Lev Kassil. The black book and Schwambrania



     PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
     MOSCOW

     Translated from the Russian by Fainna Glagoleva

     Copyright Translation into English Progress Publishers 1978
     First Printing 1978
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     OCR: http://home.freeuk.com/russica2 ¡ http://home.freeuk.com/russica2
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        THE BLACK BOOK AND SCHWAMBRANIA

     A story of THE UNUSUAL ADVENTURES OF TWO KNIGHTS
     In Search of Justice
     Who Discovered
     THE GREAT SCHWAMBRANIAN NATION
     On the Big Tooth Continent,
     With a description
     Of the amazing events
     That took place
     On the Wandering Islands,
     And also many other things,
     As told by
     ADELAR CASE,
     FORMER ADMIRAL
     OF SCHWAMBRANIA,
     Who now goes by the name of
     LEV KASSIL,
     And including a great number
     Of secret documents, sea charts,
     The Coat of Arms and the flag


     __________________________________________________________________


        PART ONE

        THE BLACK BOOK

        A LAND OF VOLCANIC ORIGIN

        DISCOVERY

     On  the evening  of  October  11, 1492,  the 68th  day of  his  voyage,
Christopher  Columbus  noticed  a  moving light  on  the  horizon.  Columbus
followed the light and discovered America.
     On  the evening  of February  8,  1914,  my brother and  I, having been
punished,  were  sitting in  the corner. After twelve minutes of this he was
pardoned,  as being the younger, but refused to leave  me until  my sentence
was up  and  so stayed put.  For a while  we  were engrossed in  picking our
noses. On the 4th minute, when we tired of this, we discovered Schwambrania.

