He Lover of Death

HOW SENKA PULLED THE CHOKE OUT TOO FAR

Senka felt so sad and disillusioned, he just walked where his feet took him, gazing deep inside himself instead of looking around. And by force of habit his stupid feet took him out on to Khitrovka Square, the last place where Senka should be making a public show of himself. If anyone saw him, they’d whistle for the Prince, and then it would be farewell, Semyon Trifonich, that’s the last we’ll see of you.

When he realised where he was, he was terrified. He raised the collar of his jacket, pulled the boater down over his eyes and walked off rapidly towards Tryokhsvyatsky Lane – from there it was only a stone’s throw to places that were safe.

Then suddenly, talk of the devil, there was Tashka walking towards him. Not alone, though, with a client. He looked like a counter-clerk from a shop. Drunk, with a bright-red face. And one armed draped over Tashka’s shoulders – he could hardly even walk.

What a fool she was to be so proud! Why did she need to let herself get pawed and mauled like that for just three roubles? And there was no way of telling her it was a shame and a disgrace – she didn’t understand. Of course not, she’d lived in Khitrovka all her life. Her mother was a whore, her grandmother too.

Senka was going to go over and say hello. Tashka saw him too, but she didn’t nod, and she didn’t smile either. She just made big, round eyes at him and jabbed her finger at her hair. There was a flower in it, she must have put it there for an occasion like this. A red poppy – ‘danger’.

But who was the danger for, him or her?

He went across anyway and opened his mouth to speak, but Tashka hissed: ‘Clear off out of it, you fool. He’s after you.’

‘Who is?’

Then the counter-clerk stuck his oar in. He stamped his foot and started making threats. ‘What you doin’? Who are you? This little mamselle’s mine! I’ll rip your face off!’

Tashka punched him in the side and whispered: ‘Tonight... Come tonight, then I’ll tell you something really important ...’ and she dragged her admirer on down the street.

Senka didn’t like the way she was whispering. It wasn’t like Tashka to frighten him for nothing. Something must have happened. He’d have to go and see her.

He was thinking of waiting on the boulevard for night to come, but then he had a better idea.

Since he was already here, in Khitrovka, why not pay a visit to the basement and lay in a bit more silver? He had the other five rods hidden in his suitcase, wrapped up in his long-johns. It couldn’t hurt to have a few more. Who could tell which way fate would take him now? What if he suddenly had to leave his native parts in a hurry?

He took another four rods. So that made nine altogether. That was serious capital, no matter which way you looked at it. Ashot Ashotovich, may he rest in peace, wasn’t around any longer, but Senka would just have to hope that some other intermediary would turn up sooner rather than later. Thinking that way was a sin, of course, but the dead had their own interests and the living had theirs.

When he clambered out of the passage into the basement with the brick pillars (‘columns’ was the cultured word), Senka moved the stones back into place, took two of the sticks in each hand and set off through the dark basement towards the exit on Podkolokolny Lane.

He only had two more turns to make when something terrible happened.

Something heavy hit Senka on the back of the neck – and so hard that his nose smashed into the ground before he even had time to squeal. He still hadn’t realised how much trouble he was in when he was pinned to the floor, with a hobnailed boot to his back.

Senka floundered this way and that, gulping at the air. The rods went flying out of his left hand, jangling sweetly on the flagstones of the floor.

‘A-a-agh!’ poor Senka yelped, as steely fingers grabbed him by the hair and wrenched his head so far back his neck-bones cracked.

Out of sheer animal terror – it had nothing to do with courage –Senka swung the rods clutched in his right hand up behind him. He hit something, then he struck at it again with all his might. And then he struck it once more. Something up there gave a grunt, deep and hollow like a bear’s. The massive hand clutching Senka’s hair let go, and the boot shifted off his back.

Senka rolled over sideways, spinning like a top, got up on all fours, then on to his feet and dashed off, howling, into the darkness. When he ran into a wall, he recoiled and ran in the opposite direction.

He darted down the steps into the dark night street and ran as far as Lubyanka Square. Beside the low wall round the pool he dropped to his knees, and plunged his face into the water, and it wasn’t until after he’d cooled off a bit that he noticed he’d dropped the rods.

To hell with them. He was alive, that was what mattered.

‘Where did you g-get to, Spidorov?’ Mr Nameless asked as he opened the door of the apartment. Then he grabbed Senka by the arm and led him over to a lamp. ‘Who d-did this to you? What happened?’

