ing  on the door in the middle of the night. Oska
slept on. I jumped out of bed. I heard my father's weak voice. He was alive!
He  was led up the stairs. His steps were  halting. His skin  was yellow. He
looked like a corpse. A beard as huge as a dickey covered his chest. He took
off his fur hat. Mammy rushed to him, but he shouted:
     "No!  Don't  anyone  come near  me!  I'm  full of lice ...  I  have  to
bathe.... And eat.... Potatoes if you have any...."
     His voice shook, as did his head. We started a fire in  the pot-bellied
stove,  fried potatoes  and heated coffee. We  put the holiday  lamp on  the
table. It was a real feast.
     The water for  his bath was ready. We went into the other room and from
there  could hear the  cake  of  soap knocking  against  his  bones. Fifteen
minutes later we were  called back into the room. Papa had on a clean shirt,
his face was clean,  and he did not look as  frightening as  before. He  was
speaking about the situation at the front.  As  long as he spoke of himself,
his voice  was calm, though his unfamiliar beard  seemed to be weighing down
his words. But then suddenly he became very  excited  and  tears rolled down
his cheeks. "There were the wounded ... the  dying ... lying on the floor in
the corridors.... On frozen urine ... three inches high.... I'm a doctor ...
I couldn't...."
     Mamma  tried to  calm him.  After a while he regained his composure. He
had a cup of coffee. He was home again. Papa  looked at me and said, "You've
grown a mile." Then he tweaked my nose, as he always did.
     "He's become unmanageable," my aunts hurried to  say. "He's carried off
all the books in the house for the proletarians."
     "It's about time you  stopped judging things the way you used to," Papa
said irritably. "I  can't understand how you can  be  so petty in times like
this. If you had only seen the faces of our boys when they  routed those....
If you had...."
     We went off to bed  an hour later. At last I had  handed over my duties
as the man of the  house. I felt as though the invisible  belt that had been
holding me  in all this time had been let  out, and I could suddenly breathe
easily again.
     I  fell headlong onto  my bed and sobbed deliciously into  my pillow. I
was bewailing Papa's typhus, my own  state of  nervous tension, the Red Army
men of the Urals Front,  poor Stepan, the injustice of the homebrew incident
and much, much more. But not one of these tears would fall upon  the soil of
Schwambrania. I decided to return to the library the next morning.


        FIRE AND ASHES

     The armoured  train  burst upon the city. From the railroad  station it
had been shunted onto a spur line  that ran within the city limits, past all
the old granaries, and was known as the Granary Line.
     Thus, the armoured train clanged along the Granary Line,  thrusting its
guns impolitely and warningly into the faces of Breshka Street and the flour
dealers' warehouses.  The  mottled,  camouflaged sides of the armoured  cars
were battle-scarred. The  locomotive  was the most  badly battered,  for its
whole front section had been  mangled. Clad in its dirty-green coat of mail,
it resembled  a  huge and angry lobster  with a missing  claw.  After it had
towed the  armoured cars  to the spur line, it  backed away  to the railroad
station to undergo repairs.
     Meanwhile,  we  were  again busy  drawing  posters in  the  library, an
assignment given to us by the Commissar. The slogan was:
     Help combat typhus!
     Once again  we spared neither paint  no effort and adorned our pictures
of the  terrible  lice with a staggering number of legs  and  feelers.  Once
again strange centipedes crawled  across our frightening posters. Underneath
we strung the lines of a poem of our own that had by now become implanted in
our minds:

     When all is neat and clean
     No louse is ever seen.