        THE LOST QUEEN, OR THE MYSTERY OF THE SEASHELL GROTTO

     The disappearance of  the queen  brought everything  to  a  head.  This
happened in  broad  daylight,  and  the  light of day  dimmed. It was Papa's
queen, and that was what made everything so terrible. Papa was a great chess
fan,  and everyone knows  what  an  important  figure the queen  is  on  the
chessboard.
     The lost queen was part of a new set made to order especially for Papa,
who was very proud of it.
     We were not to touch the figures for anything, yet it was impossible to
keep our hands off them.
     The  lovely lacquered  pieces fired  our imaginations, prompting  us to
invent any number of exciting games for  them. Thus, the pawns could  either
be soldiers  or tenpins. There  were small  circles  of felt pasted on their
round  soles,  and so they slid  around like floor polishers. The rooks were
good wine glasses, while the kings could either be samovars or generals. The
round knobs that crowned the bishops were like light bulbs. We could harness
a pair of black and a pair of  white  horses to cardboard cabs and line them
up to wait  for fares, or else we could arrange them so that they  formed  a
merry-go-round. However, the queens  were the best of  all.  One queen was a
blonde and the other was a brunette. Either one could be a Christmas tree, a
cabby, a Chinese pagoda, a flower pot on a stand or a priest. Indeed, it was
impossible to keep our hands off them.
     On that memorable day  the white  cabby-queen's black horse  was taking
the black  priest-queen  to see  the  black  general-king. He  received  the
priest-queen most nobly. He set  the white samovar-king on  the  table, told
the pawns to polish the chequered  parquet floor and turned on  the electric
light-bishops. Then the king and queen each had two rookfuls of tea.
     When  at last  the  samovar-king cooled off and we became  tired of our
game, we decided to put the figures  back in their case. Horrors!  The black
queen was missing!
     We  bruised our  knees crawling about,  looking under the  chairs,  the
tables and the bookcases. All our efforts  were in vain. The  wretched queen
was gone. Vanished! We finally had to tell  Mamma, who soon had everyone  up
in  arms. No matter how hard we all looked, we could not find it. A terrible
storm was about to break over our cropped heads. Then Papa came home.
     This was no measly storm. A blizzard, a hurricane, a cyclone, a simoom,
a waterspout and a typhoon came crashing down  upon us! Papa was furious. He
called us vandals and  barbarians. He said that  one could even teach a wild
bear  to  handle things carefully,  and all  we knew  how to  do  was  wreck
everything  we touched, and he would  not stand for such destructiveness and
vandalism.
     "Into the corner, both of you! And stay there!" he shouted. "Vandals!"
     We looked at each other and burst into tears.
     "If I'd  have known  I  was going to have such  a  Papa, I'd never  get
borned!" Oska bawled.
     Mamma blinked hard.  She  was about to  shed a tear,  but  that did not
soften Papa's heart.  We  stumbled off  to  the "medicine  chest". For  some
reason or  other  that  was  the  name  given to the  dim storeroom near the
bathroom  and the kitchen. There were always  dusty jars and bottles  on the
small window-sill, which is probably how the room originally got its name.
     There was a small low bench in one comer known as "the dock". Papa, who
was a doctor, felt  it was wrong to  have children stand  in the corner when
they were punished and so had us sit in the corner instead.
     There we were, banished to that shameful bench. The medicine  chest was
as dim as a dungeon. Oska said:
     "He meant the circus,  didn't he? I mean, the part about bears being so
careful. Didn't he?"
     "Yes."
     "Are vandals part of the circus, too?"
     "Vandals are robbers," I muttered.
     "That's what I thought." He sounded pleased.  "They have chains tied on
them."
     Annushka, our cook,  stuck her head out of the kitchen and threw up her
hands.
     "Goodness! The master's lost his toy and so the babies have to sit here
in the  dark. My poor little sinners! Do you want me to bring you the cat to
play with?"
     "No!"  I  growled.  The resentment which  had  gradually died down  now
welled up in me again.
     As the  unhappy day drew to  a close the dim room became  darker still.
The Earth  was turning its back on  the Sun. The world, too, turned its back
on us. We  looked out  upon the unjust world from  our place of  shame.  The
world was very large, as I had learned  in geography, but there was no place
for  children in  it. Grown-ups were  in charge  of  everything on  all five
continents. They changed the  course of history, rode horses, hunted, sailed
ships, smoked, made real things, went
     off  to war, fell in love, saved people,  kidnapped people  and  played
chess. But  their  children were made to stand in corners. The grown-ups had
probably forgotten the games they had played as children  and the books they
had found so interesting. Indeed, they had probably forgotten all about that
part of their lives. Otherwise they would have let us play with  whomever we
wanted to,  climb fences, wade through puddles and pretend that  a  chessman
called a king was a boiling samovar.
     That was what we were thinking about as we sat in the corner.
     "Let's run away! We'll gallop off!" Oska said.
     "Go  ahead, what's keeping you? But  where'll you go? Everyplace you go
there'll be grown-ups, and you're just a little boy."
     At that moment I had a brainstorm. It cut through the gloom like a bolt
of lightning, so that I was not at all surprised to hear the roll of thunder
that followed (actually, Annushka had dropped the roasting pan).
     There was  no need to run away, to search for a  promised land. It  was
here,  somewhere  very  close  at hand.  We  had only  to invent it. I could
practically  see it in the gloom. There, by the bathroom door, were its palm
trees, ships, palaces and mountains.
     "There's land ahead, Oska!" I shouted excitedly. "Land! It's a new game
we can play all our lives!"
     Oska's one thought was a good future ahead. "I'll blow the whistle, and
I'll be the engineer!" he said. "What'll we play?"
     "It's going to  be a game about a land, our own land. We'll live  in it
every day, besides living here, and it'll belong to us. Left paddle ahead!"
     "Aye, aye, Sir! Left paddle ahead! Whoooo!"
     "Slow speed. Pay out the mooring line."
     "Shhh," Oska hissed, letting off steam.
     We disembarked from our bench onto a new shore.
     "What's it called?"
     At the time of the events described, our favourite book was Greek Myths
by  Gustav Schwab, and  so  we  decided to name our  new  land  Schwabrania.
However, the word sounded too much like the cotton swabs  Papa used  in  his
practice, so  we added an "m", making our new land Schwambrania. We were now
Schwambranians. All of the above was to be kept a deep dark secret.
     Mamma  soon let us out of our  dungeon. She  had no way of knowing that
she  was  now  dealing  with  two  citizens  of  a  great  nation  known  as
Schwambrania.
     A  week  later the black queen  surfaced. The cat had rolled  it into a
crack under the  trunk. However, Papa had by then ordered  a new queen,- and
so this  queen was  ours. We decided to make  it the keeper of the secret of
Schwambrania.
     Mamma had a beautiful little grotto made of seashells that she had  put
away behind the mirror of her dressing table and had forgotten all  about. A
pair of tiny filigree brass gates guarded the entrance to the cosy cave. The
cave was empty. We decided to hide our queen there.
     We  wrote  "C.W.S."  (Code Words  of Schwambrania) on a  slip of paper,
pulled away an edge of the felt circle on the bottom of the black  queen and
stuck the paper into the space. Then we put the queen in the cave and sealed
the   gates  with  sealing-wax.  The  queen  was  now   doomed  to   eternal
imprisonment. I will tell you of what happened to it later.