He’d noticed the bump on Senka’s forehead and the swollen nose he’d smashed against the stone floor.

‘The Prince tried to kill me,’ Senka replied morosely. ‘Almost broke my neck.’

And he told Erast Petrovich what had happened. Of course, he didn’t say exactly where he’d been, or that he was carrying silver rods. He just said he’d looked into Yeroshenko’s basement, on some business or other, and that was where the terrible precedent happened.

‘Incident,’ Erast Petrovich corrected him without thinking, and a long crease appeared across his forehead. ‘Did you g-get a good look at the Prince?’

‘What do I need a good look for?’ Senka asked, mournfully studying his face in a mirror. What a nose – a real baked potato. ‘Who else wants to do me in? The Yerokha riff-raff won’t attack just anyone, they take a look first to see who it is. But this lug hit me without any warning, and real hard too. It was either the Prince or someone from his deck. Only not Deadeye – he wouldn’t have messed about, he’d have stuck his foil or his little knife straight in my eye. But where’s Masa-sensei?’

‘He has a prior engagement.’ Mr Nameless took hold of Senka’s chin and turned it this way and that – inspecting his face. ‘You need a c-compress. And mercurochrome here. Does that hurt?’

‘Yes!’ Senka yelled, because Erast Petrovich had taken a firm grip on his nose with his finger and thumb.

‘Never m-mind, it will heal soon enough. It’s not b-broken.’

Mr Nameless was wearing a long silk dressing gown and had a fine net over his hair – to hold his coiffure in place. Senka had one like that too, it was called a ‘garde-façon’.

I wonder how it went with Death, Senka thought, glancing at the engineer’s smooth face out of the corner of his eye. Well, it was obvious enough. A fancy trotter like that wouldn’t let his chance slip.

‘Well then, Herr Schopenhauer, l-listen to me,’ Erast Petrovich declared when he had finished smearing smelly gunk on Senka’s face. ‘From n-now on you stick with Masa and me. Is that c-clear?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘Excellent. Then g-go to bed, and straight into the sweet embrace of Morpheus.’

Senka went to bed all right, but it took him some time to cuddle up to Morpheus. Either his teeth started chattering, or he started shivering and just couldn’t get warm. It was only natural. Doom had flitted by awfully close and brushed his soul with its icy wing.

He remembered that he hadn’t gone to see Tashka. She’d said she wanted to tell him something, to warn him. He ought to go and visit her, but the very thought of going back to Khitrovka gave him the shakes, even worse than before.

If he slept on it, maybe in the morning everything wouldn’t seem so terrible. He fell asleep with that thought.

But the next day he still felt really afraid. And the day after, and the day after that too. He was afraid for a long time, a whole week. In the morning or the afternoon, if it wasn’t that bad, he’d think: today’s the day, I’ll go as soon as it gets dark. But by the time evening came he had that anxious feeling again, and his legs refused to carry him to Khitrovka.

It wasn’t as if all Senka did on those days was sit around and feel afraid. There were lots of things to be done, and the kind of things that could make you forget everything else in the world.

It all started when Erast Petrovich made a suggestion. ‘How would you like to t-take a look at my “Flying C-Carpet”?’

This was just after they’d had a conversation in which Senka begged him in the name of Christ the Lord to stop calling him ‘Spidorov’, because that offended him.

‘It offends you?’ Mr Nameless asked in surprise. ‘The fact that I address you f-formally? But I think you consider yourself an adult, d-don’t you? Between adults, less formal modes of address require s-some kind of reciprocal feeling, and I am not yet ready to address you in a m-more intimate manner.’

‘But you talk to Masa over there like a close friend, don’t you? It’s like I’m not even a human being for you.’

‘You see, Spidorov . . . I beg your pardon, I m-mean Mr Spidorov,’ the engineer said, beginning to get really annoyed with Senka, ‘I address Masa informally and he addresses me formally, because in J-Japan that is the only way in which master and s-servant can converse. In Japanese etiquette the n-nuances of speech are regulated very strictly. There are a dozen or so d-different levels of formality or informality for all kinds of relationships, whenever you address s-someone else. To address a servant in an inappropriate m-manner is quite grotesque, it is actually a g-grammatical mistake.

‘But here in Russia it’s only the intelligensia that talks to simple people politely, so they can show how much they despise them. That’s why the people don’t like them.’