     The project  was  completed  a few  days later.  We wanted to give  the
posters to the Commissar, but I was told he was at a meeting in the armoured
train. I  decided to take them there. The train was like a silent  ironclad,
moored in a dead end.
     "Where do you think you're going?" a sentry called out.
     "To  see Commissar Chubarkov. I have some posters  for  him." I did not
feel in the least bit shy.
     "Let's see them." I unrolled the posters and  the sentry  examined them
closely. "They look fine. True to life. All right, go on in."
     I  entered  the car softly. No  one noticed  me.  The  air was full  of
cigarette  smoke. The head of the Cheka was  there, and the Commissar, and a
lot of  other people. It was as dim and as close as a  vault. The atmosphere
was  tense. The heavy armour that  covered the car pressed  upon everyone. A
very  thin man  dressed  in  leather  pants and a  short sheepskin  coat was
speaking.
     "As the commander of the  train, I want  to say that the  men, the guns
and  the ammunition  are  in  readiness.  We're  being  delayed, because the
locomotive is being repaired. The railroad men are holding us up."
     "Then there's nothing  more to say. We'll wait till we hear  from them.
Robilko's due  any  minute. He'll tell  us how things are. The only thing  I
want is some sleep. I haven't  had  any sleep  for  four  nights," the Cheka
Chairman said.
     "What  if  it's not the locomotive?" the Commissar said and puffed hard
on his cigarette, flicking the ash on the table angrily.
     "Listen, friend," the commander of the armoured train said, "let's keep
this place clean. Don't drop ashes  all over. See how neat everything is? We
even got an ashtray to keep it this way. The  boys traded it someplace. It's
a  funny-looking thing. So  put your  ashes  in it." And he pushed something
strange over to the commissar. Chubarkov jabbed his butt at the opening.
     "Their attack is scheduled  for tomorrow," the Commissar said. "If your
train  doesn't shield  us,  they'll  hit  our  rear. It's  all  a matter  of
repairing the engine. And what if it's not?" he repeated.
     "If it  isn't, I'll  go over and see  what it is,"  the Chairman  said.
"I'll talk to the fellows. I can vouch for the  workers. They won't  let  us
down. They're  on our side. As for the foremen  and  mechanics.... Well,  if
it's sabotage, they'll be in for trouble."  He  rose  and  strode  along the
passage. He was a stern, determined man, so  unlike what he had been when he
had laughed so heartily over our Schwambranian papers. And the Commissar was
different, too. This  was not the man I knew.  He spoke more simply, and did
not keep repeating "that's  that". He spoke  well. Here he was among his own
people, men he could rely on completely. He was doing his job, and the great
responsibility that lay upon him gripped his  heart and  made him clench his
teeth.  This was my very first encounter with the revolution in its everyday
life. This  was the very first time  I was seeing it  at close range and not
from the  heights of Schwambrania, not by peeking  out of our  doorway. This
was when I realized  that  the job these people, whom  I now saw  in  a  new
light,  were doing was a difficult and dangerous one,  but the only real and
worthwhile job there was.
     Then Robiiko rushed in. I knew him. He was a  railroad engineer who had
helped us get rid of  the principal of  the Boys School in February 1917. He
now rushed into the car. Everyone jumped up.
     "Well?" they all demanded.
     "The railroadmen told me to give back your appeal. They said they don't
need it. They said  they know what  the revolution means  to  them by heart.
They pledged to do  their proletarian  duty. Which means they'll repair  the
engine  by tomorrow morning, even  though it means working  all through  the
night."

     The armoured train left  the next day. The railroad workers' brass band
played. The Commissar made a speech. The engine clanged and then steamed out
of the station.
     At that very moment a hand was thrust out of the loophole of the middle
car. It was holding the strange ashtray I  had seen the  evening  before and
was emptying it.
     The  armoured  train  was  moving.  The  loophole  was  passing  me.  I
recognized our  seashell  grotto,  the grotto of the Black Queen, the former
hiding place of Schwambrania's secret. Butts and  ashes were pouring out  of
it. Butts and ashes.


        LAND! LAND!

     A special meeting of all readers had been called in the library. We had
no  firewood  for the coming month. The city council had said there was none
to spare, and so the library would have to be closed. The commissar paced up
and  down  glumly. We were  desperate.  A sudden brainstorm hit me with such
force it practically blinded  me and  made me  squint. Everyone looked at me
strangely.
     "Comrades! Let's use Schwambrania for firewood!"
     "Schwambrania's firewood is only good for heating castles  in the  air.
Forget it," Dina said.
     "No! That's not  what I meant. D'you know Uger's Mansion? It's  full of
old  planks  and  logs, and what not.  That was our secret place. Oska and I
used to play there. So I know. Let's all get together and fill the woodpile.
To hell with Schwambrania. It's for a good cause."
     At first there was  silence. My  suggestion had been like a  bombshell.
Then  someone  clapped.  A  moment later  everyone  was  shouting,  jumping,
clapping.  The  Commissar lifted me off the  floor. The ceiling seemed to be
coming down on us  three times in  a row as we were  thrown up into the air,
making our hearts skip a beat. Oska and I were the heroes of the day.
     "But you'll have to chase the two alphysics out  first," Oska said when
he had been set down again.
     "Which alphysics?" Dina asked.
     "Alchemists," I explained.
     "That's what I meant. They're getting drunk on homebrew there."
     The Commissar wrote something in his notebook  and left quickly without
saying a word.

