ty.  I stuck my shoulder under  his armpit.
The Commissar took a step and fell over heavily on  me. I barely  managed to
steady  him  and  get him  back  into bed.  He  lay  there  panting, looking
miserable and strangely pitiful.
     "That's  it, fellow. Taps. That's for sure.  Go on  home.  What are you
staring at? I said, go on home! Well? What is it? Think the Commissar's done
for? You're mistaken, my boy! I'll show you some real walking yet."
     A large tear made  its  way  slowly  through the  stubble of his yellow
cheek.  I was  really  frightened.  Our  Commissar,  our  cheerful Commissar
Chubarkov, so loud-voiced and hearty, a man  who could out-holler any crowd,
was sobbing softly in his bed, as the Red Army man on the poster pointed his
finger at me accusingly and his eyes bored into me. But it wasn't my fault.
     I rushed over to the table,  poured some  of the  yellow brew from  the
kettle under the quilted  jacket and slipped  my two days' sugar ration into
the mug. The Commissar held it in his trembling hands. He had calmed down  a
bit and took a slow sip. Then he licked his lips.
     "I've never had anything so sweet! Seems like pure honey. How come?" He
looked at me  suspiciously. Then he peered into the mug. The  four lumps had
probably not dissolved completely.  "So you decided  to pamper me? I'll  bet
you  put your  whole  week's rations in here.  You should've left yourself a
lump. Now you'll have to drink yours plain again."
     I hastily poured myself a full mug of brew from the  kettle, took a sip
and  was dazed.  A molasses-thick, sickeningly-sweet syrup stuck to my lips.
It took me a few moments to realize what had happened.
     "Was anyone here to see you today?" I asked.
     "Indeed! I'll bet your whole class was here. Kostya, Labanda,  Zoya and
Stepan, of  course. They  were all here. They lit  the stove and boiled  the
kettle. But they  didn't feel like  having any  tea. What's the matter?  Why
aren't you  drinking yours? See, I  said  it  wouldn't  be  any good without
sugar. Well, if you're  not going  to have it, we  might as well try walking
again. Give  me a hand. I think I  feel  stronger after your brew. Come  on,
give us a hand here!"
     The Commissar leaned on me and tried learning to walk again.


        THE WANDERING SCHWAMBRANIANS, OR THE MYSTERIOUS SOLDIER

     Our wandering school moved from one place to another,  and Schwambrania
wandered along with it. The turbulent events in the life of Pokrovsk and our
school naturally affected the internal affairs and  geographical location of
the Big Tooth  Continent. There were  constant  disorders  in  Schwambrania,
because it was forever changing the order of things in the country.
     Lice had  come out from hiding in  Pokrovsk  and had  become  official.
Typhus had put red crosses on everything. Oska insisted we have a death toll
in  Schwambrania, too,  and  I had  to agree.  The  statistics  of real-life
situations called for a death toll in Schwambrania.  That was why a cemetery
appeared  there. We then went over the  list of Schwambranian kings, heroes,
champions, villains and seafarers, and spent  a  long time  deciding whom we
would  bury.  I  tried  to  limit  the  death  toll  to  such  insignificant
Schwambranians as the former Royal Water-Carrier,  or the Master of  Foreign
Affairs. But my bloodthirsty  brother  would  have nothing  of the kind.  He
demanded great losses, as was only true in real life.
     "What kind of  a game is  it if nobody dies? They just go on living and
living! Let somebody die who we'll feel sorry for."
     After   long   deliberations  Jack,  the  Sailor's  Companion  died  in
Schwambrania.  The  cruel Count Chatelains Urodenal  had  filled his kidneys
with  stones.  As he  lay dying. Jack, the  Sailor's  Companion,  exclaimed,
leafing through the last page of the conversation manual: "Je vais a.... Ich
gehe nach.... Ferma la machinal Finished with engine!"
     He  then departed, and  though he  wanted to  wish everyone well, there
were no such words in the manual. A brass band  played at his funeral. There
were  life  buoys instead of wreaths,  and  a gold anchor and visiting  card
adorned his grave.
     Despite  the  terrible  loss,  the  constant  changes  in  climate  and
politics, the  Big Tooth  Continent extended  across  our  every thought and
deed.
     The Black Queen, Keeper of the Secret, pined away in cobweby loneliness
behind the brass gate of the seashell grotto. Schwambrania lived on.
     One day  Oska came hurrying home from school.  He was terribly excited,
for a soldier  had come up to him on the street  in broad daylight and asked
for directions to Schwambrania. Oska had become so confused he had run away.
We set right out to find the  mysterious stranger, but there was no trace of
him.  Oska said that maybe he was a real live lost Schwambranian. Naturally,
I  made fun of him, reminding him that we had invented Schwambrania and all,
its inhabitants.  Still and  all, I noticed  that Oska had begun to sort  of
believe in its actual existence.


        PRIMARY SCHOOL SCHWAMBRANIA

     Schwambrania  soon  became known  to Oska's classmates.  From  the very
start he had made  a name for himself  in  school. One of the boys had asked
the teacher where sugar came from.
     "I know," Oska had replied. "Sugar comes from school."
     That was the day Kocherygin,  the temporary principal,  was keeping the
children  in check, since the botany teacher  was absent.  "That's where  it
comes  from,"  he  said. Then Oska said that sugar came from  kerosene which
spurted up from the ground.
     Kocherygin seemed stumped. The  next day he told  the children  that he
had looked into the matter and learned that saccharine came from the ground,
but from coal, not kerosene. However, he regarded Oska with new respect.
     Oska  immediately  took advantage of  this  and  drew  the  outline  of
Schwambrania on the large wall map in the classroom. Since the geography and
botany teacher was still absent, Kocherygin took over once again. His finger
suddenly got lost in the mountains of the Big Tooth Continent.
     "What  country's this?" he  said, pointing  to the strange  land.  "Hm?
Anybody knows?"
     Nobody did.
     "It's Schwambrania," Oska teased.
     "What's that?"
     "Schwambrania!" Oska became serious.
     "Never heard of it."
     "I did. A soldier I know even left for there yesterday."
     "How come it's not in the book?" his classmates demanded.
     "It's not on the map yet, because it's a very new country."
     "Go on, tell us about it," Kocherygin said.
     And so  Oska  went over to the big map and spent the rest of the lesson
talking about Schwambrania. He spoke in detail of the flora and fauna of the
Big Tooth  Continent, and his classmates listened  with bated breath  to his
story  of the wild 1  rum-toddies who inhabited the canyons of the  Northern
Candelabras. He told  them  of the wars against Piliguinia, of the overthrow
of Brenabor, of the adventures of the deceased Jack, the Sailor's Companion,
of the evil deeds  of Chatelains Urodenal. Kocherygin was quite pleased with
the Schwambranian geography lesson.
     Oska  returned  home  in  the best of spirits. He  was  beaming. "We're
studying about Schwambrania in school now," he said proudly.
     I nearly collapsed.
     However, the  very  next day Kocherygin brought a very embarrassed Oska
home.  He  was  holding  Oska's  hand,  trying  to   talk  him  out  of  his
Schwambranian  fantasy.  A  group  of  his  classmates   followed,  shouting
"Schwamp! Bramp!" The new  principal told our parents of Oska's strange idea
of geography and asked them to somehow influence the stubborn Schwambranian.
Oska  sniffled and  spoke  of  the  mysterious  soldier who  had  asked  for
directions to Schwambrania.
     A few days later  Oska  and  I were out for a walk.  Two poorly-dressed
young peasants came up to us on the square. They were carrying knapsacks. We
were overcome by a terrible premonition.
     "Listen,  boys, can you tell  us  how to get to Red Army  Headquarters?
We're looking for Captain Schambardin."
     So that was who the mysterious soldier had been looking for!


        ENTER FROM THE STREET

     Typhus  rolled along the  streets  in step with the even tread  of  the
stretcher-bearers  and pallbearers. Typhus raged in the  delirious  cries of
the stricken and was a murmur in the funeral  corteges. The Tratrchok camels
pulled the hearses.
     Our school was moving again.
     Schwambrania  dashed about  in  search  of a  stable  policy,  changing
rulers, climates  and latitudes.  Our house alone  stood steadfastly at  its
moorings at the same old latitude and longitude. It had rusted and sunk into
the riverbed and  was no longer a boat  but heavy,  stranded  barge that had
turned into an island. Storms had not yet invaded it, since Mamma was afraid
of draughts and kept the windows closed.
     Still, some changes had taken place. Papa now wore an army field jacket
instead of a morning coat. The red cross on his breast pocket signified that
he was an  army doctor.  He was attached  to the casualty-clearing  station.
Then, the people who we  had once been  told were  undesirable acquaintances
and had  only come up the back stairs were now all coming to the front door.
Even the water-carrier,  who,  it would seem, would  save time and effort by
coming straight into the kitchen,  now rang the front doorbell  insistently.
He trudged through the apartment, leaving puddles  and wet  tracks,  and his
pails were full of dignity.
     Oska and  I welcomed this degradation of the front hall. A  draught  of
disrespect had now been established between it and the kitchen. We could now
strike out the first point on our list of the world's injustices (concerning
"undesirable acquaintances").
     The plumber and the carpenter were the first to ring the front doorbell
after the revolution. Annushka opened the door and asked them to  wait while
she went to tell Papa that "two men wanted to see Comrade Doctor".
     "Who are they?" Mamma wanted to know.
     "Well, sort of men," Annushka said. (She divided all of Papa's patients
into gentlemen, men and peasants.)
     Papa  went out into  the  front  hall. "There's  something we'd like to
discuss," one of them said.
     "What seems to  be bothering you?" Papa asked, for he thought he  was a
patient.
     "They've no sense of  duty," the plumber said. "The town council closed
down the  hospital under Kerensky, and that  means the  working people won't
get any care when they need it. We've been appointed commissars."
     Papa could never forgive Kerensky,  because  during his short  reign in
Russia the rich,  tight-fisted town fathers  had closed  down the  municipal
hospital, saying, as they usually did, "No need for it."
     And now two Bolshevik commissars had come  to see him and tell him that
the Soviets had decreed that  the hospital was to be  opened immediately and
that Papa was to be in charge of it.


