“Darya Petrovna gave you an abomination, only exceeded by the style of those shoes. What sort of glittering trash are they made of? Where did you get them? What did I ask you to do? Get some respectable shoes; and what do you appear in? Surely Doctor Bormental did not choose those?”
“I told him to get patent leather. Am I worse than other people? Just take a walk down the Kuznetsky (5) — they’re all wearing patents.”
Philip Philipovich turned his head and said with emphasis:
“Sleeping in the kitchen must stop. Do you understand? It is an impertinence! You are in the way there. There are women.”
The man’s face grew dark and he pouted:
“Huh — women! Hoity-toity! Fine ladies! An ordinary servant she is and puts on enough side for a commissar’s wife. It’s all that slut Zina telling tales.”
Philip Philipovich gave him a quelling glance:
“Do not dare to call Zina a slut! Do you understand?”
Silence.
“Do you understand, I ask you?”
“I understand.”
“Take that obscenity off your neck. You … ought … you just take a look at yourself in the mirror and see what kind of figure you cut! Some sort of clown. And don’t throw your cigarette butts on the floor — for the hundredth time. I don’t want to hear one more swearword in this flat — ever! Don’t spit! There is the spittoon. Don’t make a mess in the lavatory. Do not even talk to Zina any more. She complains that you wait for her in dark corners. You be careful! Who answered a patient’s inquiry The devil alone knows!’? Where do you think you are, in some kind of low dive?”
“Why are you so strict with me, Dad,” the man suddenly burst out in a tearful whine.
Philip Philipovich blushed, his spectacles glittered.
“Who are you calling Dad? What do you mean by such familiarity? I never want to hear that word again. You are to address me by my name and patronymic.”
A cheeky expression flared up in the man’s face.
“Why are you like that all the time… Don’t spit, don’t smoke, don’t go there … what is all this, I’d like to know? There’s as many rules as for passengers on the tram. Why do you make my life a misery? And as for my calling you ‘Dad’ — you’ve no call to object to that. Did I ask to have that operation?” The man’s voice rose to an indignant bark. “A fine business! They go and grab hold of an animal, slit his head open with a knife, and then they can’t face up to the result. Perhaps I didn’t give my permission for the operation. And by the same token (the man looked up at the ceiling as though recalling some kind of formula) and by the same token, neither did my next of kin. I may well have the right to sue you.”
Philip Philipovich’s eyes grew completely round, the cigar dropped from his hand. What a type! flashed through his head.
“You wish to complain that you have been turned into a man?” he demanded, eyes narrowing. “Perhaps you prefer to scavenge amongst the rubbish heaps? To freeze under the gateways? Now if I had known that!..”
“Why do you keep on at me! Rubbish heaps, rubbish heaps. I was making an honest living. And if I’d died under your knife? What have you to say to that, comrade?”
“Philip Philipovich!” Philip Philipovich exclaimed irritably. “I am no comrade of yours! This is monstrous!” A nightmare! A nightmare! the thought came unbidden to his mind.
“Well yes, of course, how else…” the man said ironically and victoriously. “We understand. Of course we are no comrade of yours! How could we be? We never had the benefit of being taught at universities, we never lived in flats with 15 rooms and bathrooms. Only now the time has come to leave all that behind you. At the present time everybody has their rights.”
Blanching, Philip Philipovich listened to the man’s reasoning. The latter paused in his tirade and demonstratively headed for the ashtray with a chewed cigarette-end in his hand. His walk was ungainly. He took a long time squashing the stub into the shell with an expression that clearly said: “Garn! Take that!” Having put out the cigarette, on his way back to the door he suddenly snapped his teeth and buried his nose in his armpit.
“Use your fingers to catch fleas! Your fingers!” yelled Philip Philipovich furiously. “I cannot conceive where you get them from.”
“Well, you don’t think I breed them specially, do you?” the man said in injured tones. “Fleas like me, that’s all there is to it,” whereupon he searched the lining of his sleeve with his finger and released a puff of light orangey-red cotton wool into the air.
