unfamiliar clerk, and politely asked for a deposit slip.
‘What do you need it for?’ the clerk in the window asked.
The bookkeeper was amazed.
‘I want to turn over some cash. I’m from the Variety.’
‘One moment,’ the clerk replied and instantly closed the opening in the window with a grille.
‘Strange! ...’ thought the bookkeeper. His amazement was perfectly natural. It was the first time in his life that he had met with such a circumstance. Everybody knows how hard it is to get money; obstacles to it can always be found. But there had been no case in the bookkeeper’s thirty years of experience when anyone, either an official or a private person, had had a hard time accepting money.
But at last the little grille moved aside, and the bookkeeper again leaned to the window.
‘Do you have a lot?’ the clerk asked.
‘Twenty-one thousand seven hundred and eleven roubles.’
‘Oho!’ the clerk answered ironically for some reason and handed the bookkeeper a green slip.
Knowing the form well, the bookkeeper instantly filled it out and began to untie the string on the bundle. When he unpacked his load, everything swam before his eyes, he murmured something painfully.
Foreign money flitted before his eyes: there were stacks of Canadian dollars, British pounds, Dutch guldens, Latvian lats, Estonian kroons ...
‘There he is, one of those tricksters from the Variety!’ a menacing voice resounded over the dumbstruck bookkeeper. And straight away Vassily Stepanovich was arrested.
CHAPTER 18
At the same time that the zealous bookkeeper was racing in a cab to his encounter with the self-writing suit, from first-class sleeping car no. 9 of the Kiev train, on its arrival in Moscow, there alighted, among others, a decent-looking passenger carrying a small fibreboard suitcase. This passenger was none other than the late Berlioz’s uncle, Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky, an industrial economist, who lived in Kiev on the former Institutsky Street. The reason for Maximilian Andreevich’s coming to Moscow was a telegram received late in the evening two days before with the following content:Have just been run over by tram-car at Patriarch’s Ponds
funeral Friday three pm come. Berlioz.
Maximilian Andreevich was considered one of the most intelligent men in Kiev, and deservedly so. But even the most intelligent man might have been nonplussed by such a telegram. If someone sends a telegram saying he has been run over, it is clear that he has not died of it. But then, what was this about a funeral? Or was he in a bad way and foreseeing death? That was possible, but such precision was in the highest degree strange: how could he know he would be buried on Friday at three pm? An astonishing telegram!
However, intelligence is granted to intelligent people so as to sort out entangled affairs. Very simple. A mistake had been made, and the message had been distorted. The word ‘have’ had undoubtedly come there from some other telegram in place of the word Berlioz’, which got moved and wound up at the end of the telegram. With such an emendation, the meaning of the telegram became clear; though, of course, tragic.
When the outburst of grief that struck Maximilian Andreevich’s wife subsided, he at once started preparing to go to Moscow.
One secret about Maximilian Andreevich ought to be revealed. There is no arguing that he felt sorry for his wife’s nephew, who had died in the bloom of life. But, of course, being a practical man, he realized that there was no special need for his presence at the funeral. And nevertheless Maximilian Andreevich was in great haste to go to Moscow. What was the point? The point was the apartment. An apartment in Moscow is a serious thing! For some unknown reason, Maximilian Andreevich did not like Kiev,1 and the thought of moving to Moscow had been gnawing at him so much lately that he had even begun to sleep badly.
He did not rejoice in the spring flooding of the Dnieper, when, overflowing the islands by the lower bank, the water merged with the horizon. He did not rejoice in the staggeringly beautiful view which opened out from the foot of the monument to Prince Vladimir. He did not take delight in patches of sunlight playing in springtime on the brick paths of Vladimir’s Hill. He wanted none of it, he wanted only one thing - to move to Moscow.
Advertising in the newspapers about exchanging an apartment on Institutsky Street in Kiev for smaller quarters in Moscow brought no results. No takers were found, or if they occasionally were, their offers were disingenuous.
The telegram staggered Maximilian Andreevich. This was a moment it would be sinful to let slip. Practical people know that such moments do not come twice.
In short, despite all obstacles, he had to succeed in inheriting his nephew’s apartment on Sadovaya. Yes, it was difficult, very difficult, but these difficulties had to be overcome at whatever cost. The experienced Maximilian Andreevich knew that the first and necessary step towards that had to be the following: he must get himself registered, at least temporarily, as the tenant of his late nephew’s three rooms.
On Friday afternoon, Maximilian Andreevich walked through the door of the room which housed the management of no. 302-bis on Sadovaya Street in Moscow.
In the narrow room, with an old poster hanging on the wall illustrating in several pictures the ways of resuscitating people who have drowned in the river, an unshaven, middle-aged man with anxious eyes sat in perfect solitude at a wooden table.
‘May I see the chairman?’ the industrial economist inquired politely, taking off his hat and putting his suitcase on a vacant chair.
This seemingly simple little question for some reason so upset the seated man that he even changed countenance. Looking sideways in anxiety, he muttered unintelligibly that the chairman was not there.
‘Is he at home?’ asked Poplavsky. ‘I’ve come on the most urgent business.’
The seated man again replied quite incoherently, but all the same one could guess that the chairman was not at home.
‘And when will he be here?’
The seated man made no reply to this and looked with a certain anguish out the window.