Senka barely managed to persuade him. And even then, Erast Petrovich still wouldn’t call him ‘Senka’, like a mate. Instead of ‘Spidorov’, he began calling him ‘Senya’, as if he was some little gent’s son in short pants. Senka had to grin and bear it.

When Senka started batting his peepers at the words ‘Flying Carpet’ (he was prepared to expect all sorts of marvels from this gent, even magic), Erast Petrovich smiled.

‘It’s not magical, of c-course. It’s the name I’ve given to my three-wheeler m-motor car, a self-propelled carriage of my own d-design. Come on, you can take a l-look at it.’

Standing in the coach shed out in the yard was a carriage like a cab with sprung wheels, only it narrowed towards the front, and instead of four wheels, it only had three: the front one was low, with rounded sides, and the two at the back were big. Where the front board would be on a cab, there was a wooden board with numbers on it, and a little wheel sticking out on an iron stick, and some little levers and other fiddly bits and pieces. The seat was box calf leather and it could take three people. The engineer pointed all these things out.

‘On the right, where the wheel is, that’s the d-driver’s seat. On the left is the assistant’s seat. The driver is like a c-coachman, only instead of horses, he drives the m-motor. Sometimes you need two people –to t-turn the wheel or hold a lever in place, or just to wave a f-flag so that people will get out of the way.’

Senka didn’t twig straight off that this lump of metal would go all on its own, without a horse. According to what Erast Petrovich said (which was probably horse shit anyway), the iron box under the seat contained the strength of ten horses, so this three-wheeler could dash along the road faster than any wild cabby.

‘Soon n-nobody will want to use horses for p-pulling their carriages,’ Mr Nameless told him. ‘They’ll all want automobiles l-like this, with an internal combustion engine. Then horses will be liberated from their heavy labour, and in g-gratitude for their service to humanity over the millennia, they will be s-set free to graze in the meadows. Well, p-perhaps the most beautiful and spirited will be kept for races and romantic d-drives by moonlight, but all the others will be retired with a p-pension.’

Well now, I don’t know about a pension, Senka thought. If horses aren’t needed any longer, they’ll just be slaughtered for their skins and meat, no one’s going to feed them out of the kindness of their hearts. But he didn’t try to argue with the engineer, he was curious to hear what would come next.

‘You see, Senya, the idea of a three-wheeled motor car for all kinds of terrain was the subject of my diploma last year at the Technical Institute . . .’

‘You mean you were still a student just last year?’ Senka asked in surprise. Erast Petrovich looked really old. Maybe thirty-five, or even more – his temples were all grey already.

‘No, I took the mechanical engineering course as an external student, in Boston. And now the time has come to make my idea a reality, to test it in practice.’

‘But what if it won’t go?’ asked Senka, admiring the gleaming copper lamp on the front of the machine.

‘Oh, no, it goes very well, but that’s not enough. I intend to set a record with my three-wheeler, by travelling all the way from Moscow to Paris. The start is set for the twenty-third of September, so there’s not much time left to prepare, just a little over two weeks. And it’s a difficult business, almost impossible in fact. A similar journey was attempted recently by Baron von Liebnitz, but his automobile wasn’t hardy enough for the Russian roads, and it fell apart. My “Flying Carpet” will survive them, though, because the three-wheel design is better suited to bad roads than a four-wheeler, and I shall prove it. And then, there’s this, look.’

Senka had never seen Erast Petrovich looking so lively. His eyes were usually cool and calm, but now they were sparkling, and his cheeks were flushed. Mr Nameless was quite unrecognisable.

‘Instead of the new-fangled pneumatic tyres, which are perfectly convenient for an asphalt street, but entirely inappropriate for our appalling roads, I have designed single-piece solid rubber tyres with steel wire.’

Senka prodded a black tyre. The pimpled, springy surface felt pleasant to the touch.

The design is based on the “Patent-Motorwagen” from the Benz factory, but the “Flying Carpet” is far more advanced! On his new “Velo” Herr Benz has only a three-horse-power motor and the gearwheel drive is attached to the rear axle, while I have moved it to the frame – look! – and I have a motor of almost one thousand cubic centimetres! That makes it possible to reach a speed of thirty versts an hour. And on an asphalt surface up to thirty-five! Perhaps even forty! Just imagine!’

Senka was infected by the engineer’s excitement. He sniffed at the seat, and it smelled of leather and kerosene. Very tasty!

