I just went over the diary — and I'm frightened by how low and self — serving my thoughts are! Here I am discussing how troubles befall people because they are unprincipled, that they think they can live off to the side, not get involved, and a few pages later I cleverly make sure I'm off to the side: don't get mixed up with Harry Hilobok, let him get his damn doctoral dissertation…. Here I'm thinking about how to derive benefit from my discovery, and here I call myself to do cruel acts with reference to wars and murders in the world. Here I (or me and the double, it doesn't matter) lower myself to the level of an ordinary engineer, who can't handle such difficult work — a moral insurance in case it doesn't work; and when it does work, I compare myself to the gods. And I wrote all this sincerely, without noticing any contradictions.
Without noticing? I didn't want to notice them! It was so pleasant and convenient that way: preen, lie to myself with an open heart, adjust ideas and facts to fit my moral comfort. So it turns out I thought more about myself than about humanity? It turns out that this work, if evaluated not from a scientific but a moral position, was nothing more than showing off? Of course, where would I find the time to worry about my guinea pigs!
What kind of a man are you, Krivoshein?
September 22. I'm not working. I can't work now. Today I rode down to Berdichev for some reason and by the way, I understood the hidden meaning of the mysterious phrase that was printed out one day. Twenty — six kopeks is what it costs to fuel up to get from Berdichev to Dneprovsk: five liters of gas, two hundred grams of oil. I've unearthed another discovery!
Where is Adam now? Where did he go?
And that creature that the machine tried to create after the first double: half — Lena, half — me. It, too, must have suffered the horrors of death when we ordered the computer to dissolve it? And my father. Oh damn! Why am I thinking about that?
My father… the last cossack in the Krivoshein line. According to family tradition, my forefathers come from the Zaporozhian cossacks. There was a brave cossack whose neck was damaged in battle — and there you get the Krivoshein line. When Empress Catherine broke them up, they moved to this side of the Volga. My grandfather Karp Vasilyevich beat up the priest and the head of the village when they decided to get rid of the village school and set up a church school. I haven't the slightest idea what the difference was between them, but my grandfather died at hard labor.
Father took part in all the revolutions, and served under Chapayev in the Civil War.
He fought in the last war as an old man, and only the first two years. They were retreating in the Ukraine and he led his battalion out from an ambush in Kharkov. Then because of wounds and age, they transferred him to the rear, as a commander on the other side of the Urals. There, in the camp, a soldier and peasant, he taught me how to ride, how to take care of a horse and saddle it, how to plow, mow, shoot from a rifle and a pistol, dig the earth, and chop brambles with a machette. He also made me kill chickens and pigs by stabbing them under the right shoulder blade with a small flat knife, so that I wouldn't fear blood. “It'll come in handy in life, sonny!”
Shortly before his death he and I went down to his homeland in Mironovka, to see his cousin Egor Stepanovich Krivoshein. While we were sitting in his cottage drinking, Egor's grandson rushed over:
“Cramps, they dug out a body from the clay in Sheep's Gully where they're digging the dam!”
“In Sheep's Gully?” my father asked. The old men exchanged a look. “Let's go see.”
The crowd of workmen and onlookers made way for the two old men. The gray, chalky bones were piled up in one spot. Father poked the skull with a stick, and it turned over, revealing a hole over the right temple.
“Mine!” father said looking at Egor Stepanovich triumphantly. “And you missed. Your hand shook, huh!”
“How do you know it's yours?” the other demanded sticking his beard into the air.
“Have you forgotten? He was coming back to the village. I was right on the side of the road, you were on the left….” and father drew a picture in the clay to prove his point.
“Whose remains are these, old men?” a young foreman in a fancy shirt demanded.
“The captain,” father explained, squinting. “In the first revolution the Ural cossacks were quartered here, and this here was their captain. Don't bother the police with it, sonny. It's been over a long time.”
How marvelous it was to lie in wait in the steppe at night with father's gun, waiting for the captain — both for the principle and the fact that the bastard ripped up men with his bayonet and raped girls! Or to fly on horseback, feeling the weight of your saber in your hand, taking measure: I'll chop that one over there, with beard, from his epaulets all the way through!
