The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [22]
'My husband,' she said with a sigh, and began to unbutton her neglige, 'my husband . . .'
Red and glowing, her cloak listened intently, then asked:
'But what sort of a man is your husband?'
#
'He's a swine, and nothing more!' said Alexei Turbin to himself, alone in his room across the lobby from Elena. He had divined what she was thinking and it infuriated him. 'He's a swine - and I'm a weakling. Kicking him out might have been going too far, but I should at least have turned my back on him. To hell with him. And it's not because he left Elena at a time like this that he's a swine, that has really very little to do with it - no, it's because of something quite different. But what, exactly? It's only too clear, of course. He's a wax dummy without the slightest conception of decency! Whatever he says, he talks like a senseless fathead - and he's a graduate of the military academy, who are supposed to be the elite of Russia . . .'
Silence in the apartment. The streak of light from Elena's room was extinguished. She fell asleep and her thoughts faded away, but for a long time Alexei Turbin sat unhappily at the little writing desk in his little room. The vodka and the hock had violently disagreed with him. He sat looking with red-rimmed eyes at a page of the first book he happened to pick up and tried to read, his mind always flicking senselessly back to the same line:
'Honor is to a Russian but a useless burden . . .'
It was almost morning when he undressed and fell asleep. He dreamed of a nasty little man in baggy check pants who said with a sneer:
'Better not sit on a hedgehog if you're naked! Holy Russia is a wooden country, poor and . . . dangerous, and to a Russian honor is nothing but a useless burden.'
'Get out!' shouted Turbin in his dream. 'You filthy little rat-I'll get you!' In his dream Alexei sleepily fumbled in his desk drawer for an automatic, found it, tried to shoot the horrible little man, chased after him and the dream dissolved.
For a couple of hours he fell into a deep, black, dreamless sleep and when a pale delicate light began to dawn outside the windows of his room that opened on to the verandah, Alexei began to dream about the City.
Four
Beautiful in the frost and mist-covered hills above the Dnieper, the life of the City hummed and steamed like a many-layered honeycomb. All day long smoke spiralled in ribbons up to the sky from innumerable chimney-pots. A haze floated over the streets, the packed snow creaked underfoot, houses towered to five, six and even seven storeys. By day their windows were black, while at night they shone in rows against the deep, dark blue sky. As far as the eye could see, like strings of precious stones, hung the rows of electric globes suspended high from the elegant curlicues of tall lamp-posts. By day the streetcars rolled by with a steady, comfortable rumble, with their yellow straw-stuffed seats of handsome foreign design. Shouting as they went cabmen drove from hill to hill and fur collars of sable and silver fox gave beauty and mystery to women's faces.
The gardens lay silent and peaceful, weighed down with white virgin snow. And there were more gardens in the City than any other city in the world. They sprawled everywhere, with their avenues of chestnuts, their terraces of maples and limes.
The beautiful hills rising above the Dnieper were made even lovelier by gardens that rose terrace-wise, spreading, at times flaming into colour like a million sunspots, at others basking in the perpetual gentle twilight of the Imperial Gardens, the terrifying drop over the escarpment quite unprotected