“My God!” Stanishevskii shook his head sorrowfully. “You utter cretin! You have no powers of imagination. So get this: I did it on purpose.”
“What for?”
“It just seemed more INTERESTING to me!” Stanishevskii said weightily. “Maybe a passionate love between the saver and the saved will blaze up out of this! Did you think about that?”
“No.”
“What a dolt,” Stanishevskii snapped. “But now—to Francois’. For some ice cream.” After every exam we would binge on our modest means and go to Francois’ confectionery shop, where we would eat as many as five servings of ice cream each.
The most difficult exam for me was trigonometry. Anyhow, I passed it. The exam stretched on into the evening. Afterwards we waited for the school
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inspector to announce the grades, and overjoyed by the fact that no one had flunked we burst noisily out into the street.
Stanishevskii hurled a tattered textbook into the air with all his strength. The pages sifted down from the sky onto the pavement, dipping and fluttering from side to side. That pleased us. All of us on signal threw our textbooks skyward. A minute later the pavement was white with rustling paper. Behind us a policeman whistled.
We turned off into Fundukleev Street, then onto narrow Nesterov Street. Gradually everyone trailed off in various directions, and only five of us were left: Stanishevskii, Fitsovskii, Schmuckler, Khorozhevskii, and I.
We set off for Galitskii Market, where there were many small snack bars and beer parlors. We decided to get drunk, because we considered that the exams were already over. Latin was the only one remaining, but no one was afraid of it.
We joked and laughed. A devil, as the old expression goes, had possessed us; passers-by were turning to look at us. At Galitskii Market we dropped in at a beer parlor. The floor smelled of beer. Along the wall there were booths built of planks, wallpapered in pink. They were called “private chambers.” We occupied such a ‘chamber’ and ordered vodka and beef Stroganoff.
The owner foresightedly jerked the faded curtain closed. But we were making such a noise that from time to time one of the customers would open the curtain a bit and glance into our “chamber.” Everyone who looked in we treated to vodka. They drank it willingly and congratulated us on our “successful graduation.”
It was already late evening when the owner came into our chamber and, glancing sideways at the curtain, said in a low voice,
“There’s a shamus hanging around outside.”
“What shamus?” said Stanishevskii.
“One from Criminal Investigation. You have to get out into the courtyard as slick as you can through the back door. From the courtyard there’s a passage to Kudriavskii Boulevard.”
We attached no particular importance to the owner’s words, but all the same, we went out through the back door into the dark, stinking courtyard. Past the trash bins and the wooden sheds, bending low so as not to snag our heads on the clotheslines, we made our way out to Kudriavskii Boulevard. No one was coming after us.
We came out through a passageway onto the dimly lit sidewalk. There, waiting for us, stood a stooped man wearing a derby.
“Good evening!” he said in an ominous voice and raised his derby. “Have you had a nice party, young gentlemen?”
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We didn’t answer and set off up Kudriavskii Boulevard. The man in the derby started after us.
“Mothers’ milk not dry on their lips yet,” he said with malice, “and they’re crawling around back alleys!”
Stanishevskii stopped. The man in the derby also stopped and stuck his hand into the pocket of his long jacket.
“What do you want?” asked Stanishevskii. “You can go straight to hell!”
“Grubbing around in taverns,” the man in the derby began, “and you— pupils of the Imperial
“Let’s go,” Stanishevskii said to us. “He’s an idiot and this is boring.”
We started off. The man in the derby moved after us.
“I’m not the idiot,” he said. “You’re the idiots. I went to
“Oh, we can see that,” said Schmuckler.
“See what?” the man yelled hysterically. “I was thrown out of the
We turned off down empty streets towards Sviatoslavskii Ravine. We thought the detective would be afraid to follow us into the dead-end ravine. But he stubbornly followed along.
“Surely the five of us can deal with him?” Stanishevskii asked quietly.
We stopped. The detective pulled a revolver out of his pocket. He showed it to us and gave a muffled laugh.
We led him around the streets for a long time, avoiding the intersections where there were police. Fitsovskii suggested splitting off one at a time and disappearing. In that case the detective would always follow the larger group—first four, then three, then two, then finally one. Instead of five, he could catch only one. But none of us agreed with Fitsovskii. It wouldn’t have been comradely.
We jeered at the detective. Each of us made up a biography for him and recounted it loudly. The biographies were monstrous and offensive. The detective was wheezing with rage. He was clearly getting tired, but came dawdling along behind us with the persistence of a madman.
The east was beginning to pale. It was time to act. We agreed on a plan and, circling through alleys, came to the building where Stanishevskii lived.
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The building was shielded from the street by a stone wall about half again as high as a man. A ledge ran along its base. At a single command we jumped on the ledge and whipped ourselves up over the wall. The
