Robinzon Party

Stas Rybkin: It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and we are standing on the balcony, directly above that bar-sitting room in which we talked with Oleg Batygin yesterday.

We are sitting at one table with the island’s chief and only doctor. He asked us not to make his name public, so we shall simply call him the Doctor. All of us here are waiting for the start of the party with the romantic name “Robinzon Party”.

I am sure the party ahead of us will be unique and stunning. For the time being, though, the Doctor and I are sipping an American pale ale brewed right here on the island and conversing unhurriedly.

The Doctor is a very imposing man. He is in a light linen suit. To my mind he is the only person on this scrap of land who wears a suit. Besides which he has on dark glasses and a Hitchcock hat. On the whole the Doctor looks like a very secret agent out of a Hollywood film of the nineteen-fifties.

It seems to me that our conversation with the Doctor deserves attention and recording. So I shall now put a few questions to this vivid man in front of the camera. Tell me, Doctor, does this island have some special name?

The Doctor: You have probably noticed that two communities live on the island. They have, of course, intertwined very closely, but they have nonetheless remained independent micro-cultures. The first community is the handful of educated people who live here. A pinch, rather than a handful. Oleg Batygin, his wife, Robert, Alexei, and my wife and I. The second community is Delphine’s numerous relatives. The cultural differences between these two communities are enormous.

We speak English, they speak their own strange language. We are rational people and unbelievers, they profess their fanciful cult. It is separately curious that Oleg indulges this obscurantism. Evidently because his wife is all but the central deity of the cult in question.

We call the island simply “the Island”, they call it “the Elder Sister”. In their language it sounds like “Rahavavi Zokini”.

Stas Rybkin: Evidently there is also a Younger Sister?

The Doctor: Of course. The Younger Sister is their homeland. The shore of a remote bay whose location we are forbidden to disclose. “The Younger Sister” in their language sounds like “Zandri Vavi”. We call this “Younger Sister” simply “the Shore”.

Stas Rybkin: For some reason it seems to me that you personally are not too pleased that the Island has a Younger Sister?

The Doctor: On the one hand, I was offered this position only because the Elder Sister acquired a Younger one. When the population of the Island grew to a figure which we are likewise not to name aloud, Oleg decided that carting every slightly ailing person to the continent was a nuisance. And he hired me.

On the other hand, the Younger Sister in question is frankly sitting on our neck. Last month, for instance, forty-five per cent of the income received by the Island went to the Shore. Naturally, we get nothing from there except ever more new settlers.

I have no right to complain, of course. I bring the Island no money. I am hired staff. But forty-five per cent of the income vanishing into the void is, to my mind, a little too much.

Stas Rybkin: Yes. That is a lot. But then housing and food on the island are free. Your services, that is, medical care, are also paid for out of the island treasury. On the Island one can live very decently without spending money at all.

The Doctor: The strange form of socialism that has formed itself here may strike somebody as a beautiful and desirable arrangement of society. But I was born in a socialist country. And I consider that I was extremely unlucky in my place of birth. I prefer to pay for my life out of my own pocket. I prefer in general to be the sole master of my means.

Stas Rybkin: Tell me, how much do you earn? If this question strikes you as immodest, simply do not answer it.

The Doctor: I earn a little more than I was making in Sri Lanka, and somewhat less than I would be getting if I worked as a doctor in Europe.

Stas Rybkin: Thank you for the straight answer. Is there some reason why this position went to you in particular?

The Doctor: I once sold Oleg a train ticket. That very train which carried him into Delphine’s arms. Oleg does not much like bringing new characters into his play at all. He knew that I was living in none too easy circumstances on Lanka. And he invited me here. I was obliged to agree. Things had turned out in such a way that I should have had to emigrate in any case. And here I was getting a guaranteed and free right of residence together with a job.

Stas Rybkin: So you are not delighted at having to live and work here on the island? Forgive me for asking. I find it rather hard to imagine. This is a veritable earthly paradise…

The Doctor: Yes. It is beautiful and comfortable here. But in my youth I dreamed of something else… I grew up in a country in a state of protracted civil war. I watched American films… Somewhere there was a world in which people went to work in well-equipped offices. Took part in honest elections. Danced in night clubs. Raved at rock concerts. Dined in good restaurants. Invested. Played the stock exchange and the casino. Raced in open cars across a boundless plain.

And I went to a school half of which had been destroyed by an artillery shell. Every day on the way home from school I was searched by a military patrol. I lived in an old house on the seashore. And through the windows I saw warships lying in the roads. Now and then artillery fire woke me in the night.

As a schoolboy I worked part-time at an enormous, expensive resort. The tourists holidaying there could not have cared less about the war going on. It did not concern them. They were like Higher Beings. In the distance explosions thundered, and the tourists lazily drank their strong drinks. Lay in deckchairs. Talked about nonsense. For some reason they were certain that hunger, war, destitution and disease would on no account touch them.

One day my father, a minibus driver, took a group of tourists to the airport. On the way back his vehicle was stopped. He was shot in a cow shed. I do not even know who shot him. “Ours” or “the enemy”. He was killed so that they could take the car.

Naturally, afterwards I was very eager to begin at last to live a normal life. I had no need of any excesses. I did not want any mysterious islands, secret cults, isolation from the world, prohibitions on disclosing anything whatsoever. I wanted to go to a decent office in a business suit. To drive a solid car. To deal with reserved, businesslike people. To breakfast on a cup of americano and a fresh hot croissant. To read the paper in the morning at a café table. To put my money into whatever I felt like.