        TRIAUNTS

     Papa asked the commissars to have tea with him. After they had gone, he
paced up  and  down humming happily,  "Marusya  took  some  poison,  to  the
hospital she'll go."
     "This is a real government! It's  showing good  cultural sense. How can
you  even compare your Constituent  Assembly  to  it? It was  just like  our
district meeting. 'No need for it' on a nation-wide scale."
     "Your  Constituent Assembly" was said especially to spite  my aunts. At
the  time, starving aunts seemed to have  descended  upon us  from  all over
Russia.  One had come from Vitebsk  the  other had escaped from  Samara. The
Samara and  Vitebsk  aunts  were  sisters. Both wore pince-nez on black silk
cords and  looked very much  alike. Papa had nicknamed them  the Constituent
Assembly. Oska and I nicknamed them Aunt Neces and Aunt Sary.
     They were both terribly educated and spent hours  discussing literature
and arguing over politics, and if some of  their information jarred with the
encyclopaedia, they would say it was a printing error.
     Then a third aunt arrived from Petrograd. She said she was as good as a
Bolshevik.
     "Will you be better'n a Bolshevik soon?" Oska asked.
     However, months passed, but  our aunt still did not become a Bolshevik.
She  was  now  saying  that to all  intents and purposes  she  was nearly  a
Communist.
     The  Petrograd aunt found a job at Tratrchok, while Aunt Neces and Aunt
Sary both went  to work for the District Food  Committee. In their free time
they told us "true life  stories", had heated discussions and meddled in our
upbringing.  Our  aunts insisted that we be tutored at  home, for they  were
firmly convinced that the Soviet school system was detrimental to upbringing
of a child  from an  intellectual family and to his sensitive personality (I
believe that is the way they put it).
     They took it upon themselves to tutor us, as they considered themselves
authorities in the field of  child  psychology.  Their  constant admonitions
exhausted us. They wanted to take part in everything we did, to play all our
games.  They  were  overjoyed   when  they   discovered  the  existence   of
Schwambrania and said it was so-oo exciting and simply  divine. They  begged
to be let in on the secrets of  our world of make-believe and promised to be
of help. Schwambrania was in danger of being overrun by aunts.
     That was when the Schwambranian commanders played a trick on them. They
led  the  aunts  off  into the heart of  Schwambrania  and  there, during an
initiation ceremony, painted them with water colours, made them crawl  under
beds, locked them in a cave with wild beasts, which meant locking  them in a
storeroom with  wild rats, and made  them  sing the Schwambranian anthem ten
times in a row.
     "'Hoo-ray, hoo-ray!' they all shouted, the Schwambranians,"  our tired,
painted aunts sang in  the darkness. " 'Hoo-ray!' Eeek! Something's crawling
up my skirt! 'Hoo-ray, hoo-ray!' They were clouted! Do-re-mi-nians!"
     However, when we  then  explained the rules  and holds of wrestling and
told them to wrestle without breaks or a time limit  to a final victory, our
poor aunts became indignant. They said Schwambrania was  a crude game and  a
stupid country,  unworthy of well brought  up boys. This was why the  famous
Schwambranian poet (obviously inspired  by  Lermontov)  wrote  the following
stanza in his Aunt Neces' autograph book.
     Three lively aunts all live in our apartment,
     Thank God there are no more in this department!


        THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL

     "Your father's an  intellectual, but  he's  all right," Stepan Atlantis
said. "You can see he's on  our side. And you're an all-out sympathizer. One
of your aunts  has an  idea of what's going on,  but  those  other  two  are
awfully backward." He was leaving our house after a two-hour long discussion
on the individual and society.
     The Constituent  Assembly  aunts used such long words that I caught  my
Petrograd aunt sneaking off to the dictionary every  now and then to look up
unfamiliar  "isms" and "substances". According  to my first two  aunts,  the
free intelligent  self was the core, and everything else revolved around it.
And whatever the self believed,  was so. Whatever it wished things to be was
the way they were, and to hell with everything else! Stepan, however, argued
that, like the saying went, you  didn't call off a wedding  if one guest was
missing. He said that the  group, with  everyone  pulling together, was  the
main thing. As for the  self, if it got too stuck-up you  could always catch
it by the collar and give it a good shake. My  aunts replied that Stepan and
I were crude realists,  believing only  in that which everyone could see and
feel. Realists  were also called materialists. They believed  that the world
undoubtedly existed and governed all ideas and individuals. But my aunts did
not agree with this. They got terribly excited  and even  shouted. They said
the  world  had  no  right  to order free ideas and the  individual  around,
because, they  said,  perhaps  the  world would  never have existed  without
ideas.  Yes, undoubtedly,  only  the reasoning  individual  existed. Perhaps
everything else existed only as it appeared to it, only as in a dream.
     "Are we individual?" Oska wanted to know.
     "As far as you yourselves are concerned, undoubtedly," Aunt Sary said.
     We thought this was a great idea and decided  it would all come in very
handy in Schwambrania.
     Indeed, what if we were really Schwambranians and Pokrovsk, our school,
home and the  revolution were  all a part of  some dream? We were stunned by
the very thought of it.
     Our aunts sat down on the couch and Aunt Neces began reading aloud from
a Russian history book: "The Vikings, Rurik, Truvor and Sinehus came to rule
Ancient Rus."
     Oska and I decided  to have a look at Schwambranian history, meanwhile,
and began singing, throwing chairs around and making  as much of a racket as
possible. Our aunts asked us  to be a little more considerate.  They said it
was a lack of respect for the individual.
     "Our individual is dreaming that you're not here at all," Oska said.
     "Maybe we just imagined you?" I added.
     Our  aunts spoke  about our behaviour  to Mamma.  She came in to have a
look but we were doubtful of her existence as  well. Mamma burst into  tears
and spoke about our behaviour to Papa.
     "What sort of nursery solipsism is this?" Papa demanded. "I'm going  to
suddenly imagine  that the two of you have been sent to stand in a corner at
this advanced age."
     We were given no dinner. Papa said that, after all, the soup was only a
dream, and Oska and I were such  free-thinking individuals, it wouldn't take
any  effort on our part to imagine that  we were full, while he said that he
recalled dreaming  that we had had our dinner and had even said "thank you".
In  a  word, we  had to accept the  fact  that our soup  was not an idea but
reality, and that there were millions of other individuals except ourselves,
and that we could not exist without them.


        AROUND THE SUN

     The self had been tossed out of the centre of the universe as far as we
were concerned. We were caught up in the great whirl of events in school and
on the street. However, the centrifugal  forces could do nothing  about  the
state of  affairs at home. Our home staunchly  remained the reliable core of
our existence. We felt that everything else was whirling around it like some
great and dangerous merry-go-round. Such was the case until the day on which
a stocky  man appeared in the front hall during Papa's  office hours. He had
on a  pair of black boots protected by galoshes and a holster, and carried a
briefcase. Annushka said it was one of the commissars.
     "Sorry  to  inconvenience  you,  but  I'm going  in next.  I'm  here on
business,"  he said to the patients  in the waiting room. "We're all here on
business!" "Who does he think he is?"
     "He thinks he's a  gentleman," a fat farm woman said. A sack on her lap
moved, and a live duck-offering quacked inside it.
     Water splashed in the washstand in the office. Then the door opened and
a man came out, buttoning his shirt collar. The Commissar went right in.
     "Good day. I'm  sorry to bother you, coming in  out of  turn, but  it's
revolutionary  duty, Comrade Doctor. You see, I'm here  as the Commandant of
Pokrovsk."
     "Sit down,  Comrade Usyshko," Papa said, recognizing  the shoemaker who
had formerly made all our  shoes  and had often  borrowed  books from Papa's
library. "What's the good news these days?"
     "You'll have to move to another apartment, Comrade Doctor. Tratrchok is
expanding. They  don't have enough space any more. I'm  sorry to bother you,
but you'll have to move in two days."
     "Well. They've finally got to me," Papa said to himself. Aloud he said,
adjusting  his breast-pocket  flap with the red  cross on it. "I'm going  to
protest. Comrade Usyshko. I won't  let anyone throw me out  so high-handedly
in two days'  time, as if  I were some bourgeois. I believe that the working
intelligentsia has  the right  to  expect a more considerate approach on the
part of the government with whom it is working in complete contact."
     "All right.  I'll  give  you an extra day, but  no more.  I won't argue
about  that  contact part. And I've  personally found  you a fine  place  on
Kobzar Street.  It's  in Pustodumov's  former house.  A fine apartment.  And
we'll take care of the moving."
     "You understand that I'll have to see it first."
     "As you like. We don't  charge any for looking. So I'll send the wagons
over on the sixth. I'll be going now." As he turned, his eyes fell on Papa's
shoes. "You still wearing them?"
     "Yes!" Papa said angrily.
     "How's the left one? Not too tight? Remember, I said it'd only be tight
at first and that it'd stretch?"
     "To  be frank. Comrade Usyshko, I think you  were better at  that  job,
ah...."
     "That depends which way you look at it. Comrade Doctor." The Commandant
chuckled.  "You used  to order your shoes, but now  some  things, if  you'll
pardon my saying so, aren't done to your  measurements any  more. Maybe some
things don't fit very well."
     The news of the coming move stunned Oska and me. We saw  that centre of
the world had shifted, and  history was not made  according to the wishes of
our home.
     Copernicus' contemporaries  had  most  probably found themselves in the
same predicament. They had always believed that  Man was the centre  of  the
Universe and that the Earth was the  centre of Creation. Then they were told
that the Earth was only a speck among thousands of similar planets, and that
it  travelled around  the  Sun,  governed  by  forces that  were  not of its
creation.


        TOWARDS A NEW GEOGRAPHY

     A  most unusual caravan was moving along Breshka Street.  Ten camels of
the Tratrchok were carrying our possessions.
     The  drapes and  curtains were  rolled  up  like campaign banners.  The
dismantled beds, adorned by shiny brass knobs, clattered and jangled like  a
collection of maces  belonging to a Cossack chief. The armoured coats of the
samovars gleamed. The large pier glass spread out like a  lake, with Breshka
Street splashing in it upside-down.  The innerspring jelly of the mattresses
jiggled. A  set of hobbled bentwood chairs jostled and trotted atop  another
wagon like a little herd of colts.
     The piano in its white cloth cover rode along  in an upright  position.
Seen from  the side, it resembled a surgeon in a white smock,  but  from the
front it was a steed wearing a horse-cloth. The merry driver had one hand on
the reins and the other stuck through the slit in  the cloth.  He was poking
at the keys, trying to pick out a simple tune as the wagon rolled along.
     Our belongings looked indecent. The washstand and sideboard,  which had
always been upright, lay  on their backs with  the doors gazing at the  sky.
Passers-by  stared  at us. Our personal, private life was bared to all eyes.
We felt uneasy  and wished we could renounce  it all. Papa walked along  the
sidewalk, as if none of this had anything to do with  him,  but Mamma walked
bravely on at  the head  of the procession, right behind the first wagon, as
wan and unhappy as a widow following the pallbearers. She was holding a list
of our belongings, quite like a list of the dead for a church service.
     Oska walked ahead of us, carrying the cat. Annushka sat on a  high pile
of things on the first wagon like a maharaja atop an elephant, and the front
of  a potted  palm served  as a fan. She was  holding a stuffed owl. I  came
next,   carrying  the  precious   grotto  and  its   chess-piece   prisoner.
Schwambrania was moving to a new geographical location.
     A line of aunts brought up the rear.
     The new  apartment  greeted  us  with a hollow chill.  A  taunting echo
mimicked us.
     The drivers were busy moving our heavy bookcases. Papa poured some pure
alcohol into a measuring glass, added water and treated the drivers to it. I
could hear the' men talking.
     "It goes right through you!"
     "It's the best medicine! Castor oil for your brains. Cleans them out in
a flash."
     "Get over on the other side. Look  at all them books! What do they want
with so many?"
     "You think it's easy poking about in somebody's insides? It takes a lot
of reading, maybe a thousand books, and  then you can make a mistake and sew
up the wrong thing."
     Our aunts  tracked  along behind the drivers  to  see  that they didn't
pinch  anything, for, as our aunts said, nowadays people were very  free and
easy with other people's possessions. There was an elegant chandelier with a
fringe of glass beads in  one of  the rooms. It  had  been  left  behind  by
Pustodumov. My aunts stood admiring it.
     "Well? I see you've  put up  a chandelier," the commandant said, for he
had just arrived on the scene. "That's some fine light! I'll bet it came all
the way from Petrograd."
     My aunts seemed embarrassed. As I opened  my mouth to tell him whose it
was, my Aunt Neces stepped  in front of me, blocking me like a screen. "Yes,
you're right. It was made in Petrograd," she said quickly.
     After he  had gone my aunts  explained rather sheepishly that what they
had done was right, since Pustodumov would never get it back anyway, and the
country would manage without it.