        A BELATED INTRODUCTION

     Schwambrania was a land of volcanic origin.
     Red-hot growing forces boiled and bubbled within us. They  were held in
check by the stiff, rock-bound structure of our family and of the society in
which we lived.
     There  was so much we wanted to  know and still more that we  wanted to
learn how to do. But our teachers would only let us know as much as could be
found in our schoolbooks  and in silly children's stories,  and we  did  not
really know how to do anything, because we had never been taught to.
     We wanted to be a part of the adult  world,  but we were told to go and
play with our tin soldiers if we didn't want  to  get into  trouble with our
parents, teachers or the police.
     There  were  many  people in  our  town. They hurried up  and  down the
streets and often came into our yard, but we were only allowed  to associate
with the people our elders approved of.
     My brother  and I played Schwambrania for several years.  It became our
second country and was a mighty nation.  The Revolution,  that stern teacher
and excellent  educator, helped  us to overcome our old ties, and we finally
abandoned the tinfoil ruins of Schwambrania forever.
     I have saved  our  "Schwambranian letters" and  maps, the plans  of our
military campaigns  and  sketches  of the  flag  and  coat-of-arms.  I  have
referred to them to freshen my recollections while writing  this book. It is
the  story  of  Schwambrania,  with  tales  about  the   travels   of   many
Schwambranians and our own adventures there, as well as many other events.

        GEOGRAPHY

     "But the earth still turns-if you
     don't believe me, sit on your
     very own buttocks-and
     slide!"
     Mayakovsky


     Just  like any other country, Schwambrania had  a  terrain,  a climate,
flora, fauna and population all its own.
     Oska made the first map  of Schwambrania. He copied a large molar tooth
from a dentist's ad  he had seen, and  since it had three roots it  at  once
resembled a tulip, the crown  of the Nibelungs  and an  upside-down "M", the
letter  we had  added to the middle of  the  name of our new country. It was
very tempting to see some special meaning in this  and we did: we decided it
was a wisdom tooth,  signifying the wisdom of the Schwambranians.  Thus, the
new  country's  contours resembled a wisdom tooth. The surrounding ocean was
dotted  with islands and blots,  but  I must  say  that the  ink-spots  were
truthfully  marked  as such:  "Not an iland, an erer". The ocean was  marked
"Oshen". Oska drew wavy lines and inscribed them "waves". Then he marked the
"see"  and added two  arrows,  one pointing out  the "curant" and the  other
"this way is aposit". There  was also  a "beech", a straight-coursing  river
named the Halma,  the capital city of Schwambraena, the towns of Argonsk and
Drandzonsk, Foren  Shore Bay, "that side", a "peer", mountains and, finally,
"the place where the Earth curves".
     At the time  Oska was very much concerned about the spherical nature of
the ground underfoot and did his best to prove the roundness of the Earth to
himself. Luckily, we  knew nothing of  Mayakovsky's poetry, for Oska's pants
certainly would have been worn thin in his  efforts to see if he could slide
on it. However, he discovered another way of proving it. Before putting  the
finishing touches to his map of Schwambrania, he led me out of our yard with
a  very meaningful look on  his face. Beyond the granaries and near the main
square the remains of a mound could be seen.  Perhaps this  had once been  a
part of some earthen  foundation for a chapel, or perhaps it had once been a
large flower bed. Time had all  but levelled the little hump. Oska beamed as
he led me to it. He pointed grandly and said:
     "Here's the place where the Earth curves."
     I dared not contradict him.  Perhaps the Earth did curve  there. At any
rate, in order not to lose  face, for  he was my baby brother  after all,  I
said:  "Ha! That's  nothing!  You  should have  seen that  place in Saratov.
That's where the Earth re curves."
     Schwambrania was a truly symmetrical land, one  that could easily serve
an example for any ornament. To the West were mountains, a city and the sea.
To  East were mountains, a city and the sea. There was a bay on the left and
a bay  the right. This symmetry reflected  the true  justice  which governed
Schwambrania  and  the rules of our game. Unlike ordinary books, where  good
prevails and evil is vanquished on the very last page, ours was a land where
the heroes were rewarded  and the villains defeated at the  very start. Ours
was a country of complete well-being and exquisite perfection. There was not
even a jagged line in its contour.
     Symmetry  is  a   balance  of  lines,  a  linear  system  of   justice.
Schwambrania was a land of true justice, where all the good  things  in life
and even the terrain were  fairly distributed. There was a bay  on  the left
and a bay on the right, the city  of Drandzonsk in the West and the  city of
Argonsk in the East. Justice reigned.

