13. The Life of Basilio the Cat

Ýòî ïåðåâîä ðàññêàçà "Æèçíü Êîòà Áàçèëèî" èç ñáîðíèêà "Óñòíàÿ òðàäèöèÿ".

1

When my son grew older and started school, we found ourselves with something of a shortage of time together. By then his mother had gone to live with her second husband, leaving her son with her parents, and, like me, becoming a visiting parent. She needed a window of her own in his schedule. If it happened to coincide with mine, mine was canceled, though more often it was simply squeezed down to a couple of hours. We still went for walks in the park, but conversation no longer came easily, and I did not consider limiting ourselves to merely the necessary, circumstantial sort of communication a good thing.

One day I was given him for a very short time, and we had nothing to do. There was nowhere to go, so I decided to retell him something I had read as a child. For some reason, The Master of Ballantrae came to mind.

I began, and discovered that I had forgotten almost everything. But I remembered the key scenes, the spirit of the narrative, and I began filling in the gaps with my own inventions. Thus I discovered that I was quite capable of improvising stories as I told them. The result was not much worse than Stevenson, and my son liked it.

The next time I decided to put this newly discovered ability to educational use and began inventing a story about a disobedient boy who was forever getting himself into trouble because of his bad behavior. Along the way another character appeared—a runaway street boy, who served as a foil to the hero. While doing a good deed, the two of them rescued a strange creature, and suddenly the story broke free into open space and began developing on its own, independently of me. The educational purpose disappeared, unless one counts as education the fact that these three heroes were kind and tried to behave decently in indecent circumstances. Let us call it The Journey of Three Friends.

That story dragged another one along behind it, its sequel, involving two infernal counterparts of the heroes from the previous story, the beasts Kyf and Mom. There was also an extremely positive character—the bird Zum-Zum. This was Dima’s Adventures in the Land of the Snow Dwarfs. I was getting into it. All my stories were long, told over many days. Each time my son eagerly awaited the continuation.

And then I told him a story whose idea had come to me long before. This was The Golden Key, told not from the point of view of the actors in the puppet theater, but from the point of view of Basilio the Cat.

In this story Basilio the Cat was the sole descendant of an ancient aristocratic family and lived with his mother and their maid Annunziata in a mansion that was falling into decay. There were no other cats in that duchy besides them, as a result of a decree arising from a backstory I shall omit here. Under that same decree, they had been declared human.

Basilio the Cat attended the gymnasium. He could see that he was somehow different from the other children, but he did not understand why. The only item of clothing he wore was a lace collar.

A traveling circus arrived, and among its performers was a little cat who was a dancer.

Oh, how graceful she was! For the first time he saw a creature like himself, apart from his mother. Basilio saw her at the performance, and then encountered her by the sea, on the rocks. She spoke to him first. She was resting there before the show. They met and he fell in love. Of course, he did not understand this. They began meeting by the sea. To do so, he skipped his lessons.

There they lie on the warm, flat rocks, looking into the water. The fringe of seaweed rises and falls in time with the swaying water. Little fish have gathered in the shade. A crab, blending beneath the water with the stones, scuttles sideways from one hiding place to another.

The little cat had quite grown-up problems of her own. With Basilio she could forget them. What could Basilio possibly know about women’s problems in general? Those moments became the best memories of his life. Not least because of his blissful ignorance.

Then one day she did not come. The circus disappeared from the town. Shaken, Basilio began trying to find out what had happened and accidentally learned that the circus had been expelled for threatening public morality, at the request of his mother, who had preserved her old connections. The real reason, however, was that she considered contact with a circus performer harmful to her son.

“Mother, how could you?”

His mother was unshakable in her conviction that she was right. A horrible scene followed at the dinner table, and he was punished and sent to his room under the roof. He stood at the window. The roof, the leaves of the trees, glittered in the moonlight. He felt the roof calling to him. All his life he had been forbidden even to think of stepping onto a roof, climbing a tree, chasing anything that moved. But now, after all this, whom did he owe anything to? What obligations bound him? What agreements?

He opened the window and tore off his lace collar. Suddenly his muscles contracted involuntarily, and all he realized was how, with an extraordinarily agile leap, he had landed on the steep slope of the roof and was racing upward in bursts. His paws slipped on the tiles, but he was not afraid, because somehow he knew he would never fall. The joy of plunging into an element where everything suddenly felt familiar, recognizable, logical, came over him. In a single bound he reached the ridge, paused, looking at the familiar surroundings from this unfamiliar vantage point, and climbed down the drainpipe. He swore to himself never to return. (Here one can see the influence of The Baron in the Trees*.)* His paws carried him through gardens, groves, and the courtyards of other people’s mansions, toward the mountains, into the forests.

