VASSILY P. AKSYONOV
57
guy was meandering feebly and mindlessly through the crowd until
he saw a telephone booth for long-distance calls. From that booth he
could immediately plug into the capital's telephone system, but,
strangely enough, it was empty: apparently, nobody had any need at
all to call Rome . The fat guy stepped into the booth .
"Do you know that we are burning?" he asked his colleague at
the institute, the first person whom he managed to reach by phone.
"Old man, it's too late for philosophical questions!" playfully
laughed his colleague-in principle, an okay fellow, who, as a mat–
ter of fact, was no different from me: the same kind of crafty slave of
the communal system that swallowed us all up.
"N
0,
not in the philosophical sense at all, " said the fat guy.
"Pompeii is perishing. The volcano has gone mad."
"Well, that's no topic for a telephone conversation , " his col–
league uttered angrily.
Everything is clear. Now they will put me down as a provoca–
teur. I hung up the receiver and through the glass I saw Arabella
who, dancing and waving her hands, headed up a very merry com–
pany. A calm herbivorous snake was lying softly coiled around
Arabella's shoulders .
"Hey, come out of there!" Arabella shouted to me . "Why are
you swelling up over there in the telephone booth? Look, gentlemen,
how this character has swollen up!"
A couple of merry Georgians pulled the fat guy out of the tele–
phone booth and offered him a bottle of wonderful wine .
"Where do you get such wine?" I was surprised. "And where,
in general, do you find all these nice things?" I asked simple–
heartedly. "How is it that you Georgians manage to live rather
sumptuously in the midst of all this wretchedness?"
"No problem," the Georgians answered merrily.
A scorching piece of rock hit the telephone booth and instantly
wiped it off the face of the earth. The face of the earth, in turn, slid
apart under our fe et and formed a crack half a meter wide. We
jumped over the crack and walked along Shoreline Road passing
lines of people craving
kaij
and those having a good time inside of
burning cafes .
A small clever boy, a "young naturalist," was following on
Arabella's heels and whining: "Lady, give me back my yellow-belly.
I took it on loan from the zoological lab for some research ."
