The lilac back twitched, but probably by chance, for the foreigner was surely unable to understand what Koroviev and his companion were saying in Russian.
‘Is good?’ the lilac purchaser asked sternly.
‘Top-notch!’ replied the sales clerk, cockily slipping the edge of the knife under the skin.
‘Good I like, bad I don’t,‘ the foreigner said sternly.
‘Right you are!’ the sales clerk rapturously replied.
Here our acquaintances walked away from the foreigner and his salmon to the end of the confectionery counter.
‘It’s hot today,’ Koroviev addressed a young, red-cheeked salesgirl and received no reply to his words. ‘How much are the mandarins?’ Koroviev then inquired of her.
‘Fifteen kopecks a pound,’ replied the salesgirl.
‘Everything’s so pricey,’ Koroviev observed with a sigh, ‘hm ... hm ...’ He thought a little longer and then invited his companion: ‘Eat up, Behemoth.’
The fat fellow put his primus under his arm, laid hold of the top mandarin on the pyramid, straight away gobbled it up skin and all, and began on a second.
The salesgirl was overcome with mortal terror.
‘You’re out of your mind!’ she shouted, losing her colour. ‘Give me the receipt! The receipt!’ and she dropped the confectionery tongs.
‘My darling, my dearest, my beauty,’ Koroviev rasped, leaning over the counter and winking at the salesgirl, ‘we’re out of currency today ... what can we do? But I swear to you, by next time, and no later than Monday, we’ll pay it all in pure cash! We’re from near by, on Sadovaya, where they’re having the fire ...’
Behemoth, after swallowing a third mandarin, put his paw into a clever construction of chocolate bars, pulled out the bottom one, which of course made the whole thing collapse, and swallowed it together with its gold wrapper.
The sales clerks behind the fish counter stood as if petrified, their knives in their hands, the lilac foreigner swung around to the robbers, and here it turned out that Behemoth was mistaken: there was nothing lacking in the lilac one’s face, but, on the contrary, rather some superfluity of hanging jowls and furtive eyes.
Turning completely yellow, the salesgirl anxiously cried for the whole store to hear:
‘Palosich!3 Palosich!’
The public from the fabric department came thronging at this cry, while Behemoth, stepping away from the confectionery temptations, thrust his paw into a barrel labelled ‘Choice Kerch Herring’,4 pulled out a couple of herring, and swallowed them, spitting out the tails.
‘Palosich!’ the desperate cry came again from behind the confectionery counter, and from behind the fish counter a sales clerk with a goatee barked:
‘What’s this you’re up to, vermin?’
Pavel Yosifovich was already hastening to the scene of the action. He was an imposing man in a clean white smock, like a surgeon, with a pencil sticking out of the pocket. Pavel Yosifovich was obviously an experienced man. Seeing the tail of the third herring in Behemoth’s mouth, he instantly assessed the situation, understood decidedly everything, and, without getting into any arguments with the insolent louts, waved his arm into the distance, commanding:
‘Whistle!’
The doorman flew from the mirrored door out to the comer of the Smolensky market-place and dissolved in a sinister whistling. The public began to surround the blackguards, and then Koroviev stepped into the affair.
‘Citizens!’ he called out in a high, vibrating voice, ‘what’s going on here? Eh? Allow me to ask you that! The poor man’ — Koroviev let some tremor into his voice and pointed to Behemoth, who immediately concocted a woeful physiognomy — ’the poor man spends all day reparating primuses. He got hungry ... and where’s he going to get currency?‘
To this Pavel Yosifovich, usually restrained and calm, shouted sternly:
‘You just stop that!’ and waved into the distance, impatiently now. Then the trills by the door resounded more merrily.
But Koroviev, unabashed by Pavel Yosifovich’s pronouncement, went on:
‘Where? — I ask you all this question! He’s languishing with hunger and thirst, he’s hot. So the hapless fellow took and sampled a mandarin. And the total worth of that mandarin is three kopecks. And here they go whistling like spring nightingales in the woods, bothering the police, tearing them away from their business. But he’s allowed, eh?’ and here Koroviev pointed to the lilac fat man, which caused the strongest alarm to appear on his face. ‘Who is he? Eh? Where did he come from? And why? Couldn’t we do without him? Did we invite him, or what? Of course,’ the ex-choirmaster bawled at the top of his lungs, twisting his mouth sarcastically, ‘just look at him, in his smart lilac suit, all swollen with salmon, all stuffed with currency — and us, what about the likes of us?! ... I’m bitter! Bitter, bitter!’5 Koroviev wailed, like the best man at an old-fashioned wedding.
