Delirium Soup, Chapter One: The First Computer (Part 1)

[pilfered_words]

    The first thing I ought to say is that this is not mine. Or most of it isn’t. This story was originally written in Russian by a family friend, and I am translating it at his request. Let me know how you like it and I’ll pass it on. :)
I hope I have done the original justice, at least to some extent. There are several sentences that I have been staring at for so long that I am no longer certain if they make any sense at all as I translated them. If something is awkward-sounding or confusing, do tell me? Ditto for grammar errors. And, obviously, those awkward places, unlike the story, are all mine.
The other note I wanted to make before the story is this. This story is practically autobiographical. Minor details may have been changed, but the basics are all true. The author was born in Russia in 1942, and lived in the Soviet Union until it collapsed.The moment he could, he jumped ship and moved to the US, where he has now been for twenty-some years. I hope, therefore, that even if you don’t care for it as literature, you will find it interesting as history. If anything is confusing, let me know. This story badly needs footnotes, but I am not entirely sure where it needs them.

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      Chapter One

"Where are you from?" asked the girl.

"New Jersey," I said.

"No," said the girl, "I mean... I like your accent.”

"A-a," I said, "I'm from Russia.”

"Oh, I know, that's somewhere around Germany, right?”

"Yes, very close. We even fought a war against them.”

"You too?”

"No, this was a long time ago. My father," I said, "he was a war hero.”

"Were a lot of your side killed?”

"Twenty million.”

"You're kidding.”

"No. Have you been to Russia?”

"No," said the girl. "My sister went. Last summer.”

"Did she like it?”

"Yeah, she loved it.”

"And what did she like?" I asked.

"I don't remember. She went to some big city.”

"Moscow?”

"Yeah, probably. But she said she wouldn't go there again. I want to go though. Do you think I should?”

"Yes, of course. You will like it too.”

"Are you serious?" asked the girl.

"Absolutely," I said.

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The First Computer

Moscow, July 26, 1985

I know these days, few like remembering old times. I don't like it much myself. But sometimes, I will make exceptions. Now, for example, I'll tell you a story from ancient times.

It all happened in eighty five, in Moscow, in the summertime. No sooner had I come to work than the phone on my desk started ringing. It was my boss.

"Hello, Ilya,” he said.

“Good morning, Boris Borisych.”

“It’s not that good a morning,” said my boss. “We have a committee coming to check on the ministry system. Chetaev just called. I’m waiting for you in fifteen minutes.”

Chetaev was our Institute Director at that point, and their chairman as well. That’s how they always had it - whoever was the director was also the chairman. Or the other way round. I don’t even remember anymore.

Before Chetaev we had a different director. He was great deal milder. If they came up with something up there, he would announce it to us, of course, no matter how much nonsense it was. But he didn’t much care if we would do it or not.

Chetaev, though, was completely different. One of our crowd from the institute used to complain to me that once a week, at the very least, he would see this one dream. That he’d be sitting at home, having breakfast, and then Chetaev would yell, right into his ear, “What is your economic effect?” And my acquaintance would wake up in a cold sweat. And he just couldn’t get rid of these dreams.

No one even remembers anymore what in the world their economic effect was. And when I tell people, no one believes me. Because then it turns out that the whole country was working in the wrong direction, so to speak.

I’ll give you a small example. Say you made some machine and sold it to a factory. And the factory used your machine to make a thousand rubles worth of chairs. If you sold your machine for eight hundred rubles, then the economic effect would be two hundred rubles, but if you sold it for a thousand, then you’d have no economic effect at all. The more you sell it for, the worse for you. No one could explain why it worked that way. No one even thought about it. And Chetaev, without thinking about it, was very strict with us regarding all this, and his people thought of him very highly for that.

I still had ten minutes. I sat down in an armchair, stretched my legs out comfortably, and closed my eyes.

We went downstairs and asked the young lady where it was safe to walk around. And she gave us a map, on which she drew a little rectangle in pencil, and said that as long as we didn’t leave the French Quarter, everything would be quite safe.

“And if we do leave?” I asked.

“It’ll probably be all right as well,” the young lady said, “but I don’t advise you to do that.”

“How do we get to the center?”

“You’ll turn left here and keep going straight, without turning. In five minutes, you’ll be in the center.”

We left the hotel, turned left, and started to wander towards the center. There were a lot of people in the streets. And the further we went, the harder it was to get through the crowd. Every forty or fifty meters we’d see some small musical group, and all of it was like some jazz festival.

“Ilyusha!” said a voice right next to us, and I turned around.

