“You need not return for two weeks,” Filipp Filippovich said, “but I do ask that you be careful.”

“Professor!” from beyond the door, in ecstasy, the guest exclaimed. “Do not worry in the least.” He giggled sweetly and vanished.

The tinkling bell flew through the apartment, the lacquered door opened, the bitten one entered, handing Filipp Filippovich a piece of paper and announced: “The dates are incorrectly given. Probably 54–55. Heart tones low.”

He vanished and was replaced by a rustling lady with a hat at a rakish angle and a sparkling necklace on her flabby and wrinkled neck. Terrible black bags sagged beneath her eyes, but her cheeks were a doll’s rouge colour.

She was very agitated.

“Madam! How old are you?” Filipp Filippovich asked very severely.

The lady took flight and even paled beneath the crust of rouge.

“I, Professor… I swear, if you only knew, my drama…”

“How old, Madam?” Filipp Filippovich repeated even more severely.

“Honestly. well, forty-five-”

“Madam!” Filipp Filippovich cried out. “People are waiting! Don’t hold me up, please, you are not the only one!”

The lady’s bosom heaved mightily.

“I’ll tell you alone, as a luminary of science, but I swear, it is so terrible-”

“How old are you?” Filipp Filippovich demanded angrily and squeakily, and his glasses flashed.

“Fifty-one,” the lady replied, cowering in fear.

“Take off your pants, Madame^[27],” Filipp Filippovich said in relief and indicated a tall white scaffold in the corner.

“I swear, Professor,” the lady muttered, undoing some snaps on her belt with trembling fingers, “That Moritz… I am confessing to you, hiding nothing…”

“‘From Seville to Granada,’” Filipp Filippovich sang distractedly and stepped on the pedal under the marble sink. Water poured noisily.

“I swear to God!” the lady said, and live spots of colour broke through the artificial ones on her cheeks, “I know that this is my last passion. He’s such a scoundrel! Oh, Professor! He’s a card shark, all of Moscow knows it. He can’t let a single lousy model get by. He’s so devilishly young!” The lady mumbled and pulled out a crumpled lacy clump from beneath her rustling skirts.

The dog was completely confused and everything went belly up in his head.

“The hell with you,” he thought dimly, resting his head on his paws and falling asleep from the shame, “I won’t even try to understand what this is, since I won’t get it anyway.”

He was awaked by a ringing sound and saw that Filipp Filippovich had tossed some glowing tubes into a basin.

The spotted lady, pressing her hands to her breast, gazed hopefully at Filipp Filippovich. He frowned importantly and, sitting at his desk, made a notation.

“Madame, I will transplant ape ovaries in you,” he announced and looked severe.

“Ah, Professor, must it be an ape?”

“Yes,” Filipp Filippovich replied inexorably.

“When will the operation take place?” the lady asked in a weak voice, turning pale.

“‘From Seville to Granada’… hm… Monday. You will check into the clinic in the morning and my assistant will prepare you.”

“Ah, I don’t want to be in the clinic. Can’t you do it here, Professor?”

“You see, I do surgery here only in extreme situations. It will be very expensive, five thousand.”

“I’m willing, Professor!”

The water thundered again, the feathered hat billowed, and then a head as bald as a plate appeared and embraced Filipp Filippovich. The dog dozed, the nausea had passed, and the dog enjoyed the calmed side and warmth, even snored a little and had time for a bit of a pleasant dream: he had torn a whole bunch of feathers from the owl’s tail. Then an agitated voice bleated overhead:

“I am a well-known figure, Professor! What do I do now?”

“Gentlemen!” Filipp Filippovich shouted in outrage. “You can’t behave this way! You have to control yourself! How old is she?”

“Fourteen, Professor… You realize that the publicity will destroy me. I’m supposed to be sent to London on business any day now.”

“I’m not a lawyer, dear fellow. So, wait two years and marry her.”

“I’m married, Professor!”

“Ah, gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Doors opened, faces changed, instruments clattered in the cupboard, and Filipp Filippovich worked without stop.

“A vile apartment,” the dog thought, “but how good it is here! What the hell did he need me for? Is he really going to let me live? What a weirdo! A single wink from him and he’d get such a fine dog it would take your breath away! Maybe I’m handsome too. It’s my good luck! But the owl is garbage. Arrogant.”

The dog woke up at last late in the evening, when the bells stopped and just at the instant when the door let in special visitors. There were four at once. All young people, and all dressed very modestly.

“What do these want?” the dog thought with surprise. Filipp Filippovich greeted them with much greater hostility. He stood at his desk and regarded them like a general looking at the enemy. The nostrils of his aquiline nose flared. The arrivals shuffled their feet on the carpet.

