MAHOGANY
423
he was about to speak, he always wheezed and puffed for a
while. The Skudrin house had once belonged to the landowner
Vereisky who had gone bankrupt after the emancipation of the
serfs, while performing his duties as an elected justice of the
peace.
5
Yakov Karpovich, having served his term in the pre–
reform army,6 worked for Vereisky as a scribe and learned all
there was to be learned about legal juggling, and finally he
bought Vereisky's house, together with the office of justice of the
peace, when the landowner went bankrupt. The house had not
changed since the days of Catherine the Great and in the hun–
dred and fifty years of its existence it had grown as dark as its
mahogany furniture and the window panes had turned bottle–
green. Yakov Karpovich remembered well the days of serfdom.
The old man remembered everything-the master of the village
in which he had been a serf and the recruitment of conscripts for
Sebastopol; for the past fifty years he had memorized the Chris–
tian names, patronymics and surnames of every Russian minister
and people's commissar, of every ambassador to the Imperial
Russian Court and to the Soviet Central Executive Committee;
he remembered all the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Great
Powers and all the Prime Ministers, Kings, Emperors and Popes.
The old man had lost count of the years and he would say: "I
have outlived Nicholas the First, Alexander the Second, Alex–
ander the Third, Nicholas the Second and Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin. And I shall outlive Alexei Ivanovich Rykov! " 7
The old man had a very nasty smile which was both ob–
sequious and malicious, and his whitish eyes watered when he
smiled. The old man was quick-tempered, as were his sons as
5. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861 there was a legal reform provid–
ing for the election of law-enforcement officers.
6. Serfs were often required to serve as long as twenty-five years in the
army before the Emancipation.
7. Rykov, as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, was the
nominal successor to Lenin as head of the Soviet State. He was shot
in 1938.
