Let them look! decided the infuriated girl.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE FURNITURE MUSEUM
Liza wiped her mouth with a handkerchief and brushed the crumbs off her blouse.
She felt happier.
She was standing in front of a notice that read:
MUSEUM OF FURNITURE-MAKING
To return home would be awkward.
She had no one she could go and see.
There were twenty kopeks in her pocket.
So Liza decided to begin her life of independence with a visit to the museum.
Checking her cash in hand, she went into the lobby.
Inside she immediately bumped into a man with a shabby beard who was staring at a malachite column with a grieved expression and muttering through his moustache:
"People certainly lived well!"
Liza looked respectfully at the column and went upstairs.
For ten minutes or so she sauntered through small square rooms with ceilings so low that people entering them looked like giants.
The rooms were furnished in the style of the period of Emperor Paul with mahogany and Karelian birch furniture that was austere, magnificent, and militant.
Two square dressers, the doors of which were crisscrossed with spears, stood opposite a writing desk.
The desk was vast.
Sitting at it would have been like sitting at the Theatre Square with the Bolshoi Theatre with its colonnade and four bronze horses drawing Apollo to the first night of "The Red Poppy" as an inkwell.
At least, that is how it seemed to Liza, who was being reared on carrots like a rabbit.
There were high-backed chairs in the corners of the room with tops twisted to resemble the horns of a ram.
The sunshine lay on their peach-coloured covers.
The chairs looked very inviting, but it was forbidden to sit on them.
Liza made a mental comparison to see how a priceless Empire chair would look beside her red-striped mattress.
The result was not too bad.
She read the plate on the wall which gave a scientific and ideological justification of the period, and, regretting that she and Nicky did not have a room in this palatial building, went out, unexpectedly finding herself in a corridor.
Along the left-hand-side, at floor level, was a line of semicircular windows.
Through them Liza could see below her a huge columned hall with two rows of large windows.
The hall was also full of furniture, and visitors strolled about inspecting it.
Liza stood still.
Never before had she seen a room under her feet.
Marvelling and thrilling at the sight, she stood for some time gazing downward.
Suddenly she noticed the friends she had made that day, Bender and his travelling companion, the distinguished-looking old man with the shaven head; they were moving from the chairs towards the desks.
"Good," said Liza. "Now I won't be so bored."
She brightened up considerably, ran downstairs, and immediately lost her way.
She came to a red drawing-room in which there were about forty pieces of furniture.
It was walnut furniture with curved legs.
There was no exit from the drawing-room, so she had to run back through a circular room with windows at the top, apparently furnished with nothing but flowered cushions.
She hurried past Renaissance brocade chairs, Dutch dressers, a large Gothic bed with a canopy resting on four twisted columns.
In a bed like that a person would have looked no larger than a nut.
At length Liza heard the drone of a batch of tourists as they listened inattentively to the guide unmasking the imperialistic designs of Catherine II in connection with the deceased empress's love of Louis Quinze furniture.
This was in fact the large columned hall with the two rows of large windows.
Liza made towards the far end, where her acquaintance, Comrade Bender, was talking heatedly to his shaven-headed companion.
As she approached, she could hear a sonorous voice saying:
"The furniture is chic moderne, but not apparently what we want."
"No, but there are other rooms as well.
We must examine everything systematically."
"Hello!" said Liza.
They both turned around and immediately frowned.