“Just wait,” said Nikita Pryakhin, moving closer to Lokhankin, “you’ll have everything.
Champagne, caviar, everything . . .
Lie down!” he yelled suddenly, breathing either vodka or turpentine on Basilius.
“What do you mean, lie down?” asked Basilius Andreevich, beginning to tremble.
“There’s no point in talking to this bad man!” said Citizen Hygienishvili.
He squatted and started feeling around Lokhankin’s waist to unbutton his suspenders.
“Help me!” whispered Basilius, fixing a crazed stare on Lucia Franzevna.
“You should have been turning the lights off!” replied Citizen Pferd sternly.
“We’re no moneybags here, we can’t afford to waste electricity like that,” added Chamberlain Mitrich, dipping something into a bucket of water.
“Its not my fault!” squeaked Lokhankin, trying to free himself from the former Prince, lately a proletarian from the East.
“It’s nobody’s fault,” muttered Nikita Pryakhin, restraining the quivering tenant.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Nobody did anything.”
“I’m depressed.”
“Everybody’s depressed.”
“You can’t touch me.
I’m anemic.”
“Everybody’s anemic.”
“My wife left me!” cried Basilius.
“Everybody’s wife left,” replied Nikita Pryakhin.
“Get going, Nikita!” interrupted Chamberlain Mitrich, bringing some shining wet birches into the light.
“Talking won’t get us anywhere.”
Basilius Andreevich was placed face down on the floor.
His legs glowed like milk in the light.
Hygienishvili swung his arm as far back as he could, and the birch made a high-pitched sound as it cut through the air.
“Mama!” screamed Basilius.
“Everybody has a mama!” said Nikita didactically, holding Lokhankin down with his knee.
And suddenly Basilius fell silent.
“Maybe that’s how it should be,” he thought, flinching from the blows and looking at Nikita’s dark, armored toenails. “Maybe this is all about atonement, cleansing, a great sacrifice . . .”
And so while he was being flogged—while Dunya giggled sheepishly and the grandma cheered from her loft:
“Give it to him, just give it to him!”—Basilius Andreevich thought hard about the significance of the Russian intelligentsia, and that Galileo had also suffered in the name of truth.
Mitrich was the last to take up the switch.
“Well, let me try now,” he said, raising an arm. “A few good switches to his rear end.”
But Lokhankin never got the chance to taste the Chamberlain’s switches.
There was a knock on the back door.
Dunya rushed to open it. (The front door of the Rookery had been nailed shut a long time ago because the tenants couldn’t decide who would wash the stairs first.
The room with the bathtub was also permanently locked for the same reason.)
“Basilius Andreevich, some strange man is asking for you,” said Dunya, as if nothing had happened.
And indeed, everyone saw a strange man in white gentleman’s pants standing in the doorway.
Basilius Andreevich jumped up from the floor, adjusted his wardrobe, and, with an unnecessary smile on his face, turned toward Bender, who had just come in.
“I’m not interrupting anything?” inquired the grand strategist courteously, squinting.
“Well,” murmured Lokhankin, bowing slightly, “you see, I was, how should I put it, somewhat busy . . .
But . . . it looks like I’m free now?”
And he looked around inquiringly.
But there was nobody left in the kitchen except for Auntie Pasha, who had fallen asleep on the stove while the punishment was being meted out.
Only a few twigs and a white canvas button with two holes were left on the wooden floor.
“Why don’t you come in,” invited Basilius.
“But maybe I interrupted something after all?” asked Ostap, entering Lokhankin’s first room.
“No?
All right, fine.