Nikolaevna—an unkempt, toothless old woman—took Zhora into a dark doorway and handed him a large vial.
“Just the right strength,” she said. “Can you smell the alcohol? I’m not out to swindle you unlike some I could mention. There’re plenty of people these days who palm their customers off with water or worse.”
After he had taken Zhora’s bribe, the old man took a lantern and led Zhora and Elena up the dirty stairs to the second floor.
“As though I had nothing better to do than traipse around after the likes of you,” he grumbled. “Nowadays, guests don’t pay for their rooms anymore. They just bring me permits from the Housing Department. They don’t even tip me for service either. And folk don’t want to work for nothing, so the staff has all left. I’m the only one left here.”
The old man opened the door and put down the lantern. “Here you are.”
Elena looked in and gasped. Inside the dimly lit room, dozens of soldiers lay snoring side by side on rows of tightly packed trestle beds.
“But there’s no room for us in here,” Zhora protested.
“Aristocrats, are you?” the old man grinned. “Tell me, what’s wrong with sharing a room with the delegates of the Red Army Congress? They’re leaving tomorrow anyway. You can sleep right here,” he said pointing to a cramped couch with a curved back.
Somehow, Elena squeezed herself onto it while Zhora settled himself below her on a dirty rug on the floor.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Nina. Had she been arrested? Had she had a chance to escape?
Zhora didn’t sleep a wink. He spent all night composing epitaphs in his head.
The first one was for the hotel manager:
Another was for Zhora himself:
Where should he and Elena go in the morning? To Osinki without documents? Or should they try to find a place for themselves in Nizhny Novgorod? But how would they manage to get ahold of food? Zhora had only twenty rubles left.
Oh, what an idiot he was! He had tried to save the Lady and ended up destroying them all.
Zhora woke Elena at dawn, and they went downstairs. During the night, Zhora had decided that he would try to persuade the old man to take them on as staff in return for permission to live in some cubbyhole, but the hotel manager was nowhere to be seen.
They waited in the dim lobby, fingering the keys of a broken pianola in the corner.
“Oh, for goodness sake, where has the old fellow gotten to?” Zhora puffed impatiently, jumping up to sit sideways on the counter. “Elena… the old man…” he whispered, his eyes wide with horror.
Zhora jumped down onto the other side of the counter. The manager was lying on the floor under the leaf of the writing desk, which was why they hadn’t noticed him at first. Next to him lay an empty vial.
Elena looked behind the counter. “My goodness, what happened? Has he taken poison?”
“To think that I wrote an epitaph for him yesterday,” Zhora said in a trembling voice.
He could see what had happened at a single glance. The manager’s face was bluish, there were signs of bruising on his skin, and a sickly sweet odor could be smelled coming from his mouth.
Zhora had seen plenty of victims of methanol poisoning in the morgue of the Martynov Hospital. It was virtually indistinguishable from alcohol in appearance and smell, and cunning traders often peddled it to unsuspecting customers. Some drunks died immediately, some slowly in agony, and anyone who survived would be sure to go blind.
Thunderous footsteps echoed on the staircase. Zhora gave a start, but it was too late to run. The next minute, the lobby was swarming with Red Army delegates.
“We’re leaving,” one of them said and threw his key to Zhora. “I’ll be damned if I ever stay in your hotel again. It’s crawling with lice.”
“As if any of the other hotels are any better,” his friends laughed.
“I don’t give a damn. I want to check out.”
While Zhora stood staring dumbly at the soldiers, Elena opened the drawer, took out the inkwell, and began to write in the registry book.
“Your signature, please,” she said, handing the book to the delegates. “If you can’t write your name, then put a cross just here.”
She smiled brightly, as though she had no idea there was a dead man lying under the desk.
Finally, the delegates left.
“Zhora, we have to hide the old man,” Elena whispered, pointing to the back room.
They found the key on the counter, opened the door, and laid the old man’s body on the sagging couch.
“This must be where he lived,” Elena said, glancing at the spirit lamp on the table and the sheepskin coat hanging up behind a cloth curtain.
“We have to go,” said Zhora.
“Where?”
“I don’t know—anywhere. Just as far away from here as possible before they catch us.”
Elena shook her head. “If we become vagrants, we’ll be picked up by the Cheka in no time. Let’s stay here. If anyone asks who we are, we can tell them we’re employed to service the rooms.”
“What about the body?”
“We’ll just leave it somewhere. Do you think the police will care who the old man is and where he came from? There are lots of old people dying on the streets these days.”
Zhora covered his face with his hands. He couldn’t believe that any of this was actually happening.
They found a wheelbarrow in the shed. Zhora took the old man to the Peter and Paul Cemetery, and while nobody was looking, he dumped the body beside the fence.
The days passed, but nobody noticed the manager was missing. Zhora and Elena did his work, and it never occurred to any of the hotel guests that they were impostors. However, they had no money, so they began to sell off the old man’s belongings, from the sofa to the sheepskin coat.
Zhora was horrified by his descent to this brutal, cold-blooded pragmatism, but what could he do? Should he run into the street shouting that they had killed a man and were now selling off his possessions?
They were so hungry and desperate that they felt as though their bodies had been partially abandoned by their spirits. They had forfeited their right to live and had severed all ties to their families and friends. At night, Elena wept because she couldn’t even go to prison to take food to her parents.
But for the time being, nobody bothered them.
Only the lice made their lives unbearable.
After speaking to some women at the market, Zhora prepared a foul-smelling ointment to rub on his skin, and Elena began to wear a magic charm on her wrist. They tried everything they could from naphthalene to camphor oil and spent all of the money they got from selling the old man’s skirting boards in the battle with the lice. Both science and witchcraft proved powerless.
Zhora wrote a poem and submitted it to the local newspaper.
The editor bought Zhora’s poem but rewrote the first line as “It seems the Whites have now connived.”