The Blue Lantern: Stories available in Paperback
The Blue Lantern: Stories
- ISBN-10:
- 0811214346
- ISBN-13:
- 9780811214346
- Pub. Date:
- 05/17/2000
- Publisher:
- New Directions Publishing Corporation
- ISBN-10:
- 0811214346
- ISBN-13:
- 9780811214346
- Pub. Date:
- 05/17/2000
- Publisher:
- New Directions Publishing Corporation
The Blue Lantern: Stories
Paperback
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$15.95Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780811214346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2000 |
| Pages: | 188 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Born in Yorkshire, England, Andrew Bromfield is a translator of Russian literature and an editor and co-founder of the literary journal Glas.
Read an Excerpt
The Blue Lantern
And Other Stories
By Victor Pelevin New Directions Publishing Corporation
Copyright © 2000 Victor Pelevin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780811214346
CHAPTER ONE
News from Nepal
When the door against which Lyubochka was pressed by the invisible force finally opened, it turned out that the trolley was already moving and now she had to jump straight into a puddle. Lyubochka jumped, but clumsily, splashing cold slush on the hem of her coat, and she didn't need to look to see what she'd done to her boots. Struggling up onto the narrow divider she found herself between two streams of huge trucks, which roared past her, spattering up a mixture of mud, sand, and snow. There was no traffic light, because there was no crossing, and she had to wait for a gap to appear in the sheer unbroken wall of tall truck bodies, the metal ones with peeling paint and crudely welded ribs, and the wooden ones frightening beyond description. The sight of the trucks streaming by interminably was so oppressive that it was impossible to imagine what senseless and cruel will could possibly be organizing the movement of these oil-spattered horrors through the grey November fog that covered the entire town. It was hard to believe that human beings could be responsible.
Finally spaces began to appear in the solid wall of trucks. Lyubochka pressed her plastic bag to her chest andstepped delicately onto the surface of the road, trying to place her feet on the black spots of asphalt among the freezing mud. On the other side of the road she saw the yellow fence of the trolley park with its tall black gates. They were usually locked by half past eight, but one side was still open and she could just slip through.
"And where d'you think you're going?" shouted a sassy woman in a sleeveless orange vest, standing by the gate holding a crowbar in her hand. "Don't you know you're supposed to go in through the lodge if you're late? Director's orders."
"I'll be quick," Lyubochka mumbled, trying to walk past her.
"I can't let you," the woman said with a smile, setting herself squarely in the way. "You can't. Try getting here on time."
Lyubochka looked up at the woman standing there, her side propped against the crowbar as it rested on the asphalt, her plump hands crossed over her belly. Her thumbs were circling around each other as though she was winding some invisible thread on them. She was smiling the way Soviet people were taught to smile in the sixties, with that hint that everything would turn out okay, but she blocked the entrance very effectively. On her right was the hut with the plywood board for visual propaganda, showing three figures embracing against the background of a map of Eurasia: there was a man with a black visor over his face carrying a strange-looking weapon; a scientist staring out with a cold and unfriendly expression, dressed in a white overall and cap; and a girl in striped Asian costume, looking oddly out of place. A strip of plywood was nailed up above the board, with the inscription.
ATTENTION! ABANDON ROBES, YOU ARE ENTERING AN INDUSTRIAL PREMISES! DO NOT FORGET TO PUT ON YOUR OVERALLS!
Lyubochka turned and walked towards the lodge. She had to walk round the corner of a big tall building (the windows on its first three floors painted over--they said it housed some sort of secret institute) and then along the yellow fence to a grey brick building decorated with signs bearing the mysterious abbreviations "UPTM," "ASUS," and something else in black on a brown background.
Inside, down one branch of the corridor, beside the small windows of the cash office, the drivers were chuckling in dense clouds of smoke. Lyubochka went out through another door into the park's huge yard, which was already empty and resembled an abandoned airport. There was not a single person to be seen in the space between the cyclopean structures of the work-bays and the gates which Lyubochka had attempted to walk through three minutes earlier, except for a tall man with high, wide cheekbones, wearing a red apron. On his poster he was striding straight towards Lyubochka, his muscular pink hands bearing a board with the inscription "REINFORCE DEMOCRACY!"--and if you looked closely, the vague mish-mash behind the figure turned out to be an army of countless numbers of workers, including even a few blacks. This poster which had been hanging on one of the bays had been produced in the paint shop in spring, and Lyubochka had long ago become used to it greeting her every morning. The poster was cunningly constructed so that the text of the appeal could be changed by hanging a new piece of board on two hooks. At first it had been "REINFORCE LABOR DISCIPLINE!" and then, during a period of political uncertainty, "REINFORCE THE HONOR OF LABOR!" But now, just before the holiday, they were hanging up a slogan that Lyubochka had not seen before.
