INTRODUCTION
Yelyzaveta Kardynalovska (Ukrainian: Єлизавета Кардиналовська, b: May 16, 1900, d: Nov 5, 1971) was a Ukrainian author, translator, architect and art restorer. She wrote about 20 books of poems and stories for children, and wrote a number of science fiction short stories. "Sunshine!" (1926), co-written with her sister Tatyana, is one of the earliest works dealing with space travel in Ukrainian. Along with "Sunshine!", two of her science fiction stories, "Death of the Happy City" (1926) and "An Error" (1928) were collected and translated into Russian in 2016 by Salamandra P.V.V. Her literary output ceased in 1934, after the arrest and execution of her sister Tatyana's husband, writer Serhij Volodymyrovych Pylypenko, who was expelled from the Communist Party of Ukraine for acting "as a non-Bolshevik in distorting national policy, ideological instability and with a conciliatory attitude towards bourgeois-nationalist elements."
"Death of the Happy City" was originally published in the December 15th, 1926 issue of the Ukrainian language magazine "The Universe". A scan of the original 1926 magazine publication can be found here:
https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/Vsesvit/1926_N23_46/
The 2016 Russian translation can be found here:
https://space.profilib.net/chtenie/40527/elizaveta-kardinalovskaya-gibel-schastlivogo-goroda-sbornik.php
For further biographical information, see:
https://www.ukrlib.com.ua/bio/printit.php?tid=26029
A note from the Russian translation has been preserved as an "Editor note". The proper nouns in the story are directly transliterated and are not translations of Ukrainian words.
DEATH OF THE HAPPY CITY
Heavy, carved furniture occupied the office. Everything gave one an impression of distasteful splendor and a façade of fashion.
Here, Ark sensed that his story would seem too unbelievable. Items made out of gold can be tested to ensure their value - there was no such test for Ark's treasure.
The two indifferent people sitting opposite the table didn't seem to believe a single word he said, and Ark saw that all hope was dying of making them believe the miracle he discovered. His fame and wealth were in the hands of these fools.
And Ark, trembling, unfolded the secret of the distant island of Redrot before them. With a pencil, he marked a path on the map to the unknown, much sought-after location.
- "Starting from here," - Ark held the pencil for a moment, - "the path becomes difficult and dangerous, and steamers skirt far around it to the north. A ring of underwater rocks surrounds the island which makes it impregnable from the sea. A second method is by air, but here another obstacle forces aviators to go far around the island. A half-extinct volcano spews out plumes of a suffocating gas, poisoning the atmosphere for miles around. It was this very inaccessibility to research that created a false impression of this island in the scientific world. The poisonous gasses from the volcano are in fact light and rise upwards, not at all poisoning the air on the island itself, which allows an entire people to exist there. Redrot Island is a small, closed off world, a sliver of a continent that died many centuries ago. Fate was kind to me: in the soft cabin of a crashed aeroplane, with a headwound and gas-poisoned lungs, I, however, remained alive. I know how shakily constructed this story is. I know that my account would be considered to be a fairy tale by any scientist, as the only proof I have is a tiny handful of golden sand."
From a leather bag, Ark spilled shiny yellow mounds out onto the table. This was his final gamble.
A heavy breath-stopping pause lurked in the room. Ark looked in despair at the window, where a large green fly was beating against the glass, and smiled at it with sympathy, as he saw the commonality of their fate. A bright world was closed off to him by the stupidity of these two people.
But, when these greedy fingers began to weigh and feel through the golden sand - Ark realized that he hit the spot.
- "Thirty, forty percent pure gold!"
- "Oh, no less! This is completely incredible, completely unheard of" - and Ark was stared at by two pairs of stunned eyes.
Encouraged, he continued:
- "The life of this island is incomprehensible, like a paradox. It turns our idea of the stages of human development upside down. Our culture's history knows steam, electricity, radio, and only now are we searching for the laws of harnessing atomic energy. Electricity, for example, was never known on this island. They've bypassed it. Just as early man, unaware of the more primitive laws of physics and chemistry, made the world's greatest discovery - the means of obtaining fire, and on this island they've discovered the laws for harnessing atomic energy. But on this small world, they don't need to widely distribute it.