‘And how do you ride on this carpet?’

‘Sit here. That’s it,’ said Erast Petrovich, delighted to explain, and Senka started swaying blissfully on the springy seat. ‘You’ll start moving in just a moment. It’s quite delightful, there’s nothing to compare it with. Only be careful, don’t rush. Put your right foot on the clutch pedal. Press it as far as it will go. Good. This is the ignition switch. Turn it. Do you hear that? The spark has ignited the fuel liquid. You open the valves with these levers. Well done. Now pull on the handbrake, to free the wheels. Engage the transmission –that’s this lever. Now slowly lift your foot off the clutch and at the same time pull the choke, which ...’

Senka took hold of the little metal stick that had the strange name ‘choke’ and pulled it towards himself. The self-propelled carriage suddenly darted forward.

‘A-a-agh!’ Senka yelled in terror and delight.

He got a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach, as if he was racing down an icy slide in a sleigh. The three-wheeler went shooting out through the gates of the shed, the wall of the house came towards it at high speed, and the next moment Senka’s chest crashed into the steering wheel. There was a loud clang and a jangle of broken glass, and the flight came to an end.

There were red bricks right in front of Senka’s face, with a green caterpillar crawling across them. His ears were ringing and his chest hurt, but no bones seemed to be broken.

Senka heard leisurely footsteps approaching from behind. He saw that the glass was broken on one dial and it had completely come away from another, and he pulled his head down into his chest: Beat me, Erast Petrovich, beat me within an inch of my life – even that’s too good for a bonehead like me.

‘. . . which regulates the flow of fuel, and so it should be pulled very gently’, said Mr Nameless, continuing with his explanation as if he had not even been interrupted. ‘You pulled it too hard, Senya.’

Senka hung his head and got out. When he saw the flattened lamp, which had been so smart and shiny only a few moments ago, he sobbed out loud. What a disaster.

‘Never mind,’ the engineer reassured him, squatting down on his haunches. ‘In automobilism breakages are an everyday event. We’ll fix everything this very moment. Be so kind, Senya, as to bring me the box of tools. Will you help me? It’s quite easy to remove a dashboard with two people. If you only knew how badly I need an assistant.’

‘What about the sensei?’ asked Senka, stopping just as he was about to dash over to the shed. ‘Doesn’t he help you?’

‘Masa is a conservative and a staunch opponent of progress,’ Erast Petrovich said with a sigh as he pulled on a pair of leather gloves.

Well, that was true enough. The engineer and Masa had been rowing over progress almost every day.

If Erast Petrovich had just read an article in the morning newspaper – say, about the opening of a railway line to the region beyond Lake Baikal – and he said: Look at this splendid news for the population of Siberia. They used to spend an entire month on the journey from Irkutsk to Chita, but now it only takes a day. They’ve been given a present of an entire month! There you are, use the time for whatever you like! That is the true meaning of progress – reducing the unnecessary waste of time and effort! Then the Japanese would say to him: They haven’t been given a month of life, the time’s been taken away from them. The people in this Irkutsk of yours never used to leave home except on important business, but now they’ll start spreading out across the face of the earth. That would be fine, if they did it thoughtfully, measuring out the earth with their steps, scrambling up the mountains and swimming across the rivers. But they’ll sit down on a comfortable seat and sniff a couple of times, and that’ll be all there is to their journey. Before, when a man went travelling, he understood that life itself is a journey, but now he’ll think that life is a soft seat in a railway carriage. People used to be strong and sinewy, but soon now they’ll all be weak and fat. Fat –that’s what this progress of yours is.

Then Mr Nameless would get angry. You’re distorting things, he’d say. Fat? So let there be fat, excellent! And by the way, fat is the most valuable substance in the human body, a reserve of energy and strength for times of stress. We just need to avoid accumulating fat in certain areas of the social organism, it should be distributed equally, that’s the reason why social progress or ‘social evolution’ exists.

But Masa didn’t give up. Fat, he said, is a bodily substance, and the essence of a man is spiritual – the soul. Progress will lead to the soul being smothered in fat.

No, Erast Petrovich objected. Why despise the body? It is life, and the soul, if it exists at all, belongs to eternity – that is, to death. It’s no accident that the Slavonic word for life, ‘zhivot’, means ‘stomach’ in Russian. And by the way, you Japanese also happen to locate the soul in the stomach, in the ‘hara’.