She reached the door of the administrative building and went up the stairs to the first floor, to the technical department where she had been working for over two years as a rationalization engineer.
A mirror hung in the corridor, between the Board of Honor and the rack of photographs of employees who had spent time in the sobering-up station, and Lyubochka stopped to take a look at herself.
She was small, dressed in a black fake-fur coat and a blue knit hat embroidered with a red zigzag. Her face was slightly monkeyish, born wearing a frightened expression, and when she smiled you could see the effort she was making, as if performing the closest act to work that she was capable of.
Unbuttoning her coat (under it there was a white blouse with a broad black stripe on the chest) and pressing herself up against the mirror to let two workmen in padded jackets by, she got a close-up view of her own powdered face with the distinct wrinkles around the eyes. Twenty-eight was twenty-eight, after all. It wasn't so easy anymore to play the young girl fluttering along the corridor like some animated rubber plant, a resting place for male eyes made weary by the sight of large-scale metal objects.
She smiled once again into the mirror and pulled open the door with the plaque that said "Tech. Dept." Her desk was in the corner, by the pinpricked drafting board. Sitting behind it now, staring her straight in the eye, was the park's director, Shushpanov, resembling a bloated, older version of the worker on the poster. He was holding a small, brightly colored flag he had taken out of the old Chinese vase where Lyubochka kept her pens and pencils. She got the flag one day when the entire technical department was taken away from work to greet some exotic president or other. Everyone was given flags and told to wave them when the cars appeared. Lyubochka kept hers as a souvenir because it had a special, optimistic kind of glossy finish. When she came in, Shushpanov twirled her amulet between his fingers so fast that the two triangles above his hand were transformed into a blurred red cloud.
"Good morning, Lyubov Grigorievna," he said formally in a repulsively gallant fashion. "Delayed, were you?"
In reply Lyubochka mumbled something about the subway and the trolley, but Shushpanov interrupted her.
"I'm not saying you're late. I'm just saying you were delayed. I understand. Things to be done. The hairdresser's, the haberdashery shop...."
He acted as though he actually was saying something nice to her, but what frightened her most was the formal way he called her Lyubov Grigorievna. This made everything he was saying extremely ambiguous, because it was one thing if Lyubochka was late, but if Rationalization Engineer Lyubov Grigorievna Sukhoruchko was late, that was another thing altogether.
"How are things?" asked Shushpanov.
"All right."
"I'm talking about work. How many rationalization proposals are there?"
"None," Lyubochka replied, then she frowned, wrinkling her brow, and said, "No, I'm wrong. Kolemasov from the tin shop was in, he's thought up some new improvement. For the big shears. For cutting the tin sheets. I haven't done all the paperwork yet."
"I see. And how many last month?"
"There were two. They've already been paid."
"Aha."
The director put down the little flag, spread his fingers, touching the tips together in front of his chest, and rolled his eyes, sucking in his lips and pretending he was adding up figures.
"Twenty roubles. Well, and how much do we pay you?"
He answered his own question: "A hundred and seventy. Take away twenty and the answer is one hundred and fifty. Do you get my drift?"
Lyubochka did. She not only understood what the director was getting at, she understood a lot of other things he probably wasn't thinking about at all. She felt, like spotlight beams, the gaze of the director and the gaze of the technical section chief, Shuvalov (who stared out from the small adjoining room he had made into an office), as well as the gaze of everybody else. So as not to be frozen at the very focus of the labor collective's sadistic curiosity, she turned, hung her plastic bag on the coat hanger, and began slowly taking off her fur coat.
"Therefore," said the director, "today you will make the rounds of all the shops and tomorrow you will tell me how well you've done. I would advise you to do well."
