The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [105]
Vasilisa scowled.
'I can say with absolute truth that he's a doctor. After all, there's no reason why I should know anything else about him. How could I?'
'That's the point. In your position you're supposed to know.'
At that moment the door-bell rang. Vasilisa turned pale, and Wanda turned her scrawny neck.
His nose twitching, Vasilisa stood up and said:
'D'you know what? Maybe I'd better run straight up to the Turbins and call them.'
Before Wanda had time to reply the bell rang again.
'Oh my God', said Vasilisa anxiously. 'Nothing for it - I shall have to go.'
Terrified, Wanda followed him. They opened their front door into the communal hallway, which smelled of the cold. Wanda's angular face, eyes wide with fear, peeped out. Above her head the electric bell gave another importunate ring.
For a moment the idea crossed Vasilisa's mind of knocking on the Turbins' glass door - someone would be bound to come down and things might not be so terrible. But he was afraid to do it. Suppose the intruders were to ask him: 'Why did you knock? Afraid of something? Guilty conscience?' Then came the hopeful thought, though a faint one, that it might not be a search-party but perhaps someone else . . .
'Who's there?' Vasilisa asked weakly at the door.
Immediately a hoarse voice barked through the keyhole at the level of Vasilisa's stomach and the bell over Wanda's head rang again.
'Open up', rasped the keyhole in Ukrainian. 'We're from headquarters. And don't try running away, or we'll shoot through the door.'
'Oh, God ., .' sighed Wanda.
With lifeless hands Vasilisa slid open the bolt and then lifted the heavy latch, after fumbling with the chain for what seemed like hours.
'Hurry up . . .' said the keyhole harshly.
Vasilisa looked outside to see a patch of gray sky, an acacia branch, snowflakes. Three men entered, although to Vasilisa they seemed to be many more.
'Kindly tell me why . . .'
'Search', said the first man in a wolfish voice, marching straight up to Vasilisa. The corridor revolved and Wanda's face in the lighted doorway seemed to have been powdered with chalk.
'In that case, if you don't mind', Vasilisa's voice sounded pale and colorless, 'please show me your warrant. I'm a peaceful citizen - I don't know why you want to search my house. There's nothing here', said Vasilisa, painfully aware that his Ukrainian had suddenly deserted him.
'Well, we've come to have a look', said the first man.
Edging backwards as the men pushed their way in, Vasilisa felt he was seeing them in a dream. Everything about the first man struck Vasilisa as wolf-like. Narrow face, small deep-set eyes, gray skin, long straggling whiskers, unshaven cheeks furrowed by deep grooves, he had a curious shifty look and even here, in a confined space, he managed to convey the impression of walking with the inhuman, loping gait of a creature at home in snow and grassland. He spoke a horrible mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, a language familiar to those inhabitants of the City who know the riverside district of Podol, where in summertime the quayside is alive with groaning, rattling winches and where ragged men unload watermelons from barges . . . On the wolf's head was a fur hat, a scrap of blue material with tinsel piping dangling loosely from one side.
The second man, a giant, almost touched the ceiling of Vasilisa's lobby. His complexion was as ruddy as a jolly, rosy-cheeked peasant woman's, and so young that there was no hair on his face. He wore a coarse sheepskin cap with moth-eaten earflaps, a gray overcoat, and his unnaturally small feet were clad in filthy, tattered rags.
The third man had a broken nose, one side of which was covered in a suppurating scab, and his upper lip was disfigured by a crudely stitched scar. On his head was an officer's old peaked cap
with a red band and a pale mark where the badge had