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“What’s that thing you brought home?” Whale asked me.

It’s a cap.

“Let me see.”

He seized my new leather cap and wonderingly began to look it over. Within seconds his curiosity had reached such a fierce pitch that he was trembling. He let out a shout: “Daddy, what is it?”

“Just a funny kind of a cap,” I grunted.

“A cap to fly in?” he shouted, more fiercely still, and began leaping about with the cap in his hands.

I was willing to play along. “Yes, to fly in. We’ll fly to the North Pole in this cap, you and I.”

“Hooray! To see the polar bears?”

“Yes.”

“The walruses?”

“Yes, and the walruses.”

“And who else?”

My head was splitting: I’d had words with several people at the office that day, taken a dressing down from the manager, and made several mistakes. I was in a god-awful mood, but still, I racked my brains to recall the scant fauna of the Arctic Ocean. “The sharks,” I said in desperation.

“That’s a lie,” he retorted indignantly. “They don’t have sharks there. Sharks are evil, and all the animals at the North Pole are good.”

“You’re right,” I agreed hastily. “Well then, we’ll go and see the polar bears, the walruses . . .”

“The whales,” he prompted.

“Uh-huh, the whales and the . . . er . . .”

“The limpedooza!” he shouted rapturously.

“Now what’s a limpedooza?”

He stopped in confusion, laid the cap on the divan, went off to the far corner, and whispered from across the room. “A limpedooza is a kind of an animal.”

“Right you are,” I said. “How could I have forgotten? The limpedooza! A kind of slithery, clever little animal, right?”

“No! He’s big and fluffy!” said Whale with conviction.

My wife came into the room and said to Whale, “Let’s go tend to our business.” They went out together, but my wife came back and asked, “Did you call him?”

“Who?”

“Don’t pretend. You had all day and couldn’t make a phone call?”

“All right, I’ll do it now.”

She went out, and for the first time that day I was left alone. Listening to the unusual stillness, I might have been taking a bath or a shower, a shower of solitude after a work day filled in all its dimensions with clamorous people, some of them friends, some strangers.

I sat down at the empty desk and laid my hands on it, felt with pleasure its cool empty surface, devoid of any business or papers, serving now only as a prop for my heavy hands.

Outside the window the sun, having noiselessly surmounted the thickety yellow garden next door, was rolling toward the corner of a multistory apartment house, a gigantic up-ended parallelepiped, dark now and seemingly lifeless.

In the courtyard below, some demonic ten-year-olds were tearing around on the toolshed roof. From their wide-open mouths, I could imagine what a ruckus they were raising there outside our window panes.

A proper little old lady came timidly around from the front yard and, watchfully as a doe, turned toward the toolshed. As soon as they spotted her the boys leaped down from the roof.

This little old lady, who came out to the courtyard every evening for a breath of oxygen, with an inflatable rubber pillow to put under her meager seat, was a constant target of evil small-boy tricks. She was long since used to them and patiently endured the antics of these courtyard terrorists, so puzzling to her, so crafty and fleet—patiently endured them, but was nonetheless afraid of them, always afraid.

Now the boys had turned the janitor’s hose directly across her path; they were having a wonderful time, leaping wildly about with their mouths open in laughter, while the old lady stood there patiently waiting for them to tire of their game. The janitor’s wife appeared, a friend of the old lady’s, and rushed to the attack, opening her mouth wide and waving her arms as she ran.

This whole scene, had it been wired for sound, would surely have roused me to anger or pain, but now it passed before my indifferent gaze like the frames of an old silent film.

And so, the old lady successfully traversed the courtyard, while the terrorists raged on the toolshed roof, mindless that the old lady’s death, even now impending, might bring about the first desolation—a slight one, to be sure—of their own souls.

Striving to maintain my indifference and providential languor, I pulled the phone over and began to dial that damned number, as if paying no attention, as if it were nothing for me to call him, but by the third digit my insides were already knotted up, my heart, my liver, my spleen had contracted into one madly pounding lump, and only the short quick beeps delivered me. Busy!

