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pot and, closing the door more securely, took a small lump of sugar and a piece of cheese from some secret hiding place; after spreading a napkin on the table, he drank the coffee. After the coffee, and then a cigarette, Sergey Sergeevich shaved and put on a silk jacket with sweat-rotted arm pits; then went to his work in the savings bank, where on the first of every month he would write in the “Bulletin” that “no transactions took place this month” or “no deposits received.” Before work, Sergey Sergeevich stopped off at a little house where they exchanged cuff links for butter; in the office, in the stifling heat, the flies buzzed and Sergey Sergeevich, covered in sweat, would play “preference” with a clerk–a dunderhead; after work Sergey Sergeevich would drop in at a state cafeteria, take a meal home in a dinner-can and eat at home, laying out the napkin again, after dinner he would sleep and at dusk would go for a stroll along the boulevard.
    â€“Something philosophical about rebirth, and–

THE DEATH OF OLD ARKHIPOV
    Another dogmatist, –the same dawn. In a gray dirty murkiness the dawn began. At dawn a shepherd began playing his pipe, sorrowfully and softly, like the Permian northern dawn, and the market gardener Ivan Spiridonovich Arkhipov got up in his house at the foot of the mountain with the shepherd’s pipe; in an earthenware wash basin Ivan Spiridonovich then washed himself carefully on the porch, then, after rolling up his jacket sleeves, he milked the cow in the cowshed–and did not go, which was unlike most days, into the garden plots.
    Murkily began the dawn. In Ivan Spiridonovich’s room in his dark cottage, where you could scrape your head against the ceiling, and which had windows that went down to the ground, there stood a walnut writing desk (which had actually slid down out of the attic in the Volkovich home, as the Volkovich home was dead overhead up the side of the mountain, and the Arkhipovs were descended from the Volkovich serfs), and there was a leather-upholstered settee, on which Ivan Spiridonovich always slept
without undressing. When he had lit two candles on the table, which made the dawn through the windows look blue, Ivan Spiridonovich sat down at the table and, glasses on, with his face thin and drawn, he read from a voluminous medical text-book.–At dawn Ivan’s son, Arkhip, also woke up in his clean half of the house, and in a leather jacket came jauntily into the kitchen, drank some milk standing up and ate some rye bread. His father put the book aside, paced about the room erect, as always, and not like an old man, with his hands behind his back.
    â€œMedicine, what do you think–can one trust it?” asked the old man indifferently, staring through the window.
    â€œMedicine is a science. One can. Why?”
    â€œWell, I got this book from Daniil Alexandrovich and I’ve been flicking through it… What fevers!… I think one can too–”
    Ivan Spiridonovich stood a while by the window, staring fixedly up at the hill with the Kremlin and the Volkovich estate, like a park which had slipped down right into the ravine.
    At the crack of dawn Arkhip went off to the Executive Committee, and the old man lay down on the settee in his room–as never–he didn’t start preparing soup. And only when his son had left did Ivan Spiridonovich move over to the window and for a long time he followed his son with his eyes, and in his eyes, sunken and sullen, at that moment was sadness and tenderness. But at nine o’clock (half past six by the sun) Ivan Spiridonovich, having changed his old coat for a new one, having taken off his leggings and having wrapped a white scarf around his neck, and having pushed his oilskin peaked cap down over his ears, set off to the hospital to see Doctor Nevleninov. The road led uphill through a grove, here there was a strong smell of cherry resin and