Or there was this other time when Erast Petrovich and the sensei started arguing about whether progress changed values or not.

Mr Nameless said that they did change – they moved to a higher level, primarily because a man started to value himself, his time and his effort more highly, but Masa didn’t agree. He said it was just the opposite: nowadays hardly anything depended on the individual human being and his efforts, and so all values were in decline. When progress does half your work for you, you can live your whole life without your soul ever waking up and without understanding anything about true values.

Senka listened, but he couldn’t decide whose side he was on. On the one hand, Erast Petrovich seemed to be right. Just look at all the progress there was in Moscow: electric trams would start running soon, and they’d put up bright street lamps all over the place, and there was the cinematograph too. Values were getting higher and higher every day. Eggs at the market used to cost two kopecks for ten, and now they cost three. The cabbies used to take half a rouble to drive from Sukharevka to Zamosvorechie, but now they wanted at least seventy or eighty kopecks for the pleasure. Or just look at the price of papyroses.

Only, it wasn’t that simple. Progress did bring some good of its own. Look at the difference between a shoe made by hand and one from a factory. Of course, the first kind worked out dearer, that’s why there were hardly any of them left.

But Senka soon realised that Erast Petrovich didn’t understand a thing about values.

They were giving the ‘Flying Carpet’ a test run on Mytnaya Street. They went round a corner at speed – Erast Petrovich was turning the wheel and Senka was honking the horn – and there was a herd of cows. What did a horn mean to those dumb beasts? So they crashed into the one at the back at full pelt.

It didn’t even have time to moo, just flipped over with its hooves in the air, and lay there dead.

Senka felt sorry for the front of the car, not the cow. They’d only just put on a new lamp to replace the one that was smashed against the wall. And a lamp was fifty roubles, that was no joke.

While Senka groaned and gathered up the broken glass, the engineer counted out his recompense to the cowherd for his cow. And how much do you think he gave the man? A hundred roubles! Whoever heard of such a thing? For an old brown cow that wouldn’t fetch more than thirty on market day!

And that wasn’t the half of it. As soon as that shameless rogue of a cowherd had stuck the hundred note in his cap, the cow got up and walked off, none the worse for wear, its udders wobbling to and fro.

Naturally, Senka took the cowherd by the sleeve and told him to cough up the money.

‘In the first place, not “cough up”, but “please return”. And in the second place, there’s no need. Consider it a payment for moral injury.’

So whose moral injury was that? The cow’s?

This incident had important consequences, and the important consequences led to epoch-making results.

Senka was responsible for the consequences, and Erast Petrovich was responsible for the results.

That same day Senka sketched a metal bracket on a piece of paper. It was meant to be attached in front of the lamp, so that cows, goats or dogs could be knocked down without any damage to the automobile. And after supper he subjected Mr Nameless and the Japanese to an interrogation about what prices they paid for things and how much money they paid various people. He was flabbergasted by what they said. Erast Petrovich might be an American engineer, but when it came to simple business matters, he was the biggest fool you could imagine. He paid way over the odds for everything, just gave whatever he was asked, never bothered to bargain. He’d taken the apartment in Asheulov Lane for three hundred a month! And the sensei was no better. Apart from his Way and the women he simply didn’t have a clue. Some valet he was.

Senka taught the scatterbrained pair a bit of sound sense about the value of things, and the ‘experts’ listened open mouthed.

The engineer looked at Senka and shook his head respectfully. ‘You’re a remarkable young man, Senya,’ Erast Petrovich said solemnly. ‘You have so many talents. Your idea for a shock-absorbing bracket on the automobile is excellent. The accessory should be patented and named in your honour – say “Spidorov’s damper”. Or the “antishocker”, or “bumper”, from the English “bump”. You are a born inventor. That is one. And your economic skill is quite astounding too. If you will agree to be my treasurer, I shall gladly entrust you with the management of all my expenditure. You are a born financial manager. That is two. And I am also struck by your technical savvy. You ventilate the carburettor so skilfully, you change a wheel so quickly! I tell you what, Semyon Spidorov: I offer you the position of mechanic until I depart for Paris. And that is three. Take your time before you answer, think it over.’

It’s a fact well known that when good luck comes, it doesn’t come in dribs and drabs. The sky’s pitch black, there’s not a single star to be seen, and you could just howl at the misery of it. But then, when the stars do come out, they fill the entire vault of heaven.