        HISTORY

     Now, as was only proper for a real nation, Schwambrania  had to have  a
history all its  own.  Six months of our  playing the game  covered  several
centuries of its existence.
     As I learned from my reading, the  past history of any  self-respecting
country was crammed full of wars. That was why Schwambrania had to work hard
to catch  up. However, there was no one it could fight. That was  why we had
to draw two curved lines  across the bottom of the  Big Tooth  Continent and
write "Fence" along one  of them. We  now  had two enemy nations in  the two
marked-off  comers.   One  was  "Caldonia",  a  combination  of   "cad"  and
"Caledonia",  and  the other was  "Balvonia",  a  combination  of "bad"  and
"Bolivia". The level ground situated between Caldonia and Balvonia was there
to serve as a battle-field. It was marked "War" on the map.
     We were  soon  to see the  same  word in  large  block letters  in  the
newspapers.
     We imagined that all real battles took place in  a special hard-packed,
cleanly-swept square area like a parade ground. The Earth never curved here,
for the ground was level and smooth.
     "The  war place is  paved like a  sidewalk,"  I  said  knowingly to  my
brother.
     "Is there a  Volga in  a war?" he  wanted to know. He  thought that the
Volga meant any river.
     To both  sides of the "War"  part on the map  were  the places  for the
prisoners of war. The three areas were clearly marked "prizon".
     All  wars in  Schwambrania  began  with the  postman ringing  the front
doorbell of the Emperor's palace. He would say:
     "There's a special delivery for you, Your Majesty. Sign here."
     "I wonder who it's from?" the Emperor would say, licking the tip of his
pencil.
     Oska was the postman. I was the Emperor.
     "I  think I know that  handwriting," the postman would reply. "It looks
like it's from Balvonia. From their king."
     "Any letters from Caldonia?" the Emperor would ask.
     "They're  still  writing,"  the  postman  would  answer,  mimicking  to
perfection the reply of our postman, Neboga, for that was  what he would say
whenever we asked if there were any letters for us.
     "Lend me a hairpin, Queen!" the Emperor would shout and would then slit
open the envelope with a hairpin. A letter might read:

     "Dear Mr. King of Schwambrania,
     "How are you? We are fine, thank God. Yesterday we had a bad earthquake
and three volcanoes  erupted. Then  there was a terrible fire in  the palace
and a terrible flood. Last week we had a war against Caldonia. But we licked
them and captured all of  them. Because  the  Balvonians  are all very brave
heroes. And  all  the  Schwambranians  are  fools, idiots,  dunderheads  and
vandals.  And  we  want to fight you. God  willing, we  present you  with  a
manifesto in the newspapers. Come on out and fight a War. We'll lick you all
and capture you, too. If you don't fight a War, you're  all scaredy-cats and
sissies. And we despise you. You're all a bunch of idiots.
     "Regards to your missus the Queen and to the young man who's  the heir.
"Wherewith is the print of mine own boot.
     "The King of Balvonia"

     Upon  reading such a  letter, the  Emperor  would become very angry. He
would take his sword down from the wall and  summon his  knife-grinders.  He
would then send the Balvoniancad a telegram with a "paid reply". The message
would read:

        "I MARCH ON YOU."

     According to my History of  Russia textbook, either  Prince Yaroslav or
Prince Svyatoslav of yore had sent his enemies a similar warning. The Prince
would  telegraph this message to some warrior tribe of Pechenegs or Polovtsi
and would then ride off to settle their hash. However, it  would never do to
address such  an  impertinent fellow as the King  of Balvonia politely,  and
that was why  the Emperor of Schwambrania would angrily add  "rat": "I March
on you, rat!" Then the Emperor would summon the supplier of medicine to  His
Majesty's court,  whose  official title was Physician Extraordinary, and get
himself called up.
     "And how are  we  today?"  the  Physician Extraordinary would  inquire.
"How's our stomach? Uh  ... how's our stool, I  mean  throne, today? Breathe
deeply, please."
     Then the Emperor  would get into his coach and say:  "Come  on, fellow!
Don't spare the horses!"
     And he would go off to war. Everyone would cheer and salute, while  his
queen waved a clean hankie from her window.
     Naturally, Schwambrania won  all its  wars.  Balvonia  was defeated and
annexed. But  no sooner were  the "war parade grounds"  swept clean and  the
"prizon"  places  aired than Caldonia would declare  war on Schwambrania. It
would also be defeated.  A hole was made in the fortress wall, and from then
on the Schwambranians  could go to Caldonia without  paying  the fare, every
day except Sundays.
     There  was  a special place on  "that  side" for "Foren Land". That was
where  the  nasty  Piliguins lived.  They  roamed the icy  wastes  and  were
something of a cross between pilgrims and penguins.  The  Schwambranians had
met the Piliguins head-on on  the war  grounds on  several occasions and had
always  defeated  them.  However, we did not annex  their land,  for then we
would  have had no one to fight. Thus,  Piliguinia was  set aside for future
historic developments.