He got up from behind the desk, walked past Lyubochka's motionless figure by the coatrack, crossed himself with slow, sweeping gestures in front of the color photograph of a ZiU-9 trolley hanging in the corner, and left the room.
Without looking at anyone, Lyubochka sat on the seat still warm from the director's backside (he'd probably been waiting ten minutes), and put her hand into the bottom drawer of the desk. No one in the room said a word; they glanced at Lyubochka, who had hidden her face behind the stack of drawers, and tried hard not to show the enjoyment they were feeling. In fact their faces expressed the opposite feeling, a vague sympathy mixed half-and-half with a sense of civic responsibility.
"Now there's an interesting thing!" said Mark Ivanovich Mennizinger, evidently deciding to break the oppressive silence.
"What's interesting?" asked Tolik Purygin, looking up from his drawing.
"This morning we brought over the throttle, so it wouldn't get dusty, and I got this interesting idea...."
Mark Mennizinger stopped speaking, and Tolik realized he was waiting to be asked what the idea was.
"What idea was that, Mark Ivanovich?"
"I'll tell you. Electric current can't flow through air, right?"
"Right."
"But if you break a wire carrying a current, what do you get?"
"A spark. Or an arc. It depends on the inductance."
"Right. So electric current can flow through air after all. right?"
"What about it?" Tolik asked patiently.
"The point is that at first the current behaves as though nothing has changed. It thinks it's still flowing along the wire, after all air has no ... no ..."
"No charge carrier," Tolik prompted.
"Yes. That's it. So when the wire is already broken--"
"In the first place," said Shuvalov, coming out of his room, "electric current doesn't think. That's not its nature. And in the second place, when a current flows through gas, ionization occurs and charged particles are produced. That much I do know."
He switched on the wall radio, adjusted the volume, and went back into his office. A crowd of invisible balalaika players swept into the room, playing in a way sure to dispel instantly any doubts ever felt by anyone sitting there in the technical department concerning the existence of profound and truly national works for the balalaika orchestra.
Meanwhile, Lyubochka had finally convinced herself that she could control her facial muscles. She smiled several times behind the desk, then lifted her head, looked around, pulled out the applications file, and set about studying the proposed innovation: "... consists in equipping the bar of the metal-cutting shears with a set of variable weights, so that it is possible by means of a simple operation to adjust the shearing movement applied...."
She screwed up her eyes for a second, the way she always did when she didn't understand something, and decided she would have to go to the tin shop and take a look at the innovation onsite. Still not looking at anyone, she stood up, opened the closet, took out a brand-new padded jacket with a folded paper sticking out of the pocket, and went out into the corridor.
Outside it was even messier than before. Large snowflakes had begun falling. When they hit the asphalt, they soaked up water, but they didn't melt completely, so the yard was quickly covered with a layer of cold, semi-transparent slush, while the air was filled with the frenzied, driving bleating of balalaikas. Pausing beneath an overhang, Lyubochka threw the jacket over her shoulders (in order to distance herself from the workers, she never put her arms into the sleeves), put on a businesslike face, and set off towards the man in red soaring high above the yard.
There were two men standing about twenty-five yards from the work-bay. At first Lyubochka thought one of them was from the cafeteria, but when she got closer, she stopped dead. The clothes she had taken for white kitchen uniforms were in fact long white nightshirts, and that was all the men were wearing. One of them was fat and short, already past middle age, and the other was a young man with his head shaved clean. They were holding hands as they studied the poster.
"Note," the short one was saying, steam rising from his mouth, "the complexity of the conception. How mysterious it already is, a poster showing a man carrying a poster! If we develop this idea to its logical conclusion, and place in the hands of the man in the red overalls a board with a picture of himself carrying the same poster, what do we have?"
The young man glanced round at Lyubochka and didn't answer. "It's all right, she doesn't matter," said the short man, and he winked at Lyubochka, giving her a sudden vague feeling of hope.
"We have a model of the universe, that's obvious," answered the young man.
"Don't overdo it," said the short man, and he winked at Lyubochka again. "I think what we have is something like the corridor between two mirrors, which you've got yourself into again, though you didn't have to. Have you any idea where you are now?"
The young man shuddered and stared all around.
"Remember? Right, then, how did you get yourself here?"
