Chapter Three (full text English translation) — различия между версиями

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MIKHAIL KHARITONOV

THE GOLDEN CLUE OR THE ADVENTURES OF BURATINO

VOLUME ONE

THE ITINERANCY OF BASILIO

CHAPTER THREE WHEREIN THE COTERIE WE ARE WELL FAMILIARIZED WITH FLOUNDERS THROUGH THE EMBARRASSING SITUATION AND FORFEITS THE FAITHFUL COMPANION

September 29, 312 H. E. around noontime

Land of Fools, Cross-Domain Territory

FOR INFORMATION ONLY:

Briefing report: delimitation area (“neutrality zone”) between the domain of the Woollies and Wonderland. Breadth: ranges from five hundred to one thousand and five hundred meters. Endemic rational entities (IIQ>70) lacking. Despite relative proximity to the Zone, Tesla-mutants scarcely occur due to fugacity, volatility and non-contiguousness of Tesla-enmeshment. Isolated edifices dating back to the pre-Homocaust era persisted. The nearest large-scale facility: the mothballed German military base Graublaulichtung “The Grey-Blue Glade”. Endeavors at external infiltration therein aborted: tamper-proof. Nearest adjacent inhabited localities: the fortification of Hyena-Aul (Woollies), the mini-municipality of Qawai (Wonderland). Visitation is deprecated.

Karabas Bar-Rabbas sprawled out on flawlessly verdant, glossily scintillating grass. Isolated grass-blades were absolutely identical, well-trimmed, with horizontal, as though manicured tips. He pondered thereon, and inferred that these were actually mown, for it is implausible for any gene modification whatsoever to so prioritize and polish the lawn. All too many things would have slanted toward heterogeneity herein, commencing from varying light exposure.

Peering thereat, the Rabbi discerned the leaf-cutting ant ensconcing on the leaf apex. The ant was lifeless, or, if you prefer, moribund. Bar Rabbas somewhat mused on whether or not it is renderable thusly into Russian, and deduced that everything is anyhow renderable into Russian.

He shifted his glance slightly further ahead, refocusing it on where the ribbon of the rivulet zigzagged across the lawn. The water oozed forth languorously, reluctantly obviating gravel stones. On the yonder side of the rivulet the soil was grassless. Wanton foliage of miscellaneous endemic herbs with jagged white spots of cyme inflorescences, fondled by zephyrous breeze, vibrated under sunrays thereat. Cicadas were enthusiastically rent-seeking. Fleas, bugs, and smaller insects were whistling and crackling in accompaniment thereto.

Moldering ruins either of some villa or of a little church loomed thereupon. The slender, white turret, seamless and spotless like a candle, with lobed pinnacle crowned by the ebony canopy, stood nearby. A raven or a batman would look handsomely thereon, however, the spire was unoccupied.

Karabas beheld such edifices on former occasions likewise. They were being erected throughout the latest fifty years before the Homocaust from some abstruse raw stuff resembling masonry or brickwork but non-destructible. For some weird reasons, birds never perched thereon.

The verdant sea was bisected by the lengthy, tapering silhouette adumbrated by the skewed mast of the archaic wind mill. The leaden-gray segment of the airship hull whereon the characters “LED” had been inscribed suspended from off the fragment of the vane. The continuation of the inscription was torn off, if it had existed whatsoever.

Some non-picturesque, amorphous wreckage were situated to the right-hand side thereof, from behind which silhouetted low hills overgrown with somber eerie forest. The grand cloud drifted languorously above it, as if waddling and clasping at the corrugated wall of pine-trees.

“Fucked up”, uttered Karabas without accosting someone particularly.

“Something of that sort”, consented Basilio squatting nearby on the raincoat spread out over the lawn. Having snuggly tucked his slender dry-shod hind paws under him he was pensively poking around his fore fangs with a grass blade.

“Or you meant something in particular?” enquired the cat just in case.

“Kenny fucked up”, elucidated the Rabbi. “They have just retrieved him. That is, Pierrot did. Currently he reminisces that he sort of anticipated something like that”.

“A spoon is dear when lunch time is near”, sighed the cat. “Well, what is on our agenda, Herr Schwarzkopf?”