        FROM POKROVSK TO DRANDZONSK

     When in Schwambrania, we lived on the main street of Drandzonsk, on the
1,001st  floor  of  a diamond house. When in Russia we lived in the  town of
Pokrovsk  on  the Volga River, opposite the city of Saratov. We lived on the
first floor of a house on Market Square.
     The screeching voices  of the women  vendors burst in  through the open
windows. The pungent dregs of the market were piled high on the square.  The
unharnessed horses  chomped loudly, and their feed-bags jerked  and  bobbed.
Wagons  raised their shafts heavenwards, imploringly.  There  were eatables,
junk,  groceries,  greens,  dry  goods,  embroideries  and  hot  food  rows.
Thin-rind watermelons  were  stacked  in pyramids  like  cannon-balls in the
movie The Defence of Sevastopol.
     This  was the film  then  being shown  at the  Eldorado,  the  electric
cinematographic theatre around the corner. There were always goats  outside.
Regular herds of goats crowded  around to munch  on the playbills which were
pasted to the billboards with flour-paste.
     Breshka Street  led  from the Eldorado to  our  house.  People used  to
promenade here in the evenings. The street  was only two blocks long, and so
the strollers would  jostle each other  as they  walked back  and forth  for
hours on end,  from one  corner  to  another, like  tiny waves  in a bathtub
splashing  first  against one side  and  then another.  The girls  from  the
outlying  farms  walked down  the middle  of the street.  They seemed to  be
sailing  along  unhurriedly,  swaying  slightly  as  they walked,  like  the
floating  watermelon rinds hitting the Volga piers. The dry,  staccato sound
of roasted  sunflower  seeds  being  cracked  floated  above  the crowd. The
sidewalks were black from discarded sunflower shells. The roasted seeds were
known locally as "Pokrovsk conversation".
     Standing  on the  sidelines  were young fellows wearing rubber galoshes
over their boots. They would flick away a garland of empty seed shells stuck
to  their lip with  a  magnificent  movement of  a pinky. A young  man would
address a girl with true politesse: "Mind if I latch on? How's about telling
us your name? What is it? Marusya? Katya?"
     "Go  on! Doesn't he  think he's  something!" the girl would scoff. "Oh,
well, what the heck, you might as well walk along."
     All evening long the babbling, sunflower seed-cracking crowd of country
boys and girls would stomp up and down in front of our windows.
     We would sit on the  windowsill in the dark parlour, looking out at the
darkening street. As busy  Breshka  Street floated by  us, invisible palaces
and  castles  rose on the windowsill and palm fonds waved, and  cannonade we
two alone could hear resounded all  around us.  The  destructive shrapnel of
our  imagination tore through the night. We were firing  upon Breshka Street
from our windowsill, which was Schwambrania.
     We could hear the whistles  of the  river boats on the Volga. They came
to us from the darkness of the night like  streamers bridging the  distance.
Some were very high and vibrated like the coiled  wire in bulb, while others
were low and rumbling like a piano's bass string. A boat was attached to the
other end of each streamer, lost in the dampness of the great river. We knew
the entire ledger of  these boat calls by heart, and could read the whistles
and  blasts  like  the  lines of  a  book.  Here  was  a velvety,  majestic,
high-rising   and  slowly  descending  "arrival"  whistle  of  the   Rus.  A
hoarse-voiced tug pulling a heavy barge scolded a rowboat. Two short, polite
blasts followed.  That was the Samolyot  and the  Kavkaz-Mercury approaching
each other. We even knew  that the Samolyot was  heading upstream  to Nizhny
Novgorod, while  the  Kavkaz-Mercury was  heading  downstream  to Astrakhan,
since the  Mercury,  obeying the rules of river etiquette,  was the first to
say hello.

     JACK, THE SAILOR'S COMPANION

     Our world was a bay jam-packed with boats. Life was an endless journey,
and each given day was  a  new voyage. It was quite natural, therefore, that
every  Schwambranian was a sailor. Each and every one had  a boat tied up in
his back  yard. Jack, the Sailor's Companion,  was  far  and  away the  most
highly respected of all Schwambranians.
     This  great  statesman  came  into being  because  of a small  handbook
entitled: The Sailor's Pocket Companion and Dictionary of Most-Used Phrases.
We bought this  dog-eared treasure at the market second-hand for five kopeks
and endowed our new hero, Jack, the Sailor's Companion, with all the  wisdom
between its covers.
     Since the handbook contained a vocabulary as well as a short section of
sailing  directions, Jack soon became  a  regular linguist, as he learned to
speak German, English, French and Italian.
     Speaking for Jack, I would read the vocabulary  aloud, line after line.
The result was most satisfying.
     "Thunder, lightning, waterspout, typhoon!" Jack, the Sailor's Companion
would  say.  "Donner, blitz, wasserhose! How do  you do, sir or madame, good
morning, bonjour. Do you speak any other language? Yes, I  speak  German and
French. Good morning, evening.  Goodbye, guten Morgen,  Abend, adieu. I have
come by boat, ship, on foot, on horseback; par mer, a pied, a cheval.... Man
overboard. Un uomo in mare.  What is the charge for saving him? Wie viel ist
der bergelon?"
     Sometimes Jack's imagination ran away with him, and I  would  blush for
shame at his whopping lies.
     "The pilot grounded us," Jack, the Sailor's Companion would say angrily
on page  103, but would  then  confess in  several languages (page 104):  "I
purposely ran aground to save the cargo."
     We began our day in Pokrovsk with an arrival whistle while still in our
beds.  This meant  we  had  returned  from a  night  spent in  Schwambrania.
Annushka would watch the morning ritual patiently.
     "Slow speed! Cast down  the mooring rope!" Oska commanded after  he had
sounded his fog horn.
     We cast off our blankets.
     "Stop! Let down the gangplank!"
     We swung our legs over the side of our beds.
     "All off! We've arrived!"
     "Good morning!"

