The Fatal Eggs (4 page)

There was a faint metallic scraping behind
Persikov's back, and someone tugged at his sleeve. Turning round he saw the
yellow rotund face of the owner of the artificial leg. His eyes were glistening
with tears and his lips trembled.

"You wouldn't tell me the results of your
remarkable discovery, Professor," he said sadly with a deep sigh. "So
that's farewell to a few more copecks."

He gazed miserably at the University roof,
where the invisible Alfred raved on in the loudspeaker's black jaws. For some
reason Persikov felt sorry for the fat man.

"I never asked him to sit down!" he
growled, catching words from the sky furiously. "He's an utter scoundrel!
You must excuse me, but really when you're working like that and people come
bursting in... I'm not referring to you, of course..."

"Then perhaps you'd just describe your
chamber to me, Professor?" the man with the artificial leg wheedled
mournfully. "It doesn't make any difference now..."

"In three days half-a-pound of frog-spawn
produces more tadpoles than you could possibly count," the invisible man
in the loudspeaker boomed.

"Toot-toot," cried the cars on
Mokhovaya.

"Ooo!
Ah! Listen
to that!" the crowd murmured, staring upwards.

"What a scoundrel! Eh?" hissed Persikov,
shaking with anger, to the artificial man. "How do you like that? I'll
lodge an official complaint against him."

"Disgraceful!" the fat man agreed.

A blinding violet ray dazzled the Professor's
eyes, lighting up everything around-a lamp-post, a section of pavement, a
yellow wall and the avid faces.

"They're photographing you,
Professor," the fat man whispered admiringly and hung on the Professor's
arm like a ton weight. Something clicked in the air.

"To blazes with them!" cried Persikov
wretchedly, pushing his way with the ton weight out of the crowd. "Hey,
taxi! Prechistenka Street!"

A battered old jalopy, a 'twenty-four model,
chugged to a stop, and the Professor climbed in, trying to shake off the fat
man.

"Let go!" he hissed, shielding his
face with his hands to ward off the violet light.

"Have you read it? What they're shouting?
Professor Persikov and his children've had their throats cut in Malaya
Bronnaya!" people were shouting in the crowd.

"I don't have any children, blast
you!" yelled Persikov, suddenly coming into the focus of a black camera
which snapped him in profile with his mouth wide open and eyes glaring.

"Chu... ug, chu... ug," revved the
taxi and barged into the crowd.

The fat man was already sitting in the cab,
warming the Professor's side.

In the small provincial town formerly called
Trinity, but now Glassworks, in Kostroma Province (Glassworks District), a woman
in a grey dress with a kerchief tied round her head walked onto the porch of a
little house in what was formerly Church, but now Personal Street and burst
into tears. This woman, the widow of Drozdov, the former priest of the former
church, sobbed so loudly that soon another woman's head in a fluffy scarf
popped out of a window in the house across the road and exclaimed: "What's
the matter, Stepanovna?
Another one?"

"The seventeenth!" replied the
former Drozdova, sobbing even louder.

"Dearie me," tutted the woman in the
scarf, shaking her head, "did you ever hear of such a thing? Tis the anger
of the Lord, and no mistake! Dead, is she?"

"Come and see, Matryona," said the
priest's widow, amid loud and bitter sobs. "Take a look at her!"

Banging the rickety grey gate, the woman
padded barefoot over the dusty hummocks in the road to be taken by the priest's
widow into the chicken run.

It must be said that instead of losing heart,
the widow of Father Sawaty Drozdov, who had died in twenty-six of
anti-religious mortification, set up a nice little poultry business. As soon as
things began to go well, the widow received
such an
exorbitant tax demand
that the poultry business would have closed down
had it not been for certain good folk. They advised the widow to inform the
local authorities that she, the widow, was setting up a poultry cooperative.
The cooperative consisted of Drozdova herself, her faithful servant Matryoshka
and the widow's dear niece. The tax was reduced, and the poultry-farm prospered
so much that in twenty-eight the widow had as many as 250 chickens, even
including some Cochins. Each Sunday the widow's eggs appeared at Glassworks
market. They were sold in Tambov and were even occasionally displayed in the
windows of the former Chichkin's Cheese and Butter Shop in Moscow.

