428
BORIS PILNYAK
"Absolutely," replied Pavel.
Half an hour elapsed in silence. The train dragged time
with it, halting it only at the stations. Pavel extracted the bottle
and the glass again, drank, poured out some for
his
brother, and
then put them away.
"Shall we give the girls a treat? And are we buying china?"
asked Stepan.
"Absolutely," Pavel replied.
Mter another half hour in silence, the brothers drank again.
"Are we buying so-called Russian tapestries?" asked Stepan.
"Absolutely," replied Pavel.
By midnight the train arrived at a village on the Volga
which is famed throughout Russia for its craft in the making of
boots. The smell of leather grew stronger and stronger. Pavel
poured out a last nip for each of them.
"We're not buying anything later than Alexander the
First?" asked Stepan.
"Absolutely not," replied Pavel.
Without speaking a word Pavel Feodorovich hired a
cart
for forty kopecks to take them to the steamship office.
By midday the steamer arrived in the seventeenth and eigh–
teenth century Russian Bruges. The town sloped down to the
Volga with its churches, its citadel and the ruins left over from
the fire in 1920, when a good portion of the central part of the
town had been gutted. The fire had started in the Commissariat
of Food Supplies. Instead of trying to extinguish the fire, they
started tracking down members of the local bourgeoisie and put
them in prison as hostages. They hunted them for three days-–
for as many days as the town burned, and stopped hunting them
when the fire had burned itself out without any intervention on
the part of the fire-brigade or the population. At the hour when
the antique dealers disembarked, flocks of frantic jackdaws
were wheeling over the town, which was filled with the weird
