Ganin could not sleep. A nervous tingling ran through his legs and the pillow tormented his head. Then in the middle of the night his neighbor Alfyorov started to hum a tune. Through the thin wall he could hear him shuffling across the floor, first near then moving away, while Ganin lay there in anger. Whenever a train rattled past, Alfyorov’s voice blended with the noise, only to surface again — tum-ti-tumn, tum-ti, tum-ti-tum.
Ganin could bear it no longer. He pulled on his trousers, went out into the passage and thumped on the door of room i with his fist. In his wanderings Alfyorov happened at that moment to be right beside the door, and he flung it open so unexpectedly that Ganin gave a start of surprise.
‘Please come in, Lev Glebovich.’
He was wearing shirt and underpants, his blond beard was slightly ruffled — presumably from puffing away at his songs — and his pale blue eyes were alive with happiness.
‘You’re singing,’ said Ganin, frowning, ‘and it’s keeping me awake.’
‘Come in for heaven’s sake, don’t hang about there in the doorway,’ fussed Aleksey Ivanovich, putting his arm round Ganin’s waist in a well-meant but clumsy gesture. ‘I’m so sorry if I annoyed you.’
Ganin went reluctantly into the room. It contained very little, yet was very untidy. Instead of standing at the desk (that oaken monster with the inkwell shaped like a large toad) one of the two kitchen chairs seemed to have wandered off in the direction of the washbasin but had stopped halfway there, having obviously stumbled over the turned-up edge of the green carpet. The other chair, which stood beside the bed and served as a bedside table, had disappeared under a black jacket whose collapse seemed as heavy and shapeless as if it had fallen from the top of Mount Ararat. Thin sheets of paper were scattered all over the wooden wilderness of the desk and over the bed. Ganin noticed from a casual glance that on these sheets were pencil drawings of wheels, squares, done without the least technical accuracy, simply scribbles to pass the time. Alfyorov himself, in his woollen underpants — which make any man, be he built like Adonis or elegant as Beau Brummel, look extraordinarily unattractive — had started pacing up and down again amidst the ruins of his room, occasionally flipping his fingernail against the green glass shade of the table lamp or the back of a chair.
‘I’m terribly glad you’ve dropped in at last,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t sleep either. Just think — my wife’s coming on Saturday. And tomorrow’s Tuesday already. Poor girl, I can just imagine what agony she’s been through in that accursed Russia of ours!’
Ganin, who had been glumly trying to decipher a chess problem drawn on one of the pieces of paper lying around on the bed, suddenly looked up. ‘What did you say?’
‘She’s coming,’ Alfyorov replied with a bold flick of his nail.
‘No, not that. What did you call Russia?’
‘Accursed. It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know — the epithet struck me as curious.’
‘Now, Lev Glebovich’ — Alfyorov suddenly stopped in the middle of the room — ‘it’s time you stopped playing at being a Bolshevik. You might think it very amusing, but what you do is very wrong, believe me. It’s time we all admitted frankly that Russia is done for, that our “saintly” Russian peasantry has turned out to be nothing but gray scum — as might have been expected, by the way — and that our country is finished for good.’
Ganin laughed. ‘Quite, quite, Aleksey Ivanovich.’
Alfyorov wiped his gleaming face from top to bottom with his palm and suddenly smiled a wide, dreamy smile. ‘Why aren’t you married, old chap, eh?’
‘Never had the chance,’ Ganin replied. ‘Is it fun?’
‘Delightful. My wife is adorable. A brunette, you know, with such lively eyes. Still very young. We were married in Poltava in 1919, and in 1920 I had to emigrate. I’ve some photos in the desk drawer — I’ll show them to you.’ Crooking his fingers underneath it, he pulled open the wide drawer.
‘What were you in those days, Aleksey Ivanovich?’ Ganin inquired without curiosity.
Alfyorov shook his head. ‘I don’t remember. How can one remember what one was in a past life — an oyster maybe, or a bird, let’s say, or perhaps a teacher of mathematics? In any case our old life in Russia seems like something that happened before time began, something metaphysical or whatever you call it — that’s not quite the word — yes, I know: metempsychosis.’
Ganin looked at the photograph in the open drawer without much interest. It was the face of a tousled young woman with a merry, very toothy mouth. Alfyorov leaned over his shoulder. ‘No, that’s not my wife, that’s my sister. She died of typhus, in Kiev. She was a nice, jolly girl, very good at playing tag.’
He produced another photograph.