That little cat remained part of him forever, and he was never able to forget her. Much later he learned that some wealthy man had taken her in, and that shortly afterward she died.

Later, while living on the streets, he fell in with a gang of street boys. They were thieves who eventually intended to use him to rob his mother’s house (Oliver Twist). Unable to imagine anything bad about them, he became friends with them and took part in various shared mischief.

After some time a puppet theater came to town. They set themselves up in an old warehouse on the outskirts. Basilio went to the performance and became acquainted with the puppets. When he came to their rooms, Karabas-Barabas noticed him.

Karabas-Barabas was, in his own way, an unhappy man. He was merely an impresario, but dreamed of becoming a creator, of achieving immortal fame as a playwright and director. He was tormented by premonitions of the coming new theater, but that time had not yet arrived.

The classic plays The Little Bird-Polka and Thirty-Three Slaps, which he had inherited along with the theater, enjoyed unwavering success, but failed as soon as he changed anything in them. He had nothing to talk about with the puppets. In his eyes—and apparently in reality as well—they were stupid, vain creatures who needed an iron hand. Only Pierrot was something of an exception.

In Basilio the Cat he found at least someone to talk to. There was no one else like that in the town, and if there had been, he probably would not have talked to a puppeteer. Wrong social status, and besides, he was a foreigner. In that abandoned warehouse, which had now become the back room of the theater, Basilio sometimes sat and talked with him.

There they are sitting: an empty barrel serves as a table, with a pitcher of beer on it, and a candle stub stuck into a bottle. Or perhaps not—the space is sparsely illuminated by the uneven glow of the fire from the hearth, where stolen firewood brought by the puppets is burning down. Cozy. Columbine is sent to the tavern for beer. Pierrot does not drink. At first he refused with exaggerated politeness, but Karabas-Barabas did not even think of persuading him. Now Pierrot sulks because of it.

Karabas-Barabas has a red face; he has already drunk a couple of pitchers, sometimes forgetting to refill his companion’s mug. As he gets carried away, he says:

“I want to insert a scene called ‘Pierrot’s Dream’ into Thirty-Three Slaps. The scene takes place in prison; Pierrot dreams it. From the ceiling hangs a curtain made of chains, and behind them is Harlequin, shackled in irons. He delivers a monologue, repenting.

“Sometimes the chains in sensitive places ring like chords. For that, you pull a little rope—or no, rather, shake the stick from which they are hanging.”

Basilio listens. He is drinking for the first time. His tiny stomach is already full to bursting; the beer is looking for a way out. His head is swimming. He nods.

“A rope descends from above, a thick rope, a real cable. It has knots. It symbolizes three things: the gallows—the knots are tied in a special way to remind us of that—the ladder to heaven, and... damn it, I’ve forgotten the third.”

Basilio the Cat hiccups.

“...The Judge is played by the same actor who played the rogue in the previous scene. He has merely put on a wig; otherwise it is all the same. Malvina testifies before the Judge about how much she loves Pierrot, while the Judge secretly pinches her backside. Understand?”

Basilio feels that he has to respond somehow.

“But how will the audience see that, if both of them are facing the audience?”

“That’s it! They’ll see it from her face. Malvina, come here! Let me show you how it will be. Malvina, say us some kind of monologue. No, stand facing him—he’s the audience.”

Malvina begins to speak. Karabas-Barabas pinches her backside. Malvina squeals in surprise and blushes. Her scarlet mouth twists into a grimace, but how beautiful she is at that moment!

“That’s how it will happen, only you mustn’t squeal—you must giggle. Pretend you like it, Malvina, giggle, but keep talking, keep talking, don’t stop. Well? What do you think?”


“And now the condemned Harlequin climbs upward along the rope, weeping black tears. He stops at every knot, says something at each one, and the ringing of the chains accompanies his words. You understand?”

“And what does he say?”

“I’m working on that right now. Perhaps you can help me? Can you imagine the scene?”

Basilio nods. He tries to imagine it. He sees the theater, the audience talking among themselves, eating apples. Against his will he suddenly sees apple cores flying onto the stage and striking the chains. The chains clang from the blows.

