"You ungrateful sneak, scoundrel, spy! Get out of this house and stay
out! Do you hear?"
His lips drew back in a snarl and I caught the glint of a gold tooth in
his mouth. This was the last thing I saw in the home of the Tatarinovs.
With one hand Nikolai Antonich opened the door and with the other he
threw me out onto the landing like a pup.
CHAPTER TEN
I GO AWAY
There was nobody in the Children's Home, nobody in the school.
Everyone had gone out—it was a Sunday. Only Romashka wandered
about the empty rooms, counting something to himself-probably his
future wealth-and the cook in the kitchen sang as he prepared dinner. I
settled myself in a warm cosy corner by the stove and fell to thinking.
Yes, this was Korablev's doing. I had tried to help him, and this was
how he had repaid me. He had gone to Nikolai Antonich and given me
away.
They had been right-Nikolai Antonich, and the German-cum-French
teacher and even Likho, who had said that Korablev shed "crocodile
tears" at meetings. He was a cad. To think that I had been sorry for him
because Maria Vasilievna had rejected him!
Romashka was sitting by the window, counting.
"Goodbye, Romashka," I said to him. "I'm going away."
"Where to?"
"Turkestan," I said, though a minute before that I had not had a
thought about Turkestan.
"You're kidding!"
I slipped off the pillow-case and stuffed all my belongings into it—a
shirt, a spare pair of trousers, and the black tube which Doctor Ivan
Ivanovich had left with me long ago. I smashed all my toads and hares
and flung them into the rubbish-bin. The figure of the girl with the
ringlets on her forehead who looked a little like Katya went in there too.
Romashka watched me with interest. He was still counting in a
whisper, but with nothing like his previous fervour.
"If for one ruble forty thousand, then for a hundred rubles..."
Goodbye school! I would never study any more. What for? I had been
taught to read, write and count. What more did I need? Good enough
for me. And nobody would miss me when I was gone. Maybe Valya
would remember me for a moment, and then forget.
"Then for a hundred rubles four hundred," Romashka whispered.
"Four hundred thousand per cent on a hundred rubles."
But I would be coming back. And Korablev, who would be kicked out
of the school, would come to me moaning and begging me to forgive
him. No fear!
Then suddenly I recollected how he had stood by the window when I
called on him, staring into the yard, very sad and a little tipsy. It
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couldn't be him, surely? Why should he have betrayed me? On the
contrary, he had probably given no sign, pretending not to know
anything about that secret council. I was wrong to suspect him. It wasn't
him at all. Then who could it be?
"Ah, it's Valya!" I suddenly said to myself. "When I got back from the
Tatarinovs I had told him everything. It was Valya!"
But Valya, I remember, had started snoring in the middle of my story.
Besides, Valya would never do a thing like that.
Romashka, maybe? I looked at him. Pale, with red ears, he sat on the
window-sill, multiplying away like mad. I fancied that he was watching
me furtively like a bird, with one round flat eye. But he knew nothing,
how could he?
Now that I had firmly decided that it was not Korablev, there was no
sense in going away. But my head was aching and my ears were ringing,
and somehow I felt that I had to go, I couldn't stay, not after Г had told
Romashka I was going.
With a sigh, I picked up my bundle, nodded to Romashka and went
out. I must have been running a temperature, because on going out into
the street I was surprised to find it so cold. But then, while still in the
entrance, I had taken off my jacket and put my overcoat on over my
shirt. I had decided to flog the jacket—I figured that it would fetch
round about fifteen million.
For the same reason—my temperature and headache—I have no clear
memory of what I did at the Sukharevka black market, though I spent
practically the whole day there. All I remember was standing in front of
a stall from which came a smell of fried onions, holding up my jacket
and saying in a weak voice: "Anybody want a jacket?"
I remember being surprised at having such a weak voice. I remember
noticing in the crowd a huge man wearing two shipskin coats. He was
wearing one with his arms in the sleeves, while the other—the one he
was selling-was thrown over his shoulders. I found it very odd that
wherever I went, hawking my merchandise, I kept running into this
man. He stood motionless, huge, bearded, clad in two coats, gloomily
naming his price without looking at the customers, who turned back the
skirts and fingered the collar.
I stood about, trying to warm myself, and noticed that though I no
longer felt cold, my fingers were blue. I was very thirsty, and several
times I decided-no more: if I don't sell the thing in half an hour, I'll go
to the teashop and swap it for a glass of hot tea. But the next moment I
had a sort of hunch that a buyer would turn up in a minute, and so I
decided to stick it for another half hour.
I remember it was a sort of consolation to see that the tall man had
not been able to sell his coat either.
I felt like eating a little snow, but the snow at Sukharevka was very
dirty and the boulevard was a long way off. In the end I did go to the
boulevard and ate some snow, which, strange to say, seemed warm to
me. I think I was sick, or maybe I wasn't. All I knew was that I was
sitting in the snow and somebody was holding me up by the shoulders
because I had gone limp. At last the support was removed and I lay
down and stretched my legs out luxuriously. Somebody was saying
something over me, it sounded like: "He's had a fit. He's an epileptic."
Then they tried to take my pillow-slip bundle and I heard them coaxing
me: "Don't be silly, we're putting it under your head!", but I clung to it
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and wouldn't let go. The man in the two coats passed by slowly, then
suddenly threw one of the coats over me. But that was already delirium
and I understood that perfectly well. They were still tugging at the
pillow-slip. I heard a woman's voice saying: "He won't let go of his
bundle." Then a man's: "Never mind, lay him down with his bundle."
And again: "Looks like the Spanish 'flu."
Then the world went dark.
I was at death's door, and twice they screened me off from the other
patients in the ward. Cyanosis is always a sign of approaching death,
and I had it so bad that all the doctors except one, gave me up as a bad
job and only exclaimed every morning with surprise: "What, still alive?"
All this I learned when I came round.
Be that as it may, I did not die. On the contrary, I got better.
One day I opened my eyes and was about to jump out of bed, thinking
I was in the Children's Home. Someone's hand arrested me. Somebody's
face, half-forgotten yet so familiar, drew close to mine. Believe it or not,
it was doctor Ivan Ivanovich.
"Doctor," I said to him, and what with joy and weakness I started