     Schwambrania  was collapsing. Our  firewood  project was nearly over. A
heavily-laden sleigh was pulling away. I stood in a chain of boys and girls,
handing planks I received  from the boy on my  right to  the boy on my left.
The planks seemed to undergo a change in my hands, for I was given pieces of
Schwambrania,  but I handed over ordinary firewood for our library.  We were
working well.  My  scratched  hands and  arms ached.  The frost hurt my skin
through the holes in my mittens, but  it was good to feel that the boy on my
left was as closely linked to me as I was to the boy on my right,  while he,
in turn, was  to the one of his right, and so on down the line. I was a step
in  a live ladder.  The make-believe land of Schwambrania  was being  passed
along the chain to be burned for a good cause.
     A  group  of boys, the Commissar, Zorka, Dina and Ukhorsky were pulling
down the  rickety  wall  of the high gallery.  Suddenly,  someone  screamed:
"Stop! Wait!"
     We all looked up.  There, on  the very top of  the  swaying gallery, we
spotted Oska. He had just got there and seemed  quite unconcerned. "It's  so
beautiful up here," he called down. "I can see way far off."
     "Down! Get  down this  minute!" the Commissar croaked. "No! Wait! Don't
move! I'll get you down  myself."  He swung up as nimbly as a  cat, climbing
through the gaping holes  of the floors.  The gallery creaked threateningly.
Then he appeared in the top window.
     "Be careful!" we called.
     By now he had climbed out onto the ledge. He was gripping the crumbling
edge of the window frame with one hand and  running his other over the wall,
seeking  something to hold on to. He inched  along the  ledge  until he  had
nearly reached Oska.
     "Shh! Stand still. Don't move," he kept saying.
     "Look, isn't it nice to look down from  here?"  Oska spoke calmly as he
waited for the Commissar.
     "Give me your hand, and that's that!" Chubarkov growled as he stretched
his hand towards Oska. He grabbed him and pulled him in through  the window.
A moment later the gallery collapsed, coming down with a  great roar like an
avalanche and raising clouds of snow.
     "You sure would have spoiled everything," the  Commissar said as he set
Oska down.
     The ruins of Schwambrania lay all about us.
     "The  Schwambranians  perished  like  goggle  and  mangle,"  Oska  said
unexpectedly.
     "I think you mean like Gog and Magog," Donna Dina said and smiled.
     I  stood  among the  phantom  bodies, among the  remains of the  unborn
citizens. I stood there as a general stands on a battlefield.
     "Listen, comrades. I've just made  up  the last Schwambranian  poem," I
said and recited:

     I stand upon the battlefield,
     Schwambrania's fate has now been sealed.
     Perished all, and many more:
     Jack, Pafnuti, Brenabor,
     Ardelar, Urodenal,
     Satanrex, the admiral.
     Death-Cap-Poison-Emir, too.
     That's that! They're through!
     A glorious list of rare old names.
     Farewell, Schwambrania, land of fame!
     Down to work now, everyone,
     Till the job is really done.
     Tales are dust, tales are naught,
     What is real is better wrought!
     Life holds joy for me and you....
     That's that! Adieu!


