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“We–me . . .”

But it sounded like:

“Me–me.”

And a scraggly bunch of gents in suitcoats would start squealing:

“A–aha–ha, aha–ha!”

***

A Petersburg street in autumn is piercing; it both chills you to the marrow, and tickles. As soon as you leave it and go indoors, the street flows in your veins like a fever.

The stranger experienced all that when he came into the sweaty and steamy vestibule, jam-packed with every which kind of black, blue, gray, yellow coat, with lop-eared caps, and with every conceivable kind of overshoe. A steamy pancake smell hung everywhere:

“Aaa! . . .”

***

The restaurant premises consisted of a small grimy room. The floor was waxed. The walls had been decorated by some amateur painter, and depicted remnants of a flotilla, from above which Peter was pointing off into space.

“A little picon in it?”

“No, no picon!”

He was thinking: why had there been a frightened look behind the carriage window? The eyes had bulged, gone petrified, and shut. The head had reeled back and disappeared. A hand had trembled impotently there; it was not a hand but . . . a tiny paw.

And in the meantime snacks were drying up on the counter; and wilted leaves of some kind were turning sour under a mound of overdone meat patties.

***

Lingering there at a distance was an idle sweating stalwart with a coachman’s beard, a blue jacket, and blacked boots. He was knocking back glass after glass. Now and then he would summon the waiter:

“How’s about a little somethin’?”

“Some melon, sir?”

“Your melon, it tastes like soap with sugar on it.”

“Perhaps a banana, sir.”

“That’s a dirty-sounding fruit.”

***

Thrice had my stranger swallowed the acerbic poison. And his consciousness, detaching itself from his body, like the handle on the lever of a mechanism, began revolving around the organism.

And the stranger’s consciousness became clear for an instant. Yes: where’s the bundle? Here it is, right beside me, here. . . .

The encounter had knocked his memory out.

***

“A nice piece of watermelon, sir?”

“The heck with your watermelon. All it does is crunch between your teeth, and there’s nothin’ left in your mouth. . . .”

“All right, how ’bout some vodka. . . .”

***

“Buy you a drink, pal?”

The idle sweating stalwart with a beard gave a wink.

“But why not?”

“I’ve already had enough.”

“Come on, have a little drink, just to keep me cumpaneee. . . .”

My stranger realized something: he looked at him suspiciously, clutched at the damp bundle, at a sheet (of newspaper). He covered the bundle with it.

“Hey, you from Tula, pal?”

“Not at all.”

***

He was thinking, and he wasn’t. His thoughts were thinking themselves, and they produced a picture: tarpaulins, hawsers, herring, sacks crammed full of something; amidst the sacks a workman dressed in blackest leather, and standing out distinctly in a fog of fleeting surfaces, kept hoisting sacks onto his back; and the sacks thudded dully into a barge overloaded with beams; the workman (something familiar about him) was standing over the sacks and was taking out a pipe.

***

“Here on business?”

(Oh, Lord!)

“No!”

“O–ho, and me, I’m a coachman.”

***

“Now my wife’s brother, he drives for Konstantin Konstantinych. . . .”^†

“Well, so what?”

“So what? So nothin’!”

***

Suddenly . . .

But about suddenly, we shall speak later.