“Harlequin, weeping, climbs upward and disappears into the clouds. Drumbeat. Trill. Tragic silence. Then, from the clouds, his clothes fall down. They hang over the edge of the stage. Well?”

Karabas-Barabas leans forward. His wet lips, framed by beard, gleam like an open purse; his bulging eye narrows beneath a shaggy eyebrow.

“Powerful!” Basilio says, trying to suppress a hiccup.

“There! Good. It’s good that you understand me. Everyone embraces and weeps, Pierrot louder than anyone. They say what a fine fellow he was. Pierrot says he was kind and just; Malvina says he was polite and courteous... The Judge’s wig falls off; Malvina rubs her backside.”

“And is that the end of the scene?”

“Yep! A moment later—crash!—the drum! Harlequin, laughing, plunges down upon them from the heavens! He jumps around them and gives everyone resounding slaps, but Pierrot gets the most. Or no, he hits only Pierrot, while the others cower and try to escape. That will be cleaner. But he jumps around, cutting off all their escape routes.”

“But is he naked?” Pierrot asks.

Karabas-Barabas frowns, thinking. Ah yes, the clothes that fell from heaven!

“No, he is wearing only his underwear.”

“Will the audience really understand that this is still Harlequin?”

Karabas-Barabas twirls his fingers.

“They’ll recognize him by his voice. But we can leave his cap on. The audience will recognize him by the cap. Yes, underwear and cap.”

“And won’t you have trouble with the police?” Pierrot asks.

“That will require some work.”

Columbine returns from the tavern with the news that they are no longer willing to give them beer on credit. Basilio can no longer overcome his hiccups. Everything is swimming around inside him. He has stopped understanding what Karabas-Barabas is saying.

“...the audience laughs, applauds, and when everything grows quiet, Harlequin turns around and slaps Malvina. Just once, but hard!”

“Signore, I beg you, please don’t,” Malvina pleads, throwing up her little hands. “It will damage my role. Give it to someone else instead...”

Karabas-Barabas turns toward her.

“Here I decide everything,” he says, but then he thinks. And suddenly he begins to have doubts.

The fog in Basilio’s head has completely enveloped his brain, but his instincts have come to life. In one movement he finds himself outside the door, in the moonlit space, his paws pressed against his mouth. There he begins to vomit.

“Where did the cat go?” Karabas-Barabas asks in bewilderment, returning to the subject.

“Apparently, signore, he ran off to write a monologue for Harlequin,” Pierrot says.

Karabas-Barabas looks at him with a threatening, unfocused gaze. Pierrot holds his gaze innocently. He was not offered any beer. Usually he comes up with most of the jokes and repartee. Karabas-Barabas sinks back into himself. He studies the bottom of his mug.

“The other scenes will have to be rewritten too.”

He considers this, looks around at the puppets, and grows gloomy.

“Well, nobody, nobody needs anything, but I’ll force them all to accept me...”

When Basilio stops vomiting, he feels lightness in his body and head.

The warehouse stands in deep shadow, merging with the grove, with mountains behind it. In its dark silhouette a square window glimmers faintly. Shadows move inside. Basilio turns and walks away along a path brightening in the darkness, beaten through the thick grass, past the wagons where the puppets sleep. The moon dominates the sky; ahead, beneath the mountain, the sea can be made out. He drinks water from a fountain. Never has it tasted so delicious and sweet, and never has he felt so young, happy, and full of hope.

I had not really invented this dialogue or these roles. Knowing absolutely nothing about theater, I simply transferred, as best I could, my many conversations with my boss at work onto theatrical subjects. Of course, we did not talk about theater or art. We talked about the design of industrial plants. But isn’t that what translators of poetry do? They introduce into their native language images alien to it. Anyone who knows a foreign language can confirm that a poem in translation conveys only a reflection of the meanings invested in it. If it conveys anything at all.

My boss felt cramped within the limits in which we were required to exist. We worked at a design institute, and I was his deputy. What he had in common with Karabas-Barabas was a magnificent beard.

And most of the other characters came from there as well.

....

Alas, Karabas-Barabas was doomed to obscurity as a creator. He lacked the essential thing—talent. He never found the courage to stage a new production.

They were unquestionably drawn to each other, but Karabas-Barabas’s despotism and rudeness repelled Basilio, while Karabas-Barabas, for his part, liked no one. He envied the Cat, was jealous of him in every possible way, and greatly overestimated his education and his talent, fearing that one day Basilio would betray him.

