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BEYOND THE WINDOWS of the Retreat, the sky was now crystal clear. Only wispy scarves of cloud still clung to the necks of the mountains. The snowy valley, with its blue blobs of dachas wearing white hats, was sharp and bright again. A snow plough sped along the twisting highway, whisking billows aside. For the fog had quite suddenly evaporated. It was Monday morning.
Leonid Bragin and Diana Kotov were both due back at the Psychiatric Institute in the afternoon; but meanwhile Diana was ensconced in the small library beyond the dining room, with Arthur. Tisha presumed that the two young people were making intimate arrangements for the future…. Bragin himself was lost in thought, and Igor was scribbling away, resentfully, at a new scenario to culminate in the awful trek back to Kezhma…or perhaps in the sleigh ride back to Krasnoyarsk---or even in Delko’s return to Russia---though all of these options seemed sadly anticlimactic. Sasha’s concluding ‘insights,’ into the marriage of Baron Mishin and Lady Lydia Zelenina and their subsequent move to Peking (by 1900, Lydia Zelenina would be a photojournalist covering the Boxer Rebellion)---at about which time the white fog had suddenly begun to life and the outside world to re-emerge, like a photo floating in developing fluid---might well be climactic, but they were quite irrelevant to The Curious Journey of Mr. Eric Delko, either old or new, in Igor’s opinion. Still, something startling could be made of it all! Really, the new-style Journey had quite endeared itself to him---and even Arthur only grumbled mildly as he dashed off notes.
Tisha was considering popping out for a brisk stroll when Arthur appeared in the doorway, holding an open book. His hands were shaking.
"I just noticed this on the shelf…. Four Dramas, by Eric Delko. Want to hear which ones?"
Igor raised a weary eyebrow. "That’s the 1977 People’s Edition you’ve got there, Art. What's the big deal? Think I didn’t know it?"
"Arthur’s a bit busy at the moment." Tisha fretted in case Igor took this as an excuse to throw his pen down.
"Go on, humor me. Guess."
"Alesnarov," said Igor dismissively.
"Right, that’s here…. Full marks! Next one?"
"Piss off."
"No, he never wrote that! Alesnarov is followed by something called Kemeska Heights."
"You dumb bastard! Alesnarov is followed by A Rare Wife!"
"Here, look for yourself! Kemeksa Heights, Butchers Without Hope, and Swindlers and Criminals. Plus Alesnarov, that we know and love." Arthur headed towards Igor, but Tisha interrupted him and snatched the book away. He started turning the pages frantically.
"But. But," he said in a lame voice.
"Now you don’t suppose that I just printed the book for a giggle, in a couple of spare minutes through there. What happened to A Rare Wife? Man of Dust? And This Above All? They’re all gone!" Arthur stabbed a finger towards the window. "Gone into the fog! And it’s taken them off with it! It looks like a whole new world out there, returned from nowhere, eh? Trust me, it is a new world. These are stage plays that old Eric wrote instead. Instead, dammit!"
The caretaker stood in the doorway. "Same old mountains, same dachas. What’s all the fuss about?"
"The fuss, my dear Alex, is because Mr. Delko now appears to have written a series of plays hitherto unheard of before this very moment, among them one entitled Kemeska Heights. And if you tell me that there is no such place, I’ll bash your brains in with the whole ruddy Soviet Encyclopedia!"
For now, behind Alex, Diana was hesitating in the hallway, scanning with a sickly look a heavy volume of that opus.
"The plays themselves are still pretty much the same, though!" insisted Igor, tearing the edges of pages in his haste. "Look, Babichev’s in Kemeska Heights. And here’s Mr. Yemelyan and Mr. Vedernikov. Dialogue looks identical…. Oh dear, I don’t seem to recognize this bit. Anyway, it’s so much the same that I can't tell offhand."
Arhtur started up, dropping pen and notebook. "See whether Mishin, Izmailova and Norrena are in this.... Swindlers and .... and.... Criminals, dammit!"
"Half a tick."
Bragin stared at the three men clustered round the book. "But there are much wider implications!
"I find no sign of them," said Tisha. "The names have definitely been changed."
"That’s to be expected, assuming he based his characters on real life."
"The opening’s similar. First scene. Here, this bit’s exactly the same…Um, not here…."
"But these are minutiae!" Bragin exclaimed.
Tisha looked round angrily. "The world’s made up of minutiae, Leo! If too many minutiae are different, just how the hell are we going to fit in?"
"Ah, you do realize that! My apologies."
