You're too healthy, but you're strong, strong as a steel spike, so you ought to thrust your way upwards to the top!
Look, like this ...'
And Rusakov showed him how to do it.
Clasping the lamppost he started to wind his way up it, making himself as long and thin as a grass-snake.
A bevy of prostitutes walked by dressed in green, red, black and white hats, pretty as dolls, and called out cheerfully:
'Hey, had a couple too many? How about it, darling?'
The sound of gunfire was very far away and Shpolyansky really did look like Onegin in the lamp-lit snow.
'Go to bed', he said to the syphilitic acrobat, turning his head away slightly so that the man should not cough over him. 'Go on.' He gave the mohair coat a push with the tips of his fingers.
As his black fur gloves touched the coat, the other man's eyes were quite glassy.
The two men parted.
Shpolyansky called a cab, told the driver:
'Malo-Provalnaya', and drove away, as mohair staggered home to Podol.
That night in Podol, in his room in the librarian's apartment, the owner of the mohair coat stood naked to the waist in front of a mirror, holding a lighted candle in his hand.
Diabolical fear flickered in his eyes, his hands were shaking, and as he talked his lips quivered like a child's.
'Oh my God, my God, my God . . .
It's horrible . . .
That evening!
I'm so unhappy.
Sheyer was there with me too, yet he's all right, he didn't catch this infection because he's a lucky man.
Maybe I should go and kill that girl who gave it to me.
But what's the point?
Can anybody tell me - what would be the point?
Oh Lord, Lord . . .
I'm twenty-four and I might have . . .
Another fifteen years' time, perhaps less, and the pupils of my eyes will have changed colour, my legs will have rotted, then the lapse into mad idiotic babbling and then - I shall be a rotten, sodden corpse.'
The thin naked torso was reflected in the dusty mirror, the candle guttered in his upraised hand and there was a faint blotchy rush on his chest.
Tears poured uncontrollably down the sick man's cheeks, and his body shook and twitched.
'I ought to shoot myself.
But I haven't the strength - why should I lie to you, oh my God?
Why should I lie to my own reflection?'
From the drawer of a small, delicate, ladies' writing-desk he took out a thin book printed on horrible gray paper.
On the cover was printed in red letters:
FANTOMISTS- FUTURISTS
Verses by:
M. SHPOLYANSKY
B. FRIEDMAN
V. SHARKEVICH
I. RUSAKOV
Moscow, 1918.
The wretched man opened the book at page thirteen and read the familiar lines:
Ivan Rusakov
DIVINE RAVINE
Heaven's above - They say. And there in heaven, Deep in a vaporous Ravine,
Like a shaggy old bear Licking his paws,
Lurks the daddy of us all - God.
Time to shoot the hairy old Contrary old Bear
In his lair:
Shoot God.
When the shooting starts
Use my words as bullets,