"I remember," the young man said in a guilty voice, "I wanted to learn the meaning of death."
His companion frowned. "How many times do I have to tell you: Don't get ahead of yourself! But since you're already here, let's introduce a little clarity. Imagine that each of the infinite sequence of posters corresponds to a separate world, like this one. And in each of them there is a yard just like this one, and these ... mammoth stalls.... Young lady, what are they called?"
"They're work-bays," said Lyubochka. "Aren't you cold?"
"Not at all. He's dreaming all of this. That's right then, work-bays, and there is someone standing in front of each one of them. Then the place where we are standing now would simply be one of these worlds, and we'd see--"
"We'd see ... we'd see ... Oh God!"
The young man screamed, threw up his hands, and ran towards one of the bays. His companion swore and dashed after him, turning as he ran to apologize to Lyubochka with a gesture of splayed hands. They both disappeared round the corner.
"Some sort of freaks," Lyubochka muttered, and walked on. As she approached a gate cut in a huge work-bay door, she had already forgotten all about them.
In the tin shop, a small space with a high ceiling, it was quiet and shadowy. Towering up in the center was a table with a tin top which was cluttered with metallic off-cuts of various colors. Three men were sitting by the wall, on two benches set at a right angle. They were playing dominoes, hardly speaking a word, placing their dominoes on the table with restrained, economical movements, and occasionally commenting on the latest move. On the table, beside the domino box, stood a packet of Georgian tea, several boxes of lump sugar, and three cups made out of skulls, with tea-leaves stuck to their yellow walls. Lyubochka went over to the players and said in a cheerful voice:
"Hello, Comrade Kolemasov! I thought I'd come over and see you."
"Hi," replied a man with a wrinkled face, sitting at the edge of the group. "How's life for the young these days?"
"Not too bad, thank you," said Lyubochka. "I've come on business. About the rationalization proposal."
"What, have you brought the money, then?" Kolemasov asked, digging his elbow into the ribs of the man next to him, who smiled.
"It's too soon for the money," said Lyubochka. "We have to do the paperwork first."
"Then go on and do it. Just a minute.... We'll show it to you..."
Kolemasov put down a domino on the table, and that obviously finished the game. His partners shuffled on their seats, sighed, and threw down the dominoes they were still holding. Kolemasov stood up and went over to a workbench, nodding his head for Lyubochka to follow him.
"Look," he said, "let's say we have to cut a piece of duraluminum." He dragged a silvery triangle out of a pile of off-cuts and set it in the open jaws of the shears. "Try it."
Lyubochka put her notebook on the table, took hold of the yard-long pipe welded to the handle of the shears, and pulled it downwards. But the duraluminum was obviously too thick, the handle moved down just a bit and then stopped. "It won't go any further," said Lyubochka.
"Right. So now what we do is this." Kolemasov picked up a thirty-pound weight from the floor and carried it over to the shears, turning scarlet in the face; then he lifted it to chest height and hung it on the handle.
"Try pressing it now."
Lyubochka pressed down with all her weight on the pipe. It moved a little further and then stopped again.
"You have to press harder than that," said Kolemasov, and he pressed on the handle himself. It moved slowly downward and suddenly the sheet of duraluminum flew apart with a crack, the handle jerked, the weight jumped off it and thudded heavily into the tiled floor just to the left of Lyubochka's boot.
"That's the improvement," said Kolemasov.
His two domino partners followed what was happening with interest.
"I see," said Lyubochka. "But it says here that you have a set of changeable weights."
"Haven't got them yet," answered Kolemasov. "But the idea's simple. You have to have several weights. You hang them on one at a time, or two or three together."
Lyubochka began trying to think up an intelligent question.
"Can you tell me," she finally said, "what the economic effect is expected to be?"
"Oh, I don't know that. Haven't thought about it yet."
"You have to have one. Either a calculation of economic effect or a statement that there isn't any--and we have to have a certificate of utilization...."
"Well go and write one," answered Kolemasov. "You're in charge of all of that." He turned and walked over to his friends. One of them was already shuffling the dominoes on the table.
"Who wrote the application for you?" Lyubochka asked.
"Seryoga Karyaev. We thought it up together. Tell you what, try the metalworking shop, he's doing something over there now. Have a word with him."