I pictured him sitting in an easy chair, or maybe lying on the divan, but in any case fiddling with his spectacles, twirling them on one finger while he talked to someone. To whom? Sadovnikov? Voynovsky? Ovsyannikov?

I swore, and at that moment I heard Whale’s shout from the kitchen. He was acting up, for no good reason. Something comes over him sometimes.

“Go away!” he roared at the top of his lungs. “Go away!” he shouted to my wife. “We don’t need you!”

I could hear my wife’s indignant voice and then the click of the light switch.

Sanctions had been applied to Whale—he was left in the kitchen, in solitude and darkness. He immediately quieted down.

My wife went off to the bedroom to sulk. She takes it very hard when she has a tiff with her Whale-child, with this baby boy, our sweet little male-child, this Tom Thumb of a man just over three years old.

I got up and started for the kitchen, stomping the parquet elephant-style, trumpeting gaily and sternly, “Too-roo-roo! Here comes the Elephant Dad! Out of the depths of the jungle, Bimbo the Elephant himself! Too-roo-roo! Daddy himself! The one and only! In person!”

A feeling of tranquility and love sprang up in my heart like a whirlwind.

In the kitchen I saw his round head silhouetted against the dusky window. He was sitting on the potty whispering something, his finger raised toward the window, where the lights were already beginning to come on in the building across the way.

I’m almost used to Whale now. More and more seldom am I visited by that strange sense of illusoriness when he runs into the room or wheels in on his tricycle. The reverence before mystery, and the fear, that I felt the first few months of his life are almost gone. Now it’s “Oh, there’s Whale”—and that’s it. Small boy, sweet son, magic marvel whale-fish beside the Humpback Horsey sits . . .

He’s the stuff the old rhymes are made of.

He was six months old when I named him Whale. The two of us, my wife and I, were bathing him in a little tub; he wiggled in the soapy water, his toothless mouth gaping. I held up his head and kept stuffing the bits of cotton back in his ears as they fell out. From time to time he lifted his blue gaze to me and smiled a sly little smile, as if in foreknowledge of the intricate relations we have now.

First off it struck me he looked like a sausage in bouillon, and I told my wife so:

“A sausage in bouillon, that’s what he is.”

After a moment’s reflection my wife observed that this was scarcely an elegant comparison. Then I thought of the three whales that used to hold up the world in olden times:

“He’s a baby Whale.”

My wife was silent.

That evening, after the bath, I went out to Vnukovo airport and boarded a huge plane for the East. Then in Sakhalin, traveling around the little ports they have there, I would take out his picture in hotels and tourist homes and find myself thinking, “How’s that little Whale of mine?”

Not that I didn’t give him plenty of other nicknames later on. He was Bully-boy for a while, and Cupkins, and once he acquired this elaborate surname: Plumpkins-Bumpkins-Rumtumtumpkins-Sleepygrumpkins-Lunchkins-Munch-kins. Yet little by little these nicknames all faded away and were forgotten, until there remained but one, the big one—Whale.

“Well, what happened, Whale?” I asked, as I settled myself on the kitchen stepstool and lit up a cigarette.

“Look,” he said, pointing out the window, “pretty little lights!” He set about counting them: “One, two, three, eighteen, eleven, nine . . . Look!” he exclaimed suddenly, “the moon!”

I turned toward the window. A pale moon with its side eaten away hung over the houses.

“Yes, the moon.” It upset me, somehow, and I flicked my ash on the floor.

“Tolya, Tolya, we do have an ashtray,” said Whale in his mother’s tone of voice.

“You’re right,” I said. “Sorry.”

We fell silent and sat for a while—I on the stepstool, he on the potty—in absolute stillness, broken only by my wife’s sighs from the bedroom and the rustle of the pages of her book. Whale’s eyes shone mysteriously. The lull was evidently to his liking.

