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”So, what about you, Dravichka; why are so quiet? Don’t you know anything about Bai Ganyo?” one of our company asked our merry friend Dravichka. “Sure I do, pal; I know lots of things, but how can I tell them?” answered Dravichka with false modesty. “What do you mean,‘how can I tell them’? If only I had your way with words!” “Well, all right, listen.” 2 One summer I was taking a stroll in Genlaus, you know the place, in Switzerland. I had gotten myself a room in a hotel and had gone out to walk around the city. The city is beautiful; the surroundings are picturesque and magnificent. I’m just walking about, no particular place in mind, staring left and right, wandering from street to street, and I come out onto the square where the opera theater is. Right across from me I see an elegant café. Wait a minute, I say to myself, why don’t I stop in and take a break. To the right of the entrance I see a glass partition with a clear view of the square, and I go inside both to drink a coffee and to watch the passersby. And what do I stumble upon in there? Three entire tables occupied by Bulgarian students! Now just try to tell me that Bulgarians don’t have a taste for luxury. In such a beautiful city, in the prettiest part of town, in the most elegant café, they have taken the best seats. Noise, smoke, matches and smoldering cigarettes on the floor; clatter, shouts, quarrels . . . Here they’re playing backgammon, there preference, across the way twenty-one. And from all sides I hear,“Six and a five! Hearts! Hand over the money! Four and a one! Quit looking at my cards! Garçon! Hit me! Double fives! Liar, you don’t have double fives! Thirty-one! Spades! Garçon! You don’t know anything about preference!  Bai Ganyo in Switzerland  I don’t take advice from socialists! Double twos! And I don’t want advice from the bourgeoisie! Trump! Bastard! Garçon! Proud of your medals now, are you? Clubs! So are you with those Russian Chifuti, then? Gentlemen, here comes the ‘sucker’! Garçon! A beer! Hey, lend me one more franc! You’re a deadbeat! Get a loan from the waiter! Double fours!” The personage who had been branded with the less-than-affectionate epithet“sucker” entered the café and greeted the students, who met him, as they say, with open arms, and he couldn’t decide which group to join, since each table was trying to lure him in. Such fondness for a sucker seemed to me, at first, inexplicable, but it wasn’t long before my perplexity was dispelled by the words that traveled from table to table at that person’s expense. Then I realized that the sucker was the son of a landowner from Argentina, in South America, a rich young man. His father was apparently sending him five hundred francs a month,half of which,with the help of twenty-one, was being regularly distributed into the pockets of our “young scholars.” And because he good-naturedly let himself be fleeced—since it gave him the pleasure of observing the curious (to him) greed with which our boys tried to coax his pocket money from him—he had been awarded the title of “sucker.” No matter what hour of the day I visited that café, starting from nine in the morning until late in the evening, I always found the same faces at the same pursuits: backgammon, preference, twenty-one. When these youths did their reading, by what means they acquired European culture remained a mystery to me. The one thing that was clear was that almost none of them spoke French even passably well.As soon as one of them so much as opened his mouth in that language, the crudeness of his intonation, his diction, and the construction of his sentences gave him away as Oriental. After another day or so, the group was joined by several bitter, nihilistic young Jews who snarled at the capitalist tyrant from the dark corners of the taverns. I don’t understand the sympathy for these dark heroes, who were capable of being simultaneously nihilists and agents for the secret police, at the same time anarchists and the lowest sort of abusers of social funds, libraries, and other institutions. Instead of making friends...

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