Kolemasov sat down at the table and pulled in his dominoes.
A minute later Lyubochka was standing in the doorway of the metalworking shop, trying to spot Karyaev. She eventually saw his small, oil-smeared face with the big horn-rimmed glasses over in the corner. With a pair of pliers Karyaev was holding a long chisel against the bottom of a rusty iron boiler while another man bashed it as hard as he could with a sledgehammer. Lyubochka tried waving her notebook at them, but they were too busy to notice, so she went over herself.
"It's very simple," said Karyaev in response to Lyubochka's question. "The economic effect results from higher work rates in the metal sections. You have to figure it out."
"How?"
"As if you didn't already know. You have to figure out how much quicker operations are performed using the changeable weights, and multiply that by the number of trolley parks. Then you have to factor in the number of shears per park. And deduct the cost of the weights. I'm just giving you the general outline, okay?"
Karyaev screwed up his face at every blow of the sledge hammer, as if it was beating on his head, not the chisel, and the racket so deafened Lyubochka that she thought Karyaev was actually saying something very intelligent. Suddenly Karyaev's partner missed and slammed the sledgehammer against the boiler, and Lyubocha felt she was standing inside an immense bell for a moment. Karyaev straightened up and scratched his ear.
"Listen," he said, "I'll write you another proposal tomorrow. See that chisel? I'll weld a crossbar on to it for a handle. Then you can register it. The economic effect is calculated the same way, only you deduct the cost of the welding."
"How do I find that out?" Lyubochka asked.
"What d'you mean, how.... Look it up. Or phone the welding institute."
Karyaev pulled down Lyubochka by the arm. They both ducked, and some dark thing the size of a large dog whistled past over their heads.
Lyubochka straightened up, squinting at the finely membraned creature fluttering about under the ceiling, and Karyaev picked up the chisel that had fallen from the pliers, set it back in their grip, and held it against the boiler.
"Get on with it, Fyodor."
Fyodor cleared his throat and swung the sledgehammer. Lyubochka glanced at her watch and gasped in surprise: it was already ten minutes into lunch hour. She rushed over to the cafeteria.
She was too late, of course. The line already wound its way from the cash desk to the door. Lyubochka stood at the end and prepared for a wait. First she spent a while studying the mural paintings of a gigantic round loaf hovering like a UFO over a field of wheat, then she noticed the folded sheet of paper sticking out of the pocket of her padded jacket. She took it out and unfolded it.
KATMANDU: LAND OF MANY FACES, she read. Under the title the words "Instruction Manual" appeared in fine print. Lyubochka leaned against the wall and began to read:
The city of Katmandu, capital of the small state of Nepal, is situated on the picturesque foothills of the Himalayas. If the hills are viewed from the valleys below, they look like the back of a dragon lying on the ground. The ancestors of Nepal's present inhabitants therefore called this place the Dragon Hills.
The city is about three thousand years old. Katmandu is mentioned as a major cultural and religious center in many ancient chronicles. The city was known in Khan dynasty China as "Canto" and was regarded as the capital of the mythical Southern Kingdom.
During the second and third centuries A.D. Buddhism reached Katmandu and quickly formed a fantastic symbiosis with the local patriarchical cults. Christianity reached the city at the same time, but failed to spread very widely among the urban upper classes and remained confined to small communities of herdsmen on the extensive lowlands to the south of the city. The local Christians are Roman Catholics, but recently the Church of Katmandu has been seeking autocephalous status.
Lyubochka heard quiet singing behind her. She turned round and saw three employees from the Economics and Planning Group standing back at the end of the line. They were wearing long sacks with holes for their heads and arms, drawn in at the waist with grey string, and thick paraffin candles were burning in their hands. The sacks were printed with some kind of figures, black umbrellas, and the inscription "USE NO HOOKS." Lyubochka went back to her reading.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Blue Lantern by Victor Pelevin Copyright © 2000 by Victor Pelevin. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| News from Nepal | 1 | |
| Hermit and Six-Toes | 21 | |
| Crystal World | 63 | |
| Nika | 90 | |
| Mid-Game | 105 | |
| The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII | 138 | |
| The Blue Lantern | 150 | |
| The Tambourine of the Upper World | 163 |