        THE POWER OF POSSESSIONS

     The  rooms were no longer as hollow-sounding, for our furniture muffled
the echoes. We found a cosy corner for the Queen's grotto that we could turn
into a circus, railroad station or prison.
     Schwambrania was re-established.
     Papa climbed the stepladder and stood there, hammer in hand, to hang up
a  portrait  of  Doctor  Pirogov  and  a  portrait  of  Lev Tolstoy  by  the
Academician Pasternak. Papa was making a speech. The ladder was his rostrum.
     "Today  I  had occasion once again to see that we are all the miserable
slaves of our possessions. This tremendous pile of junk has us in its power.
It has  bound us hand and  foot.  I would have gladly left half of all  this
behind! Children! (Take  that  nail  out  of your  mouth this minute, Lelya!
Haven't you ever heard about hygiene?) As I said, children, learn to despise
possessions!"
     Then Oska and I went off to the dining-room  to hang up  a hand-painted
plate in bas-relief. Sticking up  from the surface of the plate was a castle
and  knights  on  prancing steeds.  The nail came  loose, sending the  plate
crashing to the floor. The knights perished. The castle was in ruins.
     Papa came running at the  sound of china breaking. He shouted at us. He
called us vandals and barbarians. He said that even bears could be taught to
handle things carefully. He went on to enumerate a long  and woeful list  of
things which we had  annihilated: the  black  queen, his cane, fountain pen,
etc., etc.
     We sighed.  Then I reminded Papa that  he  had  just told us to despise
possessions. At this he hit the ceiling. He said that one should first learn
to take care  of things, then  to earn the money to buy  them, and then only
could one begin to despise them.
     That evening Mamma wandered about desolately. She  had  made a list  of
all the small things, so as not to misplace them and then waste time looking
for them. She had been searching for the list for over an hour.


        THE FOLLOWING OFFICIAL PAPERS HAVE BEEN LOST

     The  sand  went  slowly  to  the  bottom in the  stirred water  of  the
fishbowl.  Fish   darted   through  the  emerald-green   water  plants  like
brightly-plumed hummingbirds, swishing  close to the green-glowing glass and
feeling quite at home.
     The walls of our new apartment had lost their chilling strangeness. The
rooms  were  becoming  lived  in.  The  cosiness  of  our  former  home  was
transported to our new one. Gazing up at the  chandelier during supper. Papa
said,  "The  revolution  ...  (eat  your  carrots,  Oska,  they're  full  of
vitamins!) The revolution is full of cruel justice. Indeed. Whom should this
apartment belong to? A moneybags  merchant  or a doctor? Actually, I believe
that the proletariat and the intelligentsia can find a common language."
     "Goodness! Aren't we all Communists at heart!" my aunts exclaimed.
     The following day our piano was rolled away.
     A gala event was being planned  by the Tratrchok offices. An army choir
was rehearsing a  Red Cross Cantata. The choir needed the use of a piano for
a week, and so they requisitioned ours.
     Mamma had  gone out. In her purse was the license, issued to her by the
District Department of Education. It stated that she was a music teacher and
verified  her  ownership  of  the piano. Papa  made  a  small  speech to the
abductors on the subject of the intelligentsia and the proletariat, and also
mentioned the need for mutual contact. However, this  made no  impression on
them.  Then Papa  said that  it wasn't a  matter of  the  piano,  it was the
principle of  the thing that counted, and that he would not sit idly by, but
would  go as high as Lenin if need be. Then Papa sat  down to write a letter
to the editors of Izvestia, a newspaper published in the capital.
     They carried the  piano  out like a body  at  a  funeral, with Annushka
bewailing its fate and my aunts dropping copious tears.
     When Mamma returned and learned of what had happened she sank down on a
chair and  blinked rapidly.  Then she spoke very  quickly, saying: "Did  you
take out the package?"
     At this Papa,  too, plopped into a chair. My aunts seemed petrified. We
then learned that  Mamma had tied a little bundle to the inside of the piano
top.  It  contained four  pieces  of  expensive  toilet soap and a sheaf  of
now-worthless, pre-revolutionary paper money. It was Oska's and my  turn  to
become terror-stricken now, for a week before we had seen Mamma tying up the
little bundle and had decided that she would hide it  in  a very safe place.
Since we, too, had quite a few things that were to be kept in secret, we had
stuck a sheaf of official  Schwambranian papers into  the  bundle when Mamma
had gone out of the room. Our sheaf contained maps, secret  campaign  plans,
Brenabor's manifestoes,  coats-of-arms,  letters of famous men, metaphorical
posters and other secret manuscripts from the Schwambranian chancellery. Now
all this  had been carted off to Tratrchok. Schwambrania  was in danger. The
piano tuner might discover our cache.
     Mamma rose, wiped her eyes and set out  for  Tratrchok.  I said I would
accompany her. She was very touched and did not suspect that  we were on our
way to salvage Schwambrania's valuables.


        THE SHOW AT TRATRCHOK

     When we  got to  Tratrchok  Mamma  told a commander who had a  drooping
moustache that she had to  remove a package of personal letters from  inside
the piano. He winked at her meaningfully, said "Aha! Love letters!" and told
her to go right ahead.
     The piano was in a large hall. It seemed to be crouching fearfully in a
far  corner.  Red  Army  soldiers  sat  around  on  the benches, chewing  on
sunflower  seeds. Two  men were  sitting on crates  by  the piano. They were
trying to play "Chopsticks". They stopped when they saw us.  Mamma went over
to  the piano and caressed the keys with  a  delicate, rippling  scale.  The
piano whinnied  like a horse that has recognized its  master.  The  soldiers
stared at us. The  commander untied the package,  winked at  Mamma again and
again said, "Love letters".
     "  'Hooray!  Hooray!'  they all  shouted,"  I  hummed as  we  left  the
Tratrchok premises.
     As  we  were crossing  the  square,  someone  behind us  shouted: "Hey,
Madame! Come on back!"
     It was the commander. He was out of breath from running when he reached
us. Mamma trembled as she pressed the package to her breast. At  that moment
an earthquake shook Schwambrania.
     "Come on back, lady. The boys are awfully mad. They say you spoiled the
piano on  purpose,  so  it won't be of any  use  to us.  They  say you  took
something out of it and now it's ruined."
     "You're talking nonsense! That's probably because none of you  know how
to play."
     "You're  wrong there. It was all right until you took that package out.
So you'll have to come back and tie it inside again."
     We trudged back to Tratrchok.
     The  soldiers greeted us with an angry rumble.  They crowded around the
piano.  They  were  shoving  and shouting,  saying  that  Mamma had  spoiled
national property on  purpose, that this was sabotage, and that  people  got
themselves shot for being saboteurs.
     "Take it  easy,  boys," their commander said, but  we could see he  was
also upset.
     Mamma  strode  over  to  the piano.  The soldiers stopped  talking. She
played a chord, but the piano did not respond with its usual fine sound. The
sound it made was dull and  barely audible. It  rose and died away like some
distant thunder.
     Mamma looked at me.  She was aghast. Then she brought her hands down on
keys as hard as she could, but the chord was a whisper again. The  soldiers,
however, roared.
     "You spoiled it! She did it on purpose!"
     "It's the soft pedal!" I cried, guessing what the matter was.
     When the commander had pulled the package  out he  had tripped the soft
stop, lowering the strip  of felt  onto the  strings. Mamma yanked at it and
the piano responded with such a loud chord it was as if cotton wads had been
removed from our ears.
     The soldiers  beamed. They asked us to tie the package  back inside the
piano  again, just  to make sure.  We did, but the piano did not  sound  any
louder.  We were  then  told we  could have our package back. The shamefaced
young soldiers asked Mamma to play something lively.
     "I don't play polkas, comrades," Mamma said acidly. "You had better ask
my son."
     They  did and I clambered up onto a crate. I was surrounded  by beaming
faces. As  I  could  not reach the  pedals from my high  perch,  one of  the
soldiers volunteered to help. He depressed it carefully and kept his foot on
it all through my performance. I played every single march,  polka and ditty
I knew, and all of  them  as loudly as  possible. Some  of the men were soon
tapping in time, and then, suddenly, a young soldier dashed to the middle of
the room, spread his  arms wide, as if he were going to embrace someone, and
tapped  his foot gingerly, as  though to test the  floor. Then  he  began to
dance inside the wide  circle that formed in an instant. He tossed his  head
and stamped as he danced. Then he began to sing a ditty in a clear voice:

     It's a pity, it's a shame,
     It's an awful darn disgrace!
     See the bourgeois and their dames
     Crawling out from every place!

     The commander cut him short. Then he turned to Mamma and said in a very
polite and respectful manner: "Madame, I mean, as we now say. Citizen, would
you please  play us something yourself? Something  more inspiring. The  boys
and I would all appreciate it very much. Say, some overture from an opera."
     Mamma sat down on the crate. She  wiped the keys with her handkerchief.
My pedal specialist offered his help  and foot again, but  Mamma said  she'd
manage herself.
     Mamma played the  Overture  from "Prince Igor" for them.  She was  very
serious and played exceptionally well.
     The  soldiers  stood around  the piano in  silence.  They  followed her
fingers  with  rapt attention, leaning over each other's shoulders. Finally,
Mamma removed her hands slowly and gently  from the keyboard. The last chord
drifted up in their wake like a wisp of cobweb and then died away.
     The men all moved back  as she raised  her  hands, but were  silent for
several  seconds  after. It seemed  they were listening to the  last, fading
notes. Then only did they begin clapping wildly. Their arms were extended as
they clapped, and  they held  their hands close  to  Mamma's face,  for they
wanted her to see that they were clapping, not merely to hear them.
     "A great talent. No doubt about it," the commander said and sighed.
     We had once again  reached  the middle  of the square, but the applause
coming from the porch of Tratrchok continued. Mamma listened to it modestly.
     "You can't  imagine the ennobling effect music has on people!" she said
later to my aunts.
     "You can't ennoble  such  people. If they'd been ennobled, they'd  have
returned the piano," Aunt Sary said.
     A  month later,  after  the  piano had long  since  been returned,  the
following lines appeared in the "Replies to Our Readers" column of Izvestia:
     To a Doctor from Pokrovsk
     You  piano  has  been  illegally  requisitioned  as  it  is a  means of
livelihood.

     Papa was  jubilant.  He carried the clipping  around  in his wallet and
showed it to all his friends.
     When Stepan Atlantis found out about it,  he said, "Was that your piano
they  wrote about in the paper? Hm! You sure spread it all over the country!
That's what private ownership does to you!"


