Chapter 4

I bought a two-day-old Pravda, drank a glass of soda water, and settled down on a bench in the park, in the shade of the Honor Roll. It was eleven o’clock. I looked through the paper carefully. This took seven minutes. Then I read the article about hydroponics, the feature about the doings in Kansk, and a long letter to the editor from the workers of a chemical plant. This took altogether twenty-two minutes.

Perhaps I should visit the cinema, I thought. But I had already seen Kozara, once in the theater and once on television. So I decided to have something to drink, folded the paper, and stood up. Of all the copper collection from the old hag, there remained only a single five-kopeck piece. Finish it up, I decided; had a glass of soda with syrup, got a kopeck back, and bought a box of matches in the adjoining stall. There was nothing else to do downtown. So I started off at random — into a narrow street between store No. 2 and dining room No. 11.

There were almost no pedestrians. A huge dusty truck with a rattling trailer passed by. The driver, head and elbow stuck out of the window, was tiredly scanning the Belgian block pavement. Descending, the street turned sharply to the right, where the barrel of an ancient cast-iron cannon, frill of butts and dirt, was stuck in the ground. Soon the street ended at the cliff by the river. I sat a while on the edge admiring the landscape, then crossed over to the other side and strolled back to the center of town.

Curious, where did the truck go? I thought suddenly. There was no way down the cliff. I started looking around, searching for a gate, and then discovered a small but very strange-looking building squeezed in between grim brick warehouses. The windows of the lower story were set with iron bars, and the bottom halves were painted white. As to doors, there weren’t any. I noticed this at once because the usual sign, which is normally placed next to the gates, was here hung between two windows. It read: Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., Srits. I went back to the middle of the street. Sure enough — two stories with ten windows apiece and not a single door. Warehouses to the right and left. Srits, thought I. Scientific Research Institute of TS. Meaning what — Technology of Security, Terrestrial Seismology? The cottage on hen’s legs, it occurred to me, is a museum of this SR1TS. My hitchhikers are probably also from here. Also those two in the tearoom… A flock of crows took off from the roof of the house and began circling about, cawing loudly. I turned around and started back toward the square.

We are all naive materialists, I thought, and also rationalists. We demand that everything should be explained immediately in rationalist terms; that is, reduced to fit in with the handful of known facts. No one applies a penny’s worth of dialectics. It enters nobody’s head that between the known data and some new phenomena, there could be an ocean of unknowns, and so we declare the new phenomenon to be supernatural and therefore impossible. Say, for instance, the way Maitre Montesquieu would take the message about the resuscitation of a dead man forty-five minutes after his heart stopped beating. With a bayonet counterattack, that’s how he would take it. Toss it on pikes, so to speak. He would no doubt dub it obscurantism and clericalism. That is, if he would not just wave such a datum away. If it happened right in front of his own eyes, he would be placed in an extremely difficult position. Such as my own at the moment, except that I was more accustomed to it. But for him, it would be necessary either to consider it a fraud, or to disbelieve his senses or even to renounce materialism. Most likely he would opt for fraud. Nevertheless, to the end of his days the memory of this adroit trick would irritate his thinking, like a mote in the eye…. But we, we are the children of a different age. We have seen a lot: the live head of a dog sewn to the body of another; the artificial kidney as big as a closet; the iron hand operated by the nerve signals from a live one; the people who can say, casually, “This was after I had died for the first time..”

Yes, in our times Montesquieu would have had a poor chance of remaining a materialist. Nonetheless we remain materialists and there is no harm done! True enough, this can get to be difficult sometimes when a chance wind, blowing across the ocean of the unknown, will carry our way some strange petals from unexplored continents. Most often it happens when one finds that which one was not looking for. Soon enough there will appear new and amazing animals from Mars or Venus in our zoos. Of course, we will be ogling them and slapping our sides, but we have been waiting for them a long time, and we are prepared for their appearance. We would be much more astounded and disappointed if there would not be any such animal or if they would be like our cats and dogs. As a rule, science, in which we have faith (and often, blind faith), prepares us well in advance for the coming miracles, so that a psychic shock occurs in us only when we collide with something unpredicted — some hole into a fourth dimension, or biological radio communication, or a living planet…. Or, say, a cottage on hen’s legs. Anyway, that hawk-nosed Roman was right with a vengeance; it’s very, very, and very fascinating here with them.