It was then that Diana came forward and began to read out in a shaky voice from the biography of E.S. Delko in the Soviet Encyclopedia:
"'Thus had E.S. Delko had returned to Moscow in 1881 as something of a hero, whereas he had merely been a celebrity before he left the city. True, some radical critics still continued to carp at him, this time attacking what they described as his ‘opportunism.’ Nevertheless, Delko's report on the Tunguska Expedition---his longest published work, illustrated with photographs by L.F. Zelenina, with technical appendices by R. Matoušek and K.E. Tsiolkovsky---was certainly instrumental in stimulating the haphazard exploitation of Siberian wealth in the years preceding the Revolution, an exploitation which was merely guided along socially productive lines subsequently.
'Meanwhile, the sudden rise to prominence of the young scientist K.E. Tsiolkovsky, resulting in support for his theoretical work on cosmic flight, could be said to have paved the way for the Soviet Moon landing in 1969, while the scientist P. P. Rostislavovich was stimulated by Tsiolkovsky’s speculations to describe the general principles of nuclear physics, anticipating the work of Ransford et al.
'E.S. Delko had paid his dues to his ‘first mistress,’ Science. The following years were to see his maturity as a dramatist, in A Rare Wife, Man of Dust, and other plays. But his constitution was undermined by the rigors of the Tunguska Expedition. He soon sold the little estate at Kemeska Heights, to which he had moved from Moscow with his mother and sister. Poor health forced him to take up permanent residence in Yalta. And he married Phyllis Faerber; and he died in 1902.
His mother survived him by fourteen years; and his siblings, Oxana and Dmitri, both died in 1956, having served his memory faithfully for decades as curator of the Delko Museum which had been their home in Yalta; Oaxana herself never married…. '"
They digested the information in silence.
By now Alex had caught on to the implications. He scratched his head. "Obviously the Communist Party’s the same. Your book mentions the Revolution. I'm sure we'll all fit in, if we keep our wits about us. We're Russians, after all."
"Imagine," said Bragin, "the ever-expanding ripples across water when an object is thrown into it. An effect from an initial state can be followed outwards incrementally. Examples of this can be found in economics, where one individual's reduction in spending reduces the incomes of others and their ability to spend. In sociology, we observe that social interactions can affect situations not directly related to the initial interaction, and in charitable activities information can be disseminated and passed from community to community to broaden its impact. So Delko goes to Yalta and weds Faerber and dies in 1902. The Revolution still takes place, true; the ripples were too small to change that enormously. But the ripples spreading outward are at least big enough to change our scientific history; we land a man on the Moon ahead of the Americans, and in the same year, too. Hip Hooray for our side!"
"What about this nuclear physicist, Rostislavovich?’ asked Arthur.
"Doesn’t the Encyclopedia always go on like that? We Russians invented the airplane before the Wright Brothers took off. We invented the helicopter. Lord knows what else."
Alex said huffily. "That’s all perfectly true. Pioneer work was done."
"These plays are probably just as good as the other ones," said Tisha, his mind working overtime. "I mean, he’s still Delko, whatever else happened! And we can still make the film, only this time can be all about Tunguska, because it’ll be absolutely true. Oh, but hell, that means we can’t use the Milan Adamavich future stuff, because it will be pointless. On the other hand, we could make a film in the 1878 framework about him heading for Tunguska, and the redstar Galactica crashing; so, he finds he’s en route for Sakhalin instead! No, wait a minute, he was en route to Sakhalin anyway, when he met that wretched Yanovich and heard about the explosion! It was Yanovich that started him off. But this would just be cinema verité compared to our wonderful new conception!"
"I never thought it was all that wonderful," grumbled Igor. "I just went along with the new idea to keep you happy. It was agreed we’d revert to the original scenario, if the other one pooped out. Seems to me that’s all we were doing."
"Oh, but what a loss, comrade."
Bragin was amazed. "But surely you’re not still seriously contemplating making the movie?"
"Why not? Look here, Timofey; we have to cling to something to keep our sanity. We’re shipwrecked—we’re timewrecked. It’s the only lifeboat we’ve got, the movie."
Arthur giggled. "Take this down, Igor, old comrade; ‘It came from outer space, into Siberia, felling a billion trees—whatever it was! Today, thanks to Eric Delko’s investigations, Space will soon become the new Siberia, of prosperity and happiness!" Arthur's giggling turned to tears upon completion of the sentence.
"There, there," said Tisha. "We’ll still make a super movie, even if it is realistic."
"But actually, it was all our fault. We knocked down a million trees! In this building, this weekend, we turned a boggy patch in Siberia into a crater years before it was supposed to happen!"
"Let’s face it, Art: wasn’t Christ changed out of all recognition by those who celebrated him? Weren’t his very worlds rewritten, even the episodes of his life? And of Joan of Arc, too? And Trotsky."
