The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [15]
Lebid-Yurchik was for current expenses.
Vasilisa glanced around, as he always did when counting money, licked his finger and started to flick through the wad of stage money. Suddenly he went pale.
'Forgeries', he growled angrily, shaking his head. 'Disgraceful!'
Vasilisa's blue eyes glowered morosely. In the third bundle of ten bills there was one forgery, in the fourth - two, in the sixth -two, in the ninth three bills in succession were unmistakeably of the kind for which Lebid-Yurchik threatened to imprison him. A hundred and thirteen bills in all and, if you please, eight of them with obvious signs of being forged. The peasant had a sort of gloomy look instead of being cheerful, they lacked the proper quotation marks and colon, and the paper was better than Lebid's. Vasilisa held one up to the light and an obvious forgery of Lebid's signature shone through from the other side.
'One of these will do for the cab fare tomorrow', said Vasilisa aloud to himself. 'And I've got to go down to the market, anyway. They don't look too hard at them there.'
He carefully put the forged notes aside, to be given to the cab-
driver and used in the market, then locked the wad in the drawer with a tinkle of keys. He shuddered. Footsteps were heard along the ceiling overhead, laughter and muffled voices broke the deathly silence. Vasilisa said to Alexander II:
'You see - no peace . . .'
There was silence again upstairs. Vasilisa yawned, stroked his wispy moustache, took down the rug and the towel from the windows and switched on the light in the sitting-room, where a large phonograph horn shone dully. Ten minutes later the apartment was in complete darkness. Vasilisa was asleep beside his wife in their damp bedroom that smelled of mice, mildew and a peevish sleeping couple. In his dream Lebid-Yurchik came riding up on a horse and a gang of thieves with skeleton keys discovered his secret hiding-place. The jack of hearts climbed up on a chair, spat at Vasilisa's moustache and fired at him point-blank. In a cold sweat Vasilisa leaped up with a shriek and the first thing that he heard was the mouse family hard at work in the dining-room on a packet of rusks; then laughter and the gentle sound of a guitar came through the ceiling and the carpets . . . Suddenly from the floor above a voice of unusual strength and passion struck up, and the guitar swung into a march.
'There's only one thing to be done - turn them out of the apartment', said Vasilisa as he muffled himself up in the sheets. 'This is outrageous. There's no peace day or night.'
'The guards' cadets Are marching along -Swinging along, Singing a song.'
'Still, in case anything happened . . . Times are bad enough. If you kick them out you never know who you'll get instead - they are at least officers and if anything happened, they would defend us . . . Shoo!' Vasilisa shouted at the furiously active mouse.
The sound of a guitar . . .
Four lights burning in the dining-room chandelier. Pennants of blue smoke. The french windows on to the verandah completely shut out by cream-colored blinds. Fresh bunches of hot-house flowers against the whiteness of the tablecloth, three bottles of vodka and several narrow bottles of German white wine. Long-stemmed glasses, apples in glittering cut-crystal vases, slices of lemon, crumbs everywhere, tea ...
On the armchair a crumpled sheet of the humorous magazine Peep-show. Heads muzzy, the mood swinging at one moment towards the heights of unreasoning joy, at the next towards the trough of despondency. Singing, pointless jokes which seemed irresistibly funny, guitar chords, Myshlaevsky laughing drunkenly. Elena had not had time to collect herself since Talberg's departure . . . white wine does not remove the pain altogether, only blunts it. Elena sat in an armchair at the head of the table. Opposite her at the other end was