I came out on the square and stopped by the soft-drink kiosk. I remembered that I didn’t have any change and that I would have to break a bill. I was formulating an ingratiating smile, knowing full well that the girls who sold the drinks couldn’t stand changing bills, when I felt a fivekopeck piece in my jeans pocket. I was both astonished and delighted, but more the latter. I drank up my soda water with fruit syrup, accepted a wet kopeck in change, and chatted with the girl about the weather. Next I set out homeward with great determination so as to finish with the DC and the TS and be free to continue with my dialectic and rationalistic explanations. I shoved the kopeck down into my pocket and stopped, discovering that there was another five-kopeck piece already in it. I took it out and studied it. It was somewhat damp and on it was stamped 5 kopecks, 1961, and the numeral 6 was marred with a small gouge. It may be that even then I would not have paid this little incident any attention, except for that instant feeling, with which I was already familiar, that I was simultaneously standing in the Prospect of Peace and sitting on the sofa looking at the wardrobe. And just as before the feeling disappeared when I shook my head.

For a while I kept on walking slowly, absentmindedly tossing the piece (it kept landing heads-up in my palm) and attempting to focus my thoughts. Then I saw the food store where I had fled from the kids in the morning, and entered. Holding the coin between two fingers, I went up to the counter and drank, this time without any pleasure at all, a glass of plain seltzer. Next, gripping the change in my hand, I went aside and checked the pocket.

It was one of those cases where there was no psychic shock. More likely I would have been surprised if the piece had not been in my pocket. But it was — damp, 1961, and with a gouge in the numeral 6. Someone bumped into me and inquired as to whether I was taking a nap. Apparently I was standing in the line for the cashier. I said I wasn’t and punched a ticket for three boxes of matches. Standing in line for the matches, I verified that the piece was back again in my pocket. I was absolutely calm. Having received my three boxes of matches, I returned to the square and proceeded to experiment.

The experiment took about an hour. During this hour, I circumnavigated the square ten times, swelled up from the seltzer, accumulated match boles and newspapers, got acquainted with all the clerks, male and female, and arrived at a series of interesting conclusions. The five-kopeck piece came back if you paid with it. If you just simply threw it away, or dropped it, it stayed where it fell. The coin returned to pocket at the moment when the change moved from the hands of the seller to the hands of the buyer. If you kept your hand in one pocket, it appeared in the other. It never appeared in a zippered pocket. If you kept a hand in each pocket, and accepted the change with your elbow, the coin appeared anywhere on your body. (In my case, it turned up in my shoe.) The disappearance of the piece from the saucer with the coppers cannot be observed: it is immediately lost to sight in the pile of other coppers, and no motion of any kind takes place in the instant of the transfer to the pocket.

And so, we were faced with a so-called unspendable five-kopeck piece in the process of its functioning. In itself the fact of the unspendability did not interest me. My imagination was primarily overwhelmed by the possibility of an extra-dimensional transference of a material object. It was abundantly clear that the mysterious move of the coin from seller to buyer represented none other than a special case of the legendary matter transmission, so well known to the friends of science-fiction under the pseudonyms of hyper transposition, similarization, Tarantog’s phenomenon…. The unfolding perspectives were overpowering.

I didn’t have any instruments. An ordinary minimum-recording lab thermometer could tell a lot, but I didn’t even have that. I was forced to limit myself to purely visual subjective observations. I started my last tour of the square, with the following self-assigned task: “Having placed the coin next to the change saucer, and impeding to the maximum possible extent the cashier’s mixing it with the rest of the coins before passing the change, to trace visually the process of transference in space, attempting simultaneously to determine, even qualitatively, the change in the temperature of the air near the presumed Trajectory of Transit” However, the experiment was cut short right at the start.

When I approached Manya, my first seller, I was already expected by the same young police sergeant whom I had met before.

“So,” he said in a professional tone.

I looked at him searchingly, with a premonition of disaster.

“May I see your papers, citizen,” he said, saluting and looking past me.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, taking out my passport.

“And I’ll be asking you for the coin, too,” said the policeman, accepting the passport.

I handed him the five-kopeck piece in silence. Manya was regarding me with accusing eyes. The policeman studied the coin and, stating with satisfaction, “Aha,” opened the passport. He studied that passport like a bibliophile would study a rare incunabulum. I waited, mortified. A crowd grew slowly around us. Various opinions about me were expressed by its members.

“We’ll have to take a walk,” the policeman finally said.

We took a walk. While we walked, several variants on my unsavory biography were created in the accompanying crowd, and a series of antecedents was formulated for the court case that was initiated right in front of everybody’s eyes.

In the station house, the policeman handed the passport and the five-kopeck piece to the lieutenant on duty. He examined the coin and offered me a chair. I sat down. The lieutenant said disdainfully, “Hand in the change,” and also immersed himself in the study of my passport. I shoveled out the coppers. “Count them, Kovalev,” said the lieutenant and looked at me steadily.