        A QUIET HAVEN

     Our house was just another big boat. It had dropped anchor in the quiet
harbour  of Pokrovsk. Papa's consulting room was the bridge. No second class
passengers, meaning us,  were allowed there. The parlour was the first class
deck  house.  The dining room was the mess. The  terrace was  the  promenade
deck. Annushka's room  and the kitchen were the third  class deck, the  hold
and the  engine  room. Second class passengers were  not  allowed in  there,
either. That was really a shame,  because if there was ever any smoke in the
house it came from there.
     There smokestack was not  a make-believe one, but  a real one, and real
flames roared  in the furnace. Annushka, the  stoker and the  engineer, used
real tools:  a poker  and scoop.  The deck  house bell rang insistently. The
samovar whistled,  signalling our departure. As the water in it bubbled over
Annushka snatched it up  and carried it off to  the  mess, holding it as far
away  from her body as possible. That  was how babies were carried off  when
they had wet their diapers.
     We were summoned up on deck and had to leave the engine room.
     We always  left  the  kitchen  unwillingly,  because this was the  main
porthole of our house, a window to the outside world, so to speak. The  kind
of people  we  had been  told once and for all were  not the kind we were to
associate with were forever  coming and going here. The people  we were not.
to  associate with were:  ragmen, knife-grinders,  delivery  boys, plumbers,
glaziers,   postmen,   firemen,  organ-grinders,  beggars,   chimney-sweeps,
janitors, the neighbours' cooks, coal men, gypsy  fortune-tellers,  carters,
coopers, coachmen  and wood-cutters. They were  all third  class passengers.
And they were probably the best, the  most interesting people in  the world.
But  we were told that they were carriers of  the most dreadful diseases and
that their bodies swarmed with germs.
     One day Oska said to Levonty Abramkin, the master garbage man, "Are you
really  swamping, I  mean swaping, uh  ... you  know,  full of  measle  bugs
crawling all over you?"
     "What's  that?"  Levonty sounded  hurt.  "These here are natural  lice.
There's  no such  animal as measle bugs. There's worms, but that's something
you get in the stomach."
     "Oh!  Do you  have  worms  swarping  inside  your  stomach?" Oska cried
excitedly.
     This was the last  straw. Levonty pulled  on  his cap and  stalked out,
slamming the door behind him.
     The kitchen  was  a seat  of  learning. In  Schwambrania  the King  sat
enthroned  in  the  kitchen  and let  anyone  in  who  wanted  to  come. The
neighbourhood children would come carolling there on Christmas Eve.
     On  New  Year's  Day  our  precinct  policeman  would  call to pay  his
respects. He would click his heels and say:
     "My respects."
     He would be  offered  a glass of vodka  brought out on a saucer,  and a
silver rouble The policeman would take the rouble, offer his thanks and then
drink  to  our health Oska and I  stared into his  mouth. He would grunt and
then  stop  breathing  for moment. He  seemed to  be listening to some inner
process  in  his body, listening to the progress of the vodka,  as  it were,
down  into his policeman's stomach. Then he would click his  heels again and
salute.
     "What's he doing?" Oska whispered.
     "He's offering us his respects."
     "For a rouble?"
     The policeman seemed embarrassed.
     "What are you doing here, you rascals?" our father boomed.
     "Papa!  The  policeman's  giving us his respects  for a  rouble!"  Oska
shouted.