"Comrade Pushkaryov!" cautioned Alex, shocked.
"Past events can be altered. History gets rewritten. Well, l we’ve just found that this applies to the real world, too." Tisha tossed his copy of Four Plays onto the sofa and strode about. "Maybe it’s happening to us all the time, without us realizing? Maybe the real history of the world is changing constantly! And why? Because history is fiction. It’s a dream in the mind of humanity, forever striving…towards what? Towards perfection."
"Oh yes, and how about Auschwitz?" retorted Arthur. "And the Inquisition? And Genghis Khan? It’s a grotesque parade, this world, that’s all it is."
"A dream in the mind…" Igor echoed Tisha's words in a sinister tone. He snapped his fingers. "Might I suggest that we’ve all been taken for a ride by the master hypnotist himself!"
"Igor, please."
"No listen, Tisha. He hypnotized the lot of us---that’s the easiest explanation! This has nothing to do with mass suggestion coming from Arthur. Leonid Bragin----him! ---he hypnotized the whole bunch of us into believing that Delko ever did write a play called Man of Dust. Or A Rare Wife. Or This Above All. It’s that man who persuaded us the Tunguska bang happened a few years after Delko’s death. He bloody well mesmerized us with these lies---just to see how we’d all react when the true version popped up out of Sasha’s subconscious, as he knew it must do. It’s a psychology experiment, that’s what it is….and all at our expense!"
"I suppose," said Bragin bitterly, "it’s one way of adapting yourself psychologically."
"And as for this Milan Adamavich nonsense: that was because Arthur's mind has been struggling to reconcile this pack of lies with what he knows deep down. I’ve done you an injustice, Art!" Igor opened his arms to embrace the actor, but Arthur fended him off.
Bragin jumped up. "You do me an injustice! I really protest my innocence. Most sincerely!"
Igor sneered. "Only animals and savages are ever sincere, so said Milan. He knew a thing or two."
"But that’s not how Dr. Bragin proceeds," cried Diana hotly. "Not ever."
Igor ignored her. "Oh, what marvelous political applications this could have! To persuade people that things are other than they are, that some things never happened, and other things happened instead. But we’d better test it out on a small scale first, eh, chaps? Something unpolitical…. The Stanislavsky Film Unit of Krasnoyarsk seem like a good gang of dupes."
"But this is preposterous!" Bragin advanced menacingly. As of to break Igor over his knee. "I demand an apology at once!"
"And maybe, when we wake up tomorrow, we’ll no longer remember Man of Dust at all!" Sasha chewed at his nails; his face was haunted. "I can’t star in a movie, knowing all these…these ambiguities!" He tore a meniscus of nail loose and spat it on to the carpet.
"You do owe him an apology, Comrade Tolkachyov," insisted Diana. "What you said was grossly unfair."
"It would be a far, far better thing," said Arthur to her softly, "if he was to hypnotize the whole lot of us---right now. And himself, as well! Yes, and tell us all to forget about this ‘new’ Eric who wrote Kameska Heights. I can’t bear to be haunted by mystery till the day I die."
"Is that what you really want," shouted Bragin. "Oblivion? The blindfolds pulled down?"
Arthur flapped his hands helplessly. "Look, Eric would have said that it’s meaningless to blather on about a mystery. He’d have gone off, and written Kameska Heights, yes! Kameska Heights. And he apparently did…Speaking of which…I think I’ll take myself off somewhere quiet and read it. Just to see what it’s all about…" He retrieved Four Plays from the sofa and slapped his jacket pocket with his free hand as if he had just slipped the book inside, though he was still clutching the volume in his other hand. "Frankly, I don’t care a hang anymore. It’s all a grotesque parade…. how can we make sense out of anything? No, you stay here, Diana, so I can be alone for a while."
Diana subsided; and Arthur departed, leaving the doors half open. Alex pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and was promptly racked by a coughing fit.
"Stop it!'" snapped Igor.
"I suppose," mused Tisha, "we ought to be thankful that there’s something in the universe, instead of nothing…. I mean, when you do come down to it Kemeska Heights instead a Man of Dust---what are the odds?"
Alex thumped himself on the chest, to clear it. "Yeah, let’s not get worked up in a stew. Let’s keep our heads screwed on. And our feet on the ground." He flicked ash carelessly at the carpet. "Who do you reckon won the match at Dynamo Stadium, eh?"
"Both sides lost," Igor said sourly.
The noise of a pistol shot, coming from the direction of the library, sounded just like a champagne cork popping out of a bottle. But they all realized at once exactly what it was!
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