“Preferably Signor Testanera or something like that, anyway... Psht”, Karabas rolled over on his stomach, and tilted his broad-brimmed Rabbinical felt hat over his eyes protecting himself from the scorching sun. “So, what do we have here?”

“This zoophilic cunt bitch and her canine have nearly smashed us up”, Basilio conveyed the stale piece of news.

“With her canine? I do not think Artemon is involved. Treasonable ideas metastasize throughout stealthily. It takes time. I would have intercepted them if any. No, nobody consulted with him. Malvina perpetrated everything unassisted”.

“Has she pulled a lever?” queried the cat.

“Frankly, I do not remember exactly if it is leverage or a push button”, confessed Karabas. “Scarcely something sophisticated. Altogether, she opted for liberty for herself and on behalf of Artemonito. But I am wondering how she managed to demothball the base? She ought to tamper with it, infiltrate therein and reach the control panel”.

“She rewired everything through batman's brains, and jettisoned him. Big deal”, snarled the cat.

“As far as I am informed regarding these contrivances, not even a mouse can squeeze through therein”, demurred Bar-Rabbas.

“A mouse cannot squeeze? Well, then, a mouse or a rat. Not a prototype, but a real-life rat or mouse, anima vili, in a nutshell. Some petty rodent with re-soldered brains infiltrated in the control room and gnawed through some cable, or squatted down on a push button. And whoops”.

“And how do you visualize that? Batman plummeted from the altitude of six kilometers clasping the little mouse in his teeth? They would perish both”.

“And who told you that she had energized the base prior to the elopement? That would be obtusely. When did we park on the last occasion?"

"By Lake Garda. No mouse whatsoever shall jog therefrom".

"Incidentally, what did we need there?”, the cat suddenly grew curious.

“I needed to negotiate with someone”, Karabas shared with Basilio not any more information as the latter could glean autonomously from the existing evidence, all the more so that it was obnoxious for him to reminisce the discussion with the senile amphibious portmanteau.

"Well then, Malvina jettisoned him whilst you were negotiating”, inferred the cat. "wingless, certainly. Although intuition hints me that our jet-propelled packs are lacking whatsoever. And altogether many other things are lacking. We have been fleeced”.

“Let nothing be wasted”, commented the Rabbi philosophically, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. Sultriness intensified.

Voices echoed. Pierrot and Harlequin were reverting. Symptoms of the ice abstinence ostensibly recrudesced in Pierrot.

“Lolled, lulled, oozed, circumfused, fluctuated”, maundered the poet gradually elevating his voice. “Whiter than water lilies, redder than rubies, thou wert alabaster and incarnadine, mauve, mallow, Malva, Malvina. Oh, nay, there is not a single dew-drop of incarnadine or lilaceous in thee whatsoever. Thou art a glacial osculation, every single inch of thee, whiteness on azureness. However, it was an alternative music about distant lands that my fellow was toting in his saddle. He crooned as he beheld outlands: Malvina, my bride, evanesced!” he ululated the lattermost words at the top of his lungs already.

The muffled, crisp echo of the one-palm handclap pealed out: Harlequin dealt a hard-hitting slap in the face of Pierrot. Instantaneously, the handclap re-echoed in an alternative tonality: the author of the slap in the face decided to enhance the attained effectiveness with a box on the ear.

“Shut the fuck up, blowjob”, he finalized the pedagogical session.

The cat glanced back to the echo, and momentarily slightly lifted his pair of spectacles fine-tuning long-range optics.

“They are fetching something”, he informed. “But I cannot discern what precisely”.

“Kenny, the tablet and my knapsack with victuals”, expounded the Rabbi. “We ought to fortify ourselves. What do you think about that?”

“I guess so”, the cat yawned petulantly. “And you as ever?”

“Mammals permissible for consumption must be cloven-hoofed, even-toed ungulate and ruminant. As regards the situation of Pikuach nefesh, I do not currently diagnose it”, the Rabbi commenced his hermeneutics. “Generally, the issue is extremely controversial and thought-provoking. “The Book of Raphael the Angel” expressly prohibits it even under the situation of Pikuach nefesh, although Rambam in “Maahalot Asurot” argues that...”

The cat ostentatiously lowered his ears.

