at him. And he would immediately address bitter reproaches to heaven for not having endowed him at birth with literary talent, lacking which there was naturally no dreaming of owning a Massolit membership card, brown, smelling of costly leather, with a wide gold border — a card known to all Moscow.
Who will speak in defence of envy? This feeling belongs to the nasty category, but all the same one must put oneself in the visitor’s position. For what he had seen on the upper floor was not all, and was far from all. The entire ground floor of the aunt’s house was occupied by a restaurant, and what a restaurant! It was justly considered the best in Moscow. And not only because it took up two vast halls with arched ceilings, painted with violet, Assyrian-maned horses, not only because on each table there stood a lamp shaded with a shawl, not only because it was not accessible to just anybody coming in off the street, but because in the quality of its fare Griboedov’s beat any restaurant in Moscow up and down, and this fare was available at the most reasonable, by no means onerous, price.
Hence there was nothing surprising, for instance, in the following conversation, which the author of these most truthful lines once heard near the cast-iron fence of Griboedov’s:
‘Where are you dining today, Amvrosy?’
‘What a question! Why, here, of course, my dear Foka! Archibald Archibaldovich whispered to me today that there will be perch au naturel done to order. A virtuoso little treat!’
‘You sure know how to live, Amvrosy!’ skinny, run-down Foka, with a carbuncle on his neck, replied with a sigh to the ruddy-lipped giant, golden-haired, plump-cheeked Amvrosy-the-poet.
‘I have no special knowledge,’ Amvrosy protested, ‘just the ordinary wish to live like a human being. You mean to say, Foka, that perch can be met with at the Coliseum as well. But at the Coliseum a portion of perch costs thirteen roubles fifteen kopecks, and here — five-fifty! Besides, at the Coliseum they serve three-day-old perch, and, besides, there’s no guarantee you won’t get slapped in the mug with a bunch of grapes at the Coliseum by the first young man who bursts in from Theatre Alley. No, I’m categorically opposed to the Coliseum,’ the gastronome Amvrosy boomed for the whole boulevard to hear. ‘Don’t try to convince me, Foka!’
‘I’m not trying to convince you, Amvrosy,’ Foka squeaked. ‘One can also dine at home.’
‘I humbly thank you,’ trumpeted Amvrosy, ‘but I can imagine your wife, in the communal kitchen at home, trying to do perch au naturel to order in a saucepan! Hee, hee, hee! ... Aurevwar, Foka!’ And, humming, Amvrosy directed his steps to the veranda under the tent.
Ahh, yes! ... Yes, there was a time! ... Old Muscovites will remember the renowned Griboedov‘s! What is poached perch done to order! Cheap stuff, my dear Amvrosy! But sterlet, sterlet in a silvery chafing dish, sterlet slices interlaid with crayfish tails and fresh caviar? And eggs en cocotte with mushroom puree in little dishes? And how did you like the fillets of thrush? With truffles? Quail a la genoise? Nine-fifty! And the jazz, and the courteous service! And in July, when the whole family is in the country, and you are kept in the city by urgent literary business - on the veranda, in the shade of the creeping vines, in a golden spot on the cleanest of tablecloths, a bowl of soup printanier? Remember, Amvrosy? But why ask! I can see by your lips that you do. What is your whitefish, your perch! But the snipe, the great snipe, the jack snipe, the woodcock in their season, the quail, the curlew? Cool seltzer fizzing in your throat?! But enough, you are getting distracted, reader! Follow me! ...
At half past ten on the evening when Berlioz died at the Patriarch’s Ponds, only one room was lit upstairs at Griboedov‘s, and in it languished twelve writers who had gathered for a meeting and were waiting for Mikhail Alexandrovich.
Sitting on chairs, and on tables, and even on the two window-sills in the office of the Massolit executive board, they suffered seriously from the heat. Not a single breath of fresh air came through the open windows. Moscow was releasing the heat accumulated in the asphalt all day, and it was clear that night would bring no relief. The smell of onions came from the basement of the aunt’s house, where the restaurant kitchen was at work, they were all thirsty, they were all nervous and angry.
The belletrist Beskudnikov - a quiet, decently dressed man with attentive and at the same time elusive eyes — took out his watch. The hand was crawling towards eleven. Beskudnikov tapped his finger on the face and showed it to the poet Dvubratsky, who was sitting next to him on the table and in boredom dangling his feet shod in yellow shoes with rubber treads.
‘Anyhow,’ grumbled Dvubratsky.
‘The laddie must’ve got stuck on the Klyazma,’ came the thick-voiced response of Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova, orphan of a Moscow merchant, who had become a writer and wrote stories about sea battles under the pen-name of Bos’n George.
‘Excuse me!’ boldly exclaimed Zagrivov, an author of popular sketches, ‘but I personally would prefer a spot of tea on the balcony to stewing in here. The meeting was set for ten o’clock, wasn’t it?‘
‘It’s nice now on the Klyazma,’ Bos’n George needled those present, knowing that Perelygino on the Klyazma, the country colony for writers, was everybody’s sore spot. ‘There’s nightingales singing already. I always work better in the country, especially in spring.’
‘It’s the third year I’ve paid in so as to send my wife with goitre to this paradise, but there’s nothing to be spied amidst the waves,’ the novelist Ieronym Poprikhin said venomously and bitterly.
‘Some are lucky and some aren’t,‘ the critic Ababkov droned from the window-sill.
Bos’n George’s little eyes lit up with glee, and she said, softening her contralto:
‘We mustn’t be envious, comrades. There’s twenty-two dachas4 in all, and only seven more being built, and there’s three thousand of us in Massolit.’
‘Three thousand one hundred and eleven,’ someone put in from the corner.
‘So you see,’ the Bos’n went on, ‘what can be done? Naturally, it’s the most talented of us that got the dachas ...’
‘The generals!’ Glukharev the scenarist cut right into the squabble.
Beskudnikov, with an artificial yawn, walked out of the room.
‘Five rooms to himself in Perelygino,’ Glukharev said behind him.
‘Lavrovich has six to himself,’ Deniskin cried out, ‘and the dining room’s panelled in oak!’
‘Eh, that’s not the point right now,’ Ababkov droned, ‘it’s that it’s half past eleven.’
