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✦ 343 ✦ 30 The Author of “The Gavriliad” by the time madame gritsatsueva left the business office’s inhospitable camp, the lowest level of office workers was already trickling into the House of Nations: couriers, the young ladies from incoming and outgoing, the next shift of telephone operators, accountants’ young assistants, and quota teenagers. Among them circulated Nikifor Lapis, a young man with an immodest gaze whose fleecy hair was cut like a sheep’s. The only people who went into the House of Nations through the front entrance were ignoramuses, stubborn people, and first-time visitors. Nikifor Lapis went into the building through the medical clinic. He was completely at home in the House of Nations and knew the shortest ways to the oases where bright springs of authors’ fees gush under the wide-leafed shade of trade publications. The first thing Nikifor Lapis did was go to the snack bar. The nickel-plated cash register played a maxixe and threw out three tickets. Nikifor broke the paper seal on his glass and ate his varenets, then consumed a cream puff that looked like a little round flower bed. He finished it all off with some tea. Then he sedately began making the rounds of his demesne. He made his first visit to the office of the monthly hunting magazine Gerasim and Mumu. Comrade Napernikov wasn’t in yet, so Nikifor Lapis moved on to The Hygroscopic Herald, the weekly mouthpiece by which pharmaceutical workers interacted with the wider world. “Good morning,” Nikifor said. “I wrote a marvelous poem.” “What’s it about?” asked the editor of the literary page. “What’s the theme? You do know, Trubetskoy, that our magazine is . . .” The editor wiggled his fingers in order to more subtly define the essence of The Hygroscopic Herald. Trubetskoy-Lapis looked down at his white canvas trousers, leaned back, and said, in a singsong voice, “The Ballad of Gangrene.” “That’s interesting,” remarked the hygroscopic personage. “It’s long past time we started promoting the idea of disease prevention in a more popular form.” Lapis quickly declaimed, Gavrila’s bane was gangrene dire, Gangrenous were his legs, his feet. In the same fine iambic quadrameter, the rest of the poem related how the benighted Gavrila didn’t go to the pharmacy in time and eventually died because he didn’t swab a cut with iodine. “You’re coming along, Trubetskoy,” the editor approved. “But it’d be good if there were a little more . . . You know?” He wiggled his fingers, but took the terrible ballad and promised to pay on Tuesday. Lapis was met hospitably in the magazine The Telegraph Operator ’s Workday. “Good thing you’ve come, Trubetskoy. We do need some poetry just now. All we’ve got is daily life, nothing but daily life. There’s no lyricism. You hear me, Trubetskoy? Something out of the mail and telegraph worker’s life, but something that’s also, you know . . . got it?” “I was just thinking yesterday about nothing other than the everyday life of the mail and telegraph worker. And this epic poem just came pouring out. It’s called ‘The Last Letter.’ Here: 344 ✦ in moscow Gavrila was a mailman brave, Gavrila kept the mail on time.” The story of Gavrila was told in seventy-two lines. At the end of the poem, the mailman Gavrila, wounded by a fascist’s bullet, still manages to deliver the letter to its addressee. “Where does the story take place?” he asked Lapis. It was a logical question. There are no fascists in the USSR, and there are no Gavrilas (members of the communications workers’ union) abroad. “What’s the big deal?” Lapis said. “It takes place here, of course, and the fascist is in disguise.” “You know what, Trubetskoy? It’d be better if you’d write something for us about a radio station.” “But why don’t you want the mailman?” “Let it sit around here for a while. We’ll take it conditionally.” Saddened, Nikifor Lapis-Trubetskoy went back to Gerasim and Mumu. By now, Napernikov was sitting at his desk. On the wall hung an enlarged portrait of Turgenev wearing a pincenez and waders with a double-barreled gun over his shoulder. Lapis’s competitor, a poet from the suburbs, was standing next to Napernikov. The old song about Gavrila began, but this time it was spiced with a hunting flavor. The creation went by the name “The Hunter’s Prayer.” Gavrila waited for...

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