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was in reality totally indifferent to Bezdomny's fate and did not feel sorry
for him at  all. ' Good for him! He's right! ' thought Ryukhin with cynical,
masochistic  relish and breaking  off  his  description of  the  symptoms of
schizophrenia, he asked :
     'Archibald Archibaldovich,  could  I possibly have a glass of vodka. .
.? '
     The pirate put on a sympathetic expression and whispered :
     'Of course, I quite understand . . . right  away .  . .' and signalled
to a waiter.
     A  quarter  of an  hour later Ryukhin  was sitting in absolute solitude
hunched  over  a dish  of sardines, drinking  glass  after  glass  of vodka,
understanding  more  and more about  himself  and admitting  that  there was
nothing in his life that he could put right--he could only try to forget.
     The  poet  had wasted  his night while  others had  spent  it  enjoying
themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift
his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone
beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The
cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably
over the poet.





7.The Haunted Flat



     If next day someone had said  to Stepa Likhodeyev  'Stepa! If vou don't
get  up  this minute you're going  to be shot,' he would have  replied  in a
faint, languid  voice : '  All right, shoot me. Do  what you like to me, but
I'm not getting up! '
     The worst of it was  that he could  not  open his eyes, because when he
did  so there would  be a flash of lightning  and his head  would  shiver to
fragments.  A great bell was  tolling in his head, brown  spots  with  livid
green edges  were  swimming around somewhere  between his  eyeballs  and his
closed lids. To cap it all he felt sick and the nausea was somehow connected
with the sound of a gramophone.

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