        THE COMMISSAR AND THE KINGS

     The secret package was now  tucked away into a drawer  of Mamma's desk,
and the  desk was now  a  part of the  furnishings belonging to  one of  our
neighbours, for we now shared our apartment with others, having had three of
our rooms borrowed in succession. Chubarkov, who was recuperating, was given
one room, something that pleased us both immensely.
     "Now we  can be like Robinson Crusoe and Friday," he  said,  unbuckling
his belt and holster and laying them  on the table. "Will  you  lend me  the
book?"
     "Sure!" I examined the gun. "Is it loaded?"
     "Sure. Don't touch it."
     My  aunts peeped  in,  examined  the  Commissar's  broad shoulders  and
uptilted  nose  critically and departed with an indignant sniff. "No manners
at all! He's a regular martinet!"
     The Commissar winked in their direction  and said, "They don't look too
happy."
     "They never are," I said.
     "But we are," Oska said.
     "That's that then.  If boys  like you  are,  I'll make out."  Chubarkov
smiled  fondly.  Then he  lifted Oska up and sat him on his knee.  The  blue
cloth  of his  narrow  breeches  was  stretched  tight. "Anybody  here  play
checkers?" His question was unexpected.
     "That's no fun. Chess is much better. Do you play chess?"
     "No. Never had a chance to learn."
     "Lelya'11 teach you  quick.  He  knows all the movings. The white ones,
and the  black ones, and the back and front ones, too. All I know is how the
horse  moves." Oska jumped down and began  hopping  in  the  squares of  the
linoleum. He stopped  suddenly, stood on one foot and said, "We  put a queen
in jail. We put her away  in a kennel  long ago, when there  wasn't any war,
but there was a tsar. That's how long ago!"
     I glared at him, and he said no more.
     In  order  to cut  short  this unnecessary  and  risky conversation,  I
suggested that  the  Commissar and I  have  a game of  checkers.  He took  a
printed  checkerboard from  his  knapsack and dumped the checkers  out  of a
little  pouch. Then he set  them up, and  we bent  over the cardboard field,
forehead to forehead.
     "Your move," he said.
     In no time I saw I  was up against a  serious  opponent. The  Commissar
would send his pieces into the most unexpected squares with a light flick of
his middle finger.  He set up traps and made two-for-one shots, scooping  my
checkers up  lightly and  saying as he did, "Haven't had time to learn chess
yet, but I  know a bit about checkers. What are you  doing? Look here! You'd
better jump  or I'll huff, that's for  sure. Ah, that's  better.  Now here's
where we plaster back your ears. And reach the king row. My king. And that's
that."
     Five minutes  later I found myself with one blocked piece on the board.
It was a disgraceful defeat.
     I immediately  set  up the pieces  again and suggested we  have another
game. Ten minutes later my  last two pieces were blocked  in a  corner.  The
Commissar had  rolled himself a cigarette and  was cheerfully blowing  thick
clouds of smoke at that unhappy corner.


        CAT-AND-MOUSE

     Oska was crushed by  my defeat. He decided to try his  own hand against
the invincible Commissar.
     "Do you know how to play cat-and-mouse?"
     "Cat-and-mouse?" The Commissar sounded genuinely puzzled.
     "I'll show you," Oska said and got  up  on  the Commissar's  lap again.
"You put your hand  out like this, and I'll try to slap it. But  you have to
yank it away,  so's I don't.  If I miss,  it's your turn to slap me. We  all
play it in school."
     "Let's give it  a  try."  Chubarkov  laid his  huge hand, the hand of a
stevedore, on the card table.
     Oska took aim.  He  raised  his left  hand but quickly brought down his
right. Slap! The Commissar did not have a chance to yank his hand away.
     "What'd  you know! You tricked me that time! Let's do it again. I think
I've got the hang of it. Go on, try again!"
     Oska repeated the manoeuvre, but  his palm came down hard on the table,
since Chubarkov had yanked his hand away  at the very last moment. "Aha!" he
said and seemed very pleased with himself. "Now you put down your paw."


        PAPA SHOWS PROMISE

     A short while  later someone  knocked  and  Papa  entered.  We  quickly
removed our puffed hands from the table  and hid them  behind our backs, for
they were as  red as a goose's feet and  itched  badly from the  Commissar's
slaps. However, Papa must have heard something of what was going on from the
hall.
     "What's wrong with your hands, boys?"
     "Oh, Papa! Come on  in!  We're  playing cat-and-mouse.  The Commissar's
real good at it, too. Even better than Vitya Ponomarenko."
     "He's a  real sharp fellow, your Oska is," the  Commissar  said and  he
sounded a bit embarrassed.  "You have to keep your eye on  him all the time.
But he cheats. He hits you in mid-air, and that's against the rules."
     "No, I don't! I don't cheat! You're real sharp yourself!"
     "This is abominable! Look at your hands! It's unhygienic. Pardon me for
saying so. Comrade Commissar,  but my children are used to more  intelligent
games. This is no way for them to be spending their time."
     "They're getting hardened," Chubarkov said, trying to stick up for us.
     "It's good training! You have to have a good eye and be quick."
     "Nonsense! What a thing to be proud  of! You don't  need any brains for
this kind of a game."
     The Commissar looked at him slyly. "I wouldn't say so. Doctor. It seems
easy when you're on the sidelines,  but it takes some brains. Why  don't you
try?"
     "If you don't mind, I'd rather not."
     "That's a pity."
     "Come on, Papa!"
     "He's scared! Papa's scared!" Oska shouted.
     Papa shrugged. "I don't see what there is to be afraid of. And I  don't
see that you need any brains for it, either. But if you insist. Well...."
     "That's  that," the Commissar said and put  his huge paw  on the table.
"Your turn, Doctor."
     Papa raised his white, antiseptic, surgeon's hand high into the air. He
shrugged disdainfully again and  smacked  the empty table  top in the  place
where  the  Commissar's hand  had just been  lying,  but  had been  suddenly
whisked away.
     We were ecstatic.
     "Well, Doc? You still say there's nothing to it?"
     "One minute.  That  didn't  count. One  minute,  please.  I  think  I'm
beginning to see what it's all about. Very well. You put your hand here, and
I hit from here. Excellent. All right, let's try it again."
     The Commissar,  keeping a  wary eye  on  Papa, placed his  hand  on the
table. He was  ready  to  jerk it away in a  flash. Papa made  several false
moves, and each time Chubarkov's hand jerked slightly. Then Papa pinned down
the Commissar's hand with a sudden loud slap.
     "Oho! You  sure  have  a surgical sledge-hammer,"  Chubarkov  said  and
rubbed his swelling hand. "You'll make a good player. But you won't catch me
napping again, that's for sure."
     "Come on, put your hand down. I have another turn. Wait a minute!" Papa
took off his jacket and pulled up a chair. "We'll see who's the smart fellow
here. Aha!"
     When our aunts peeped into  the  room several minutes  later  they were
flabbergasted.  The  Commissar and Papa were sitting  at the table, one with
his  shirt  out over his  breeches  and  no belt  on and  the other  in  his
shirtsleeves. They were taking  turns  slapping each other's hands  soundly,
missing and slapping the table top.
     "Got you!" said the Commissar.
     "Aha!" Papa boomed.
     Oska and  I were hopping around  excitedly, egging them on, though they
were quite carried away  with  the game as it were. The little table creaked
and swayed under their blows.
     The  sacred  rules  of propriety  hammered into  us by  our  aunts were
creaking and rocking as well.


        ACQUAINTANCES, DESERTERS AND DRAUGHTS

     An elegant army man who wore laced boots moved into the second room. He
carried in his suitcase, examined the room, cleaned his nails, beat a tattoo
on the table with his finger-tips and said, "So".
     "You can always tell a gentleman,"  my aunts, who had been watching him
stealthily, decided and entered to greet the newcomer.
     The  gentleman jumped up, kissed  their hands in turn  and gave each of
the  three one of his  gilt-edged visiting cards.  The  name on the card was
Edmond  Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan. The fine type in the lower left-hand
corner read: "Marxist".
     Despite his fine-sounding name,  Edmond  Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan
turned out to be completely  non-Schwambranian in character. He actually did
exist,  though, and  was well  known  in Pokrovsk. La  Bazri  de Bazan first
appeared in town shortly  after the revolution and became the editor  of the
Volga  Stormy  Petrel, a  small  newspaper published  in Pokrovsk. He became
famous  after he printed  a banner  headline on Christmas, greeting  all the
readers on behalf  of "the 1918th anniversary of the birth of the Socialist,
J.  Christ". The following  day the paper had a new  editor. At the  time in
question, La Bazri de Bazan was on the Tratrchok  staff. He held the rank of
aide-de-camp for special missions, but since he was chiefly responsible  for
arranging lectures, shows and debates,  he soon found his  rank unofficially
referred  to  as  "aide-de-camp  for  special  intermissions". The  soldiers
nicknamed him Bags-and-Sacks.
     The Committee  to Combat Desertion set up its headquarters in the third
room, and penitent deserters  trooped in  and out all day long. They trekked
in guiltily to the committee, but since they usually took  the wrong turn in
the apartment,  they  would as often as  not lay their  guilty heads  on our
tables and windowsills. They wandered through the rooms and held meetings in
the kitchen.  In  the  mornings they would tramp  into  the parlour  without
knocking and wake Oska and me and  our aunts, who slept on the other side of
the  wardrobes  that  divided the  room.  Our aunts  would  appeal to  their
consciences, but the deserters would assure them that they were no strangers
and would not hurt anyone, after which the men would curl up by the door and
go to sleep.  Whenever a little  girl  came  for  a piano lesson, they would
crowd around  the  piano and  follow  her rippling  fingers  up and down the
keyboard admiringly.  "Just  look at that!.  No bigger'n a  baby,  but watch
those fingers go!" they would say.
     Strangers kept drifting in and  out of every door,  but they all seemed
to  be  desirable acquaintances.  Mamma  soon got used to the draughts.  The
draughts  drew the  red  flags  in through the windows.  The house  became a
thoroughfare, with the corridor serving as  an extension of the street.  For
some  reason or other, no one noticed the gate, and so they  passed  through
our  apartment  to  reach  the  back  yard  from the street.  Day  and night
typewriters clattered overhead  in the army office on the second  floor. One
night they  clattered louder and  faster than usual, and in the  morning  we
discovered that the people upstairs had been testing a new machine-gun.  Tin
pails clanged in the  yard  near the tethering post. Hardened deserters  who
were  under arrest sat around  on  the porch railing. Sentries walked up and
down  with measured steps. Oska hopped and skipped along behind them, trying
to keep  in  step and  looking very intent as he shouldered his  toy gun. He
would peep into Bags-and-Sacks' windows as he paraded back and forth,  since
our manuscripts  were  locked up  in  the  desk  there.  Oska  was  guarding
Schwambranian property.


        THE MARQUIS AND THE MARTINET

     The  Commissar  was reading his way  through the  third volume  of  the
encyclopaedia before going to bed. He had already read the first two volumes
and intended to go through  the entire set. My aunts despised  him in  their
hearts and cautioned me against being too friendly with, as they referred to
him, a  martinet. However, Oska  and I tagged  along  after  him whenever we
could. We accompanied him to the stables to groom the army horses and shared
his dream of big ships.
     Bags-and-Sacks' room reeked  of perfume. Cuff  links,  little  bottles,
boxes,  wine glasses,  cigarette holders  and nail files were  scattered all
over the windowsills. There  was a photograph  of Vera Kholodnaya, a popular
silent  screen  star,  on the  wall.  Bags-and-Sacks was  polite. He  always
stepped aside to let someone pass in the cramped corridor and often  clicked
his heels. My  Petrograd aunt said he was certainly more like a marquis than
a Marxist.  The marquis entertained every evening.  His visitors were ladies
in uniform and men in civilian clothes, the ex-town fathers and ex-volunteer
nurse's  aides.  Bags-and-Sacks'  guests were very  noisy. A  guitar twanged
mournfully far into the  night, while he sang in a grating voice of the King
of France playing chess on  the parquet  floor with  his  jester. Aunt Neces
would wake up and sigh.
     "He's a very fine gentleman," she said. "It's certainly no fault of his
that he has neither a voice for singing nor an ear for music. I simply can't
understand why he insists on singing."
     One day  La Bazri  de  Bazan  got  the Commissar drunk. Chubarkov  kept
refusing, but the  marquis kept coaxing him to  drink. "Go on, drink up. The
proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains."
     After a  while the Commissar came  into  our room in  his stocking feet
with the straps of his breeches dangling. "I'm nearly through with the third
volume,  Doctor,  but  what's the use?  I guess  hauling sacks is my  limit.
That's for sure." And he kneeled over. When someone tried to help him to his
feet he jumped  up and dashed  out into yard. Five  minutes later he entered
from  the street.  He  was tightly belted and every button of his tunic  was
buttoned. He  was  very official-looking. His spurs  jangled. His  face  was
strained and intent.
     "Where's that Army  guy who just made  a  fool of  himself?" he rasped.
"Lolling around drunk, disgracing our Soviet system. Where is he? He's under
arrest! And that's that." He searched the room. Papa  stood  in front of the
mirror,  so the Commissar  would not find himself. Before leaving, Chubarkov
turned in  the  doorway and  shook an unbending  finger at everyone. "See it
doesn't happen again! And that's that!"