“Y’know”—he suddenly roused himself—”Gagarin the pilot flies to the moon.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Y’know,” he said, “Gagarin doesn’t, and Titov doesn’t, and Tereshkova doesn’t, and John Glenn doesn’t . . . ” A thoughtful pause.

“What?” I asked.

“And Cooper doesn’t—they don’t breathe anything into their mouth or nose,” he completed his thought.

My wife came into the kitchen and lifted him off the potty. “You didn’t do anything. Sit down again and try. You aren’t trying at all.”

“Tolya, do you try when you sit on the potty?” asked Whale.

“Yes,” I said. “Bimbo the Elephant tries.”

“And Tumba the Mama Elephant?”

“She does too.”

“And Kuchka the Baby Elephant?”

“Sure he tries.”

“And who else tries?”

“The dolphin,” I said.

“Is the dolphin good?” he asked.

“Did you call him?” my wife asked.

“It was busy,” I said.

“Then call him again.”

“Listen here!” My temper flared. “This is my business, right? It’s my business, and I’m the one who knows when to call.”

“You’re just chicken,” she said scornfully.

I jumped up from the stool.

“Go take a walk, the both of you!” she said sharply. “Get dressed, fast! Out!”

Whale and I went out of the house and walked down our street toward the boulevard. It was already dark. Whale took big, business-like steps, his soft baby hand firmly clasping mine.

“So what about it?” he asked.

“What?” I was lost.

“Is the dolphin good?”

“Yes, of course he’s good. Sharks are evil, but the dolphin is good.”

How does he picture the sea, when he’s never laid eyes on it, I thought. How does he picture the depth and boundlessness of the sea? How does he picture this city? What does Moscow mean to him? He doesn’t know anything yet, at all. He doesn’t know that the world is split into two camps. He doesn’t know what it is, the world. We have already labelled . . . it’s been catch as catch can, but we’ve managed to put a label to practically all the phenomena in our environment; we’ve built ourselves up this real world of ours. But right now he’s living in a world strange and wonderful, not in the slightest like ours.

“And who bit off the side of the moon?” he asked.

“The Great Bear,” I blurted, and at once felt alarmed, realizing how long it would take me to explain all that to him. I could tell from his tiny hand that once again he was quivering all over with curiosity.

“What do you mean, Tolya?” he asked carefully. “What kind of a bear?”

I picked him up in my arms and pointed to the sky. “See those little stars?

Those right there—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . In the shape of a dipper. That’s called the Great Bear.”

What are they, the stars? What is the Great Bear? Why has she hung over us like this since time immemorial?

“Yes, the great bear!” he cried happily, shaking his finger at her. “She’s the one that bit off the side of the moon! Tch, tch!”

The ease with which he had grasped these fictions emboldened me. “And up a bit higher there,” I said, “there’s a Lesser Bear too. See the little small dipper? That’s the Lesser Bear.”

“Where’s the Daddy Bear?” It was a reasonable question; he was trying to set up a bear family.

“The Daddy Bear . . . ” I muttered, “the Daddy Bear . . .”

Whale came to my aid. “He’s gone hunting in the woods, hasn’t he?”

“That’s it.” I let him down from my shoulder.

We came out on to the boulevard. The benches here were all taken by old men and nannies, but promenading along the mall were packs of fourteen-year-old girls, followed by packs of fifteen-year-old boys. It was bright and bluish here: fluorescent lamps cast their light on a Humpback Horsey the size of a dinosaur; a Firebird that looked like a giant turkey; an enormous Puss-in-Boots, tall as two men, with a depraved expression on his round visage; another cat—this one with a totally corrupt look—on a golden chain by the curving sea; King Guidon, the Swan Princess, a rocket, the Queen of the Fields, Gulliver . . .

It was Fantasy World, a children’s book fair set up on our boulevard. At this hour the stalls were closed; only here and there did a yellow light gleam through the cracks in the fabulous plywood giants—the vendors were inside counting their take.

