CONQUERED CITY
9
neighbor, Andre
Va~silievitch.
"I serve my country. A government,
even of madmen and bandits, is still my country; and the people
who submit to it get only what they deserve.... We are tearing
down the city, my friend. We are creating a pretty housing crisis
... but a pretty one! When this whole business is finished, I tell you
that the value of real estate will be tripled...."
He was the best appraiser in the district.
The house was interested in the new·born baby in apartment
15. He issued from a weakened womb in a cold maternity ward.
Born because his parents had not known how to prevent it in time,
he had already been living stubbornly for weeks, against all
expectations. Under old fur robes, he breathed the ammonia-like
stench of his urinations. He sucked implacably at the drained
breast of a woman with a deathlike radiance of profile, who said
to her visitors, opening her large, slightly crossed eyes to gaze on
her joy:
"He's still living, he's still living! Can you imagine that! ..."
They could only marvel at this triumph of tenacity.
People brought logs, grain, and oil for the lamp in number
15. They knew her husband was at the front; the wife of an officer
also at the front-but on the other side, so that if the two men met,
the one would kill the other, or, if taken prisoner, would be coldly
put to death-this woman would bring bread to the mother. These
neighbors read together, and with equal anxiety the accounts of
towns taken or lost.
A little girl in a red beret still went, every morning, to the
School of the Ballet to master the art of toeing and turning. The
storm will pass, won't it? the dance will remain; and the little girl
is talented. On her way, she read, when she had time, Anderson's
fairy tales, and wondered, meanwhile, why not a single flying
carpet ever appeared over the roofs of the dismal houses. She also
read, carefully, so as to be able to repeat them properly on her
return, the pencilled notices at the communal store: "the third
category will receive two herrings on coupon 23 of the food
card...." How sad life is, without a flying carpet!
Workers, ready to move out at the first alarm, in order not
to be murdered in this house in which they felt themselves in–
truders, lived in the apartment of a lawyer who had
disappeared~
