VASSILY P. AKSYNOV
59
"I am taking heart," the secretary lopked trustingly at
Arabella. "That's exactly what I reported, I managed to say on the
hot line: courage is making a stand against the elements ... "
"Lady, give me back my yello'.v-belly!" begged the young natu–
ralist. "It's time for it to eat."
Someone who appeared to have once had and lost some secret
power approached, holding in his hands a bottle of Pepsi-Cola and a
glass.
"Your reptile, does it eat Pepsi-Cola?" he asked the young nat–
uralist, looking at him with his still penetrating look.
"It hasn't tried it yet," the young naturalist mumbled, "but I
. . . I, personally, Comrade Colonel, eat Pepsi-Cola with plea–
sure."
The colonel in civilian clothes, chief of the local department of
centurions in civilian clothes, began to pour the bubbling Pepsi-Cola
into a glass and to treat the young naturalist and his snake to it. The
boy swallowed the foreign drink greedily, while the yellow-belly
hanging down from Arabella's shoulders only delicately sipped the
brown moisture.
Our company was growing. It had turned into a crowd. The
men and women and the young and old were walking; children and
dogs were jumping up and down; cats were scurrying back and
forth; and tigers from the local circus dragged along like sheep . The
whole crowd was following the darling of all our people, the metro–
politan area, and the barbaric regions: the television mirage,
Arabella.
She once sang in an expressive voice in the attics and basements
of Rome and was famous only among the attic-basement elite.
Then, suddenly, this strange creature with the hypnotic voice
appeared on TV in among all the mug-ugly peddlers, and all of our
preposterously savage people, tired of hearing about their achieve–
ments, did not boo her; they fell in love with her. What miracle
brought her into the telecommunication system? Wasn't it the first
symptom of the present seismological storm?
Where were we going? For some reason, uphill-closer to the
fire. Along the steep narrow streets of Pompeii, past the burning
houses and closer to the scorching heat, we were ascending the
Hill
of Glory.
In
the houses, homemade vodka-distilling machinery was
exploding, television tubes were bursting, and mirrors were melt–
ing, but the inhabitants for some reason didn't seem to take notice of
