Some strange thoughts flooded the head of the ailing poet. ‘There’s an example of real luck ...’ Here Riukhin rose to his full height on the flatbed of the truck and raised his arm, for some reason attacking the cast-iron man who was not bothering anyone. ‘Whatever step he made in his life, whatever happened to him, it all turned to his benefit, it all led to his glory! But what did he do? I can’t conceive ... Is there anything special in the words: “The snowstorm covers ...”? I don’t understand! ... Luck, sheer luck!’ Riukhin concluded with venom, and felt the truck moving under him. ‘He shot him, that white guard shot him, smashed his hip, and assured his immortality ...’
The column began to move. In no more than two minutes, the completely ill and even aged poet was entering the veranda of Griboedov’s. It was now empty. In a comer some company was finishing its drinks, and in the middle the familiar master of ceremonies was bustling about, wearing a skullcap, with a glass of Abrau wine in his hand.
Riukhin, laden with napkins, was met affably by Archibald Archibaldovich and at once relieved of the cursed rags. Had Riukhin not become so worn out in the clinic and on the truck, he would certainly have derived pleasure from telling how everything had gone in the hospital and embellishing the story with invented details. But just then he was far from such things, and, little observant though Riukhin was, now, after the torture on the truck, he peered keenly at the pirate for the first time and realized that, though the man asked about Homeless and even exclaimed ‘Ai-yai-yai!’, he was essentially quite indifferent to Homeless’s fate and did not feel a bit sorry for him. ‘And bravo! Right you are!’ Riukhin thought with cynical, self-annihilating malice and, breaking off the story about the schizophrenia, begged:
‘Archibald Archibaldovich, a drop of vodka ...’
The pirate made a compassionate face and whispered:
‘I understand ... this very minute ...’ and beckoned to a waiter.
A quarter of an hour later, Riukhin sat in complete solitude, hunched over his bream, drinking glass after glass, understanding and recognizing that it was no longer possible to set anything right in his life, that it was only possible to forget.
The poet had wasted his night while others were feasting and now understood that it was impossible to get it back. One needed only to raise one’s head from the lamp to the sky to understand that the night was irretrievably lost. Waiters were hurriedly tearing the tablecloths from the tables. The cats slinking around the veranda had a morning look. Day irresistibly heaved itself upon the poet.
CHAPTER 7
A Naughty Apartment
If Styopa Likhodeev had been told the next morning: ‘Styopa! You’ll be shot if you don’t get up this minute!’ — Styopa would have replied in a languid, barely audible voice: ‘Shoot me, do what you like with me, I won’t get up.’
Not only not get up, it seemed to him that he could not open his eyes, because if he were to do so, there would be a flash of lightning, and his head would at once be blown to pieces. A heavy bell was booming in that head, brown spots rimmed with fiery green floated between his eyeballs and his closed eyelids, and to crown it all he was nauseous, this nausea, as it seemed to him, being connected with the sounds of some importunate gramophone.
Styopa tried to recall something, but only one thing would get recalled — that yesterday, apparently, and in some unknown place, he had stood with a napkin in his hand and tried to kiss some lady, promising her that the next day, and exactly at noon, he would come to visit her. The lady had declined, saying: ‘No, no, I won’t be home!’, but Styopa had stubbornly insisted: ‘And I’ll just up and come anyway!’
Who the lady was, and what time it was now, what day, of what month, Styopa decidedly did not know, and, worst of all, he could not figure out where he was. He attempted to learn this last at least, and to that end unstuck the stuck-together lids of his left eye. Something gleamed dully in the semi-darkness. Styopa finally recognized the pier-glass and realized that he was lying on his back in his own bed — that is, the jeweller’s wife’s former bed — in the bedroom. Here he felt such a throbbing in his head that he closed his eyes and moaned.
Let us explain: Styopa Likhodeev, director of the Variety Theatre, had come to his senses that morning at home, in the very apartment which he shared with the late Berlioz, in a big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on Sadovaya Street.
It must be said that this apartment - no. 50 — had long had, if not a bad, at least a strange reputation. Two years ago it had still belonged to the widow of the jeweller de Fougeray. Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray, a respectable and very practical fifty-year-old woman, let out three of the five rooms to lodgers: one whose last name was apparently Belomut, and another with a lost last name.
And then two years ago inexplicable events began to occur in this apartment: people began to disappear[72] from this apartment without a trace.
Once, on a day off, a policeman came to the apartment, called the second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) out to the front hall, and said he was invited to come to the police station for a minute to put his signature to something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna’s long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but never came back at all. The most surprising thing was that the policeman evidently vanished along with him.
The pious, or, to speak more frankly, superstitious Anfisa declared outright to the very upset Anna Frantsevna that it was sorcery and that she knew perfectly well who had stolen both the lodger and the policeman, only she did not wish to talk about it towards night-time.
Well, but with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there’s no stopping it. The second lodger is remembered to have disappeared on a Monday, and that Wednesday Belomut seemed to drop from sight, though, true, under different circumstances. In the morning a car came, as usual, to take him to work, and it did take him to work, but it did not bring anyone back or come again itself.
Madame Belomut’s grief and horror defied description. But, alas, neither the one nor the other continued for long. That same night, on returning with Anfisa from her dacha, which Anna Frantsevna had hurried off to for some reason, she did not find the wife of citizen Belomut in the apartment. And not only that: the doors of the two rooms occupied by the Belomut couple turned out to be sealed.
Two days passed somehow. On the third day, Anna Frantsevna, who had suffered all the while from insomnia, again left hurriedly for her dacha ... Needless to say, she never came back!
Left alone, Anfisa, having wept her fill, went to sleep past one o’clock in the morning. What happened to her after that is not known, but lodgers in other apartments told of hearing some sort of knocking all night in no. 50 and of seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning. In the morning it turned out that there was also no Anfisa!
For a long time all sorts of legends were repeated in the house about these disappearances and about the accursed apartment, such as, for instance, that this dry and pious little Anfisa had supposedly carried on her dried-up breast, in a suede bag, twenty-five big diamonds belonging to Anna Frantsevna. That in the woodshed of that very dacha to which Anna Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up, of themselves, some inestimable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, plus some gold coins of tsarist minting ... And so on, in the same vein. Well, what we don’t know, we can’t vouch for.
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