420
BORIS PILNYAK
resignation and retired to
his
country estate. He used to travel
to the town once a week in
his
carriage, with two footmen, to do
his shopping; with a wave of his white glove he would command
the salesmen to wrap up half a pound of caviar, three quarters
of a pound of
balyk
and a whole sturgeon; one of the footmen
would then settle the bill while the other collected the purchases.
A shopkeeper once tried to shake hands with Karazin, but Kara–
zin repulsed him saying, "That is unnecessary."
Karazin wore a greatcoat of the period of Nicholas I and a
nobleman's cap. The Revolution had ejected
him
from
his
coun–
try estate and exiled him to the town, but it had left
him
his
greatcoat and cap; he wore this cap when he stood in queues,
now preceded not by
his
footmen, but by his wife.
Karazin lived off the sale of
his
antiques; in connection with
this business he would call on the museum curator. At the cur–
ator's he recognized certain articles which had been confiscated
from his country house by the will of the Revolution; he would
glance with contemptuous unconcern at these articles, but one
day he noticed the ashtray shaped like a nobleman's cap.
"Remove it," he said curtly.
"Why?" the curator asked.
"A Russian nobleman's cap cannot serve as a spitoon,"
Karazin replied. The two antiquarians quarreled. Karazin de–
parted in a rage. He never crossed the curator's threshold again.
There was a saddler in the town who remembered with
gratitude how Karazin, for whom he had worked as a groom
in his youth, had knocked out seven of his teeth with a blow of
his left hand because he had been too slow about something.
A deep silence hung over the town; the tedium was relieved
once every twenty-four hours by the wail of the riverboat's siren
and by the pealing of the town's ancient bells-that is, until
1928, when the bells were removed from many of the churches
for the use of the Metallurgical Trust. With pulleys, bearns, and
jute ropes the bells were pulled down from their high perches
on the belfries and then, poised high above the ground, they