How he might betray him, Karabas-Barabas himself did not know. It never occurred to him that Basilio himself had not yet figured anything out, did not dream of fame, and did not know what he wanted. The theater interested him very little.

Thus my translation from the ordinary into the fairy-tale continued.

The puppets got mixed up between them. Malvina was the stupidest and prettiest of them, and therefore did whatever she pleased. She took it into her head to get her hands on Basilio. After all, he came from a good family.

Let us note that there was not yet any Buratino, nor even the slightest hint of one. Papa Carlo played a hurdy-gurdy from courtyard to courtyard, while the future Buratino lay in the form of a block of rare, expensive wood in the workshop of a musical-instrument maker. Giuseppe was his servant.

Then the master died, the wood remained where it was, and little by little it was taken away for firewood. Later the master’s heirs sold the remnants to Cremona. Another inserted story is connected with them, but that comes later. Among the inheritance were also the notes of that same master, in a leather-bound notebook, from which the mystery of the Golden Key gradually began to unfold. But many more events had to take place before that.

Of course, I did not tell all this directly to a nine-year-old child. These were merely my ideas, and they revealed themselves through dialogue and action. I do not know how he understood it all. Probably he was carried along by the flow of the story itself. Just as I had been carried along when I read The Three Musketeers. Back then I had no interest in who Madame Bonacieux was or what she had to do with the hero. And Milady’s maid—what exactly was she doing with d’Artagnan? For me she did not exist there at all. And what was wrong with the queen giving the duke garters? I had no interest in that either, and how could I have known?

I accepted those charming details as a frame around the main picture: duels, pursuits, and witty dialogue. And I was older then than my son.

Meanwhile, the bad boys in our story planned to draw Basilio even more deeply into their criminal activities. What they had done together before could be interpreted as mischief: stealing fish from nets, stealing fishing boats. Now they were planning to rob the post office. Basilio’s participation was assumed in advance; they had invented a role for him. They also counted on having an excuse if they were caught together. They told him to come to the post office at night, at a specified hour. They gave him no detailed plan, intending to involve him in the events immediately.

That evening Basilio was again sitting with Karabas-Barabas, while Malvina hovered around them, shaking her skirts. Well, let us suppose she was wiping the wooden table with a dirty rag, stirring the coals beneath a little pot of beans—the dinner of the entire troupe—or carrying mugs of beer from the tavern. Basilio was getting ready to leave. There was not much time left before his appointed meeting with his friends, when suddenly Malvina secretly slipped him a note. On his way out he read it: Malvina was asking him to come to the waterfront. They met there. She began complaining to him about something, and he could not understand anything about her tangled grievances.

She burst into tears, then calmed down. Basilio had never had anything to do with women, especially crying women; he did not even know that such a thing happened.

Then they sat beside each other. Malvina talked nonsense, in which he tried to find meaning that had never been there in the first place. Malvina leaned against him, and he melted with an unfamiliar sensation. The clock in the tower kept striking, again and again. The appointed hour had long since passed, and not only could he not pull himself away from her, he did not even dare mention it.

They’ll manage without me, he thought with delight.

Malvina had already realized that from now on she could do whatever she wanted with him, and she calmed down. There is no need to hurry things, she decided. There will be time enough.

They parted when dawn was already breaking, and Basilio went back to his shed, filled with utterly unfamiliar, wonderful sensations.

A gendarme was already waiting for him at the shed. At the station, a bulldog detective asked him where he had been during the night. He told him where, without mentioning Malvina’s name.

“Do you know these people?”

His friends were brought into the room: Kyka, Kosyak, and Frau. Basilio immediately understood that they had been caught in something.

It was not his fault, but for some reason he felt guilty. He was clever enough to understand that saying I know them meant answering other questions as well, and then everything could become much worse for everyone.

“No, I don’t know them, although I cannot swear that I have not encountered them in the street.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain,” he said. “Just think: who are they, and who am I?”

He tried not to look at them. He did not even know what they had been caught doing or what threatened them. This will be better for them, came the thought that justified him.

His friends were led away.

“What happened?” he asked with difficulty.

“They were arrested attempting to rob the post office,” the gendarme said. “And they said you were their accomplice. But who will believe them? Who are they and who are you? They belong in hard labor.”