        THE SMELL OF SOAP

     A terrible discovery was made one evening. La Bazri de Bazan  had  gone
off somewheres and Mamma wanted to see if the package was still in  the desk
drawer. It was not. The precious package containing the worthless  money and
our manuscripts was gone, as were four bars of fine toilet soap that she had
also  kept  there.  They  were all gone. The  Schwambranian secrets had been
pilfered.
     Papa and Mamma  went back  to the dining-room. We  were gathered around
the table for a meeting of the family council.
     "So that's what your marquis is like," Papa said.
     "Impossible!" all three aunts protested. "You can tell he's from a good
family. The Commissar probably picked the lock and requisitioned everything,
as they say."
     "Such audacity!" Mamma moaned. "And there was the soap, too. I couldn't
care less for the  money. It was just a pile  of paper that should have been
thrown out long ago."
     "Why'd you hide it then?" I asked.
     "Well, you never can tell...."
     We sat around  in silence  for some  time, staring  at the oilcloth. It
seemed that misfortune was spread out on the table like a dead fish.
     Papa rose and said he would notify the authorities.
     My aunts were aghast.
     "You  must be out of your mind!  How can  you complain to robbers about
the doings of robbers? Why, they'll arrest you and shoot you!"
     But Papa  brought  his  fist  down  on  the table  and the  Constituent
Assembly said no more. Then Papa cranked the telephone.
     "The Special  Section, please," he said in a special voice. "It's busy?
Then the Cheka."
     "Shhh!" Aunt Neces said in a frightened voice. She was used to uttering
these words in a fierce stage whisper.
     Two men came to the house shortly afterwards.  They  were both tall and
olive-skinned and  both had  small black moustaches.  They  were  dressed in
leather jackets and looked  like  drivers. Papa had informed  Chubarkov that
they  were  coming,  and  the  Commissar  joined  them  when  they   entered
Bags-and-Sacks' room. The marquis was at home.  He seemed taken  aback for a
moment, but then greeted the unexpected visitors with his usual familiarity.
"Come  on in.  Prenez  vos  places,  as  they say.  May  I  offer  a  little
refreshment?"
     They searched  the room.  The  lost  soap fell  out  of  an  overturned
suitcase.
     "It's ours," Papa said.
     "I must disagree. It's mine," the marquis said.
     The  worthless paper money was  mixed  up  with some other  papers  and
charts. Oska and I exchanged glances.
     One of the men  leafed  through the papers, reading aloud: " 'Letter to
the tsar',  'Battle map',  'Guide to the city of P.'  'Secret Instructions',
'List of conspirators'. What's all this?"
     "I don't  know,"  the  marquis  replied.  He had  turned pale  when  he
realized that this was beginning to smell worse than merely soap.
     "How did you come by all this?"
     "I don't know. My word  of honour. None of this belongs  to me. Nor the
soap. I don't know a thing about it."
     Chubarkov went right  up to him  and cursed through  his teeth. It  was
very much as if he had spat in his face.
     Suddenly Oska made  his way through to the  front. I waved him  back. I
rolled my eyes like a jack-in-the-box, but he paid no attention.
     "That's  ours! Tell him to give it  back, 'cause  it  doesn't belong to
him."
     The two men were examining the charts. They exchanged glances.
     "Mm?" one said quizzically.
     "Uh-huh," the other agreed.
     "Comrades!" I said. "My brother and I were playing, and we hid all this
next to the soap. That's all there is to it," I said.
     "We'll straighten it all out at headquarters," was the reply.
     Then  one  of the men put through a  call. "That you?  This is Schorge.
I've got him here.  Yes, we found it. Yes,  he confessed he stole it. But we
found something funny here. Yes. The boys say it's theirs. Yes. I  doubt it.
What? Both of  them? All  right!" and the  receiver clicked  like a pair  of
heels. He then  went over to Chubarkov and spoke to him. Chubarkov looked at
us awkwardly.
     "I'll tell you what,  boys,"  the Commissar  said. "Let's all go for  a
ride in  an automobile. The chief has specially  invited you  over. He wants
you  both to  tell him all about those papers of yours. And that's that. I'm
going along for the ride. All right? Then that's that."
     My aunts fainted like  so many  tenpins  rolling over. I,  too, felt  a
little  queasy. ' A large automobile took us to the Cheka. The night  rushed
at us. Like  true Schwambranians,  we  were  anxious to  reach the  scene of
adventure.


        TWO SCHWAMBRANIANS AT THE CHEKA

     The office was  still. Two men were bent over our papers.  The light of
the  table  lamp was reflected  on  the shiny bald  head of  the fat man  in
eyeglasses. The other was a Lett. His blond eyelashes fluttered.
     "Well, boys, sit down  and tell us all  about it," the fat man said. He
seated Oska on his desk. There was a Browning gun on it.
     "Is it loaded?" Oska asked matter-of-factly and  then  went back to his
usual tone of voice. "Who are  you?  The chief chief? Are you? Then tell him
to give us our papers. You know how long it took us to draw everything?"
     "We'll do just that,  but first I want you to tell us all about it from
the very beginning. All right?"
     The Lett's  eyelashes  fluttered  again as  he  read our  Schwambranian
letters. I felt very ill-at-ease.
     "This is  just a lot of nonsense!" he said in an angry voice and handed
the papers to the fat man, who looked them over carefully.
     "Where's the city of P.?" the fat man asked.
     "That's Port Folio. The port in Folio."
     "And where would that be?"
     "In  Schwambrania," Oska  piped  up. "It's  a  make-believe country. My
brother discovered it all by himself. We've been playing it all our lives."
     "Your brother's  a real Columbus, isn't he?  Well, if it's only a game,
why'd you hide all this?"
     "So's it would be real secret. It's more interesting when  everything's
secret."
     The  chief  was  intrigued.  He   asked  us  to  tell   him  all  about
Schwambrania.  We  began our  story rather  reluctantly,  but were gradually
carried away by our  old game. We interrupted each other as we spoke of life
on the Big Tooth Continent. We told them what the coat-of-arms stood for and
all  about  the map. We enumerated all  the members of the Brenabor Dynasty,
described the wars,  journeys, revolutions and tournaments,  while Oska even
recalled the name of the last Minister of External Affairs. We stood to sing
the Schwambranian anthem and were about  to  argue  over the  last  cemetery
reforms when....
     The chief was laughing. He was roaring, choking and wiping  his tearing
eyes.  He  slapped his  bald  pate  and shook his head, but  could  not stop
laughing.
     The  angry-looking  Lett was laughing, too.  His body shook, though his
pale  lips did not open and his eyes were shut tight. Something squeaked  in
his throat.
     Oska and I  looked  at them reproachfully. Then we smiled. Soon we were
laughing, too.
     "Oh!  You're  better than  a circus!" the chief  panted. "I thought I'd
die. Ah.... What did you call him? Brenabor? How'd you ever think of it? You
had it all figured out! I haven't heard of anything so good in a long time."
Then he suddenly became serious and said, "Do  you find it very difficult to
govern the country?"
     "It's not too bad. We manage. But sometimes things get mixed up."
     "Why'd you have to invent all that?"
     It  was a serious question.  I took a deep breath and said,  "We wanted
everything  to be beautiful. And everything really  is in Schwambrania.  All
the streets are paved, and all the boys have big  muscles. And parents don't
interfere. And you can have as much sugar as  you like. There are hardly any
funerals, and you can go to the movies every single day. As for the weather,
it's always sunny and it's  cool in the shade. All the poor people are rich.
And everybody's happy. And there aren't any lice at all."
     "You're wonderful boys!" the chief  said warmly. "We've got to make all
these  dreams come  true. And we'll have paved  streets everywhere,  and big
muscles,  and movies every day.  And we'll call off the funerals  and outlaw
the  lice. Just  wait!  It's easier  said than done,  so we'll  call off the
dreaming and get down  to work. I have no time to lecture you, not this late
at night. Look at the younger Schwambranian  yawning. He's opening his mouth
so  wide  he might swallow the whole continent. And  I'm sure your  mother's
worried. I'll phone her."
     The chief took us home in his car. He let Oska toot  the horn before we
said goodbye. He laughed and said he was very happy to have met some members
of  the Schwambranian tribe. He said  we  should  establish Soviet power  in
Schwambrania soon and then stop dreaming and help lay real pavements.
     "What happened to Bags-and-Sacks?" I said, feeling  that  we  were well
enough acquainted by now for me to ask him.
     "We'll send him off  to ... uh ... what's  its  name ... Pi-li-guinika.
You know, he  invented himself, too. But  he's a sleazy character and he was
playing for  money. Well, goodnights,  boys! Happy Schwambranian dreams  and
good real times ahead!"


        NEW VISTAS FOR ROAMING

     We were soon asked to move again. This time we were  given an apartment
on Atkarskaya  Street.  It  was  very far  from  the  centre  of  town.  The
centrifugal forces were at work.
     The actual moving was not  too much of a strain, for  we  had  by  then
become used to  all sorts  of  changes.  The greatness of the  Home  (with a
capital   "H")   had  long  since  been  debunked.  Our  belongings  crawled
shamefacedly into the crowded corners of our new place of  habitation. Since
there  was  not  enough room for everything, a wardrobe and a table wandered
off to our friends' house on the way.
     Our moving coincided with new great changes in Schwambrania. Once again
this  island  roaming  in  search of a  single, common universal  truth  had
undergone  considerable displacement.  After  our  visit  to  the  Cheka  we
approached the goal of all our wanderings in the great wide world.
     However, a  new,  an entirely new  passion gripped  Schwambrania. Three
days later we decided that this passion was at last the truth.
     It was the theatre.
     The Lunacharsky Municipal Theatre was opened in Pokrovsk in the defunct
Dawn Cinema. The troupe was made up of actors from  Petrograd and Moscow who
had  chosen  to  forego  future  fame in the capital  for satisfactory  food
rations in the provinces.
     We  were immediately  captivated by the actors' names, which had a true
Schwambranian ring.  There  was  Enriton,  Polonych and Vokar,  for example.
True, we later discovered that some  of the names had simply been  reversed,
so that a very ordinary Rakov had become Vokar.
     Kholmsky was  head  and  shoulders above  all the other  actors of  the
troupe. He was a  man  of many  talents whom  I met in Moscow  several years
later,  when he  was the manager of the  popular Theatre of Satire. Kholmsky
played  either  villains  or  Napoleons. Besides,  he was the playwright and
designer. The  City Council commissioned him  to do  the murals  for the new
theatre. Soon  the  walls were covered with  centaurs,  troubadours,  muses,
prophets and such like. Kholmsky was a man who was easily  carried  away and
was  liable to run to extremes. He bundled some of  his  painted  characters
into suits of mail, but had not a scrap  of covering left for the others. He
coloured their  bodies purple, which was wholly in keeping with the freezing
temperatures inside  the unheated building. Kholmsky  drew Venus de  Milo at
the  entrance.  He added a pair of arms at  the  suggestion  of the  council
members.  The  inscription  on the  pedestal  was: "Sow ye all  kindness and
wisdom eternal! Sow ye! The people will thank you sincerely."
     The people of Pokrovsk did not like his work.
     "He's supposed to be a Party  man, but he's gone  and drawn a bunch  of
naked  people.  You'd think  the  theatre  was  a  bathhouse!"  the audience
complained.
     Our Petrograd aunt turned out to be a great theatre-goer,  and she took
us  to  every single premiere. In  no time  we  were  able to  recognize the
members of the troupe,  both  coming and  going.  We were mesmerized by  the
theatre. We liked everything about it: the gong, the intermissions, the line
at the box office.
     At the time, the theatre resembled a railroad  station, and the curtain
was often delayed, as were the trains. The floor was littered with butts and
sunflower seed shells. The audience  sat bundled in winter coats with raised
collars. The applause was  wild, no matter that gloves  and  mittens muffled
the sound. All through  the performance the inclined floor of the hall shook
lightly and  emitted a rumbling sound. This  was the people in the  audience
tapping their feet softly to keep their toes warm.
     "The heat is excruciating! There's not a breath of  air!" the  queen on
stage fumed  as she fanned herself, though  steam escaped from  her mouth in
the cold air and she  had on a heavy quilted jacket  under her flimsy robes.
The prompter's whispering steamed upwards from his booth.
     The  audience  reeked  of   disinfectant.  We  were   doused  with  the
foul-smelling  liquid  before going  to the  theatre and  were  inspected by
candle light in the front hall upon returning.


