2Yj82YZrE

Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 29
B a s i l e u s / 29
However, the feline’s fidelity to his wife was unconditional only within
the confines of the apartment. The vivid smells of the outside world excited
Basileus. Abandoning his spouse to sprawl at people’s feet like a snotty child’s
mitten after their lovemaking, the cat jumped up ponderously onto the windowsill
and from there into the frame of a small open window pane. Out
there in the free world spring was shining, pigeons were clapping, the courtyard
rubbish tip was thawing, blossoming in a rose of odors. Basileus trembled
feverishly, letting the chill into his fur; his thick tail, graying at its mighty
root, hammered impatiently on the windowpane.
Suddenly he started leaving acrid-smelling puddles around the flat: mingling
with the dust, they set into salty lemon-drops. He did this absolutely
everywhere he could position his broad rump that resembled a bicycle
saddle. Of course, he tried not to get caught, scraping his paw through the
air in tense passes to cover over his criminal offense on the quiet—but even
so his claws could not help rasping, and Elizaveta Nikolaevna, distraught,
came running with a rag. One day she didn’t close the laptop and Basileus,
after trampling about for a while on the sheets of paper and leaving them
strewn with numerous crude hangnail tatters to incriminate himself, somehow
managed to take a leak on the keyboard. Before his mistress realized
what had happened, the salty goo had corroded the delicate insides of the
elegant computer, which was still connected to the mains: it gave a terrible
squeal and died.
What happened after that is not known for certain. Pavel Ivanovich, summoned
by a desperate phone call at two in the morning, found Elizaveta
Nikolaevna in the dark yard, enmeshed in dark springtime arboreal shadows
as she rummaged through the bushes, dressed in a badly smeared raincoat
and an absurd brown hat that snagged on the branches. Fortunately the fugitive
criminal was quickly located: he was sitting growling under a wet iron
roundabout, on which a little white cat, as elegant as a small harp, was
perched with her eyes narrowed indifferently.
With the thick scruff of his neck gripped in Ertel’s fingers, the cat wriggled
and squirmed obstinately, rolling the round, bloodshot whites of his
eyes. Upstairs they took stock of their losses. Elizaveta was stunned after the
domestic battle and her hands were gouged and swollen, so that they looked
like overboiled sausages. Basileus’s condition was no better: he was limping
and howling and blinking his left eye, which wouldn’t open properly. He
responded to his weeping mistress’s attempts to stroke him with furious hissing.
Ertel tactfully did not try to ascertain exactly how the cat had managed