I started. So did the young guy.
“Bhagavad Gita!” said the voice. “Chapter 3, verse 30.”
“It’s the mirror,” I said automatically.
“I know that,” the bozo growled.
“Put the plywitsum down,” I demanded.
“Why are you yelling like an elephant with a sick head?” the guy asked. “As if it was yours!”
“You mean it’s yours?”
“Yes, it’s mine.”
I had a sudden flash of inspiration. “So it was you who took the sofa too!”
“Mind your own business,” the young guy advised me.
“Give the sofa back,” I said. “I signed a receipt for it.”
“Go to hell!” said the bozo, looking around.
At this point another two men appeared in the room, a skinny one and a fat one, both wearing striped pajamas, like inmates of Sing Sing.
“Korneev!” the fat one howled. “So you’re the sofa thief! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
“You can all go—” said the bozo.
“You lout!” the fat man shouted. “You ought to be thrown out. I’ll send in a report on you!”
“Go ahead,” Korneev said morosely. “Do what you enjoy doing most.”
“How dare you talk to me in that tone of voice! You insolent urchin! You left the plywitsum here! This young man could have suffered as a result!”
“I already have,” I interjected. “The sofa’s gone, I’m sleeping on the floor like a dog… these conversations all night every night… That stinking eagle…”
The fat man immediately turned toward me. “A quite unprecedented breach of discipline,” he declared. “You must complain… And you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” he said, turning back to Korneev.
Korneev was gloomily stuffing the plywitsum into his cheek.
The skinny man asked in a low, threatening voice: “Have you extracted the Thesis, Korneev?”
The bozo laughed morosely. “There isn’t any Thesis in it,” he said. “Why do you keep going on about it? If you don’t want us to steal the sofa, then give us another translator.”
“Have you read the order about not removing items from the storeroom?” the skinny man asked threateningly.
Korneev stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed up at the ceiling.
“Are you aware of the decision of the Academic Council?” the skinny man asked.
“I am aware, comrade Demin, that Monday starts on Saturday,” Korneev said morosely.
“Enough of your demagoguery,” said the skinny man. “Return the sofa immediately, and do not dare come back here again.”
“I won’t return the sofa,” said Korneev. “Not until we’ve finished the experiment.”
The fat man made a shocking scene at that. “Unpardonable insubordination,” he squealed. “You hooligan!”
The vulture started screeching excitedly again. Without taking his hands out of his pockets, Korneev turned his back and stepped straight through the wall. The fat man dashed after him, yelling, “Oh no, you give back the sofa!”
The skinny man said to me, “It’s all a misunderstanding. We’ll take measures to prevent it from happening again.” He nodded to me and also started moving toward the wall.
“Wait,” I exclaimed. “The eagle! Take the eagle! And take the smell with it!”
The skinny man, already halfway into the wall, turned back and beckoned to the bird with his finger. The vulture noisily launched itself off the oven and was sucked in under his fingernail. The skinny man disappeared. The blue light slowly faded and the room went dark. I switched on the light and looked around. Everything in the room was the same as it had been, except for the deep, gaping scratches from the vulture’s claws on the oven and the fantastically absurd, dark-ribbed imprints of my shoes on the ceiling.
“The transparent oil found in the cow,” the mirror pronounced with idiotic profundity, “does not facilitate the cow’s nourishment, but being processed in an appropriate fashion, it provides the finest of nutrition.”
I turned the light off and lay down. The floor was hard and there was a cold draft. I’ll catch it hot from the old woman tomorrow, I thought.
6
“No,” he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation of my eye; “I’m not a member—I’m a ghost.”
“Well, that doesn’t give you the run of the Mermaid Club.”
In the morning the sofa was back where it belonged. I wasn’t surprised. I just thought that one way or another the old woman had gotten what she wanted: the sofa was standing in one corner and I was lying in another. As I cleared away my bedding and did my morning exercises, I thought about how there must be some kind of limit to the capacity for surprise. Clearly I was well past the threshold now. In fact I was feeling pretty close to saturation. I tried to imagine something that would astonish me at that moment, but my imagination wasn’t up to it. I didn’t like that at all, because I can’t stand people who are incapable of being surprised. But my psychological state was still a long way from so what’s the big deal anyway—it was more like Alice in Wonderland, as if I were dreaming and prepared to accept any miracle as something perfectly natural that deserved a more adequate response than simply dropping my jaw and gaping wide-eyed.
I was still doing my exercises when I heard the hallway door slam. There was a sound of shuffling feet and clattering heels, someone coughed, something clattered and fell, and an imperious voice called out, “Comrade Gorynych!” The old woman didn’t answer, and the people in the hallway started talking to each other.
“Which door is this? Ah, I see. And this one?”
“This is the entrance to the museum.”
“And this here? What’s this? All sealed up, these locks…”
“She keeps a very strict house, Janus Polyeuctovich. And here’s the phone.”
“Then where is the famous sofa? In the museum?”
“No. There should be a storeroom here somewhere.”
“That’s in here,” said a familiar morose voice.
The door of my room swung open to reveal a tall, skinny old man with a magnificent head of snow-white hair, black eyebrows, a black mustache, and intense black eyes. Catching sight of me (I was standing there in my underpants with my arms extended to the sides and my feet planted at shoulder width), he stopped and said in a sonorous voice, “I see.”
There were other faces peering into the room on his left and right. I said: “I beg your pardon” and ran to get my jeans. But in fact they took no notice of me. Four people came into the room and arranged themselves around the sofa. I knew two of them: the morose Korneev, unshaven and red-eyed, still wearing that frivolous Hawaiian shirt, and the swarthy, hook-nosed Roman, who winked at me, made a mysterious sign with his hand, and immediately turned away. I didn’t know the white-haired man. And I didn’t know the tall, stout man with the black suit that was shiny on the back and the sweeping, imperious gestures.
“This sofa here?” the shiny man asked.
“It’s not a sofa,” Korneev said morosely. “It’s a translator.”
“To me it’s a sofa,” said the shiny man, looking in a notebook. “Sofa, soft, small double, inventory number 1123.” He leaned down and felt it. “There’s a damp spot here, Korneev, you had it out in the rain. You’ll see, now the springs will turn rusty and the upholstery will go rotten.”
“The value of the item concerned,” said Roman in a tone that I thought sounded mocking, “does not depend in any way on its upholstery, or even its springs, because it doesn’t have any.”