And now, the seventeenth
brahmaputra
that morning, their dear little crested hen, was walking round the yard
vomiting. The poor thing gurgled and retched, rolling her eyes sadly at the sun
as if she would never see it again. In front of her squatted
co-operative-member Matryoshka with a cup of
water.

"Come on, Cresty dear...
chuck-chuck-chuck... drink some water,"

Matryoshka begged, thrusting the cup
under the hen's beak, but the hen would not drink. She opened her beak wide,
threw back her head and began to vomit blood.

"Lord Jesus!" cried the guest,
slapping her thighs. "Just look at that!

Clots of blood.
I've never seen a hen bring up like that before, so help me God!"

These words accompanied the poor hen on her
last journey. She suddenly keeled over, digging her beak helplessly into the
dust, and swivelled her eyes. Then she rolled onto her back with her legs
sticking up and lay motionless. Matryoshka wept in her deep bass voice,
spilling the water, and the Chairman of the cooperative, the priest's widow,
wept too while her guest lent over and whispered in her ear: "Stepanovna,
I'll eat my hat if someone hasn't put the evil eye on your hens. Whoever heard
of it! Chickens don't have diseases like this! Someone's put a spell on
them."

"Tis devils' work!" the priest's
widow cried to heaven. "They want to see me good and done for!"

Her words called forth a loud
cock-a-doodle-doo, and lurching sideways out of the chicken-coop, like a
restless drunk out of a tavern,
came
a tatty scrawny
rooster. Rolling his eyes at them ferociously, he staggered about on the spot
and spread his wings like an eagle, but instead of flying up, he began to run
round the yard in circles, like a horse on a rope. On his third time round he
stopped, vomited, then began to cough and choke, spitting blood all over the
place and finally fell down with his legs pointing up at the sun like masts.
The yard was filled with women's wails, which were answered by an anxious
clucking, clattering and fidgeting from the chicken-coop.

"What did I tell you? The evil eye,"
said the guest triumphantly. "You must get Father Sergius to sprinkle holy
water."

At six o'clock in the evening, when the sun's
fiery visage was sitting low among the faces of young sunflowers, Father
Sergius, the senior priest at the church, finished the rite and took off his
stole. Inquisitive heads peeped over the wooden fence and through the cracks.
The mournful priest's widow kissed the crucifix and handed a torn yellow rouble
note damp from her tears to Father Sergius, in response to which the latter
sighed and muttered something about the good Lord visiting his wrath upon us.
Father Sergius's expression suggested that he knew perfectly well why the good
Lord was doing so, only he would not say.

Whereupon the crowd in the street dispersed,
and since chickens go to sleep early no one knew that in the chicken-coop of
Drozdova's neighbour three hens and a rooster had kicked the bucket all at once.
They vomited like Drozdova's hens, only their end came inconspicuously in the
locked chicken-coop. The rooster toppled off the perch head-first and died in
that pose. As for the widow's hens, they gave up the ghost immediately after
the service, and by evening there was a deathly hush in her chicken-coop and
piles of dead poultry.

The next morning the town got up and was
thunderstruck to hear that the story had assumed strange, monstrous
proportions. By midday there were only three chickens still alive in Personal
Street, in the last house where the provincial tax inspector rented lodgings,
but they, too, popped off by one p. m. And come evening, the small town of
Glassworks was buzzing like a bee-hive with the terrible word
"plague" passing from mouth to mouth.

Drozdova's name got into The Red
Warrior, the local newspaper, in an article entitled "Does This Mean a
Chicken Plague?" and from there raced on to Moscow.