Whale was overwhelmed. He did not know where to run first—the Cat, the Prince, the Swan. For a moment or so he stood as if struck dumb: he just rolled his big eyes and whispered soundlessly. Then he tugged at my hand and let out a squeal, and practically skipping we took off for the stalls. I fought off a barrage of questions and was a long time telling him what was what, who was good and who was evil.

As it turned out, nearly all the figures stood for goodness and light, wisdom and the native wit of the people; there was only the wretched kite, hovering over the Swan, to represent the forces of evil, and Guidon’s arrow was already aimed at him.

At length my Whale got tired and leaned heavily against the Humpback Horsey.

“Let’s go, Whale,” I said. “We should be getting home.”

“Tolya, listen, let’s take them all with us.”

“But they’re so big, how can we?”

“Who cares, we’ll take them anyhow.” He swatted the Horse with his small palm: “This one’s taken!” He ran over and swatted the Cat: “And this one!”

Thus he captured them all to have with him at bedtime and after that departed for home—quite tranquil now—without a backward glance.

At the turnoff from the boulevard he was lagging behind. I stopped; what now?

“Look, Tolya,” he said. “Look what a pretty lady.”

And what should I see but a pretty lady, who was coming our way. Her gait called to mind a restrained, or rather a scarcely restrainable, dance. With each nudge of her marvelous knees she flung open the skirts of her marvelous coat, and the umbrella, incredibly sharp and slim, which she held under her arm was plainly nothing less than a spare inner pivot for her gyrations, and her eyes, secret and subtle, flashed brilliantly at the sight of us. It was three days since I had last seen her, this lady, and now a dismal, anxious mood came over me, as always when I saw her or thought of her. The more so now, with Whale there.

“Oh,” said she, “so this is what he’s like, your little Whale. How delightful!”

She bent down to him, but he touched the umbrella and asked, “What’s this? An arrow? A gun?”

“It’s an umbrella,” she exclaimed, and in a trice she had it open. With a faint flip it unfolded over her head, lending her whole figure a supplemental buoyancy, an airiness almost of the circus.

“Let me hold it!” shouted Whale.

She handed him the umbrella.

“It is a pleasure, Signor, to see you engaged in such peaceful pursuits,” said she to me.

“And you, Mam’selle, are a joy to behold,” said I.

We really could have done without the fatuous badinage customary in our circle and plunged right into serious talk about whatever had lately been on our minds; but it was the thing to do—one had to start by displaying his sense of humor in this or some more felicitous manner—and neither she nor I could break with the custom.

Whale was circling about on the great umbrella, and we were able to talk in peace.

“Tolya, why so sour?”

“Am I offending you?”

“You’re sick of me, aren’t you?”

“How come?”

“You think I’m crowding you—”

“Do you have to play games?”

She said she was not playing games, we shouldn’t have to quarrel, after all we hadn’t seen each other in three days, she understood that I had a fox gnawing at my vitals, she understood all, I was always in her thoughts, and maybe that was helping me.

She was lying and not lying. How neatly the female heart combines sincerity and subtlety, I thought. Everlasting peace and the senseless, disgusting inner turmoil of vanity. They have it easier later on, pretty women do, I thought; they have no fear of death, never give it a thought, their only fear is old age. Silly things, they’re afraid of old age.

I had the further thought, as she went on being sympathetic, that I’d better not enter into her world again; I wasn’t up to it, I had nothing in my head but turmoil, I was in no mood for adventure just now and no mood for romance; how I yearned for tranquility, yet only once that whole day had I been tranquil, amid the plywood monstrosities of Fantasy World.

“Darling,” said the pretty lady to me, “I know how humiliating it is, but pluck up your courage and make that phone call. You must clear things up once and for all, and even if it turns out for the worse, it will still be for the better, I assure you.”

She lifted her hand and put the palm of this hand to my cheek . . . stroked . . .