Who was Speedy Senka only a little while ago? No one, a dung beetle. But now he was everything: Death’s lover (yes, that did happen, it wasn’t a dream), and a rich man, and an inventor, and a treasurer, and a mechanic. What a career he’d fallen into now – a much plummier position than a lowly sixer in the Prince’s deck.

*

Senka really had his hands full now. He never even thought about how he ought to go and see Tashka, and how afraid he was, except in the evenings, just before he went to sleep. During the day he didn’t have the time.

The three-wheeler had to be cleaned and tuned, didn’t it?

He had to go round the shops and buy everything, didn’t he?

He had to keep an eye on the cleaner, the yard-keeper, the cook (he’d hired an old woman to cook proper human food, they couldn’t keep eating nothing but raw stuff) – didn’t he?

With Senka managing everything, the sensei turned into a total idler. He’d spend the best part of an hour on his knees with his eyes closed (that was a way the Japanese had of praying). Or else he’d disappear off somewhere with Erast Petrovich. Or else he had an assignation. Or else he would suddenly decide to teach Senka Japanese gymnastics.

And then Senka was supposed to drop all his important business and go running round the yard with him, almost naked, go climbing up a drainpipe and wave his arms and legs around.

Maybe this was all nice and useful, very good for his health, or for defending himself against bad people, but, for starters, he didn’t have the time, and what was worse, his bones ached so badly afterwards that he couldn’t even straighten up.

Back in Khitrovka there was this old grandfather who used to be an orderly in an asylum. When he talked about the people in there, with all their quirks and whimsies, it was absolutely fascinating. Well now, Senka sometimes felt a bit like that orderly. As if he was living with madmen. They looked like normal enough people, with all their wits about them, but sometimes you could just see the place was a loony bin.

Take Mr Nameless himself, for instance, Erast Petrovich. He wasn’t Japanese, was he, he looked like a normal person, but he had these foreign habits. When he was in his study, fiddling with the drawings or writing something, that seemed clear enough. But one time Senka glanced over his shoulder, out of curiosity, just to see what he was drawing, and he gasped out loud: the engineer wasn’t writing with a pen, he was holding a wooden brush, the kind you use for spreading glue, and he wasn’t drawing letters, but some strange-looking kind of squiggles that didn’t mean a thing to Senka.

Or else he might start striding across the room, clicking his green beads, and he could carry on striding about like that for ever.

And then he might sit down facing the wall and stare at a single spot. Once Senka tried to see what was there on the wall. He couldn’t see anything, nothing at all, not even a bedbug or some other little mite, and when he tried to ask what it was that Erast Petrovich found so interesting, Masa, who happened to be close by, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, dragged him out of the study and said: ‘When master contemprate, reave him arone.’ But then, what was he contemplating, if there was nothing there?

Apart from all the work involved in preparing the ‘Flying Carpet’ for its long-distance run, Mr Nameless had other mysterious business to deal with, something Senka wasn’t let in on. Erast Petrovich disappeared almost every evening at nine o’clock and didn’t come back until late, or sometimes he went missing until the next morning. When this happened, Senka was tormented with dark visions. Once he even took the engineer’s undershirt out of the laundry pile and sniffed to see whether it smelled of Death (that heady, minty smell that you could never confuse with anything else). It didn’t seem to.

Sometimes the master went out in the afternoon as well, but Senka didn’t know the reason for his absence.

Once, when Erast Petrovich took longer than usual straightening his collar and combing his hair in the mirror before he went out, Senka suffered an overwhelming fit of jealousy. He just couldn’t stop himself, he slipped out of the house as if he was going shopping, then out in the street he fell in behind the engineer and followed him, to see if he was going to meet a certain immoral individual.

He was indeed going to meet someone but, thank God, not the person on Senka’s mind.

Mr Nameless went into the Rivoli cafe´, sat down at a table and started reading the newspapers – Senka could see everything through the glass windows. After a while, Senka realised he wasn’t the only person interested in Erast Petrovich. There was a young lady standing not far away, in front of a fashionable shop window, and she was looking in the same direction as Senka. First he heard a quiet tinkling sound, but he couldn’t understand where it was coming from. Then he noticed that the girl had little bells sewn to her cuffs, and a necklace in the form of a snake; in fact it looked like it was alive. Clear enough, she was one of those decadents, lots of them had appeared in Moscow just recently.