Professor Persikov's life took on a strange,
uneasy and worrisome complexion. In short, it was quite impossible for him to
work in this situation. The day after he got rid of Alfred Bronsky, he was
forced to disconnect the telephone in his laboratory at the Institute by taking
the receiver off, and in the evening as he was riding along Okhotny Row in a
tram, the Professor saw himself on the roof of an enormous building with
Workers' Paper in black letters. He, the Professor, was climbing into a taxi,
fuming, green around the gills, and blinking, followed by a rotund figure in a
blanket,
who
was clutching his sleeve. The Professor
on the roof, on the white screen, put his hands over his face to ward off the
violet ray. Then followed in letters of fire: "Professor Persikov in a car
explaining everything to our well-known reporter Captain Stepanov." And
there was the rickety old jalopy dashing along Volkhonka, past the Church of
Christ the Saviour, with the Professor bumping up and down inside it, looking
like a wolf at bay.

"They're devils, not human beings,"
the zoologist hissed through clenched teeth as he rode past.

That evening, returning to his apartment in
Prechistenka, the zoologist received from the housekeeper, Maria Stepanovna,
seventeen slips of paper with the telephone numbers of people who had rung
during his absence, plus Maria Stepanovna's oral statement that she was worn
out. The Professor was about to tear the pieces of paper up, but stopped when
he saw "People's Commissariat of Health" scribbled next to one of the
numbers.

"What's up?" the eccentric scientist
was genuinely puzzled. "What's the matter with them?"

At ten fifteen on the same evening the bell
rang, and the Professor was obliged to converse with a certain exquisitely
attired citizen. The Professor received him thanks to a visiting card which
said (without mentioning any names) "Authorised Head of Trading Sections
for Foreign Firms Represented in the Republic of Soviets."

"The
devil take
him," Persikov growled, putting his magnifying glass and some diagrams
down on the baize cloth.

"Send him in here, that authorised
whatever he is," he said to Maria Stepanovna.

"What can I do for you?" Persikov
asked in a tone that made the authorised whatever he was shudder perceptibly.
Persikov shifted his spectacles from his nose to his forehead and back again,
and looked his visitor up and down. The latter glistened with hair cream and
precious
stones,
and a monocle sat in his right eye.
"What a foul-looking face,"

Persikov thought to himself for some
reason.

The guest began in circuitous fashion by
asking permission to smoke a cigar, as a result of which Persikov reluctantly
invited him to take a seat.

Then the guest began apologising at
length for having come so late. "But it's impossible to catch ... oh,
tee-hee, pardon me ... to find the Professor at home in the daytime." (The
guest gave a sobbing laugh like a hyena.)

"Yes, I'm very busy!" Persikov
answered so curtly that the visitor shuddered visibly again.

Nevertheless he had taken the liberty of
disturbing the famous scientist. Time is money, as they say ... the Professor
didn't object to his cigar, did
he
?

"Hrmph, hrmph, hrmph," Persikov
replied. He'd given him permission."

"You have discovered the ray of life,
haven't you, Professor?"

"Balderdash!
What life? The newspapers invented that!"

"Oh, no, tee-hee-hee..." He
perfectly understood the modesty that is an invariable attribute of all true
scholars... of course... There had been telegrams today... In the cities of Warsaw
and Riga they had already heard about the ray. Professor Persikov's name was on
everyone's lips... The whole world was following his work with bated breath...
But everyone knew how hard it was for scholars in Soviet Russia. Entre nous,
soi-dis... There wasn't anyone else listening, was there? Alas, they didn't
appreciate academic work here, so he would like to have a little talk with the
Professor... A certain foreign state was offering Professor Persikov entirely
disinterested assistance with his laboratory research. Why cast your pearls
here, as the Scriptures say? This state knew how hard it had been for the
Professor in 'nineteen and 'twenty during that tee-hee ... revolution. Of
course, it would all be kept absolutely secret. The Professor would inform the
state of the results of his work, and it would finance him in return. Take that
chamber he had built, for instance. It would be interesting to have a peep at
the designs for it...

At this point the guest took a pristine wad of
banknotes out of his inside jacket pocket...

A mere trifle, a deposit of 5,000 roubles,
say, could be given to the Professor this very moment... no receipt was
required. The authorised whatever he was would be most offended if the
Professor even mentioned a receipt.

"Get out!" Persikov suddenly roared
so terrifyingly that the high keys on the piano in the drawing-room vibrated.