Basilio looked at the gendarme, and it seemed to him that the man actually did believe them.

“And now you must report immediately to the governor’s office.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t you know? War has been declared.”

Only then did Basilio realize that all this time, drums had been rumbling in the distance.

As he left the station, Basilio glanced sideways and encountered the hateful looks of his friends, staring at him through the barred basement window. Their heads were already being shaved. He would meet them again later. By then they would be galley rowers, chained to their benches.

2

The drums were thundering in the square in front of the governor’s office. There was a recruiting station there.

The Duke had declared war on the Land of Fools. Or perhaps the Land of Fools had declared war first. Thus began the great European war. Later a coalition was formed, and the Empire entered on the other side. According to the statute governing the family of Basilio the Cat, all male cats of his lineage were required to serve in the army in wartime. At the office, the general, an old family acquaintance, informed Basilio that he was to report to his regiment. The regiment had already marched off to war.

He had to go home, consoling himself with the thought that this did not count as a real return. From the wardrobes they took out his father’s uniform with epaulettes, an officer’s hat, and a saber. The uniform, however, consisted only of a short, narrow blue jacket with silver embroidery on the sleeves. His ancestors had already understood that a cat in trousers looked ridiculous and had bargained for this concession in the uniform. Basilio was deliberately cold toward his mother, embraced Annunziata, the maid, and departed, having of course slipped into his uniform pocket the purse full of coins his mother had given him. How could he go without money? The saber dragged along the ground, and the hat was too large.

He caught up with his regiment at night. Complete confusion reigned. The regimental commander had reported himself sick. In the end Basilio was sent to the senior officers. He found them in a tent bent over maps. They were two friends, captains who dreamed of military careers. For them this was an opportunity to distinguish themselves, especially since it was obvious that everything was organized terribly. They believed their battalions occupied a key position in the coming battle, one the command did not recognize. They calculated every possible course of action, and saw advantage everywhere. Then a new officer appeared.

They had not expected such an absurd character. They sent him to a third-rate sector to command a reserve company composed of inept soldiers and recruits.

In the morning there was fog, and the battlefield could not be seen. Marching units lost their direction and ended up behind their own lines. The roar of battle came from all sides; it was impossible to tell where the main action was taking place. Basilio saw a dark, bristling strip through the fog and a second later realized that the enemy was moving toward his position.

The company stood in an uneven line. A noncommissioned officer ran along the ranks, straightening them. Green uniforms were already visible, the enemy’s rifles raised. Wisps of smoke curled upward.

Volley!

Bullets whistled overhead. The enemy soldiers had aimed badly.

“Fire!” Basilio shouted in response, and heard, instead of a unified volley, several scattered shots. He looked around—almost no one remained in the line. Killed? Run away? Meanwhile the grenadiers of the Land of Fools were fixing bayonets.

It seemed that it was not he who was there, but someone else, a stranger, and that stranger had only seconds left to live. He was merely watching from the outside.

His stomach cramped, and suddenly Harlequin’s monologue on the rope began forming in his head. The words came of themselves, as though large pearls were falling one after another into an open palm:

“O my beloved Malvina, in the gardens of my fantasies you were the queen of wi—”

Suddenly a horn played an unfamiliar melody. Basilio turned and saw, through breaks in the fog, a little to one side, on a hill diagonally opposite the infantry flank, some kind of battery deployed. The artillerymen moved quickly and skillfully, and it was immediately clear from them that they had come from somewhere else. In the distance a sharp command rang out in an unfamiliar language.

The fog burst apart with a volley. Grapeshot screamed.

Basilio turned toward the field. The advance there had stopped; the ranks had become confused. He watched until another volley thundered, tearing open gaps in the dense formations. Then everything there became a churning mass, and he realized that the movement had reversed, that the enemy was fleeing. A third volley followed. Some time later explosions boomed ahead in the fog. Now they were firing grenades after the retreating enemy!

Again the sound of the horn. The battery limbered up as skillfully as it had deployed and disappeared.

What color had their uniforms been?

The enemy infantry had vanished from sight. The field was covered with corpses—the result of accurate shooting.

What was he to do next?

Without the slightest understanding of what was happening or what he was doing, Basilio walked forward to see. The fog was thinning. He was looking at scattered bodies when he heard voices and saw several figures in green uniforms wandering across the field.

One of the figures suddenly swung his rifle and drove the bayonet into a body, then bent down.

What were they doing?

