"Women like you have a lot of freedom under the Soviet regime," said a voice in the last pencil box on the left.
"She's gone to drown herself," decided the third pencil box.
The fifth pencil box lit the primus and got down to the routine kissing.
Liza ran from street to street in agitation.
It was that Sunday hour when lucky people carry mattresses along the Arbat and from the market.
Newly-married couples and Soviet farmers are the principal purchasers of spring mattresses.
They carry them upright, clasping them with both arms.
Indeed, how can they help clasping those blue, shiny-flowered foundations of their happiness!
Citizens! have respect for a blue-flowered spring mattress.
It's a family hearth. The be-all and the end-all of furnishings and the essence of domestic comfort; a base for love-making; the father of the primus.
How sweet it is to sleep to the democratic hum of its springs.
What marvellous dreams a man may have when he falls asleep on its blue hessian.
How great is the respect enjoyed by a mattress owner.
A man without a mattress is pitiful.
He does not exist.
He does not pay taxes; he has no wife; friends will not lend him money "until Wednesday"; cab-drivers shout rude words after him and girls laugh at him. They do not like idealists.
People without mattresses largely write such verse as:
It's nice to rest in a rocking-chair To the quiet tick of a Bouret clock.
When snow flakes swirling fill the air And the daws pass, like dreams, In a flock.
They compose the verse at high desks in the post office, delaying the efficient mattress owners who come to send telegrams.
A mattress changes a man's life.
There is a certain attractive, unfathomed force hidden in its covering and springs.
People and things come together to the alluring ring of its springs.
It summons the income-tax collector and girls.
They both want to be friends with the1 mattress owner.
The tax collector does so for fiscal reasons and for the benefit of the state, and the girls do so unselfishly, obeying the laws of nature.
Youth begins to bloom.
Having collected his tax like a bumblebee gathering spring honey, the tax collector flies away with a joyful hum to his district hive.
And the fast-retking girls are replaced by a wife and a Jewel No. 1 primus.
A mattress is insatiable.
It demands sacrifices.
At night it makes the sound of a bouncing ball.
It needs a bookcase.
It needs a table with thick stupid legs.
Creaking its springs, it demands drapes, a door curtain, and pots and pans for the kitchen.
It shoves people and says to them:
"Goon! Buy a washboard and rolling-pin!"
"I'm ashamed of you, man.
You haven't yet got a carpet."
"Work!
I'll soon give you children.
You need money for nappies and a pram."
A mattress remembers and does everything in its own way.
Not even a poet can escape the common lot.
Here he comes, carrying one from the market, hugging it to his soft belly with horror.
"I'll break down your resistance, poet," says the mattress. "You no longer need to run to the post office to write poetry.
And, anyway, is it worth writing?
Work and the balance will always be in your favour.
Think about your wife and children!"
"I haven't a wife," cries the poet, staggering back from his sprung teacher.