        SCHWAMBRANIA FOR GROWN-UPS

     The Constituent Assembly sometimes went  to a play and  then  spent the
rest of the week criticizing it. Aunt Sary was nearly run out of the theatre
once. The  curtain had just  gone up, and  there was  a strong draught  from
backstage. My  aunt's  voice  complained from  the  front  row:  "There's  a
draught! Shut whatever it is!" She  said this loudly as if the curtain, that
magic veil that separated the two worlds, was no more than a window.
     The audience was truly offended.
     We  were  dying to go backstage. Grisha Fyodorov, an  influential, kind
soul and  the son of  the  troupe's hairdresser, took us to that workshop of
wonders. We were stunned at the sight of the unbelievable, crude props,  the
toy fruit and sackcloth scenery. But we gazed in awe at the grown people who
played  at  other  people's lives every  single day.  This was  better  than
Schwambrania.
     There was a painted inscription in the hall over the stage that read:

     ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS
     (Shakespeare)

     This quotation became the new motto of Schwambrania.
     The  Schwambranians took to  the stage. The world was now divided  into
actors and audience. Daytime in Pokrovsk was like a drawn-out intermission.
     "Art takes one's mind  off  one's  dull, uninteresting life," my  aunts
said. "It transports one into a world of beauty."
     They argued  heatedly and  nearly  quarrelled  when they discussed  the
actions  of  the various  characters  in the previous  evening's  play. They
accused  these  invented personages, defended  them, loved  or  hated  them,
exactly  as Oska and I did  when  we played  Schwambrania. That was when  we
decided that the theatre  was  Schwambrania for  grown-ups. They  were  very
serious when they played their game.
     Once, during a  performance  of Sunset, the lights went  out. The  play
continued by the light of kerosene lamps which sent sooty streaks across the
painted sky.  The action was drawing  to  a close. The father had decided to
kill his daughter and had picked up his revolver.
     At that  very moment I noticed  that the lamp  closest to the wings had
begun to smoke badly. The  flame appeared as a tiny fountain over the rim of
the  lamp glass. The  father  walked towards his daughter. The flame reached
the edge of the sackcloth  pavilion. The father raised his gun.  The scenery
was about to catch  fire.  The daughter wrung  her hands. I am positive that
many other people besides myself were aware of the fact that the faulty lamp
might at any moment set fire to the  scenery. However,  the daughter fell to
her knees and  no one said a  word. They were  afraid  to spoil  the murder.
Schwambrania reigned in the theatre. The father cocked his gun.
     The scenery began to smoke.
     "Die, wretched woman!" the father exclaimed.
     "The lamp's smoking!" I shouted, breaking the spell.
     The  nimble actor was  up to par. He turned the wick down with one hand
and killed the ingenue with the other.
     The  theatre  was saved.  However,  no sooner had the curtain come down
than  the people sitting next to  me began scolding, saying that the theatre
was no place for boys, that I might  have waited before I shrieked, and that
now, instead of a murder, they had seen a stupid comedy, and they were sorry
they had  wasted their  money  on  tickets. In my  heart of  hearts I had to
confess that for the first time in my life I had betrayed Schwambrania.


        THE MEANING OF MITAC

     There were  two things  that had been bothering me  for  several years.
These were  an old locomotive that had  sunk  into  the  ground on Skuchnaya
Street  and  the  mysterious  charm-word  "mitac" which had been  a  part of
Annushka's card trick.
     Now, at last, I discovered the meaning of "mitac". A simple street sign
held the answer. It proved  more knowledgeable than the teachers  in  my old
school or the encyclopaedia. I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the word
"MITAC"  on  one of  the houses on Breshka  Street,  now  renamed  Communard
Square. I  ran over  and read  the  following:  "Municipal Institute  of the
Theatre and Cinema".
     Pokrovsk  was captivated  by the theatre. Everybody and his brother was
now  an  amateur  actor. Tratrchok,  the Department of Education,  the  Food
Committee  and Volga  Shipping all had their own troupes. Theatrical studios
mushroomed. Finally, all  the small studios joined forces  to become  MITAC,
which then established a children's  studio.  Since  our  school was  closed
down,  Oska and I enrolled. Stepan Atlantis  and Taya Opilova  soon followed
our example.
     We were  rehearsing a play called Prince Fork de Forkos. The prince was
in love with a princess, but the queen, her mother, was very proud and a bad
lot  in general, and  so the prince was  shown the door.  Then he  broke the
spell  that  had been  cast over a mushroom, and a fairy  came out of it and
gave the  prince  an apricot. The queen  ate it, and her  nose began getting
bigger  and  bigger.  Meanwhile, back on  Rodos  Island,  where  the  prince
lived.... In a word, the plot was very involved.
     Taya Opilova was  the princess. Both  Stepan and  I  wanted to  be  the
prince. We nearly  quarrelled over the part, because the prince was supposed
to declare his love for the princess, and the princess, we felt, would guess
that these were not simply lines from the text. Kramskoi, the director, said
Stepan would be the prince, since  he  was older than  I and taller, and his
voice was deeper. As if I couldn't talk in a deep voice if I wanted to!
     We  coaxed  Forsunov into being the great magician. Grisha Fyodorov was
our makeup man, as he was the son of a real hairdresser in a real theatre.
     Our first performance was at the MITAC. I was the court jester and Oska
was a gnome. His  was a  non-speaking part. We were both jittery. Grisha had
made us up for  our parts. The audience was buzzing impatiently  out in  the
hall, and the sound seemed dangerous, mocking and mysterious. It was time to
begin, but both Stepan and  Forsunov were missing. The director paced up and
down backstage.
     "Curtain time!" the audience shouted and stamped.
     The boys finally showed up. They were sober-faced and in a hurry.
     "So long, Leva!"  Stepan said. "All the Communists have been mobilized.
We're being  sent  to the  front lines. I'm a volunteer.  I had a  hard time
making them take me.  They said I was too young.  But  they finally did. Our
train's leaving soon. Goodbye!"
     Our hands met in a firm handshake. Stepan was silent for a moment, then
cleared his throat and  said softly, "I'll  bet you'll be  seeing Taya  home
alone now.  Well, I don't mind if  it's you. But don't let anyone else  near
her, hear?"
     The  audience  was  in  an uproar. Forsunov went  out in  front of  the
curtain. He had on his knapsack. The audience calmed down. Forsunov adjusted
a strap and said, "The performance has been postponed."
     "Till when?" the people shouted.
     "Till we wipe out the Whiteguards!"


        THE MAN OF THE HOUSE

     A day later Papa left for  the  Urals  Front. Papa was heading into the
thick of the typhus epidemic, for the dread  lice had infested the trenches.
Mamma and my aunts had packed three full suitcases  for him.  Papa took one.
He joked unhappily, saying that he didn't need a thing, since  they wouldn't
put  a burial mound over him  and  he didn't believe in the hereafter. Then,
according to the old Russian custom, we all sat down for a moment of silence
before the journey.
     "All  right,"  Papa said as  he  rose. He  kissed each of  us in  turn.
"You're the man of the house now," he said to me.
     As he  was leaving, he collided with a patient  who was just  entering.
The man moaned and bowed to him.
     "There are no more office hours. I'm leaving."
     "Please, Doctor!  It'll only take a minute!  I can't stand the pain any
more. And  who knows how long I'll have to wait till you get back. You might
even get yourself killed out there."
     Papa looked at the wall clock, then at the man, and  then at us. He set
down  his suitcase. "Take off  your things,"  he said  in  an  angry  voice,
ushering  the man into the office. "Don't forget,  seven drops after meals,"
he said to him ten minutes later as he got into the sleigh.
     After the sleigh  had  borne Papa off,  my aunts walked  away  from the
windows and all three began to wail.
     "No more of that, hear me? Dry up," I said rudely.
     My frightened  aunts stopped  weeping. However, the  stillness that had
descended upon our suddenly empty house was still worse. I clenched my fists
and left the room, my gait very much that of the man of the house.

        ON TERRA FIRMA


        SOME LESSONS TO US AND TO OTHERS

     I don't recall how long it  was after  that, perhaps  a year, but maybe
only a month. There were no calendars in the stores, and so it was difficult
to follow the passing of time, which had somehow lost its  familiar quality.
When  my  old Boys  School uniform  was  traded  for  a slab  of  bacon, for
instance, the days were swallowed up, as it were. Other,  less filling days,
dragged  on like weeks. Endless,  hungry weeks. Our daily schedule was quite
unlike what it had once been. Before, dinner time had been the centre of the
day's  activities, the traditional  hour when the  family gathered, a solemn
repast, a  sacrament, the  ceremony of partaking of food, the main meal, and
the hours were counted off in terms of: "before dinner"  and "after dinner".
Now we often skipped dinner  altogether. We  ate whenever there was anything
to eat. At such times Mamma would say, "Let's have a bite."
     And we ate on the run, standing up, like people at a railroad  station,
since it was impossible to come in physical contact with the icy chairs. The
apartment  was freezing,  and each of  us grudged  sharing the warmth he had
hoarded up in his body with an inanimate thing like a chair.
     We moved about, trying to avoid all cold objects, for they could snatch
away some of our body's warmth. We took turns being the fire-tender. The one
on  duty  would crawl out from  under a pile  of  blankets and drapes in the
morning,  when  the thermometer pointed  to 5œ.  The  day's fire-tender, his
teeth chattering,  would  stick his feet into a pair of  icy felt boots  and
start  a fire  in the pot-bellied stove. It would become red-hot  and as the
temperature rose, the inhabitants of our apartment would rise, too. The bare
and empty  sideboard greeted  us with open arms.  Our breakfast consisted of
bland pumpkin mush, watermelon tea and saccharine.
     Mamma  was  now a  Music  School  teacher, but since  the school had no
facilities  for  practising, the lessons were conducted  in our  house.  The
little girls stepped  on the  piano pedals in  their  heavy  felt  boots and
roused  the chilly  innards of the  piano  with  their  icy fingers.  Mamma,
dressed in her  fur coat and gloves, would nimbly lift the  stuck keys  from
under their fingers.
     I,  too, was a  tutor.  A  buxom girl named Anna Kolomiitseva, who  was
older than  I,  came to the  house  to learn the three R's.  The payment for
these  lessons was  pound of meat  a month. It was hard-earned meat.  That's
when 1 learned the  real  meaning of work.  My  pupil  stubbornly refused to
trust  the letters of the alphabet, relying mostly on her own intuition. For
instance, there was her own name, Anna.
     "Aaa-nnn-nnaaa," she drawled. "Oh! It says Annie!"
     One day we were tackling the word "parasol".
     "Paa-raa-ss-sool," she stumbled along.
     "Well? Read it all together," I said.
     "Umbrella."