The body rolled from side to side, an arm flailing.

They were enemy soldiers looting the dead. They were quickly emptying the pockets of corpses and finishing off the wounded. The bodies they left behind stiffened in absurd positions, bellies exposed, pockets turned inside out. There—the looter raised his bayonet over another body.

“What are you doing?” Basilio shouted. “Don’t! There are still living people there! They need help!”

The looters saw him, exchanged glances, and moved toward him.

Everything that followed happened quickly. The nearest looter lunged. Basilio pulled at his saber, but the saber was longer than he was and almost heavier than he was. It was useless to him. Only the flexibility of his body and his agility could save him. He barely managed to dodge the bayonet thrusts.

Fortunately, the grenadiers of the Land of Fools had received poor training in bayonet fighting.

The other looters were already close. One of them was making rapid movements with a ramrod, pushing a bullet down the barrel.

The looter raised his bayonet for the final blow.

Basilio felt his chances rapidly running out, but suddenly the looter threw down his rifle and ran away, crouching and covering his head with his hands.

Basilio felt as if a rider had suddenly leapt almost straight through him. Hooves struck the ground, turning over sand; a leather-clad backside rose and settled into the saddle. The rider, standing in his stirrups, pursued the looter, swinging his saber.

The other looters also ran.

Several more riders burst out and raced after them, spreading out like a fan. Basilio turned, rubbing the sand from his eyes. A carriage was emerging from behind the hill.

The carriage approached. The door opened, a boot descended, and inside sat someone in a white uniform covered with orders and decorations.

“Basilio, salute Marshal de Croa,” someone said behind him.

Basilio raised a paw to his hat, registering only peripherally that he recognized the voice of a classmate standing above him.

Marshal de Croa made a gesture. Basilio approached.

“What a brave heart beats in that little chest,” said the marshal.

“But, Your Excellency...” Basilio began.

“Do not tell us anything. I have just seen how bravely you fought five enemies alone, on a field strewn with enemy bodies. Brave ensign, where are your soldiers?”

Basilio looked around. Several soldiers from his company were tentatively getting up from the ground after seeing their superiors.

“How few heroes have survived,” the marshal said sadly. “Adjutant, write down their names. This must be recorded in the order.”

Basilio’s former classmate, now the commander-in-chief’s adjutant, saluted. The carriage door closed. The riders returned, sheathing their sabers. They all departed.

No one ever learned the whole truth, which was that a small detachment under General Manteuffel had arrived at the battlefield just in time.

The Empire had entered the war on the side of the Land of Fools!

Had General Manteuffel’s detachment been larger, the war would have ended right there, and our story would have taken a different course. But this was merely the prologue to his future glory. General Manteuffel’s detachment marched rapidly, and in fear of its iron tread both friend and foe scattered before it. They became so absorbed in maneuvering that they lost all sense of where they were and, in the fog, confused allies with enemies.

A grenadier regiment of the Land of Fools lost its way and accidentally ended up precisely where it was not supposed to be according to the plan. General Manteuffel opened fire on the advancing ranks, mistaking them for enemies. Having routed his own allies, General Manteuffel hurried off to attend to some other urgent matters.

The battle ended in nothing, although each side declared victory. Both armies withdrew, and our regiment gathered in one place.

It turned out that no one in Basilio’s company had been hurt. Most of his soldiers had simply run away, sat out the danger in safe places, and were now making their way toward the kitchen.

The regiment’s other companies had been badly mauled. One captain was wounded; another faced a court-martial for failing to carry out an order.

He had been ordered to storm the enemy battery from the front, but instead he went around it. The enemy artillerymen, it was true, fled, abandoning their guns when he appeared in their rear, but that no longer mattered. Marshal de Croa, who had personally given the order to attack and watched the beginning of it through a telescope, had ordered him removed from command and court-martialed before the battle was even over.

Now a difficult inquiry was underway.

In this situation Basilio felt like a complete fool when, at the general formation, an order was read out declaring him and his company heroes. The soldiers of his company had already figured out that playing the role of heroes was better for them than playing the role of cowards and deserters, and they were enthusiastically telling tall tales about the imaginary battle and their part in it. Soon everything became so tangled that no one could possibly establish the truth.

But what was Basilio to do about it?

Prove what? To whom?

The army became repugnant to him...

How he longed to return to the theater! This did not happen soon.