“It is okay. Let us get down to business”, halted Karabas. “Collect some fallen dead branches, and I shall go and seek some gravestone. The remains must be treated with due deference”.

The Rabbi reverted in forty minutes or so. He panted and puffed as he was carrying the gravestone on his shoulders.

Meanwhile the posse congregated around the small bonfire. Crouching and face-palming Pierrot was serenely, noiselessly weeping: the terminal stage of the ice withdrawal syndrome re-pullulated. Harlequin was fumbling with the intestines, rummaging in the guts. The prudent puss was roasting the liver on the twig.

“Would you like to break your fast?” inquired the cat, extending to the Rabbi the twig with the smoking slab of meat skewered thereon. “Freshly-cooked meat, do you know how palatable is that?”

“I do”, the Rabbi squatted down gingerly unburdening his shoulders. “Withdraw my biscuits from the knapsack. And we ought to boil some water”.

“There isn’t anything to boil it in”, sighed the cat.

“Run down to the nacelle”, said Karabas leering at the hectic Harlequin. “Fetch something promptly. Incidentally, see if you can find my humidor”.

“Boss, will you let me eat something or what?” resented Harlequin hastily stuffing his mouth with meat and spewing the sauce.

Karabas squinted. Harlequin conspicuously reluctantly upped, stood at attention, the flesh meat dropped out from his right hand which menacingly withdrew aside clenching the fist.

“Will comply, will comply, I’ll be right back, like a bee”, muttered the petite sodomite.

“Incidentally, this is the idea, like a bee”, remarked the cat. “One batman ostensibly survived, didn't he? He is reachable, right? Well then, let him fly over, and seek the humidor while he is at it”.

“He is currently foddering”, scowled the Rabbi who loathed when somebody flouted his instructions. “Okay, though, let him fly. Don't stir” he retorted to Harlequin. “Gluttonize”.

“Anyway, this Kenny was not so bad”, commented the cat sucking the twig all over after the liver. “Please, grill the tongue for me”, he accosted Harlequin. “Schwarzkopf, are there spicery in your knapsack?”

“The highland pepper should suit” said the Rabbi musingly. “Listen here. Don’t you remember who the defunct was basically? He is unlikely to have had porcine genes in him... Leporine ones are also scarcely plausible... I can't think of anything particularly non-kosher...”

It dawned upon Harlequin that the ravenously famished ogre might want to join the repast, hence he began to toil with his jaws at twice the speed.

“Napsibypytreten” intelligibly spelled out Pierrot. “Nap-si-by-pyt-re-ten”.

“Yes?” quizzed Harlequin munching with relish. “Shall I fuck you in the ass?” he decided to clarify proactively. “I can do it if anything”.

“Napsibypytreten” reiterated the poet. “I shall coin this neologism tomorrow so as to vainly mention him who is guilty of everything. Let him be the scapegoat. Thou, Malvina, my truelove, however, art immaculate, innocent: merely constellations agglutinated thusly...” he abruptly stretched forward his slender, thin-fingered hand, grabbed the slab of half-raw meat, and tearfully stuffed it into his mouth.

“Lo and behold, he re-vivified, he has got the munchies”, commented the cat. “Apropos, where is my barbecued tongue?”

“Well, you see, his head is severed from his neck” acknowledged Harlequin. “He was decapitated by the explosion. This guy had damned bad luck. I cannot even figure out how he had such bad luck. We escaped with nothing worse than bruises whilst he thusly”.

“This is precisely what we have taken him along for” Karabas, having dismissed hesitations, aggressively reached out for yet another twig. “This is precisely why we escaped”.

“The mascot?” comprehended the cat. “I did not know that. You never told us we had a mascot”.

“He was doomed to die”, informed Pierrot almost meaningfully, re-masticating a cannibalized fragment of Kenny. "On this wise held they the funeral for horse-taming Hector", he blurted out some obtuseness.

“He certainly was”, the Rabbi deigned to explicate. “The Rarest Gift. Like that of the Frustrator-Flamingo’s, but the reverse thereof. It concentrates inauspicious probabilities refocusing them from others on himself, a sort of self-sacrifice. The Russian genetics. The chromosomal map is lost. Such are scarcely extant”.