"Their culture is unlike any other. I can you tell more..."
- "About the gold, Ark, the about gold," the smoothly bald Hollar interrupted impatiently.
- "We are interested... because the purpose of our meeting... our future expedition..." - the second one sounded confused.
- "For you, Ark, the glory of discovery and the academic accolades, and for us - the golden sands of Redrot", - Hollar interrupted again, his teeth flashing with gold.
Ark saw faces tense with greed before him, and the wooden lions on the armchair rests bared their predatory teeth.
Ark realized that he sold Redrot out, but the prospect of glory aroused in him the arrogance of a man who had not yet known success. The small world's fate was decided by the blind greed of two financiers and Ark's haughtiness.
- "On this golden soil," Ark said, indifferently placing the shiny grains in his palm, "a city was built, the small continent's only city - Ao-Gol, which in their language means 'The Happy City.' A giant dam surrounds the island for many miles, protecting it from the ocean's onslaught, and contains a huge percentage of gold. Almost all of Redrot's gold is concentrated there. That's the only use the islanders have found for the precious metal."
Ark looked up to see that Hollar was listening with his mouth hanging open. Blue cigar smoke enveloped his bald skull in a transparent glow, and Ark thought he looked like Mammon in Watts' painting.[Editor note: "Mammon", an 1885 oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, the personification of earthly goods and riches in the New Testament.] Feeling disgusted, he dropped the yellow nuggets from his palm, and for a moment the desire to mock and agitate these arrogant people flared up in him. They've already considered Ark, with his priceless treasure, to be their property, and he could destroy their dreams if he refused their help, as his plan for an expedition to the island of Redrot forever concealed the secret of the one way he knew there.
For just a moment...
Ark clutched his heart, feeling an almost physical pain. The fly was still happier than him - it was no longer fighting against the window as it found another way to its alluring goal. Ark had no other way out.
- "Well," - Hollar impatiently shrugged his shoulders, and Servik strained forward.
- "The funniest thing," said Ark, "is that these people are not at all interested in gold. They don't even make jewelry from it, because they consider its yellow sheen to be vulgar and unpleasant to the eyes. They have no concept of money. When I showed them a few leftover coins I had in my pockets, and told them that with this currency you can buy absolutely anything from us, they burst out in laughter and couldn't understand in any way what one would use these coins for, what to do with them, or who would ever receive them in exchange for some product or otherwise generally useful item. To them, gold's conventionally enormous value is completely incomprehensible.
"They brought me nuggets polished by the waves and smiled at my delight and greed. In a great basin, I stacked a mountain of gold. I reveled in the glitter of the treasure, thinking that there was no greater Croesus in the world than myself.
"But slowly, my greed was tempered by this mass of gold and the islanders' indifference to it. Often, lying on the shore, I amused myself by ricocheting pebbles off the water, equally indifferent to the splashes from a pebble or a heavy nugget. Gold lost the charm of wealth for me.
"Just thinking of returning, of the sensation of my discovery, of glory, did not give me peace. Air and water - I had to traverse these paths as I knew how. But flight was not known to the islanders. The sky above them was poisoned, and no birds lived on Redrot. I saw no creature there that had wings. The air was impenetrable. And the circle of underwater rocks, where the waves seethed and boiled, formed whirlpools, and threatened to smash any vessel to pieces that dared to break through it.
"The Happy City became a hateful prison for me.
"And finally I dared.
"I took much gold, as much as a light sailboat could hold - the only thing the islanders used on the water.
"My plan was simple. I hoped to break out of the hazardous circle, to get out onto the open sea and to find a steamer that would pick me up and take me to the mainland.
"Fate was kind to me this time too.
"True, out on the sea I found myself in the bottom of the sailboat, heavily battered, beaten around, wounded, without a drop of water. A bag sewn to my belt containing a handful of this sand was all that remained of my fortune. Fortunately, the wind drove me north. And after many, many days, unconscious and unable to count them, I was picked up by the steamer 'Rail'. I invented a more plausible story, because I knew that no one would believe the real one. Science needs hard evidence, and I had none..."
- "But taking the expedition on this route sounds impractical to me," - Hollar rapidly interjected.
- "Yes... you know, it's not quite... that... practical..." - Servik muttered.