        A CHAPTER CONCERNING THE GLOBE


        BY WAY OF AN EPILOGUE

     The story's over. This is the end of the book.
     But wait a minute!  I'll pick up  the globe. It's round and true, and I
want to take my bearing. The coloured sphere spins on its base as if it were
a  bubble blown out of the black stem. But it lacks the brilliant shimmering
and the readiness to burst at a moment's notice that is a part of every soap
bubble. The globe is solid, steady and ponderable.
     It can be picked up like a lamp or a cup.
     Oska  and  I  were  both  bookworms.  Our  respect for  the  globe  was
excessive.  We  never  grabbed  it  by the stand, but always  picked  it  up
carefully. It  rested in our  hands, nestling in the reverence  bred by  our
elders who spoke about "all is  vanity" and  "there  is  greatness  in small
things". It looked bold, significant and even terrible,  like Yorick's skull
held by Hamlet's probing fingers.
     "I know how people guessed the Earth was round," Oska said after he had
become convinced that his  version of the place  where the Earth  curved was
unscientific. "It's because the  globe is ... spherical.  That's why,  isn't
it, Lelya?"
     We  would  probably have  grown  up  to  increase  the  number  of  the
well-known type of  human being, the person who learns the Earth is round by
looking at a school globe, who  fishes in a fishbowl, who watches life go by
through his window and learns the meaning of hunger when his doctor puts him
on a diet.
     Our thanks  to the epoch! The way of life of callous hardened rear ends
was blasted. It was a  crushing blow. And we had to learn the hard way  that
the Earth was round.
     As for  the globe, we have long since learned its true use and purpose:
it is not a revelation, it is simply a visual aid. The  sphere turns. Oceans
and continents pass in  review. There  is no Schwambrania.  Nor can one find
Pokrovsk now. The city has been renamed Engels.
     I visited the  city recently. I went there to congratulate Oska  on the
occasion  of  the birth of  his  daughter. When  I received the telegram  in
Moscow I must confess I was overcome by  an  attack  of former Schwambranian
pride. I  went as far  as to prepare a grandiloquent speech (0,  daughter of
the Land  that Never Was! 0,  daughter of a  doughty  Schwambranian!) I even
thought of a number of fine-sounding names for her: Schwambraena, Brenabora,
Delyara.... But then  I  received a  letter  from Oska which read,  in part:
"Enough is enough! We created more than enough imaginary idiots. My daughter
is  real,  and  I  don't  want  to  hear  a  word  about  Schwambranians  or
Caldonians.'I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I've named her Natalia. All the
best to you,
     Your brother Oska."

