The oilcloth-covered couch was empty.
Barbara moved her eyes and saw Basilius.
He was standing in front of the open cupboard with his back to the bed and making loud chomping noises.
Greedy and impatient, he was leaning forward, tapping his foot clad in a green sock and making whistling and squelching sounds with his nose.
He emptied a tall tin can, carefully took the lid off a pot, dipped his fingers into the cold borscht, and extracted a chunk of meat.
Basilius would have been in deep trouble even if Barbara had caught him doing this during the best times of their marriage.
His fate was sealed.
“Lokhankin!” she called out in a terrifying voice.
The startled hunger striker let go of the meat, which fell back into the pot, producing a small fountain of shredded cabbage and carrot medallions.
Basilius leaped back onto the couch with a wounded howl.
Barbara was dressing quickly and quietly.
“Barbara!” he whined. “Are you really leaving me for Ptiburdukov?”
There was no answer.
“You she-wolf you,” declared Lokhankin uncertainly, “I truly do despise you. You’re leaving me for that Ptiburdukov . . .”
But it was too late.
Lokhankin whined about love and about dying of hunger all in vain.
Barbara left him for good, dragging her travel bag with the colorful stretch pants, felt hat, decorative perfume bottles, and other objects of female necessity.
And so a period of agonizing reflection and moral suffering began for Basilius Andreevich.
There are people who don’t know how to suffer, it just doesn’t work for them somehow.
And if they do suffer, they try to get through it as fast as they can, without calling attention to themselves.
Lokhankin, on the other hand, suffered openly and grandly. He gulped his misery in large draughts, he wallowed in it.
His cosmic grief offered him yet another chance to reflect on the role of the Russian intelligentsia, as well as on the tragedy of Russian liberalism.
“Maybe this had to be,” he thought, “maybe this is the redemption, and I will emerge from it purified.
Isn’t this the fate of every refined person who dared to stand above the crowd?
Galileo, Milyukov, A.
F.
Koni.
Yes, Barbara was right, this had to be!”
His depression, however, didn’t stop him from placing an ad in the paper offering his second room for rent.
“That will give me some material support for the time being,” decided Basilius.
And then he again immersed himself in vague theorizing about the suffering of the flesh and the significance of the soul as the source of goodness.
Nothing could distract him from these thoughts, not even his neighbors’ persistent requests that he turn the lights off after he used the bathroom.
In his discombobulated state, Lokhankin kept forgetting, which irritated the frugal tenants to no end.
It should be noted that the tenants of communal apartment No. 3, where Lokhankin resided, had a reputation for being ornery, and were famous throughout the building for their frequent squabbles and fierce feuds.
The apartment was even dubbed the Rookery.
Long communal coexistence had hardened these people, and they knew no fear.
Equilibrium was maintained by competing coalitions of tenants.
At times, all the residents of the Rookery banded together against one of their number, which spelled big trouble for that person.
The centripetal force of litigiousness would pick him up, suck him into legal offices, carry him through smoked-filled courthouse hallways, and push him into countless courtrooms.
The defiant tenant would be adrift for years, searching for truth all the way to the office of the country’s president, Comrade Kalinin himself.
For the rest of his life, the tenant would speak the legalese that he had picked up in various government offices, saying “penalize” instead of “punish” and “perpetrated” instead of “did.”
He would refer to himself not as Comrade Zhukov, which had been his name since birth, but as “the injured party.”
But most often and with particular glee, he’d utter the phrase “to launch legal action.”
His life, which hadn’t been all milk and honey to begin with, would become downright miserable.
Long before the Lokhankin family drama erupted, the pilot Sevryugov, who had the misfortune of residing in apartment No. 3, had been urgently dispatched by the Society for Defense and Aviation to fly beyond the Arctic Circle.
The whole world was anxiously following Sevryugov’s progress.
A foreign expedition that had been headed for the North Pole had disappeared, and Sevryugov was supposed to find it.
The world’s hopes rested upon the success of his mission.
Radio stations from every continent talked to each other, meteorologists warned the brave Sevryugov about geomagnetic storms, ham radio operators filled the airwaves with noise, and all the while the newspaper Kurier Poranny, which was close to the Polish Foreign Ministry, was already demanding the restoration of Poland’s 1772 borders.
Sevryugov had been flying over the icy desert for a month, and the roar of his engines was heard around the world.