At first Senka thought the young lady was waiting for someone, and he enjoyed taking a look at the lovely brunette, the way you do. But then she gave her head a shake, walked across the street and marched into the cafe´.

Erast Petrovich put down his newspaper, stood up to greet her and offered her a seat. They exchanged a couple of words, and the engineer started reading out loud from the newspaper.

Just what kind of halfwit was he?

Senka didn’t watch any more after that, because he felt calm now. Why get himself all worked up if Mr Nameless was so blind? He’d seen Death, he’d spoken to her, gazed into her shimmering eyes, and here he was chasing after some little street cat.

No, this particular individual was beyond Senka’s comprehension.

Take the move, for instance.

It was two days before Senka observed the rendezvous at the Rivoli Cafe´. All at once – completely out of the blue – Mr Nameless decided to move out of Asheulov Lane. Mr Nameless said they had to. They moved across to Sukharevka, into an officer’s apartment in the Spassky Barracks. No one explained to Senka why they had to go, what it was all for. They’d only just started settling in properly: he’d put up all those shelves in the study, hired floor-polishers to wax up the parquet so that it shone, half a carcass of veal had been ordered from the butcher – and suddenly this. And the rooms were paid for two months in advance – that was six hundred roubles down the drain!

They packed in a great hurry, threw everything higgledy-piggledy into two cabs and left.

The new apartment was pretty good too, with a separate entrance, only it was a little while before they could find a place for the three-wheeler. Senka spent two days cajoling the janitor Mikheich, drank four samovars of tea with him, gave him six roubles and then another three and a half before he got the key to the stable (there weren’t any horses there anyway, because the regiment had gone off to conquer China).

While Senka was trying to persuade the janitor, Masa-sensei persuaded the janitor’s wife – and more speedily too. So all in all, they settled in quite well, they couldn’t complain: they had a roof over their heads, the ‘Flying Carpet’ was in a warm, dry place, they had Mikheich’s respect, and pies and stewed fruit from his wife almost every single day.

On the last day of this peaceful life, before everything was sent spinning head over heels again, Senka received visitors at his new residence: his little brother Vanka and Judge Kuvshinnikov. As soon as they moved out of Asheulov Lane, Senka had sent a letter by the municipal post, saying that he was now living at such and such an address and would regard it as an honour to see his dear brother Ivan Trifonovich, please accept, etc., etc. The judge had replied by letter too: Thank you, we shall definitely come soon.

And he kept his word and came to visit.

At first he looked around suspiciously, wondering whether the place was some kind of thieves’ den. When Masa appeared in the hallway wearing nothing but his white underpants for renzu, the judge frowned and put his hand on Vanka’s shoulder. The youngster gaped wide eyed at the Oriental too, and when Masa slapped himself on the stomach and bowed, he gave a squeal of fright.

Things were looking bad. The judge had already turned towards the door, in order to leave (just to be on the safe side, he hadn’t let the cabby go), but then, fortunately, Erast Petrovich came out of his study, and one look at this respectable man in a velvet house jacket, holding a book in his hand, was enough to allay Kuvshinnikov’s fears. It was quite clear that a gentleman like that would never live in a den of thieves.

They introduced themselves to each other in the most respectable manner possible. Erast Petrovich called Senka his assistant and invited the judge into his study to smoke Cuban cigars. Senka never found out what they talked about in there, because he took Vanka to the stable to show him the automobile, and then drove his little brother round the yard. He moved all the levers and operated the crafty choke all on his own, and he turned the wheel himself too, while Vanka just hooted the horn and roared with delight.

They drove around like that for a long time and used up half a bucket of kerosene, but that was all right, no one would mind. Then the judge came out, to take Vanka home. He shook hands when he said goodbye to Senka and even gave him a cheery wink.

The judge and his brother drove away.

And in the evening, before he got into bed, Senka looked in the mirror to see whether he had any more hairs in his beard, and he discovered four new ones, three on the right cheek and one on the left. That made thirty-seven altogether, not counting the ones in his moustache.

He thought about going to see Tashka in his usual way and listened closely to see whether his heart would skip a beat.

It didn’t.

He told himself to remember the Prince, and how he’d legged it out of that basement.

So he’d legged it to get away from the Prince – was he going to spend the rest of his life trembling with fear?

For more than a week he’d been afraid even to think of showing his face back in Khitrovka, but now, suddenly, he felt the time was right, he could go.