At the same moment the ceiling bulb blazed forth, and the humming and heaving cage was flooded with yellow light. Alfyorov blinked, as though just waking up. He was wearing an old sandy-colored, formless overcoat — of the so-called ‘in-between-season’ sort — and holding a bowler hat. His thin fair hair was slightly ruffled and something about his features reminded one of a religious oleograph: that little golden beard, the turn of that scraggy neck from which he pulled off a bright-speckled scarf.
With a lurch the lift caught on the sill of the fourth-floor landing and stopped.
‘A miracle,’ Alfyorov said, grinning, as he opened the door. ‘I thought someone had pressed the button and brought us up, but there’s no one here. After you, Lev Glebovich.’
But Ganin, with a grimace of impatience, gave Alfyorov a slight push and, having followed him out, relieved his feelings by noisily slamming the steel door behind him. Never before had he been so irritable.
‘A miracle,’ Alfyorov repeated. ‘Up we came and yet there’s no one here. That’s symbolic too.’
<p>2</p>The pension was both Russian and nasty. It was chiefly nasty because all day long and much of the night the trains of the Stadtbahn could be heard, creating the impression that the whole building was slowly on the move. The hall, where there hung a bleary mirror with a ledge for gloves, and where stood an oak chest so placed that people naturally barked their shins on it, narrowed into a bare and very cramped passage. Along each side were three rooms, numbered with large black figures stuck onto the doors. These were simply leaves torn off a year-old calendar — the first six days of April, 1923. April I — the first door on the left — was Alfyorov’s room, the next was Ganin’s, while the third belonged to the landlady, Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn, the widow of a German businessman who twenty years ago had brought her here from Sarepta and who the year before had died of brain fever. In the three rooms down the right-hand side — April 4 to 6 — there lived Anton Sergeyevich Podtyagin, an old Russian poet; Klara, a full-busted girl with striking bluish-brown eyes; and, finally, in room 6 at the turn of the passage, two ballet dancers, Kolin and Gornotsvetov, both as giggly as women, thin, with powdered noses and muscular thighs. At the end of the first stretch of the passage was the dining room, with a lithograph of the Last Supper on the wall facing the door and the yellow, horned skulls of deer along another wall above a bulbous sideboard. On it stood two crystal vases, once the cleanest things in the whole apartment but now dulled by a coating of fluffy dust.