“We are here, Professor,” said the one with a topknot of about a half foot of thick, curly black hair, “on this matter-”

“Gentlemen, you shouldn’t go around without galoshes in this weather,” Filipp Filippovich interrupted edifyingly. “First, you will catch cold, and second, you’ve left tracks on my carpets, and all my carpets are Persian.”

The one with the topknot shut up and all four stared in astonishment at Filipp Filippovich. The silence extended to several seconds and it was broken by Filipp Filippovich’s fingers drumming on the painted wooden plate on his desk.

“First of all, we’re not gentlemen,” said the youngest of the four, who had a peachy look.

“First of all,” interrupting him as well, Filipp Filippovich asked, “are you a man or a woman?”

The four shut up and gaped once again. This time the first one, with the hair, responded. “What difference does it make, Comrade?” he asked haughtily.

“I’m a woman,” admitted the peachy youth in the leather jacket and blushed mightily. After him, one of the other arrivals, a blond man in a tall fur hat, blushed dark red for some reason.

“In that case, you may keep your cap on; but you, gracious sir, I ask to remove your headgear,” Filipp Filippovich said imposingly.

“I’m not your ‘gracious sir’,” the blond youth muttered in embarrassment, removing his hat.

“We have come to you-” the dark-haired one began again.

“First of all, who is this ‘we’?”

“We are the new managing board of our building,” the dark one said with contained fury. “I am Shvonder, she is Vyazemskaya, he is Comrade Pestrukhin, and Sharovkin. And so we-”

“You’re the ones who have been moved into the apartment of Fyodor Pavlovich Sablin?”

“We are,” Shvonder replied.

“God! The Kalabukhov house is doomed!” Filipp Filippovich exclaimed in despair and threw his hands up in the air.

“What are you laughing about, Professor?”

“I’m not laughing! I’m in complete despair!” shouted Filipp Filippovich. “What will happen to the central heating now?”

“You are mocking us, Professor Preobrazhensky!”

“What business brings you here? Make it fast, I’m on my way to dinner.”

“We, the Building Committee,” Shvonder said with hatred, “have come to you after the general meeting of the residents of our building, on the agenda of which was the question of consolidating the apartments.”

“Where was this agenda?” screamed Filipp Filippovich. “Make an effort to express your ideas more clearly.”

“The question of consolidating-”

“Enough! I understand! You know that by the resolution of 12th August of this year my apartment is exempt from all and any consolidation and resettlement?”

“We know,” Shvonder replied, “but the general meeting examined your case and came to the conclusion that in particular and on the whole you occupy an excessive space. Completely excessive. You live alone in seven rooms.”

“I live and work alone in seven rooms,” replied Filipp Filippovich, “and I would like to have an eighth. I need it as a library.”

The foursome froze.

“An eighth! Ho-ho-ho,” said the blond man deprived of his headgear, “that’s really something!”

“It’s indescribable!” explained the youth who turned out to be a girl.

“I have a reception – note that it is also the library – a dining room and my study – that’s three. Examining room, four. Operating room, five. My bedroom makes six, and the maids’ room is seven. Basically, it’s not enough… But that’s not important. My apartment is exempt and that’s the end of the conversation. May I go to dinner?”

“Sorry,” said the fourth, who looked like a sturdy beetle.

“Sorry,” Shvonder interrupted, “it is precisely the dining room and examining room that we came to discuss. The general meeting asks you voluntarily, as part of labour discipline, to give up the dining room. No one has dining rooms in Moscow anymore.”

“Not even Isadora Duncan!”^[28] the woman cried out resoundingly.

Something happened to Filipp Filippovich, the consequence of which was a gentle reddening of the face, but he did not utter a sound, waiting for what would come next.

“And the examining room too,” Shvonder continued. “The examining room can easily be combined with the study.”

“Ah-ha,” said Filipp Filippovich in a strange voice. “And where am I supposed to partake of meals?”

“In the bedroom,” all four chorused.

Filipp Filippovich’s crimson colour took on a greyish cast.

“Take food in the bedroom,” he said in a slightly stifled voice, “read in the examining room, dress in the reception room, operate in the maid’s room, and examine people in the dining room? It’s quite possible that Isadora Duncan does just that. Maybe she dines in the study and cuts up rabbits in the bathroom. Perhaps. But I am not Isadora Duncan!” he burst out, and his purple colour turned yellow. “I will eat in the dining room and operate in the operating room! Tell this to the general meeting, and I entreat you humbly to return to your affairs and allow me to take food where all normal people do – that is, in the dining room, and not in the entrance and not in the nursery.”