“That is, we wasted our clandestine trump card at the first outset”, acknowledged the cat. “That's a pity. I shall wash my forepaws. Water seems to be there?” he twisted his head toward the rivulet.

“Yes, there. I shall also go down. Neaten things up here, and excavate a decorous grave, we shall inter the remains” commanded Karabas.

The rivulet proved to be extremely shallow and rather turbid. Nevertheless, the cat thoroughly washed up his muzzle, combed his clotted hair under the chin with his claws, and performed the ablution again.

Karabas squatted down demonstrably intimating that he yearned to discuss something, but was reluctant to accost. Basilio intuited him.

“Whatever shall we do next? Shall we revert back to the nacelle?” he queried.

“No. We ought to stay here. We shall occupy that turret, for instance, if we shall be able to unlock the door. If not, we shall spend the night in the ruins. We should rather not revert back to the nacelle. Anyway, there is nothing precious therein except for my cigars. And the woollies will emerge there before much longer: we landed on their turf, and they are petulant”.

“The woollies are none too well. And what shall prevent them from promenading as far as here?” enquired the cat.

“Here we have chances” Karabas proceeded to explain. “See here, the situation is as follows: we collapsed upon the woollies, quite literally, on the very brink thereof. Here we are in the cross-domain zone. Over there”, he fingered at the hills “Wonderland looms. It was hitherto supervised by the Sublime Grandee Apostasius; currently, however, it is usurped by dwarfish ponies. Woollies fear dwarfish ponies, and never molest them promiscuously. Along there - the Co-Operative Society “Loch”, we have already visited it...”

“It takes seven days to reach the Loch afoot, and then if only by the paved road”, admonished the cat.

“Currently, it is irrelevant to us. Significantly, Tortilla hosted us. By the codes of the underworld, the boss identified us as code-bound. And dwarfish ponies, albeit they are hell of bitches, nevertheless esteem the code, in contrast with the woollies. They will allow us to pass through”.

Basilio sighed.

“Well, anyway, Schwarz, we were not born yesterday, and we know the Land of Fools perfectly well. Do not trust bosses, do not place reliance in bosses, and do not solicit from bosses. And never discuss the codes if you are not a boss yourself. The electorate is codeless. And in the estimation of autochthones we are an electorate no matter what they might bloviate. You should better ponder on how many nakhnakhs you can browbeat, should anything happen. And can you browbeat even though one single dwarfish pony, particularly, if we take into consideration that you are, as it were, a masculine. She will ogle you with her eyelets and the game is over”.

“A safety lane to the Directorate is anyway indispensable for us” reminded Karabas. “We shall not infiltrate through the woollies. I am reluctant to rendezvous with Tarzan and his apes. Such sort of intercourse is counterproductive, if you know what I mean. And the Monarch of Beasts shall obligatorily evince an interest in us. Not so keen as to trespass on the Wonderland, however”.

“And however shall we penetrate through dwarfish ponies, quite apart from the fact that we need some nutrition, a vehicle, and a dormitory? Money is indispensable for all of that, while Malvina absconded with our gold. Has anything remained with you?”

“Five sovereigns”, sighed Karabas “I mislaid them in my pocket. We shall put them aside for use in an emergency. And altogether the situation is frustrating yet extricable. We shall put a play on the stage. The Empathetic Theatre. Pierrot and Harlequin is a readymade duo. We shall recruit several autochthones for the enhancement of effectiveness”.

“Is that what I am thinking about? What a loathsomeness” Basilio bristled up his whiskers. “Is it absolutely indispensable?”

“Suggest an alternative idea” Karabas shrugged his shoulders. “Memorize, these are dwarfish ponies. Filly foals and maiden mares dote upon slash art”.

“This is precisely what I am talking about: loathsomeness” hissed the cat. “Hopefully, I am not involved therein?”

“No, you are not. You are overslaughed. Your mission is to re-establish liaison with our might-have-been guide. Regretfully, he dwells in an obnoxious location, but you can infiltrate there, it is passable for you. It is not far away from here”.

“If it is not far away, you dubbed this place obnoxious, and this is not about the woollies, then the Zone remains”, the cat squirmed. “Am I correct?”