Ark smiled.
- "At this spot", - he pointed to the map, - "the circle of reefs is nearly interrupted. It's so narrow that a 'sea flea' can jump over it."
- "A sea flea? What does a flea have to do with it?" - Hollar asked with irritation, feeling mocked.
- "It's the latest technical invention. A motor boat capable of taking off from the water and jumping a distance of several tens of meters."
- "Ah, yes... I didn't hear..." - Hollar mumbled.
- "Well then", - Ark stood up, tall and impetuous. He felt the pathos of the moment, after all the fate of his discovery depended on it. - "I need your approval for funds to purchase a boat and to organize the entire expedition. Redrot's gold will cover the cost. Their gold is enough to buy all the continents in the world."
Hollar and Servik silently took out their checkbooks. In their usual business, they acted quickly and precisely.
Having received the two checks, Ark left the office.
He wiped his forehead with his hand and looked ahead with eyes wide open. At the end of a plain, endlessly long street, the setting sun was squinting at him from the west.
- "The sun is rising over the island of Redrot", Ark thought dreamily.
* * *
Like a golden sunflower, the sun was blooming over Redrot Island.
Onoa awoke - he felt like the face of his friend Ark was leaning over him.
The sun touched his curly head.
Onoa jumped up, quick and light, putting on his loose clothes. The beautiful chocolate body was full of life, the wide eyes seemed unusually clear and transparent against the dark face.
- "Aimee, the sun is waiting for you at your doorstep!" - he shouted the usual greeting.
- "You're late, the sun has long come to me," and Aimee drew back the curtain to Onoa's room.
The city of Ao-Gol, the Happy City of Redrot, awoke with the sun. The streets were filled with a lively and noisy crowd. Onoa and Aimee joined them. People split up into groups and spread out through all the city streets, on their way to work. Everyone gave part of their day towards public labor. Such was Redrot's law.
Onoa and Aimee were walking along a wide, smoothly curved street that led to the sea. From a distance, the mighty ridge of the giant dam could be seen. Its perfect semicircle encircled the island from the west, holding back the advance of water that threatened to engulf the steadily receding shore.
Onoa felt some sort of vague and strange excitement today. On the road, he kicked a pebble with his foot, and flying to the side, it flashed in the sun with a bright golden streak. Onoa realized that he had been incessantly thinking about Ark.
- "I saw Ark in a dream," he said with uncertainty.
- "I was just wondering what he's doing over there, in his strange land," Aimee pointed to the horizon. - "Maybe he, like here, is walking along the shore and collecting yellow stones..."
- "If he even got there," Onoa corrected.
- "I keep thinking about that land, where all the people are like Ark, where strange animals fly and great machines lift people into the air. Will we never see all this, Onoa?"
Aimee looked down at him.
On her face, he read anxiety waiting to turn into despair as soon as he objected.
Onoa smiled, hiding his eyes behind his eyelids.
- "I think that Ark will return to us," - he evaded answering.
- "Well, it's unlikely," - the cheerful Loe intervened in the conversation, who was walking next to him. - "If he reached his homeland alive, he'd hardly dare risk breaking his neck a second time. But we don't need such guests. His tales about that country don't please me at all, but first and foremost, they've made so many utterly unhinged. You've heard, Onoa, that it's driven old Unk rather mad. He himself dragged all the stones from Ark's basin and melted down the yellow metal from them. And Vea and Doto are stirring up the boys, persuading them to go to Ark's country. The name Ark never leaves the tongue. His fables about gold, birds and houses as tall as our Kohayo - everyone can't stop talking about them. A mountain of sand has grown near Raikao's house, and the entire family carries and washes it from morning to night, just as Ark taught. This business is starting to wear them down - I've never seen a more senseless activity. They've even stopped going to public labor. The mountain near the house grows and the desire for more and more gold grows with it. And Raikao says that he's not yet old and wants to see something better than the Kohayo volcano and our tiny village. And in those countries you can't live without gold, Ark said. How do you like that, Onoa?"
- "The law does not prohibit leaving the island," Onoa answered quietly. - "If you know how to - then go."
- "But, I tell you, madness is taking over the city. It would seem they're just fine with dismantling the dam because it's easier to get gold from there. I myself saw how the stones were carved out of the upper rows."
