Waltz for K.

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I dropped in on Nikolai Petrovich just like that, for no reason. It was a violet, vibrant evening. Spring already possessed Moscow utterly. At least the old back streets of Sretenka were tipsy with it. A girl with a spray of pussy willows ran into me right outside his house. And she herself was like the willow: her hair loose, shivering a little, peeping out from inside herself. I knocked on the dirty window—Nikolai Petrovich lived on Lukov Street, in a communal apartment, in a lop-sided little room at the end of a dull, yellow corridor. The little passage leaned sideways, the floorboards squeaked and tended to spring loose, a light bulb hung in dismal nakedness, and the place reeked of years of misery. A sour, de­pressing smell....

Nikolai Petrovich had a cat, an enormous coal-black monster of an animal. Lifting him down from some cupboard, Nikolai Petrovich—Kolenka, Nikusha—would say: “This cat weighs as much as an expensive black pudding.”

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