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I returned to Berlin a half-year later. One Sunday morning I felt an urge to see Martin. On weekdays you could get through via the shop, since his apartment-three rooms and kitchen-was directly behind it. But of course on a Sunday morning the shop was closed, and the window had shut its grated visor. I glanced rapidly through the grating at the red and gold boxes, at the swarthy cigars, at the modest inscription in a corner: "Russian spoken here," remarked that the display had in some way grown even gayer, and walked through the courtyard to Martin's place. Strange thing-Martin himself appeared to me even jollier, jauntier, more radiant than before. And Petya was downright unrecognizable: his oily, shaggy locks were combed back, a broad, vaguely bashful smile did not leave his lips, he kept a kind of sated silence, and a curious, joyous preoccupation, as if he carried a precious cargo within him, softened his every movement. Only the mother was pale as ever, and the same touching tic flashed across her face like faint summer lightning. We sat in their neat parlor, and I knew that the other two rooms-Petya's bedroom and that of his parents-were just as cozy and clean, and I found that an agreeable thought. I sipped tea with lemon, listened to Martin's mellifluous speech, and I could not rid myself of the impression that something new had appeared in their apartment, some kind of joyous, mysterious palpitation, as happens, for instance, in a home where there is a young mother-to-be. Once or twice Martin glanced with a preoccupied air at his son, whereupon the other would promptly rise, leave the room, and, on his return, nod discreetly toward his father, as if to say everything was going splendidly.

There was also something new and, to me, enigmatic in the old man's conversation. We were talking about Paris and the French, and suddenly he inquired, "Tell me, my friend, what's the largest prison in Paris!¹" I replied I didn't know and started telling him about a French revue that featured blue-painted women.

"You think that's something!" interrupted Martin. "They say, for example, that women scratch the plaster off the walls in prison and use it to powder their faces, necks, or whatever." In confirmation of his words he fetched from his bedroom a thick tome by a German crim-inologist and located in it a chapter about the routine of prison life. I tried changing the subject, but, no matter what theme I selected, Martin steered it with artful convolutions so that suddenly we would find ourselves discussing the humaneness of life imprisonment as opposed to execution, or the ingenious methods invented by criminals to break out into the free world.

I was puzzled. Petya, who loved anything mechanical, was picking with a penknife at the springs of his watch and chuckling to himself. His mother worked at her needlepoint, now and then nudging the toast or the jam toward me. Martin, clutching his disheveled beard with all five fingers, gave me a sidelong flash of his tawny eye, and suddenly something within him let go. He banged the palm of his hand on the table and turned to his son. "I can't stand it any longer, Petya-I'm going to tell him everything before I burst." Petya nodded silently. Martin's wife was getting up to go to the kitchen. "What a chatterbox you are," she said, shaking her head indulgently. Martin placed his hand on my shoulder, gave me such a shake that, had I been an apple tree in the garden, the apples would literally have come tumbling off me, and glanced into my face. "I'm warning you," he said. "I'm about to tell you such a secret, such a secret . . . that I just don't know. Mind you-mum's the word! Understand?"

And, leaning close to me, bathing me in the odor of tobacco and his own pungent old-man smell, Martin told me a truly remarkable tale. [In this narrative, all traits and distinguishing marks that might hint at the identity of the real Martin are of course deliberately distorted. I mention this so that curiosity seekers will not search in vain for the "tobacco shop in the corner building." -V.N.]