        ON THE ROAD THERE

     There-beyond sorrow's seas,
     sunlit lands
     uncharted.
     Mayakovsky

     After my pupil had gone, Oska and I went out to look  for straw to heat
the stove a bit. We made  use of its quick-heating qualities to  set out the
dough for bread and took turns  kneading the sticky mass with  our ice-cold,
swollen hands. The job called for frenzied  effort, and we imagined  that we
were pummelling the hated guts of the enemies of revolutionary mankind, from
Chatelains Urodenal to Admiral Kolchak.
     In the evening we all gathered  at the table. There was no electricity.
The single nightlight was only put on on Sundays, which then truly became  a
special day.  The weekdays  were illuminated  by  an  oil wick lamp  with  a
twisted length of cotton for  a wick. It was immersed in a cup of  sunflower
or linseed oil. A  tiny flickering  flame burned  at  the  tip  of the wick,
filling the room with writhing black shadows.
     My aunts  moved  the lamp closer. They  sat in a row, stony-  faced and
somewhat  unreal.  The lamp  cast a  faint light  on them.  The  Constituent
Assembly resembled madonnas in  pince-nez. My aunts read aloud in turn. Then
they spoke of the wonderful past and our ruined lives.
     "My God! What a beautiful life it  was!  Remember the Sobinov  recitals
and the literary magazines, and sugar was fifteen kopecks a pound. And now?"
     "Aunts!" I said in a voice belonging to the man of the house. I sat  in
a dark corner that  was now Schwambrania. "Listen to me! I'm asking you once
and for all  to keep your counter-revolutionary ideas to yourselves. It's no
skin off my nose, but it's wrong to be a bad influence on small children." I
would come closer to the table and  glance meaningfully in Oska's direction.
For some time now I  was aware that I  was  maturing  at a tremendous speed.
This feeling of being responsible for the household, far from oppressing me,
actually inspired  me. I felt that I had become more logical in my thinking,
that the necessary words  came to me  more  easily, that I was  more sure of
myself  in  many ways. I looked  reality  in  the face  now without  fear or
reproach. Our straw  patrol, frozen fingers and pumpkin mush  did not dampen
my spirits.  The  absence of a calendar, eating standing  up and wearing our
overcoats  indoors made  our way of life seem like  something  temporary and
transient, like something that was happening at a railroad station. However,
this was not but  another stage of the Schwambranians' wandering.  Life  was
moving in a definite direction, though  the road was  an unusually difficult
one.
     "Don't worry, Mamma," I would say on the days when there were no lentil
beans,  no kerosene  and no letters from  Papa. "Keep your  chin up. Imagine
that we're on  a very long journey, travelling through deserts and over  all
kinds of high mountains. We're on our way to a new land. A wonderful land."
     "Where  to?  Your Schwambrania  again?"  she would reply in  a hopeless
voice.
     "No, not Schwambrania. A real  land. Who cares about oil wick lamps and
carrying straw, and frozen hands? Honestly, Mamma. Remember our  undesirable
acquaintances, Klavdia and Fektistka? Their whole lives were a hundred times
worse  than what  ours are  now  for just this little while. It'd  really be
unfair if we'd go  straight from  one good life to another. We're just  like
passengers as it is, not helping in any way. And my aunts didn't even bother
to  buy tickets. They should be put off the boat. Papa's  the only one,  and
even though I miss him, I'm glad he's doing his duty at the front lines."
     My   aunts   were  horrified.  "Goodness!  Just  imagine.  They've  had
everything! Even governesses! And look at them now! They're growing up to be
Bolsheviks!"
     1 dreamed of the day Stepan returned. I would  go out to meet him in my
patched felt boots, carrying an armload of rotten straw.
     "Hello, Stepan," I would say. "Give me five (but don't squeeze hard, my
hands are swollen). See? I'm the man of the house now, and I've forbidden my
aunts  to talk like  counter-revolutionaries.  I'm  rather  hungry, but that
doesn't matter. I'll gladly eat pumpkin mush till victory day."
     "Good for  you,"  Stepan  would say.  "Your thinking is all right. Hold
out. Mush is as good as bread."
     "But I  don't want  to be a passenger.  I  want  to be  a member of the
crew!"
     "Well, that's just what you'll be, a sailor of the revolution."
     My daydreams broke off  here, like a  broken reel  in the movies, for I
did not know how to become a sailor of the revolution. And Mamma would never
have let me be one, anyway.


        A PERSONAGE OF GASTRIC ORIGIN

     Still and  all,  Schwambrania  lived on. It did not become  any smaller
territorially, though it now  took up much less of our time than before. One
day Schwambrania  suffered  a terrible blow. While  we were out Mamma traded
the  seashell   grotto  and  its  prisoner,  the  Black   Queen,  Keeper  of
Schwambrania's Secret, for three litres of kerosene at the railroad station.
Thus  did we lose her  forever. For half an hour we were frantic. The sun of
Schwambrania was about  to set for good.  But that evening we  turned on the
lamp.
     Playing Schwambrania at that time  was mostly having imaginary  feasts.
Schwambrania was busy eating. It had dinners and suppers. It stuffed itself.
We savoured  the  fine-sounding long menus we  found in  the  cook  book. We
satisfied  our  raging  appetites somewhat  at  these  Schwambranian feasts.
However,  Schwambrania's  sugar  stores  were  only  disturbed  on holidays.
Georges Borman was Head Chef of Schwambrania. We discovered him on an old ad
for cocoa  and  chocolate. Georges Borman was the last of the  Schwambranian
personages, though he was a  personage  of  gastric  origin.  He, certainly,
could not cause any new errors.
     In  general,  Schwambrania  was  on  the decline.  However,  unexpected
circumstances brought about  a new  flourishing of  the Big Tooth Continent.
These circumstances lived in a large deserted house on our street.


     UGER'S MANSION

     The  house  had been built by  a slightly mad  rich German named  Uger.
Uger's Mansion was one of the landmarks of Pokrovsk. People from out of town
were  shown  it.  They  marvelled  at  it.  It  was indeed a most  fantastic
structure. The owner had been possessed by vanity and a consuming desire for
luxury. He had decided to beautify Pokrovsk by putting up a unique building.
He craved for fame. However, he did not trust  the  architect and so drew up
the blueprints himself.  Construction proceeded under his  watchful eye. The
house was three stories high and had a basement. The people of Pokrovsk, all
of whom lived in one-story houses, threw back their  heads and  counted  the
floors on their fingers.
     Uger's  Mansion  was  a  cross between  a  prince's  towered  manse,  a
fairgrounds  pavilion and  the Hanging Gardens of  Semiramis. The windows of
one floor were  unlike those of the others.  There were  tall, round, square
and narrow windows.  There  were galleries with stained  glass panels.  Seen
from the side,  the house  resembled a patchwork quilt. The  entire pediment
was covered with murals. Mermaids frolicked below, ships sailed along at the
second story  level, while generals  of  all sizes and  shapes  adorned  the
third. Under the eaves hunters in Tyrol hats were depicted  shooting  tigers
and lions.
     The house would jingle and buzz at the slightest breeze, for twenty-two
weather-vanes  and  fifteen  tin whirligigs spun and whirred on the turrets,
while eight huge fans clanged as they  turned in the windows. This  clanging
and  jingling  so puzzled the pigeons that they avoided the  house,  to  say
nothing of prospective tenants.
     In  the beginning, the Junior High School  was located there,  but  the
weathervanes  and fans distracted the Juniors. A few heedless  tenants tried
to live there for  a while, but the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis would  sway
whenever  it  was  windy, the  floors  were springy, and the  window  frames
creaked. The mansion began falling apart like a house of cards. Uger died of
a broken heart. He was delirious at the end and said he wanted a weathervane
and a fan for a tombstone.
     Meanwhile, the house kept on falling apart bit by  bit. The door jambs,
banisters  and sometimes whole  galleries  crumbled  and disintegrated.  The
nearby  houses all  sported panes of  stained  glass.  Weathervanes that had
abandoned Uger's Mansion now spun on rooftops up and down the street.
     When  a blizzard  hastened  the process of  destruction the  neighbours
would converge, pulling sleds. They would take up their positions all around
the house and wait, sitting there like a pack of hyenas beside a dying lion.
They dragged the fallen pieces of the house off to their own houses on their
sleds, but did not have the courage to  openly attack and loot this building
that was of no use to anyone any longer.


        ADVENTURES IN THE DEAD HOUSE

     We knew  that  the  huge dead house  could  be  a  new, convenient  and
mysterious  place  for  our  game.  Soon Schwambrania  moved  into  all  the
remaining rooms. Once again the game became fun. We were not at all dismayed
by the  fact that everything was wrecked inside. Schwambranians brought  new
life to the ruins, and the dead house put off the fall of Schwambrania for a
long time.
     A rustling, creaking and  echoing filled  the  remains  of the mansion,
firing  our imaginations. The wind swished up  and down the  rickety stairs.
Fear haunted the dim, musty hallways,  and terror  crept along the walls  at
night.
     This certainly  was  the  best  possible  place  for our  Schwambranian
adventures. We quickly surveyed the house, giving each room a beautiful name
of a Schwambranian city. The  country was  being restored to  life. However,
there was one  place we  had not yet  explored. This  was a dark, suspicious
passage  that  led  to a  basement filled with  debris.  We  set  out on  an
expedition to this uncharted land. Our  equipment  consisted of long  sticks
and  a  hanging votive light instead of a lantern. Then, following  the best
advice  of our various  camping books, we  tied a  rope  around our  waists,
attaching ourselves thus to each other. We now looked like spelunkers.
     We climbed down into the cave. The treads had long since fallen out  of
the  staircase. We  skidded  along slanted boards and  scrambled over  loose
bricks. I led the way. The light that was tied to the tip of my stick swayed
in front  of me. Oska plodded  along behind.  He was very staunch and brave,
and, to prove it, he kept  saying that he wasn't one bit scared, and that he
actually felt quite cosy. Just as he was saying how cosy  he was feeling for
the  sixth time, he  fell through the floor. A  rotten board had  given  way
under him, and Oska fell  into the  basement. Since we were tied together, 1
was  dragged  to  the very  edge of the hole  and  pulled  flat  against the
floorboards. The rope was very taut. It kept squeezing  my waist tighter and
tighter, cutting painfully into my middle.
     "Did you fall down?" I shouted into the black hole.
     "Not yet. I'm flying and flying, but I can't fall down to the bottom."
     I  lit the votive  light, which had gone out  during  the accident, and
lowered into the pit. There I  saw Oska. He was suspended by the rope around
his middle and  was revolving slowly. He kicked and squirmed as  he tried to
touch the floor.
     "Get me out of here, Lelya. It's awfully uncozy here. And the rope's so
tight."
     I  started  pulling  my  brother  up,  straining  as  hard  as I could.
Suddenly, there was a very unpleasant crack. The  boards I had been lying on
crumbled. I fell into the blackness and landed on top of him.
     "See? I fell down to the bottom. And the rope's not tight any more." He
sounded pleased.
     The little light was smashed.  Darkness  billowed  up around us in  the
cave.  A dense, sour-smelling  darkness filled the basement.  Wisps of  grey
light  filtered down through the hole we  had made. When our eyes had become
accustomed to the dark we noticed  quite a few strange objects that had been
concealed  by the  gloom. There was a crate  on legs,  some glass  and metal
vessels, and  strangely twisted and  spiralling tubes. We stumbled over some
sacks filled to the top with something or other.
     "It's hidden treasure," Oska said.
     "A secret one," I whispered.
     "This is big news!"
     "It  sure  is!  Real  hidden treasure for Schwambrania! We'll set  up a
wonderf...."
     A sudden beam of light  hit the floor  between us. We tried to scatter,
but  something  grabbed  us  from behind and  sent us sprawling.  It was the
accursed  rope that  had caught us  by the waists and tripped  us up. A hand
pulled the rope towards a  lantern. We saw a terrible mug above the lantern:
a glittering upper lip, flaming nostrils and  white lids. The other features
of the mysterious face were lost in the darkness.
     Then  we heard a rough voice saying, "What the hell are you doing here?
Hm?"
     The upper lip glistened and "Why the hell are you  here? I'll kill you,
you brats! If I see you  trying to give me the slip, I'll plaster you like a
pair of puppies." Some terrible cursing followed.
     "What are you yapping  about?" I  said, trying to keep  my  teeth  from
chattering.
     "You're not supposed to curse in  the presence of children," Oska said.
"Otherwise I will, too, and you'll be sorry."
     The rope  jerked, pulling us up to a huge fist  that was illuminated on
one side by the lantern. It  then revolved expressively, displaying, as some
menacing moon, all of its phases.
     "Let go of the rope! Who said you could hold  it like  that? Who do you
think you are?" I shouted.
     "He thinks this is  tsarist times,"  Oska added. "We'll  tell the Cheka
chief  on you. He's a very good friend  of  ours. We'll tell him  to  arrest
you."
     "Don't  you threaten  me, you!" At this the  huge fist  was raised over
Oska's head.
     "Stop! Remove  your hand,  madman!"  a  voice piped  up  behind  us. It
sounded strangely  familiar.  "And take the chains  off the  prisoners,"  it
continued in  the  same pompous vein. "Sit down,  young wanderers. Greetings
from an old scholarly hermit. What brings you to my cave, troglodytes?"
     The fist disappeared.  Now  a bald pate gleamed  like  a lagoon  in the
light of  the  lantern.  It  belonged  to  E-muet, to the toadstool  teacher
Kirikov.