Just then Whale came squirming in between us: He tugged the pretty lady by the sleeve: “Hey, take your old umbrella and don’t touch Daddy. He’s my Daddy, not yours.”

We parted from the pretty lady and started home. Ever so slightly false, affectedly amiable, possibly bitter, her laughter lingered a few seconds in our ears.

Along the way we stopped at the gate of the bus depot. Enormous buses kept driving in through the gate, and middle-sized ones, and micro-buses.

“Daddy Bus, Mama Bus, Baby Bus,” said Whale, and laughed.

And so we returned home. While Whale had supper and told his Mama about the walk, I hung around in the living room, glancing at the phone from time to time, and got myself too upset to do anything at all.

I hate that instrument. It amazes me the way my wife can talk to her girl friends for hours on end, the way she can achieve a cordial intimacy with people by means of a telephone. Could it be that her affection for her friends is transferred to the telephone receiver, and all those hours it’s really the receiver she’s so fond of?

I do waste a lot of time out of dislike for the phone. Rather than pick up the receiver and make some gaffe, I drive clear across town, a waste of time and money. Maybe it’s because I aspire to a life of realism, while any voice you hear in the receiver seems like make-believe, always make-believe, never the real thing.

Perhaps that’s what I should do this time? Perhaps not call him today, but go over tomorrow and have this talk face to face. Once we are face to face I can use the art of mime, delicate, barely perceptible mimicry, to show him I’m not all that simple, it’s not all that simple to humiliate me; give him to understand that I’m no milktoast but a man of courage, that this visit of mine, too, is an act of courage, and I care not a fig for him. A conversation over the phone gives him an enormous advantage, over the phone I might just as well be conversing with a supernatural power.

The phone rang. Jangled, the ugly thing! I picked up the receiver and heard the voice of my old pal Stasik.

“I’m mad at you, you’re mad at me, I’m a skunk, you’re a skunk,” babbled Stasik.

With the overture out of the way, I asked what he was calling for.

“I’ll tell you what for: don’t be a fool, call that party immediately. You know yourself how much depends on him. I saw Voynovsky today, and he’d run into Ovsyannikov, who’d spoken to Sadovnikov yesterday; all of them feel you must do it. I’m about to call Ovsyannikov, and he’ll try and get in touch with Sadovnikov, and Sadovnikov will be calling you. You wouldn’t know Voynovsky’s number?”

I hung up. The plungers clicked nastily. For fifteen minutes, sitting by the now silent instrument, I had an almost physical awareness of the telephonic hurry-scurry my friends had set in motion—pictured their words, sleek as mice, darting cleverly into the cables and slithering along in convergent streams.

Then Sadovnikov called, promising to hurry and get in touch with Ovsyannikov, who would give him Stasik’s number, and Stasik would help him contact Voynovsky.

“Did you get through to him?” my wife asked as she came into the room.

“There’s no one home,” I lied.

“Of course not. You’re just a man with no answers.”

She left. I was in a state of complete confusion and disarray when in came Whale, smiling, his arms piled with books.

“Read me a story, Tolya?”

There were works by Marshak, Jacob Akim, Eugene Rein, and Henry Samgir, as well as an assortment of folk tales. We took up the folk tales. Whale leaned against me and listened attentively, pulling on my ear at tense moments.

The Indian story of the little elephant he rejected, however. When we came to the part where the crocodile seizes the little elephant by the trunk, Whale gave a shout, snatched the book, and hurled it to the floor.

“It’s a lie!” He even flushed red. “That didn’t happen! It’s a bad story!”

“Now look, Whale,” I said, “the story is a good one. It has a happy ending.”

“No it’s not. It’s evil! Read this one here.”

What he pulled from the pile was “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats.”

My God, I thought, here too we have dramatic happenings—a dreadful act, the devouring of the baby goats—and even though it all ends happily, how am I going to read it to Whale, my baby fact-varnisher?