- "The dam musn't be destroyed. Let them dig for gold underground."
Aimee's brow furrowed.
- "I know every stone on the shore and every tree on the island. Every day, the sun rises over here and sets over there. But Ark says that there are lands where the sun, once it sets, does not return for six months, where you can walk for an entire year and not see the sea, or the end of your journey."
They approached the dam. The buttresses that supported its mighty frame looked like the ribs of a giant skeleton. The sea pressed against the wall in a heavy mass, touching the last band of stones with its wet lips.
Onoa supervised the operation of the machines that supplied the stone. Cubic blocks of gold and stone were laid in even layers and bound together by a composition of golden sand and a certain substance that had the properties of cement.
The dam was just now being repaired. A significant portion of it was under threat of destruction, and the islanders stubbornly reclaimed a tiny patch of land from the sea.
From the tall dam, Onoa could see the entire city.
The perfectly simple, clean lines created an impression of lightness, freeing the mass of buildings from the weight of stone. But Onoa's imagination stretched the lines of lower walls upward, creating skyscrapers.
The upper stories rose above the summit of the Kohayo. Down below, people in black, stuffy clothes, like Ark's, scurried about. And above the city, inexplicably hovering in the air, strange creatures with wide, shiny wings were soaring...
Onoa's eyes darkened. To free himself from the caustic mirage, he turned to the sea, and his gaze caught a bent human figure on the edge of the dam. At the risk of falling into the water, the person was stretching out their hands, trying to retrieve something from the wall facing the sea. Onoa walked over and saw Doto. He was using a small crowbar to pry at something in the masonry.
- "What are you doing, Doto?" - Onoa asked in surprise.
Doto raised his disconcerted face.
- "This seems too good to just be hanging around here," - he said, displaying a round heavy nugget on his palm, already torn off from the wall. - "Ark would be grateful for such a stone, and we'll need it in that country."
- "And the dam? After all, all it takes is one crack - and water will rush onto the island..."
- "I'm not the only one..." - Doto said and turned to leave.
The sun slowly crept across the sky.
It seemed to Onoa that it was crawling slower than usual, and that the work was progressing slower than usual. Onoa walked along the dam from machine to machine, hastened, and descended to where the stones were melted down and made into cement.
To Onoa, the tranquil mass of water that hung over the city never seemed so menacing before. Its blue edges were much higher than ground level.
And in the evening, Onoa came to Aimee and placed the shiny yellow stones on her open palm that he was gripping in his hand.
- "It's not so ugly after all, this gold," said Onoa, "and afterwards, you've still got something else to see other than Redrot."
Aimee bowed her radiant face over the fragments.
* * *
All day long, Ark's steamer was aimlessly floundering about on the sea's smooth surface. On the clear, distant horizon there was no hint of land, nothing but boundless blue water. There was no Redrot. The transparent telescope in Ark's hands probed every spot on the skyline looking for the missing island. Vexation and surprise raised the eyebrows on his face.
Finally, at dawn on the second day, they saw a black speck. This speck approached and took on the appearance of a fishing longboat. Prosperous fishing and calm waters lured the longboat into the depths of the ocean. When they got closer, the hoarse voice of the longboat's captain shouted, tearing his throat:
- "Halloa! Do you have a veterinarian on board? We picked up this monkey here who was trying to cross the ocean on a sailboat. It looks like he's going to die soon."
With unreasonable agitatation, Ark descended onto the deck of the longboat. A sunburnt body lay on the folded sails. Ark leaned towards him, turning pale.
- "Onoa," - he said, looking into the wide eyes. Ark gathered all the will of desire and the thirst of impatience from his gaze.
Quietly, quietly, so that a second seemed like an eternity, Onoa raised his eyelids.
- "Ah, you," he said slowly, inaudibly, like a breath. - "You... But Redrot is gone... The people dismantled the dam."
Ready to scream, Ark brought his ear to his lips. But he could no longer make out a single word in the hoarse whisper.
Onoa's transparent eyes reflected the entire world, but they no longer saw Ark.
... An outraged Hollar was waiting on the steamer, and Servik, thin and sharp, was bent over like a knife ready to a strike.
Ark looked at them indifferently.
