Entry 20

20


My baggage--the handbag--was found.

Those peculiar things can happen only in the present Russia. She is
like a good make of automobile after a wreck. Everything seems to
be crushed and broken--machinery, wheels, glass, body.... Still some
parts are strong enough to keep moving. So miraculously there moved a
part, which brought my handbag here from Moscow,--the very first ray
of sun in my existence for a long time.

I came to the depot this morning--I had been coming every day since
Schmelin gave me the baggage check--and saw a few men unloading a
baggage coach. I approached them.

"Hello," I said to a tartar whose abominable face was covered with
pock marks, (nowadays one must always address the most hostile looking
person in a crowd, never the most sympathetic, for one should not show
any weakness to the mob), "any work"?

"Hello,--yourself," the tartar answered grouchily and without
looking at me, "there is. Don't let them skin you. Ask fifty rubles,
understand?"

"Is that so?" I said, spitting through my front teeth onto a sidewalk
covered with gleaming white snow, "not me, damn them! Whose baggage?"

They did not answer--in their language it meant 'don't know, don't
care, and go to hell!'

On the coach I saw "Moscow Special" written with white stone and I
decided to take one more chance and ask for my handbag, presenting my
luggage check.

"It came at last," said the man in charge of the luggage depot, "thank
God I won't see your muzzle any more. What's in it?"

"Since when has it been your business, your burjooi honor?" I said,
"You did not pay me for buying my belongings, so better keep your trap
shut!"

I took the dear old bag--it was Maroosia's before, and came home.
What did Mlle. Goroshkin put in the bag in Moscow? I opened the rusty
lock--and found my silver toilet kit, razors, "La Question du
Maroc," on which the shaving soap had made a big yellow spot, Laferme
cigarettes, some linen (the thing I need the most), night slippers,
manicuring box, and poor Maroossia's fan,--she wired me to take it to
Gurzoof in the last telegram I ever got from her.

The fan was fragrant with her perfume on it; so I shed a few tears. On
the inside of the bag was written "All well, write often," and on the
bottom of the bag--was this book of my notes. I had decided to sell
the silver kit and the fan and get some money as I was very short of
it. Both the fan and the silver outfit looked so inharmonious in my
little room with a small window on a triste court with a yard full of
blindingly