        OUR CAPTAIN AT HOME

     Papa was a very tall man with  a great mass of curly blond hair. He had
tremendous drive and never seemed to tire. After a hard day he could drink a
samovar-full of tea. His movements were quick and his voice loud. Sometimes,
when Papa got angry at a local  peasant who had come to him with an ailment,
he would begin to shout,  and we  feared the patient might die of fright, if
nothing else, for we certainly would have.
     However, Papa was also a very  cheerful person. Sometimes a man who had
come to complain  of a pain in the chest would soon forget about it and roar
with laughter as he gripped his sides. When Papa's  booming laugh sounded in
the house  the cat would dash under the sideboard and waves would  appear in
the fishbowl. He would  often scandalize Annushka by carrying Mamma into the
dining-room and say, "The lady of the house has arrived  for dinner,"  as he
sat her down.
     Papa liked to have  fun. As we sat at the table he would say, "Hey you,
Caldonians,  Balvonians and highwaymen, don't look so  glum." He would chuck
us under our chins and add, "Get your beards out of your soup."
     The King of Schwambrania  was aping Papa  when he  said, "Get some life
into those nags," to his driver.
     When Papa demanded another cot for the free community hospital he would
speak at the town meetings, and all the rich farmers would grumble, "No need
for that." Our local  paper, The Saratov  News, would carry a  report of the
meeting, describing  the chairman  calling our  father to order, while  "the
honourable doctor  demanded  that  Mr.  Gutnik's words be  included  in  the
minutes of the meeting and, in reply, Mr. Gutnik said that...".
     Papa knew everyone in town. Flower-decked wedding parties nearly always
felt it their duty to stop their sleighs outside our house, enveloping it in
a cloud of dazzling colour and song. Breshka Street was strewn  with wrapped
candies  that were  tossed into  the crowd by the handful from the  sleighs.
Hundreds of bells jangled on the beribboned yokes. Musicians  played  in the
rug-draped  lead sleighs.  The  red-faced, shrieking matchmakers would dance
right in  the broad sleighs, waving bouquets of paper flowers  tied  up with
ribbons.
     Papa was also remembered in connection with the following incident.
     At one  time  a gang of thugs  terrorized the town. The thugs  were all
middle-aged family men, and the police were not providing any protection for
the population.
     Then the people decided to take the law into their own hands. They drew
up  a  list of the most dangerous men  and the  crowd set out, going to each
house on the list in turn and murdering the men on the list.
     All this took place in the dead of night.
     One  of the ringleaders  found refuge in Papa's hospital. He really was
very sick. He  begged Papa to save him from the mob, going down on his knees
to plead for his life.
     "They're justified in  settling the score," Papa  said. "You  can thank
your lucky stars  you  got  sick when you did. Since  you'll  be my patient,
that's all  I'm  concerned  about  at present. I don't want to know anything
else. Get up and go lie down."
     The angry crowd surrounded the hospital. Men shouted and cursed outside
the locked gates. Papa went outside the fence to  face the crowd.  "What  do
you want?  I won't let you in, so you  might as well turn back! You'll bring
all sorts of germs into the surgical wards.  And we'll have to disinfect the
whole hospital."
     "You  just  hand  over Balbashenko,  Doctor.  We'll sign-a paper saying
we're responsible for him. We'll... take good care of him."
     "Balbashenko has a very high fever," Papa replied in a steely voice. "I
cannot discharge him now, and that's  final!  And stop all the noise. You're
frightening the other patients."
     The crowd advanced silently. Suddenly, an old stevedore stepped forward
and said,  "The doctor's right, boys.  That's according to their  laws. Come
on,  let's go. We'll take care of Balbashenko later.  Sorry to have bothered
you. Doc."
     Balbashenko was "taken care of three months later.

        THE LAND OF HANON

     Papa had a terrible temper. When  he was really angry he was deafening.
We would be chastised and  chastened,  reproved and reprimanded, admonished,
upbraided and raked over the coals. That was when Mamma entered the scene.
     She was  our soft pedal during  all of Papa's really excessive tirades.
He would always tone down in her presence.
     Mamma was a pianist and music teacher. All day long the house resounded
with  scales rippling up and down the  keyboard and  the drumming  of finger
exercises. The dull voice of a pupil with a cold could be heard counting out
loud: "One  an' two, an' three, one an' two, an' three...." Then Mamma would
sing, to  the  tune of Hanon's  immortal piano exercises: "One and five, and
three, and one, and four, and don't raise your elbows, and five and one...."
     It seemed this song was an accompaniment to all our childhood years. In
fact, all my memories can be sung to the tune of those finger exercises. All
save those associated with the sticky, fever-ridden days of diphtheria,  the
measles,  scarlet fever and  the croup come  back to me  minus this  musical
background, for then Mamma devoted herself entirely to restoring our health.
     Mamma was nearsighted. She  would bend low over the music,  so  that by
the  day's end she would be seeing  spots from  all the black squiggles that
were called notes.
     There was a bronze paper-holder on the  desk in Papa's consulting room.
It was made  in the  shape of a woman's delicate, tapering  hand  and held a
sheaf of prescription blanks, postal receipts and bills. Mamma's  hands were
just like that. As a pampered young damsel she had left her parents' home in
a large city to accompany  her husband to his rural practice in the wilds of
Vyatka region. She was to spend  many a sleepless night sitting by the dark,
frosted window, waiting up for  Papa.  There was a draught  from the window.
The flame of the small  night light flickered.  Bitter frost, a blizzard and
darkness enveloped  the house. Papa was  somewhere out in the  howling gale,
riding in a horse-drawn sleigh, on his way  to  patient in a village fifteen
miles away. Tiny  lights would  appear in the darkness,  but these  were not
lighted windows,  they  were  the  glittering  eyes of  wolves.  The distant
churchbell,  that  beacon of  all nights when blizzards raged,  faded in the
distance. Papa would follow the  sound. In time the dark houses of a village
would  appear  among  the  snowdrifts. There Papa would perform an emergency
operation by the glow of  a rushlight in a stuffy  log  cabin, rank with the
smell of sheepskin coats. Then he would wash his hands and head back home.