I saw a girl and a young man. They were waving at us cheerfully, and it all looked as if we had agreed to meet up with them here. Moreover, it seemed as though we knew them well, because when we came up to them, we started calling them Mira and Lesha, and the girl, Mira, simply grabbed me by the sleeve and started to drag me somewhere.

“You should like this,” she said.

“What’s ‘this’?” I asked.

“You’ll see in a moment.”

“How would you know what I could like?”

“I know,” said Mira, “I told you, I know. You’ll really like this.”

While Mira was dragging me, she kept talking, nonstop.

“We’ll go to the Oyster House,” she said.

“Do oysters live there or something?” I asked.

“No, oysters get eaten there. But we won’t go there right away, not now.”

“So where are we going now?”

“You’ll see it all yourself.”

We were moving forward through a thick crowd of young people, among whom there was a great deal of young girls. And suddenly I saw one of them abruptly pull up her shirt, baring herself. Everyone screamed approvingly, and the girl pulled down her shirt, and started looking up to the second floor balcony, where there was a bunch of young guys.One of them tossed something down to this girl. And when she caught it and put it on herself, I saw it was a bead necklace. The crowd hummed approvingly again, and that same second, another girl, who was standing right next to me, turned towards me and also pulled up her shirt above her head, baring her completely white breasts. And these breasts, which were amazingly fine, were, since she was standing with her arms raised, even though they were quite large, sticking right out into my face, and this, of course, made my breath catch.

I opened my eyes and looked at my watch in fright. Ten minutes had passed since I had sat down in the chair, and apparently fell asleep right away. And I was surprised what complete nonsense a person can dream of, just like that, with no warning. Everything, absolutely everything that I had seen in my dream was strange and implausible. And the other thing that had surprised me was that while I was dreaming, it hadn’t seemed like nonsense at all. And I thought that the next time I’d have a dream about something like that, I should try to realize that all of it was a dream, and wake up.

And now, I really needed to switch over to the ministry system. We knew about it in our institute, as in the ministry itself, only as the most vague of ideas. Like, incidentally, most of what we worked on. Even though we were supposed to be working on the most important of government plans. These plans were developed in their State Committee by simple bureaucrats. They, naturally, couldn’t begin to imagine what the country needed to work on in the next five years. So they didn’t even trouble themselves to try understand what in the world they were planning. They just sent out a bunch of gibberish. And on the ground, each person would decipher it individually, and later folks would defend unimaginable dissertations, many would become Academics, would get all kinds of awards.

I remembered how once, an acquaintance of mine called me up. At one point, we were in college together. And then he went off to work for that State Committee.

“Listen,” he said, “we’re still short. Instead of eighty programs we only have sixty-five. If you want, give me your suggestions.”

“I don’t even know what to suggest anymore,” I said. “They’ve already tortured me about it at the institute.”

“Didn’t you used to work on Egyptian squares or something?”

“Latin rectangles.”

“Right. I think that will work. Let me put in your topic right away. Go ahead, dictate the title.”

I told him my topic.

“Great,” said my acquaintance. “Except we’re supposed to have automated systems right now. So let’s start this way: ‘Automated system...’ and then continue as written. You don’t mind?”

“No,” I said. “What are they?”

“I’ll send it all to you later. Right now, let’s decide what funding you need.”

“I don’t need much. Five will probably be enough.”

“Keep in mind that this is for five years.”

“Five years? Then put down twenty five.”

“Alright, I’m putting down twenty five million for five years.”

“Million?” I asked. “I meant twenty five thousand.”

“Are you crazy? We don’t have any programs for less than five million.”

“Really? Put down five million then.”

“Great, then,” said my acquaintance, “five million for five years it is.You can go ahead and send us the expanded program.”

The institute approved my program immediately. It turned out that they had been struggling for half a year, not knowing what to send. In a year, the program came back to the institute from the committee for realization. Out of the five million, we only spent a few thousand on salaries over the five years. I went on a business trip once. That was two hundred more. And I got two pens, a ruble apiece. And the rest of the money just got crossed out somewhere.

We finished work on the program in time and in five years, sent a report to the committee. And there it was kept on file for ten years. That was it.

I went off to my boss, and on the way got to wondering how it was possible that all these meaningless things seemed absolutely natural, normal, and ordinary to everyone. And then I thought that all of this was very like some terrible dream. And it occurred to me that maybe I was actually sleeping at that very moment. And I was even surprised that this had never occurred to me before. If it was very like a dream, why had I never before suspected that I was asleep? And I started wondering how I could check if I was sleeping or not, and how I could possibly wake up. And because of all this, I became quite uncomfortable. And then I finally realized that I should have been thinking about something completely different. What I should’ve been thinking about was how we were going to get out of the situation with the ministry system. Because we hadn’t even started it yet.

Part Two