When he tried to remember and write down the monologue of Harlequin that had come to him during the battle, he could not remember a single word except:

“O Malvina!”...

3

Those were the kinds of stories I told my son.

After that came new events leading up to the appearance of Buratino and the struggle for the Golden Key, in which the older Basilio the Cat participated only indirectly, and in a manner quite unlike the narrative of Tolstoy. In fact, they eventually led to the situation in which he found himself as the poor, ridiculous, mad companion of Alice the Fox.

I will not recount them now. It would be better to do that somewhere else, and only if I manage to remember everything.

For some reason I am certain that my son remembers absolutely nothing.

After that came Dwarf Hannibal—Destroyer of Cities, The Adventures of the Jack of Diamonds, and The History of the Cockroach Empire.

That was where all my stories ended.

Everything around us was changing. Perestroika was underway. Video parlors appeared, showing unknown films. Books by authors such as Tolkien and Zelazny were being published. Architectural moonlighting appeared, bringing me additional money. An atmosphere of carnival arose, and everything ended with the coup and the dissolution of the Union.

In some magazine, in the early 1980s, I encountered a new word: postmodernism. Until then I had never even heard it.

The appearance of buildings already constructed in that style, including in Moscow, did not particularly appeal to me. The next time I heard the word, it was applied to me, in New York.

We had submitted one of our projects to the city department for approval, and it was rejected with comments.

In the written comments, the word appeared repeatedly in a negative context:

“...postmodern architecture, more characteristic of shopping centers... seems inappropriate on this segment of the river... one would like to see this place more naturalistic...”

That was what the document said. Until then I had not known that my design was postmodernism.

We later redesigned everything there, so no one ever used such words about our projects again.

And rightly so that they rejected that project at the time. I understand that now. After all, a park is a public place. People are supposed to relax there, not indulge in doubts.

Now it is clear to me that the stories I told my son were as postmodern as they could possibly be, even though I did not know the word at the time.

Because our life itself was postmodern.

And still is.

Well, what kind of life you have—that is the kind of fairy tales you have. And these notes of mine are postmodern, too.

What did all these stories give my son?

I now think they gave him nothing good.

At best, we simply passed the time somehow.

At worst, I muddled his head for life.

I did not muddle it intentionally.

I was simply like that myself, throughout my life.

That is how I raised him.

My first wife’s second husband had a son, about four years older than mine. My son was drawn to him.

One day, taking my son with me, I was walking to the dacha. I noticed that he was fiddling with some little piece of paper sticking out of his back pocket.

I asked what it was.

He did not resist for long.

It turned out to be a pornographic card in the form of a playing card, apparently an ace. On it a young woman was conscientiously displaying herself in all her feminine glory.

That boy had sold the card to him.

“Well, how much did you pay him?” I asked first of all, deliberately refraining from making any moral judgment about the discovery.

I knew that my son was good with money.

“Forty kopeks.”

“And how are you going to play cards with it now? You know how many cards there are in a deck?”

“Thirty-six,” my son said in a trembling voice.

He was very interested in cards at the time.

“And in some games, there are even more. So how much would a complete deck cost you?”

My son calculated. His mood deteriorated.

“There,” I said. “Now hold it up to the light: you can see all the suits through it. So how are you going to play with cards like that?”

My son understood that the worst had already happened:

He had been cheated out of his money.

“So, what do I do now?” he muttered.

“Well, what can you do? Let it be what it is. Just don’t show it to anyone. How about we hide it somewhere safe at the dacha?”

And we hid it in a crack beneath the windowsill.

A few days later I was sitting at the dacha with my friend Borya and his wife at the table. We were having a good time, as always, and I told them about the incident.

“And, by the way, here is the card itself.”

I took it out and handed it to them.

Borya’s wife recoiled in disgust when she saw it.

I was surprised at the time.

Why, really?

A few days later my sister was at the dacha with us. She quietly called me aside and said ominously:

“Here. Look what your son is looking at!”

“Ah, that?” I spoke. “Yes, I know about it.”

“You know?” my sister exclaimed. “Well, then you’re a fool.”

Sometime later I asked my sister what had happened to the card.

It turned out that she had thrown it away at the time.

My son never looked for the card again and never mentioned it.

....

Now I understand that the best thing for a child is when both parents live with him under the same roof.

In a house that he will later call home for the rest of his life.

And it is good if, while doing so, they also tell him the most ordinary fairy tales.

And if they do not, that is good, too.