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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 45
B a s i l e u s / 45
a large chunk of her life—the best chunk—had been stolen. But even so
Elizaveta Nikolaevna was casting off the shackles of decrepit old age acquired
in her youth. The old woman’s world, dangerously slippery and abounding in
treacherous potholes and steep steps, was turning springy once again beneath
her worn-out boots and the little widow was becoming bolder and bolder in
her pedestrian forays, both alone and arm-in-arm with Ertel. As he helped
his companion maintain her balance along a tall curb, Ertel seemed to be
holding a faithless, fluttering happiness by the wing; Elizaveta Nikolaevna
laughed and dropped her hot cap off her flattened curls as she jumped down
onto the pavement.
Meanwhile the future was becoming more and more uncertain. Now
Ertel had no idea at all what would become of him and the little widow. The
usual uncertainty of tomorrow, into which a person steps without thinking,
had suddenly acquired new volumes of space, and it seemed as if literally
two steps ahead the ground would suddenly break off at a yawning abyss.
It started with the neighbors being robbed—the same neighbors who
had bought Elizaveta Nikolaevna’s jewelry from her for a knock-down price.
The thieves took the brooch and the watch—together with a frostbitten little
brick of money hidden between the humpbacked chunks of meat in the
refrigerator, as well as handfuls of high-metal-content gold jewelry with
which the owner of the flat, a merited functionary of Soviet trade, had stuffed
the pockets of her old coats. Elizaveta Nikolaevna felt alarmed and even went
to look at the scene of the crime. The neighbor was sitting alongside her gaping
wardrobe, swaying from side to side and no doubt feeling herself robbed
many times over in all her plump tweeds and yellowed arctic-fox furs, hanging
there with their pockets turned inside out and their sleeves flung up
absurdly. In the kitchen, beside the refrigerator, a heap of reddish-brown
meat was oozing watery blood, like a frozen mammoth thawing out, and the
local militiaman, with an expression of habitual dissatisfaction on his snubnosed
face, was writing out a report.
Arriving several days later, Ertel noticed a new disorder in the apartment,
a disorder that was horizontal as opposed to the usual vertical disorder
resulting from the falling of objects and settling of dust. The sloppily reshuffled
books and crookedly jammed drawers would immediately have told any
thief from which old hiding place to which new one the flat’s owner had
moved her money. Elizaveta Nikolaevna must have accumulated a substantial
sum, and so far she had not felt at all concerned about what might happen