2Yj82YZrE

Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 33
B a s i l e u s / 33
clumsily and was afraid that the hot teapot would slip out of her grip. But she
should have been afraid of something quite different. Looking up, she saw
the best friend of the house crumpling up her work with both of his red
hands and tossing the scrunched-up balls onto the carpet.
“Have you any idea how much I demand from all my staff for a quarter
of your pay?” Mr. K suddenly shrieked in a hoarse falsetto and stamped his
foot.
“But I deliver the bulletins regularly . . .” Plonking the heavy teapot down
on the tablecloth, Elizaveta Nikolaevna began nervously gathering her sheets
of paper from all over the place, shaking off the pistachio shells and the apple
seeds that had stuck to them.
“I asked you to prepare a press review, fuck it!” K screeched hoarsely,
suddenly switching to a less respectful tone and a boorish obscenity that
made the widow shudder. “But you didn’t do that! You just didn’t bother!
You type a word into Yandex and just download everything that comes up.
The diaries of some whores or other, chunks of novels—is that what I pay
money for?”
“You didn’t complain about anything before,” Elizaveta Nikolaevna said
through her nose. “Why are you being so rude and unpleasant now?”
“To get anything sensible out of you I had to hold your hand on the
Internet with you, did I? Maybe I’ve got other things to be doing? Shall I tell
you what work is? It’s when you flog yourself to death all week and then catch
up on things at the weekend! When there’s no fucking way you can be ill,
even if you’re dying! And your nerves won’t let you sleep at night! But you
just piddle around here for five and a half grand, and I have to bring you a
new computer chop-chop to replace the once that was pissed on?”
Elizaveta Nikolaevna slowly sank down into an armchair with her dumbfounded
gaze fixed on Mr. K and her eyes filled with piercingly blue tears.
“You mean I’m fired?” she asked helplessly, folding her little satin hands
on her tightly closed knees. “What shall I do now?”
“Do I have to answer that question?” K roared.
The drawing room seemed to shudder at his fury and a burgundy picture
of some kind scraped its way down the wall in an arc and flopped onto a sofa.
That triggered an orgy of destruction. Gazing round with a haunted look, K
saw the little things surrounding him on all sides—pitiful, heartrending
things no longer worth a kopeck, which could easily have been eliminated
with the money from just one of his envelopes, but continued to exist. Grabbing
a pile of dessert plates with both hands, he slammed them down with