        ELIXIR OF SCHWAMBRANIA

     "Sit down. I recognized you. You're  a member of the wild tribe. You're
both sons of the great and noble land of Schwabria," Kirikov said.
     "Schwambrania," Oska corrected him. "How'd you know?"
     "I know everything. I live in the hallowed depths of your  country, but
in my  free time, when I'm not occupied with scholarly research, I  surface,
0, Schwambrania, and  the  day  before, and last week,  I heard you  playing
among these pitiful ruins.  What I mean  is, when  you became inhabitants of
fair Schwambromania."
     "Schwambrania,"  Oska  said. He sounded annoyed.  "What  are you  doing
here?"
     "And what's all this stuff?" I asked.
     There was a long silence.
     "0, Schwambranians, you have carelessly touched upon  the one secret of
my miserable life, a secret that gives me no peace of mind," Kirikov said in
an echoing voice.
     "Do you only have a piece of mind?" Oska inquired. "Do you live  in the
Iboney house?"
     "My soul is pure, and my mind is clear, but I have been unjustly passed
over by my fellow-men and the authorities. I am insulted and humiliated. But
I  am suffering  for the good  of mankind. If you swear you  won't breathe a
word of my  secret to  anyone,  I  will preserve your secret, the secret  of
Schwamburgia."
     "Schwambrania," Oska muttered.
     We swore we would not. Kirikov held the lantern up to our faces, and we
solemnly pledged that we would preserve his secret to the grave.
     "Listen,  then, Schwambranian brothers!  I  am the  last  alchemist  on
earth.  I am science's Don Quixote, and this is my  faithful sword-bearer. I
have discovered the elixir of universal joy.  It makes the sick well and the
sorrowing  happy.  It  turns foes into  friends  and  strangers  into  bosom
companions."
     "Is that your game?" Oska asked.
     Kirikov snapped  that  his  elixir  was  not  a  game,  but  a  serious
scientific  discovery.  We then  found  out that the  cave  was  actually  a
laboratory where the  elixir was made. The  alchemist said  that in a year's
time,  when  the  last  experiments were completed,  he  would  publish  his
findings. He would then completely renovate the  house, have electricity put
in,  and  would give  us  the  entire top  floor  for Schwambrania.  In  the
meantime, however, we had to keep  quiet, no matter what. "I'm going to name
my  elixir of  universal  joy  in your honour, my young friends. It will  be
known as the Elixir of Schwambardia.
     "It's Schwamhrania. Schwambrania!" Oska shouted. "You can't even say it
right. What kind of an alphysics are you?"
     "I'm an alchemist, not an alphysics!" Kirikov sounded just as cross.
     We  visited  the  alchemist several  more  times. By the  light of  day
Kirikov and his  assistant Filenkin turned out  to be  very hospitable  men.
They told us of their progress and listened to the latest Schwambranian news
with  interest. The alchemist went so far as  to help us govern the country.
Schwambrania flourished.
     They worked  at  night. Their  secret  smoke  wafted  up  into the yard
through  a camouflaged  pipe and  was blown  away. Sometimes we even chopped
wood for their  stove. However, they never once showed us the elixir, saying
that it wasn't ready  yet. One day we  came  to see them and found them in a
very merry mood. They were singing  softly and clapping  warily. A fat woman
in bright felt boots and a bright shawl was part of the party.
     "See  how happy she is? She  just had the first  drops of the elixir of
world joy," the  alchemist said. "This is  Agrafena, I mean Agrippina, Queen
of Schwambrania. We'll crown her, and lead her to the throne. Hooray!"
     "We don't have any queen-ladies," Oska said glumly.
     "He's  right.  We'd  love  to have  her, but Schwambrania's a republic,
after all. If she wants to, she can be the president's wife," I explained.
     "All right then. She'll be  the president's wife. Agrafe ... eh- mew-eh
... Agrip-pina,  would  you  like  to  be  the  wife  of  the  President  of
Schwambrania?"
     "You bet!" said Agrippina.


        DONNA DINA AND THE KINSMEN

     A  young girl who  was  our cousin came  to stay with us. She was  from
Moscow and her name was Donna  Dina,  or Dindonna. Her real  name  was  just
Dina. Her black hair and  flashing black eyes,  which were as shiny  as  the
piano  top, and her teeth, which were as  white and even as the  ivory keys,
had earned her the name of Donna.
     Our aunts made sure that we understood we were to call her Cousin Dina.
However, Dina turned  out to be a  regular pal and  when she  first heard us
say, "Good morning, Cousin Dina," she burst out  laughing. When  she laughed
everything about her laughed: her eyes, her teeth and her hair.
     "Well,  then, good  morning, kinsmen!"  she replied. "How do you  spend
your time, if I may ask?"
     "In Schwambrania," Oska  replied, for he felt drawn to her immediately.
"And carrying straw. And we go out for walks. Will you go out with us?"
     "With pleasure. I'm sure to lose my way here alone."
     Even Oska had to agree that Dina was a beauty. She wore a real sailor's
middy-blouse,  given  to her by a  revolutionary sailor  from  Kronstadt. We
thought that  was wonderful. We escorted her around town. We  showed her the
ruins of Uger's Mansion, but did not say  a word about the alchemist or  his
elixir. Dina wanted to know all about Schwambrania. She was a little puzzled
by the fact that  in  such interesting  times as these  we  felt  a need for
make-believe. She  said it  was a  shame  and high time we  got down to real
work. Our friendship blossomed during our long walks.
     Young men would step aside politely to let Donna Dina pass. They nudged
each  other and looked  after her.  We  could hear them saying  what  a good
looker she was and beamed proudly.
     Dina had only been with us for three days when, to our joy, she stepped
on our aunts' toes, that is, hems. She criticized them for bringing us up in
such an old-fashioned way,  saying it was a  crime  to put  a damper on  the
social feelings that churned and boiled within us.
     "She's right! You can't imagine how my feelings churn! Especially after
pumpkin mush," Oska said.
     Dina hugged him and said  he hadn't  really understood, but  no matter.
The argument continued. Our aunts said that they had long since given up, as
far as we were concerned, that we had come completely under the influence of
the street and Bolshevism which, to their minds, was one and the same thing.
They  went on  to say such awful things it made Dina stand up and  slap  her
hand loudly on the table. Her face became flushed.
     "I think I forgot to mention the fact that I've  joined the Party," she
said.
     "Are you as good as a Communist now?" Oska inquired.
     "I hope so," she replied cheerfully.
     My aunts were flabbergasted. They gaped. Then their mouths shut slowly.


     FEKTISTKA'S OTHER NAME

     "My  dear kinsmen," Dina  said soon after. "Great vistas have opened up
before you. They are a challenge  to your boundless energy  and imagination.
But  you must  be social beings, dear kinsmen. It's high time you were!" She
had  just been  appointed Commissar Chubarkov's  assistant, in charge of the
children's library and reading-room.
     My  aunts'  definition  of  a  children's  library  was: an  officially
operated  hotbed of infectious diseases  which were to be found  lurking  in
profusion in the old books, as worn and torn as a ragman's clothes.
     Dina's idea of a  children's library was as follows: "It's not merely a
counter,  kinsmen. It's  not merely  a  place where  books are handed out. A
children's library should be the main  centre for educating  and bringing up
children outside the school.  It'll be  the  children's favourite clubhouse,
where each can  do as he likes. We'll teach children to respect good  books.
Oh, kinsmen, we'll have such a wonderful place! Your Schwambrania won't even
hold a candle to it! Everyone will want to belong to it. Just wait and see."
     However, in order to become such  a wonderful place, the library had to
have  more space. There were some  very rich people living in the  adjoining
apartment.  They had  been asked to  move  some  time before,  and  now Dina
decided to take matters into  her own hands.  She asked me to come along and
back her up.
     This would be the beginning of my volunteer work for the library.
     Dina was busy checking the catalogue and  library cards when I came in.
She was  surrounded  by  raggedy children. I  recognized many of  my  former
neighbourhood  enemies. There were also  some skinny children who lived near
the  railroad  tracks, some  stocky  boys  and  girls  from the  fishermen's
settlement,  and some  boys  who worked  at  the  cannery  and the bone-meal
factory. Some were filling in the  cards,  others  were pasting torn  pages,
while  still  others were  on  the  step ladders, placing the books  on  the
shelves. Everyone was  busy and you could  see they were  enjoying  the job.
This was the first children's book brigade.  They  obviously liked Dina  and
kept pestering her with questions.
     "Donna  Dina!  Donna  Dina! Who's Uncle  Tom's  cabin?" a  little  girl
wrapped in a huge shawl that  was  crossed on her  chest  and tied  in  back
asked.
     "Donna Dinovna!"  came  a voice from the top of a ladder. "Is Tolstoy a
place or a someone?"
     "Here's another helper, children," Dina  said, pointing to me. "Put his
name down on the list, Ukhorskov."
     I  was very offended. I had no intention of playing second fiddle here.
I had been  positive  Dina had intended  me to be in  charge  of everything.
However, I decided to say nothing for the time being.
     "I know you.  You're the doctor's  son. Won't  you  get in  trouble for
coming here with us?" somebody said.
     "Why should I get in trouble? Everybody's equal now."
     Ukhorskov, a tall boy with high  cheekbones,  came over to me. "Are you
going to be a doctor, too?" he said.
     "No. I'm  going to be  a sailor of the revolution." "That's  not bad. I
want to be an aviator."
     Commissar Chubarkov  came in just then. We hadn't seen each other for a
long time. "Oho! The younger  generation's shooting up! What does your  papa
write home about life in the trenches?"
     Then  we all trooped next door to help with the eviction. To  my horror
and embarrassment  the people were close relatives  of Taya