     Once again I was home  in Pokrovsk. We were in the very  same room from
which, twelve  years  before, I had  exited, my stride that of  a man of the
house. The stand-in for our famous  Black Queen was  now tucked  away in the
chess table. I looked for and  found the scratches on the piano lid that had
been made in the  Tratrchok. Six-months-old Nata stared at me in  round-eyed
wonder.
     I  gave her  a rattle with a long handle  that  was made to  resemble a
globe.
     Our grey-haired father  returned from inspecting  an outlying district.
Mamma had just finished conducting a lesson for a group of illiterate women.
They were learning to read and write. A warm family reunion awaited us. Oska
arrived from  Saratov late  that  evening. He was  curly-haired,  hoarse and
manly-looking.
     "Lelya! I barely managed to get away. I lectured to shipbuilders in the
morning and at a technical school in the afternoon. From there I went to the
district committee. I'm just back from a meeting of rivermen. I spoke on the
revolution in Spain. How do you like Nata?"
     At this I made my emotional cradle speech of welcome: "0, you," I said,
"you who," I said.
     "That's enough," Oska said. "That's enough of your hamadryads."
     "It's  about  time  you knew the difference between a  hamadryad  and a
madrigal!" I cried.
     "Ah! It's that old childish habit of mine of getting words mixed up. By
the  way,  can  you  tell  me  the  difference  between  a  dragoman  and  a
mandragora?"
     I  then  read the  family  this  book. It  was not  the usual  kind  of
author-reads-his-book evening, for the characters of story kept interrupting
me. They  would become  offended over  something, or feel proud. They  added
things, protested about others, argued with the author and forgave him.
     Meanwhile, Nata was busy chewing on the globe-rattle. The descendant of
Schwambranians rattled her small mace.
     "I'll tell you what I think of the book," Oska said  in  a very  formal
tone of voice. "It rightly presents us as insignificant and silly fools. The
author   has  successfully  exposed  the  silliness   of  such  daydreaming.
Unfortunately,  however, he has  not  been  able to avoid  a petty-bourgeois
vagueness in  some  of  the characterizations. However, while  exposing  the
insignificance and silliness of those Schwambranian daydreams, you've gone a
bit too far. You  want to deprive the present  of the right to dream. That's
wrong! I think this should be changed. Wait...." He  dumped the contents  of
his  briefcase onto  the  table, and books and  notepads, squirmed out of it
like  fish  out  of  a  creel.  Among  them  I saw a small book  entitled "A
Communist's  Companion"  and  recalled   the  deceased  Jack,  the  Sailor's
Companion.
     "Here it is," he said, opening a pad. "Here's a quotation from  Lenin I
copied out:
     "  'And if they  say: what is it to  us? After all, we  don't  need any
illusions or tricks to sustain our enthusiasm.... This is our great joy. But
does this mean that  we ... don't need to dream? A class that is in power, a
class that is truly changing the world in a workaday way is always  given to
realism, but it is also given to romanticism.'
     "Here, you see,  one  should understand this romanticism  to  mean what
Lenin meant when he  spoke of a  dream.  And this  is no longer an imaginary
star  that  can never  be  reached.  It's  not  something  to  console  your
imagination. It's our own very real Five-Year Plan, and all the ones that'll
follow. It's our determination to  move on despite all obstacles. It is that
'practical idealism' which Engels said the materialists had  so much of when
the narrow  materialists  accused him of 'narrowness and excessive soberness
of mind'. You should have said something about that in the book," my learned
brother concluded.
     "I know there's a lot that can be improved," I said humbly. "I feel it,
but don't know how to  do it yet. And don't  rush me. A person has to digest
all this first. I'm not happy about being Jack, the Communists' Companion. I
don't want to be just  a companion. I want to be a sailor of the revolution,
and I will be one,  I promise you, my brother and communist, as I would have
said to Stepan Atlantis."
     Oska and I stayed up talking late into  the night. Everyone had gone to
bed. Speaking in  whispers made our throats  itch, as did our recollections.
We  lined  the characters of the book up for a  last review. We  held a roll
call of my old class at school.
     "Vyacheslav Alipchenko!" I said.
     "Died of typhus," Oska replied.
     "Sergei Aleferenko?" I asked.
     "Party Secretary of the wharves."
     "Stepan Gavrya, alias Atlantis!"
     "Killed in action on the Urals Front."
     "Konstantin Rudenko, alias Beetle!"
     "Lecturer in analytical mechanics."
     " Vladimir Labanda!"
     "Shipbuilding engineer."
     "Martynenko, alias Hefty!"
     "Exiled for counter-revolutionary activities."
     "Ivan Novik!"
     "Director of a machine and tractor station."
     "Kuzma Murashkin!"
     "First mate on the Gromoboi."
     "Arkady Portyanko!"
     "Botanist and scholar."
     "Grigory Fyodorov!"
     "Red Army commander."
     "Nikolai Shalferov!"
     "Killed by counter-revolutionaries."

     The next morning Father took me to the suburbs to see the new hospital.
I couldn't recognize the city. At the place where the Earth curved there was
a wonderful  recreation park.  Homes for workers  of the meat-packing  plant
were going  up on the  side of our destroyed  Schwambranian mansion that had
once belonged  to Uger. A bus passed. Students of  the city's three colleges
were  hurrying to  their  classes. Large  new  houses lined  Breshka Street.
Airplanes  roared over the  city,  but I  didn't see anyone  look up.  A new
theatre,  clinic and library were under  construction. A magnificent  sports
stadium crowned  the top  of the hill. I recalled  the  two  Schwambranians'
visits to the Cheka and the Chairman's words:
     "And  we'll have paved  streets everywhere, and big muscles, and movies
every day."
     While the  story  was  in  the telling, the deed  was done.  The  clear
windows,  spotless floors  and shiny instruments of the new hospital dazzled
me.
     "Well?  Was there anything remotely like this  in  Schwambrania?"  Papa
said, enjoying my admiring glances.
     "No. Nothing of the kind."
     Papa beamed.
     The day before we  were to leave for Moscow  Mamma went to  the  closet
that housed  our family treasures  and pulled out  a large  shield with  the
coat-of-arms of Schwambrania  on it. It now adorns the  wall of my study and
is a taunting and  devilish  reminder  of  our errors and  our Schwambranian
imprisonment.  Thus,  according to legend, did Prince Oleg of yore hang  his
shield  upon  the gates  of Constantinople as  a  constant  reminder to  the
conquered Greeks.
     But  the  globe  has  spun full circle. There is no  Schwambrania.  The
story, too, has  come  full circle.  It  is not a revelation,  but simply  a
visual aid.

        1928-1931, 1955