“Then, Professor, in view of your stubborn resistance,” said agitated Shvonder, “we will file a complaint against you higher up.”

“Aha,” Filipp Filippovich said, “is that so?” His voice took on a suspiciously polite tone. “I’ll ask you to wait a minute.”

“That’s some guy,” thought the dog delightedly. “Just like me. Oh, he’s going to nip them now, oh, he will! I don’t know how yet, but he’ll nip them!.. Hit them! Take that long-legged one right above the boot on his knee tendon. Grrrrr.”

Filipp Filippovich picked up the telephone receiver with a bang and said this into it: “Please. yes. thank you. Vitaly Alexandrovich, please. Professor Preobrazhensky. Vitaly Alexandrovich? Very glad to find you in. Thank you, I’m fine. Vitaly Alexandrovich, your operation is being cancelled. What? No, cancelled completely, just like all the other operations. Here is why: I am stopping work in Moscow and in Russia in general. Four people just came in to see me, one of them is a woman dressed as a man and two are armed with revolvers, and they terrorized me in my apartment with the goal of taking part of it away-”

“Excuse me, Professor,” Shvonder began, his expression changed.

“Sorry. I do not have the opportunity to repeat everything they said, I’m not interested in nonsense. It is enough to say that they proposed I give up my examining room, in other words, making it necessary to operate on you where I have been slaughtering rabbits until now. In such conditions I not only cannot work but I do not have the right to work. Therefore, I am ending my activity, closing up the apartment, and moving to Sochi. I can turn over the keys to Shvonder, let him perform the operations.”

The foursome froze. Snow melted on their boots.

“What else can I do?… I’m very unhappy about it myself. What? Oh, no, Vitaly Alexandrovich! Oh no! I will not continue this way. My patience has run out. This is the second time since August. What? Hm… As you wish. But at least. But only on this condition: from whomever, whenever, whatever, but it must be a paper that will keep Shvonder and everyone else from even approaching the door to my apartment. A final paper. Factual. Real. A seal. So that my name is not even mentioned. Of course. I am dead to them. Yes, yes. Please. Who? Aha. Well, that’s better. Aha. All right. I’ll pass the phone over. Please be so kind,” Filipp Filippovich said in a snake-like voice, “someone wants to speak to you.”

“Excuse me, Professor,” Shvonder said, flaring up and then fading, “you perverted our words.”

“I will ask you not to use such expressions.”

Shvonder distractedly took the receiver and said, “I’m listening. Yes. chairman of the BuildCom. We were acting in accordance with the rules… the professor is in a completely exceptional situation as it is. We know about his work. we were going to leave an entire five rooms. well, all right. if that’s the case. all right…”

Completely red, he hung up and turned.

“He really showed him! What a guy!” the dog thought in delight. “Does he know some special word? You can beat me all you like now, but I’m not ever leaving here!”

Three of them, mouths agape, stared at the humiliated Shvonder.

“This is shameful,” he muttered diffidently.

“If we were to have a discussion now,” the woman began, excited and with flaming cheeks, “I would prove to Vitaly Alexandrovich…”

“Forgive me, you’re not planning to open the discussion this minute, are you?” Filipp Filippovich asked politely.

The woman’s eyes burned.

“I understand your irony, Professor, we will be leaving. Only. As chairman of the cultural section of the building-”

“Chair-wo-man,” Filipp Filippovich corrected.

“I want to ask you,” and here the woman pulled out several bright and snow-sodden magazines from inside her coat, “to buy a few magazines to help the children of France. Half a rouble each.”

“No, I won’t,” Filipp Filippovich replied brusquely, squinting at the magazines.

Total astonishment showed on their faces, and the woman’s complexion took on a cranberry hue.

“Why are you refusing?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t you feel sympathy for the children of France?”

“I do.”

“Do you begrudge the fifty copecks?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t want to.”

A silence ensued.

“You know, Professor,” said the girl after a deep sigh, “If you weren’t a European luminary and you weren’t protected in the most outrageous manner (the blond man tugged at the hem of her jacket, but she waved him off) by people whom, I am certain, we will discover, you should be arrested!”

“For what exactly?” Filipp Filippovich asked with curiosity.

“You hate the proletariat!” the woman said hotly.

“Yes, I don’t like the proletariat,” Filipp Filippovich agreed sadly and pressed a button. A bell rang somewhere. The door to the hallway opened.

“Zina,” Filipp Filippovich shouted. “Serve dinner. Do you mind, gentlemen?”

The foursome silently left the study, silently went through the reception, silently through the entrance, and behind them came the sound of the front door shutting heavily and resoundingly.

The dog stood on his hind legs and performed a kind of prayer dance before Filipp Filippovich.