430
BORIS PILNYAK
giggled as he told the Bezdetov brothers of the places to which
they should go
in
search of antiques and which he had noted for
their benefit.
"But you yourself won't give in? You're not selling?" in–
quired Pavel Feodorovich.
The old man, fidgeting and giggling, replied
in
a whimper–
ing voice:
"Yes, yes, seems so. I can't, no, I can't. I'll not part with
my own. I may need it myself. We shall see what we shall see ...
yes, h'm ... I'd better tell you about my theory.... I'll outlast
you all yet!"
After lunch the guests retired to bed. They closed the creak–
ing door, stretched out on the feather-beds and silently drank
cognac out of old silver cups. By evening they were quite drunk.
Katerina sang her hymns all afternoon and Yakov Karpovich
lurked near the visitors' door, hoping they might come out or
start talking, so that he could drop in and have a chat with them.
The rooks departed with the day which they had been busily
pilfering all through sundown, and the water-carriers came on
their evening round, distributing the darkness. When the guests
came down for tea their eyes were quite dead and fixed in a
stupefied glaze. They sat down at the table, side by side and in
silence. To be within easy reach of their ears, Yakov Karpovich
settled himself right behind them. The guests sipped tea from
their saucers, lacing it with cognac, and unbuttoned their jackets.
A charcoal brazier of Catherine's day gave off its fumes near the
dining table, which was round and made of mahogany.
Yakov Karpovich talked, spluttering in his haste to have
his
say: "I have a new thought for you, h'm, a new thought.. ..
Marx's theory about the proletariat will soon be forgotten, be–
cause the proletariat itself must disappear: there you have it, my
thought! ... It follows that the whole Revolution was for noth–
ing, a mistake, h'm, of history, because, yes, in two or three gen–
erations the proletariat will have disappeared-first of all
in
the
United States, in England and in Germany. Marx wrote down