        THE WHISTLE AWAKENED SCHWAMBRANIA

     In winter  there were  blizzards in  Pokrovsk,  too.  The steppe  would
attack  the settlement with snowstorms and sharp winds. Then the churchbells
of Pokrovsk would toll on through the night, guiding stragglers back to  the
snow-covered road.
     Our family was all at home in our warm house. The blizzard spun on like
a spindle, spinning its fine, frosty thread, howling in the chimney.  It was
our houseboat whistling from its safe berth in a sheltered harbour.
     The  guests  that evening  were our usual  visitors: Terpanian, the tax
inspector,  and  the  dentist,  a  tiny  man  named  Pufler.  Oska had  just
embarrassed everyone  by  confusing  his words and calling Pufler  a denture
instead of a dentist.
     Papa  and  the  tax inspector  were playing chess. Mamma was  playing a
minuet by Paderewski, and  Annushka was carrying in the  samovar, which  was
saying "puff", whistling and saying "wheeee...."
     Terpanian,  who was a jolly man, teased Annushka, as always, pretending
he was going to poke her in the ribs as he made a scarey noise.
     Annushka got frightened,  as she always did,  and shrieked,  making the
tax inspector laugh and say, "Yippee!"
     Papa looked at the clock and said, "All right, you rascals, off to bed!
We won't detain you any longer."
     We  politely  bid everyone  goodnight  and went  off to  sail  away  to
Schwambrania for the night.
     The mooring ropes were  cast  off,  which meant  we  had  taken off our
shoes.  Sailing  whistles  could  be heard  in  the  nursery. Then  the last
commands were sounded: "Left paddle ahead! Shhhhh! Whooo!"
     "Half speed ahead! Full steam ahead!"
     We were  Schwambranians again. We were sick and tired of  safe harbors,
of being barred  from the kitchen, of piano  exercises and patients  ringing
the front doorbell. We  were  sailing for our second homeland. The shores of
Big Tooth  Continent could be seen beyond the place where  the Earth curved.
The Black Queen, the keeper of the secret of Schwambrania, was imprisoned in
the seashell grotto. The palaces of Drandzonsk awaited us.
     We finally arrived. I stood on the bridge and pulled the whistle lever.
There was a loud blast.
     It was a loud approaching whistle. I opened my eyes. I was in Pokrovsk.
Back in our room. The whistle sounded again. An urgent blast hit the window.
The  room  was filled with  the  loud, oppressing sound of  the  whistle. It
passed through the house, dragging its feet.
     It did not stop. Then bells began ringing all over the house. The front
doorbell pealed. The bell for Papa's consulting room  rang in  the  kitchen.
The telephone was jangling. I could hear Papa shouting: "They  should all be
hanged!  Couldn't they have foreseen such a  thing? Well, it's  too late  to
talk about it now. Do you  have enough stretchers? I'm  on my way.  Have you
sent a horse for me? I'll be right over. The hospital's been alerted."
     The  whistle was  warning us about  some  great  calamity.  Mamma  came
rushing into our  room. She said there had been a terrible  accident at  the
bone-meal factory, where the high wall of the drying shed had collapsed. The
manager had told the workers to load too many  bones on it, and the wall was
very old.  He had  been  warned  that the wall might give  way.  Now  it had
collapsed  under great  weight,  falling on top  of  fifty men. Papa and the
other doctors had all rushed to the factory to try to save the victims.
     So. That's what.... That's what. That's what could happen. But never in
Schwambrania! Never!

        CRITICISING THE WORLD AND OUR OWN LIVES

     The collapse of the wall  in the bone-meal factory  brought  about  the
collapse of our faith in the well-being of the all-powerful tribe of