“Bought much?” he asked.

“A lot,” I answered.

“Hand it in, too,” said the lieutenant.

I laid out four issues of two-day-old Pravdas, three issues of the local Fisherman, two issues of the Literary Gazette, eight boxes of matches, six pieces of Golden Key toffee, and a marked-down wire brush for cleaning kerosine stoves.

“I can’t hand in the drinks,” I said dryly. “Five glasses with syrup and four without syrup.”

I was beginning to comprehend what was involved, and I was extremely nauseated and discomfited at the idea that it would be necessary to find excuses for myself.

“Seventy-four kopecks, comrade Lieutenant,” reported the youthful Kovalev.

The lieutenant pensively regarded the pile of newspapers and match boxes.

“Were you amusing yourself, or what?” he asked me.

“Or what,” I said gloomily.

“Not prudent of you,” said the lieutenant. “Not prudent, citizen. Tell me about it.”

I told. At the end of the story, I asked the lieutenant most earnestly not to interpret my actions as an attempt to save up the price of a car. My ears were burning. The lieutenant chuckled.

“And why not so interpret it?” he inquired. “Cases of it have been attempted.”

I shrugged.

“I can assure you such a thought couldn’t enter my head…. What am I saying? It couldn’t, when, in fact, it didn’t!”

The lieutenant was silent for a long time. The young Kovalev took my passport and again set to studying it.

“It would be rather ridiculous to suppose…” I said, distraught. “An altogether loony concept… to save by the kopeck…” I shrugged again. “You’d be better off begging on the church steps, as they say.

“As to begging, we try to combat that,” said the lieutenant significantly.

“And that’s correct and only natural…. I just don’t understand what that has to do with me….” I caught myself shrugging once more, and resolved not to do it again.

The lieutenant was silent for a tiresomely long time, examining the coin.

“We’ll have to make out a report,” he said finally.

“Please, of course… although…” I didn’t know exactly what followed the “although.”

For a while, the lieutenant looked at me in expectation of a continuation. But I was busy figuring as to which section of the criminal code my actions came under, so he drew a sheet of paper toward him and set to writing.

The young Kovalev returned to his post. The lieutenant was squeaking away with his pen, and dipping it often and noisily into the inkwell. I sat, dully staring at the posters hung on the walls and thinking, listlessly, how, in my place, Lomonosov, for example, would have grabbed his passport and jumped out the window. What’s at the core o/ it all? I thought. The essence of the matter is that a man does not regard himself as guilty. In that sense, I was not guilty. But guilt, it seems, can be objective and subjective. And a fact is a fact: all that copper money in the amount of seventy-four kopecks, juridically speaking, was the result of theft, carried out by technical means in the form of an unspendable coin.

“Read it and sign, please,” said the lieutenant.

I read. According to the report it was manifest that I, the undersigned, Privalov, A.I., had, by means unknown to me, come into the possession of a working model of an unspendable five-kopeck coin, All-union Government Standard type 7 18–62, and had willfully misused same; further, that I, the undersigned Privalov, A.I., allegedly carried out my operations with the aim of conducting a scientific experiment, and without any intent to defraud; that I was prepared to make restitution for the losses suffered by the state in the amount of one ruble and fifty-five kopecks; and, finally, that in accordance with the resolution of the Solovetz City Council of March 22, 1959, I had handed over said working model of the unspendable five-kopeck coin to the lieutenant on duty, Sergienko, V.V., and received in return five kopecks in monies of legal tender on the territory of the Soviet Union. I signed.

The lieutenant verified my signature with the one in the passport, again meticulously counted the coppers, rang up somebody to confirm the prices of the toffee and the wire brush, and wrote out a receipt and handed it to me together with five kopecks in monies of legal tender on the territory of the Soviet Union.

Returning the papers, matches, candies, and wire brush, he said, “As to the soft drinks, you have consumed those as you have already admitted. Altogether, you owe eighty-one kopecks.”

I paid up with a feeling of tremendous relief. The lieutenant having leafed through my passport once again, handed it back to me.

“You may go, citizen Privalov,” he said. “And be careful from now on. Are you in Solovetz for long?”

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I said.

“Well then, be careful until tomorrow.”

“Oh, I will!” I said, putting the passport away. Then, responding to an impulse and lowering my voice, I asked, “Would you mind telling me, comrade Lieutenant, don’t you find it a bit strange here in Solovetz?”

But the lieutenant was already absorbed in his paperwork.

“I’ve been here a long time,” he said absentmindedly. “I’m used to it.”