MAHOGANY
427
Their daughter Katerina had small yellow eyes, which
seemed to have been immobilized from endless sleep. All year
round freckles sprouted round her puffy eyes. Her arms and legs
were like logs and her bosom was as large as the udder of a Swiss
cow.
The town is a Rmsian Bruges and a Russian Kamakura.
. . . . Moscow rumbled with trucks and deeds, with projects
and achievements. Automobiles and buildings together hurtled
into space. Posters blared in the language of Gorky's GIZ,9 of
the movies and of congresses. The din of tramcars, busses and
taxis proclaimed the capital from end to end.
A train was departing from Moscow into a night as black
as soot. The hectic glow and roar of Moscow were dying away,
and they died very quickly. The fields lay wrapped in black si–
lence and this silence came to dwell in the carriage. In a double
compartment of a "soft" carriage sat two men, the brothers Pavel
Feodorovich and Stepan Feodorovich Bezdetov, connoisseurs
and restorers of mahogany furniture. It was impossible to weigh
them up from their appearance. Like merchants in the days of
Ostrovsky,10 both wore frock coats over their Russian tunics and
their faces, though clean-shaven, had the slavonic cast of Yaro–
slav!. Their eyes were vacant, yet shrewd.
The train went on dragging time across the black expanse
of the fields. In the carriage there was a smell of tanned leather
and hemp. Pavel Feodorovich extracted a bottle of cognac and a
silver liqueur glass from his
vali~e;
he poured out a glassful and
drank it down; he poured out another and handed it silently to
his brother. His brother emptied the glass and passed it back.
Pavel Feodorovich put the bottle and glass into the valise.
"Are we buying bead-work?" asked Stepan.
9. The State publishing house.
10. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-86), Moscow dramatist, who in many of
his plays described the life and manners of the merchant class.