Philip Philipovich raised his eyes to the garlands on the ceiling and began to drum on the table with his fingers. Having executed the flea, the man went to sit down. When he was seated he raised his hands and relaxed the wrists, letting them drop along the lapels of his jacket. His eyes appeared glued to the pattern of the parquet. He was surveying his shoes, which gave him great pleasure. Philip Philipovich glanced in the direction of the brilliantly twinkling stumpy toes and said:
“What else did you want to see me about?”
“What else? Simple enough. Documents. I need a document, Philip Philipovich.”
Philip Philipovich twitched slightly.
“Hm … the devil! A document! Yes indeed… Hm … but perhaps, somehow or other, it might be possible…” His voice sounded uncertain and doomed.
“Where’s your common sense?” replied the man with confidence. “How can one live without a document? That is—I beg pardon. But you know yourself a person without a document is strictly forbidden to exist. In the first place, the house committee…”
“What has the house committee to do with it?”
“What do you mean, what? They happened to run into me and they asked: When are you going to register as an inhabitant of this house?”
“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Philip Philipovich miserably. “They happened to run into you’, ‘they asked’. I can imagine what you told them. I forbade you to go slinking around on the stairs.”
“What do you think I am, a convict?” the man demanded on a note of surprise, and even the red pin at his throat glowed up with the awareness of injured innocence. “What do you mean by ‘go slinking around’? I take exception to such words. I walk, like everybody else.”
As he spoke he stamped his lacquered feet on the parquet.
Philip Philipovich fell silent. His eyes wandered. Self-control, he thought. One must, after all, control oneself. He made for the sideboard and downed a glass of water in one gulp.
“Excellent,” he said more calmly. “We won’t argue over words. So, what has your charming house committee to say for itself?”
“What do you suppose it says? Anyway, there’s no call to go branding them as charming. They defend people’s interests.”
“Whose interests, may one ask?”
“Everyone knows that. The working class element’s.”
Philip Philipovich’s eyes bulged.
“Why, pray, should you consider yourself a worker!”
“That’s obvious. I’m no Nepman. (6).
“Right then, let that pass. And so, what precisely does it require of me in defence of your revolutionary interests?”
“That’s obvious—you ought to register me. They say—whoever heard of anyone living in Moscow without being properly registered? That’s for starters. Then the most important thing is to have a record card. I don’t want to be taken for a deserter. Then again there’s the Union, the Labour Exchange…” (7)
“And how, pray, am I to go about registering you? — On the basis of this table-cloth, perhaps, or of my own passport? One must, after all, make allowances for the situation. Don’t forget that you are—uh—hmm—you see, you are, so to speak—an unexpected development, a being that originated in the laboratory,” Philip Philipovich spoke with ever-decreasing assurance.
The man preserved a triumphant silence.
“Excellent. What, in the last analysis, do we need in order to arrange everything to the satisfaction of that house committee of yours? You have neither name nor surname.”
“I can’t be blamed for that. All I have to do is to choose a name for myself. I announce it in the newspaper, and that’s it.”
“And what do you wish to be called?”
The man straightened his tie and replied:
“Polygraph Polygraphovich.”
“Don’t play the fool,” frowned Philip Philipovich. “I am speaking seriously.”
A sarcastic smile curled the man’s meagre moustache.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” he said gleefully and with emphasis. “I mustn’t swear, I mustn’t spit—but all I ever hear from you is ‘ Fool, fool.’ I see that in the RSFSR swearing must be for Professors only.”
Philip Philipovich flushed heavily, poured himself out a glass of water and smashed it. Having recruited his forces from another glass he thought: If he goes on this way he’ll be telling me how I should behave, and he’ll be absolutely right. I am losing my self-control.
He half turned in his chair, bowing slightly from the waist with exaggerated courtesy and with iron resolve forced out:
“I beg your par-don. My nerves are playing me up. Your choice of name seemed curious to me. Where, I would be interested to know, did you dig it up?”
“The house committee advised me. We looked through the calendar and they said to me: what do you fancy? So I chose that one.”
“There could not possibly be anything of the sort in any calendar.”
“Now you do surprise me,” the man smiled sarcastically. “Considering it’s hanging in your consulting room.”
Philip Philipovich, without getting up from his chair, lent over to the bell on the wall. Zina answered