Whale, meanwhile, was leafing through the book, scrutinizing the crude illustrations.

“Here’s the Mama Goat,” he said, “bringing milk. Here are the little goat-children, playing.”

The delightful idyll unfolded before us, and it gladdened Whale. Naive as he was, and ignorant of the laws of dramaturgy, he turned calmly to the next page, where a garishly ferocious wolf was taking the poor little white kid into his fearsome maw. I froze.

“And here’s the nice Daddy Goat,” said Whale, pointing to the wolf. “He’s playing with the baby.” He had set up the goat family in a most peaceful fashion.

“Whale, you’re mistaken,” I said cautiously. “That’s not the Daddy Goat, it’s the nasty gray wolf. He’s about to swallow the little goat, but everything turns out all right, the wolf will be punished. This is Dramaturgy, my little Whale.”

“No!” he shouted, on the verge of tears. “That’s not a wolf! It’s the Daddy Goat. He’s playing. You don’t understand anything, Tolya!”

“My mistake,” I said hastily. “You’re right. It’s the Daddy Goat.”

“Ivan dearest, time for bed,” called his mother, and off he went, taking with him into his gentle dreams the family of heavenly bears, the “bus family,” and the nice family of goats, the pretty lady’s umbrella, the good monstrosities of Fantasy World, and my cap, which would of course grow overnight to the size of an airplane and which he would fly to the North Pole, to the kingdom of good animals.

When she had tucked him in my wife returned and sat down in the armchair opposite me. We lighted cigarettes. Normally these were happy moments, when we smoked together at the end of the day, but tonight it was no good.

“Who’s the lady Ivan was telling me about?” asked my wife.

“Someone from the main office. A consultant on legal problems.”

“Is that so,” she said. “What do you intend to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that so,” she said.

“My God, I wish it were winter!” I burst out.

“Why winter?”

“Winter’s when I have vacation. I’ll go skiing.”

“But of course,” she said caustically. “You’re a great skier.”

“Don’t.”

“No, it’s true. You are a first-class skier. Everyone knows that.”

She bit her lip, ever so slightly, to keep from breaking into tears. Whereupon I pulled the phone over and dialed that damned number at one fell swoop.

While the long slow tones rang in the receiver, I pictured him swinging his feet down from the divan and leisurely walking to the telephone, reading from one of his books on the way. Maybe he was rubbing his back or his seat, maybe thinking, “Who can this be? Most likely that sad sack with his fatuous requests.” Here he was, picking up the receiver.

He spoke to me gently, confidingly. “Listen, my friend, they tell me you’ve had trouble bringing yourself to call me. I’ve been waiting for your call a long time. Come now, why the rigamarole and apprehension? Apparently it’s all been due to a misconception. When last we met I wondered whether you hadn’t misunderstood me. I do believe everything will be favorably resolved. Sleep in peace. With all my soul I am for you, and by its every fiber and by my every nerve, my heart, my liver, and my spleen, by my virtue and my honor, my fidelity, my sincerity and my love, by all that is sacred to humankind, by the ideals of all generations, by the earth’s axis, by the solar system, by the wisdom of my best-beloved writers and philosophers, by history, geography, and botany, by the red sun, the blue sea, and the high and far off kingdom I vow to be unto you a faithful servant, your armor-bearer and your page.”

Drenched in sweat, I hung up the receiver.

“There,” said my wife to me, “that wasn’t so dreadful, was it? You just have to make a wish, and . . .” She smiled at me.

I got up, went into the bathroom, washed, and then stopped by the bedroom for a look at Whale. He slept like an infant hero, arms and legs flung wide. The creases of his baby fat had not quite faded away; they still marked his wrists, his dimpled paws. In his sleep he smiled a sly little smile, evidently busy completing various droll and delightful turnabouts in his kingdom.

When I look at him I am filled with gladness, goodness, and light. I feel like drinking to the long, happy life of the Seven Little Goats.