Stas Rybkin: Thank you, dear Doctor! You have explained everything to us most exhaustively. Zhenechka and I are going downstairs now. To where the last preparations for the party are being finished. The party is drawing near, and, to be honest, my heart is leaping in anticipation of something spectacular.

……………………………

Stas Rybkin: Zhenechka and I have come down to the wardroom. The very one with the fresco and the heavy long table. Nearby young people are stacking a tall pyramid of some sort of square, compressed bales, plainly of vegetable origin. Zhenechka, tell me, did you like the doctor?

Zhenechka: He is charming. He reminds me a little of Dr. Gregg from “Cabbages and Kings”. Only Dr. Gregg was a drunkard, whereas the Doctor here has quite a different vice.

Stas Rybkin: A vice? The doctor has some particular vice?

Zhenechka: Did you not understand? The Doctor is too fond of “investing”. He is a passionate and not very lucky player of the stock exchange. That, in fact, is why he ended up locked away here — he lost a large sum of other people’s money on the exchange. And now it is awkward for him to go back to Sri Lanka.

Stas Rybkin: Zhenya! You are a regular Sherlock Holmes!

Zhenechka: More of a Gleb Zheglov, rather. I do without deduction and other dubious tricks. I learned that the doctor is an inveterate gambler from his wife. She and I got thoroughly drunk together yesterday.

………………..

Stas Rybkin: People are gradually gathering. Music is already playing. To be honest, parties like this, slowly kindling in the warm lilac dusk, simply take my soul out of me. Look at these beautiful silhouettes of young people in the half-dark. Somebody is dancing on the spot. Somebody is tapping long fingers on a small bongo. Somebody is smoking something. Somebody has put their arms round somebody. Alexei and Robert are coming over to us. They really do look like Vintik and Shpuntik.

Zhenechka: Or like Petrov and Vasechkin. Do you think they are in love with each other?

Stas Rybkin: Zhenya! Are you interested in anything at all apart from the intimate preferences of people you barely know?

Zhenechka: Of course! I am interested in what they eat!

Stas Rybkin: Hello, Alexei! Hello, Robert!

Alexei: Good evening!

Robert: Hi!

Stas Rybkin: To be honest, I feel a certain trepidation talking to you. I have never met real technical geniuses before.

Alexei: Robbie, do you hear? You are a genius!

Robert: I know that. What is interesting is that you are too!

Stas Rybkin: Today I shall try to collect as many varied opinions about the Island and about the situation here as I can. I want to present the cultural and social phenomenon of the Island to the viewer from different angles. Tell me, please, what is the Island for you?

Robert: Absolutely everything. A place to live. A source of income. A source of joy and delight, a hope for the future.

Alexei: The Island is our child. We created it. We brought it up. And now we have the right to place our hopes in it.

Stas Rybkin: And Oleg Gennadievich?

Alexei: What about Oleg Gennadievich?

Stas Rybkin: Does this Island have two fathers or three after all?

Robert: That is a fairly provocative question. We love Oleg. We like to think that we are his closest and most devoted friends. And yes, Oleg initiated this project. Formally the Island has only one father. And that, of course, is Oleg.

Alexei: It all depends here on who should be considered the father. If it is the one who conceived the child, then our Island has one father — Oleg. But if the father is the one who spent sleepless nights by the cradle and traded his last shirt for nappies, then Robert and I are the fathers of the Island.

And the point here is not that Oleg works little. He works three times as much as we do. It is simply that Oleg is not a scientist in the literal sense. He is a programmer. He can think up a beautiful system. By some special sense he feels the relations between the components of a mechanism. He knows how to systematize a technical line of reasoning and turn it in an unexpected and successful direction. But to bring to life a project based on the actual properties of nature he has insufficient competence.

Robert: In my youth I travelled in the Caucasus and heard a curious interpretation of the Bible there.

According to that version God did not create the world himself. God is something in the nature of an owner-investor. He had the funds to create the Universe. And he invested in a start-up. The project itself was carried out, naturally, by devils. Headed by the contractor’s CEO, Satan.

That is why the world came out so imperfect — it was made by devils. And as to whether God can build worlds with his own hands, rather than with the help of the well-known contractors, we know nothing. Perhaps there are other, earlier universes where he did everything himself. It may even be that it was they that brought God the funds to build our world.

Alexei: Robert picks up bad habits terribly fast. In particular he has learned from Oleg to smoke a great deal.

Robert: But you must agree, we have no right to assert with full responsibility that Oleg could not have built a similar project without you and me. Yet this particular project was built almost entirely by the two of us — if, of course, we are speaking of this project as scientific and technical work, and not as the result of rational planning and good provision of resources.

Alexei: Yes. With that formulation I shall probably agree.

Zhenechka: Tell me, are you married?

Stas Rybkin: Zhenya!

Robert: Excellent question! We are married to Science. Officially. We registered the marriage a month ago.

Alexei: Science! Come here! We shall introduce you to the journalists.

Stas Rybkin: A very beautiful and young dark-skinned lady is approaching us. Her name really is Science, and she really is the official wife of Alexei and Robert simultaneously. As far as I know, Science is Delphine’s own sister. Hello, Science!

Science: Hello, Stas! Only please do not ask me any difficult questions. I have already smoked a great deal today and I may talk nonsense.

Zhenechka: So the three of you? How wonderful! Tell me, is that your real name, Science?

Science: Yes. My father named me that. He decided that since his elder daughter was deeply bound up with mysticism and magic, the younger one ought somehow to make up for the situation. So he named me Science and sent me to study at a physics and mathematics college. That is, it was Byung Min who sent me there. But papa asked Byung Min to do it outright.

Robert: I think it is all beginning! The musicians have taken their places. Let us go closer to the fire…