“Hey!” I called, willing my voice to sound rough and harsh, but the call came out stifled.
What should I call them? ‘Hey, people’, ‘Hey, tramps’? They’re not actually tramps, if they have a place of residence.
I examined the floor, for some reason convinced that I would put my foot into slimy filth if I took another step. I took a step. The floor was firm. The kitchen was to the left, and to the right was a room. I felt sick. I let a long line of spit, the precursor to vomit, out of my mouth. The line of spit swayed, fell and hung on the wall that was covered with wallpaper that was ripped in the form of a peak.
Why is the wallpaper in these apartments always ripped? Do they rip it on purpose or something?
“What are you spitting for?” a hoarse voice asked. “You’re in a house, you fuck.”
I couldn’t tell at first whether the voice was a man’s or a woman’s. And where was it coming from — the room, or the kitchen? I wasn’t visible from the room, so it must be from the kitchen. It was also dark in the kitchen. As I looked in, I realized that the windows were covered with sheets of plywood. I took another step towards the kitchen, and saw a person sitting at the table. The sex of the person was still unclear. A lot of disheveled hair… Barefoot… Pants, or something like pants, which ended above the knees. It seemed that there was a wound on the person’s bare leg. And something was writhing in the wound, in a large quantity. Maybe I just imagined it in the dark.
There were a lot of bottles and cans on the table.
We were silent. The person wheezed, not looking at me. Suddenly, the person coughed, the table shook and the bottles chimed. The person coughed with all his insides, his lungs, bronchi, kidneys, stomach, nose, every pore. Everything inside him rumbled and seethed, spraying mucus, spit and bile around him. The sour air in the apartment slowly moved and thickened around me. I realized that if I took a single deep breath, I would catch several incurable diseases, which would in short order make me a complete invalid with pus-filled eyes and uncontrollable bloody diarrhea.
I stood to attention, without breathing, in front of the coughing tramp, as if he were a general giving me a dressing-down. The coughing gradually died down, and in conclusion, the tramp spat out a long trail of spit on to the floor, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Finally, I decided to go into the kitchen.
“I’ve come for the puppies!” I said loudly, almost choking, because as I opened my mouth, I did not breathe. My words sounded wooden. “Hey you, where are the puppies?” I asked with a last gasp: it was as if my shoulder had hit a pile of wood and several logs had rolled off it, dully thumping to the ground.
The person looked up at me and coughed again. I almost ran into the kitchen, scared that I would fall unconscious and would lie here, on the floor, and these vermin would think that I was one of them, and put me to lie with them. Marysenka would come and see me lying next to tramps. I kicked the bare legs of the tramp, that were in my way, and it looked as if several dozen little midges flew up off the wound on his ankle.
“Damn it!” I cursed, breathing heavily, no longer able to hold my breath. The person I had kicked swayed and fell over, taking the bottles on the table with him, and they fell on him, and the chair that he was sitting on also fell over, with two legs stuck in the air. And they were not positioned diagonally, but on the same side. It couldn’t stand up! You can’t sit on it! I thought, and shouted:
“Where are the puppies, scum?!”
The person squirmed about on the floor. Something trickled under my shoes. I tore the plywood board from the window, and saw that the window was partially smashed, and so this was evidently why it had been covered over. In the window, between the partitions, there was a half-liter bottle containing a solitary limp pickle covered in a white beard of mold that Father Christmas could have envied.
“Damn it! Damn!” I cursed again, helplessly looking over the empty kitchen, in which several broken crates were lying around in addition to the upside-down chair. There was no gas stove. A tap was leaking in the corner. In the sink lay a mound of half-rotten vegetables. All kinds of creatures with feelers or wings were crawling over the vegetables.
I jumped over the person lying on the floor and raced into the room, almost falling over the clothes piled on the floor — coats, jackets, rags. Perhaps someone was lying under the rags, huddled there. The room was empty, there was just an old television in the corner, with the picture tube intact. The window was also covered over with plywood boards.
“Who do you think you are!” the voice shouted to me from the kitchen. “I’m a boxer, asshole.”
“Where are the puppies, boxer-asshole?” I mocked him, but didn’t go back to the kitchen. Instead, overcoming my squeamishness, I opened the door to the toilet. There was no toilet bowclass="underline" just a gaping hole in the floor. In the bath, as yellow as lemonade, there were shards of glass and empty bottles.
“What puppies?” the voice shouted again, and added several dozen incomprehensible noises resembling either complaining or swearing.
The voice definitely belonged to a man.
“Did you take the puppies?” I shouted at him, leaving the toilet and looking for something in the corridor to hit him with. For some reason I thought there should be a crutch here, I thought I had seen one.
“Did you eat the puppies? Talk! Did you eat the puppies, you cannibals?” I screamed.
“You ate them yourself!” he shouted in reply.
I picked up a long-collapsed coat rack from the floor, threw it at the man lying in the kitchen and began to look for the crutch again.
“Sasha!” the tramp called to someone. He was still squirming, unable to stand up.
“Crack!” the bottle he threw at me clanked against the wall.
“Thief!” sobbed the man writhing on the floor, looking for something else to throw at me.
He had obviously cut himself on something — blood was streaming profusely from his hand.
He threw an iron mug at me, and another bottle. I managed to avoid the mug, and comically kicked the bottle away.
OK, that’s enough… I thought and ran out of the apartment. In the entryway I checked to make sure that there was no slimy mud on me. It didn’t look like it. The air hit me from all sides — how wonderful and clean the air is in entryways, my God. A trail of murky and sour filth, almost visible, crawled towards me from the tramps’ den — and I ran down to the first floor, madly smiling about something.
I could hear shouts still coming from the apartment on the second floor.
“They were also children once,” Marysya said to me back home. “Imagine how they ran around with their pink bellies…”
“They were,” I replied without thinking, not having firmly decided whether they were or not. I tried to remember the face of the man in the kitchen, but couldn’t.
When I got home I got into the bath and scrubbed myself with a sponge for a long time, until my shoulders turned pink.
“They couldn’t have eaten them in one morning? They couldn’t, could they?” Marysenka asked me loudly from behind the door.
“No, they couldn’t!” I replied.
“Perhaps they were taken away by other tramps?” Marysya suggested.
“But they should have squealed,” I thought out loud. “Wouldn’t they have whined when they were thrown into the sack? We would have heard them.”
Marysenka fell silent, evidently thinking to herself.
“Why are you taking so long? Come to me!” she called, and by her voice I understood that she hadn’t reached any definite conclusion about the puppies’ fate.