Katerina Lvovna having always prepared a special food for them with her own hands, using a dangerous white powder entrusted to her keeping. Katerina Lvovna delivered her Sergei from the old man’s stone larder and, with no shame before people’s eyes, placed him in her husband’s bed to rest from her father-in-law’s beating; and the father-in-law, Boris Timofeich, they buried without second thoughts, according to the Christian rule. Amazingly enough, no one thought anything of it: Boris Timofeich had died, died from eating mushrooms, as many had died from eating them. They buried Boris Timofeich hastily, without even waiting for his son, because the weather was warm, and the man sent to the mill for Zinovy Borisych had not found him there. He ...