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You're sitting in a bar, of sorts, and a rather shabby fellow comes in, dirty scarf trailing, and he does not stop at the table of students, or to the officers in their greatcoats. No. He pauses, and heads for you. A polite slight bow. And then he says, "I wonder, citizen, if you wouldn't like to acquire a philosophical system?"

You are looking through old books. And you find an old bookmark: a flat body of faded silk and needlepoint designs trailing a swallowtail train. It was left in a book you didn't finish and, that, a long time ago. Thus do long sea voyages part sailors from their wives.

You visit, more and more often, a cemetery. You walk in--first past a chaos of crosses, then past the inner wall--to the new crossless cemetery... You meet the old gravedigger there. You offer him a smoke. He smokes and points out Actors' Row, Speakers' Corner, Writers' Impasse. Then he tells you about the buried man who visits him.

A sampling, and a tease, what's there above, about the 'fantastical' stories in this volume. It's my second foray into Krzhizhanovsky. And, yes, it's pronounced exactly as it looks. I read Autobiography of a Corpse and reviewed that. It's mind-bending without, you know, violating any of the applicable controlled substances statutes. Krzhizhanovsky worked as a lawyer but he wrote, a lot. You could read Krzhizhanovsky as science fiction. Or you could read him as political satire. The Soviets read him as the latter. So these stories, written in the 1920s, sat in a desk drawer, published finally in 1989.

I interrupted my reading of Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century to read this. Serge's book was very well-written, about the travails of Soviet counter-revolution. But that's a story I know. So I turned here, knowing from previous experience that I'd be turned upside down.

The title piece - 'Memories of the Future' - in its abstract nugget is about a man who builds a time machine. And that's silly, yes. Although there's enough algebra here to appeal to sci-fi fans; and enough wry to satisfy those looking for political skewering. I liked it instead for the wordplay. I liked how, in the telling, Krzhizhanovsky would channel characteristics of his characters. An examining doctor became 'the palm'; an interested party, with shabby attire, became 'the faded piping'; the General wasn't the General, he was 'the General's collar'.

Our inventor is his first subject. He travels. And eventually, he meets a group of potential investors who want to hear about his 'travel'. They are described thusly:

Among Moscow's "Izvestians" scattered about on straight-legged benches and stools one might spot: a fashionable poet with a lyrical incandescence in his cold-blooded breast; a learned linguist who never opened his mouth--people called him "a mute in twenty-six languages"; a famous film director whose ever-gesticulating thoughts made him look like a six-armed Vishnu; a long-faced novelist with legs squeezed into gaiters, cheeks that twitched, and a habit of saying "as I was saying"; the fleshy, gray-fringed brow of a venerable critic; the abstractionist's deep décolleté; the round, carefully combed-over bald spot--like an eye on the back of of his head--of a publisher; the crook of a nervous hand sticking out of a cartoonist's cuff.

What they (you) hear is vague, obscured. It is 1929. I'd be careful in the late 1930s, he says.

When he went poof, there was a new tenant. But our inventor was still there:

There's a very peaceable little worm that bores into walls and cabinets and desks and taps: rat-tat-tat. A meticulous timber worm, only I don't remember the Latin name. In France they call it "fate": destin, or something like that. Well, this little worm, this destin, has given you a fright. Plain as day.

Am I wrong to hum: da-da-da-dum?