“I am not dispatching you to the Monolith, and nobody anticipates the stalker’s heroics on the Field of Miracles from you”, Karabas grinned. “You merely ought to rendezvous with a certain iconic figure who acquiesced to collaborate with us, the Hirudotherapist”.

“The leech therapist?” the cat plunged into pensiveness. “Is that the one who exhumed you?”

“Precisely. He extracted me from out of the quagmire wherein I had been interred for too long, properly speaking, ever since the labefaction of the Monolith”.

“I have been meaning to ask you how he detected you?” inquired the cat.

“Fortuitously” responded Karabas. “He was unditching some hippopotamus thence, well, and fortuitously hooked me. Initially he misidentified me as a mummy, subsequently he clarified. I spent around a year in his leech burrow. That was a splendid time”.

“And is he truly as tough a guy as he is rumored to be?” queried the cat.

“I am well-acquainted with him. He is somewhat heavy-handed, although he is the toughest Cisalpian guy. You will click with each other”.

“If they don’t ensnare me in some grill or slaughterhouse earlier than that” grunted Basilio out.

“You are a gazer, Bas. You are the only one from amongst all of us who can intuit Tesla-effects”.

“Probably, some of them” snarled the cat. “Yet altogether… into the Zone… unaided … without a single latch-key…”

“We have utilized Kenny” reminded Karabas. “Incidentally, let’s go and finalize it with him lastly. We shall discuss other things during the night-time when these boyfriends will, hm… slumber”.

“Together”, the cat couldn't refrain from divulging. The Rabbi said nothing.

When Karabas and Basilio reverted, Kenny’s orts lay in the shallow burrow tactfully veiled with an orange-colored parka.

“They killed Kenny”, sighed the cat, itching with his claw under his pair of goggles. “You bastards”.

“But was the defunct an ethical person?” simpered Harlequin. Karabas quizzically scrutinized his brain and persuaded that the classical citation infiltrated therein fortuitously. In his younger days Harle sojourned with a certain fuckwit who drubbed several utterances into his head.

The Rabbi elevated the gravestone. His robust arms exerted, sleeves of the frock-coat pleated in an accordion.

“Kenny immolated himself for our sake. He sacrificed his flesh and blood unto us. May God...” he re-snatched the burdensome gravestone more comfortably. “May God-Daughter bless you”.

The lattermost extant batman whizzed above the grave, and leaked the jet of liquid excrements therein. The obtuse creature likewise intuited death, and endeavored to pay condolences after its own fashion.

Karabas groaningly dropped the gravestone over the hole, rearranged it, thereupon he mounted it from the above. The porous soil yielded and sagged under the burdensomeness of the massive body. The Rabbi circumambulated the grave along the edges tamping the soil down with his high boots.

“The grave is earthed”, he said. “Well, now, this is seemingly all there is to it. I could have recited the Ziduk Ha-Din yet, but who will appreciate that?”

“Not me”, asserted Bas adamantly. “Requiems are irrelevant, for the soul anyway obtains what it had prepared for itself through its mundane exertions”.

“Solely Kenny empathized with me”, informed Pierrot staring somewhere heavenward with the petrified glance.

Harlequin re-opened his mouth demonstrably intending to utter yet another nastiness, however, Karabas squinted his eyes hereon, and the jaws of the petite sodomite convulsively shrank into a gallinaceous rump.

Pierrot upped, neared the gravestone, and hugged it with his supple arms. He nuzzled against the ancient monolith whereon vestiges of the lapidary inscription were still discernible. The entire inscription was unreadable: shredders-alphanumeric erasers nibbled at almost each character thereof having routinely substituted them with regular vacant tick boxes. Just one word, with the tailpiece of the other, persisted: “TRESPASSERS WILL”. Pierrot endeavored to ponder on whoever that might have been. He merely osculated the monument instead, and relapsed in lamentation and ululation, profuse and mellifluous, as has always been the case when the ice eventually ebbs away.

When he finalized herewith, and reared his head, he beheld the retreating ebony dorsum of Karabas who was marching towards the turret in a surer step. Lineaments and adumbrations of his silhouette irradiated some sort of augustness, portentousness and fatefulness. It momentarily loomed unto Pierrot that something goldenly scintillated in the Rabbi's hand. Suddenly, it lusciously nettled in the dorsum, and instantaneously thawed like a little icy needle.