square spectacles, windows—watching me open the squeaky doors of a barn, look into corners, nooks and hidden places. … A gate in the fence and a lonely spot. The monument of the Two Hundred Years’ War. From the ground naked, stone ribs were sticking out. The yellow jaws of the wall. An ancient oven with a chimney like a ship petrified forever among redbrick waves.
It seemed to me that I had seen those yellow teeth once before. I saw them still dimly in my mind, as at the bottom of a barrel, through water. And I began to search. I fell into caves occasionally; I stumbled over stones; rusty jaws caught my unif a few times; salt drops of sweat ran from my forehead into my eyes.
Nowhere! I could find that exit from below, from the corridors, nowhere! There was none. Well, perhaps it was better that it happened so. Probably that all was only one of my absurd “dreams.”
Tired out, covered with cobweb and dust, I opened the gate to return to the main yard, when suddenly … a rustle behind me, splashing steps, and there before me were the pink winglike ears and the double-curved smile of S- . Half closing his eyes, he bored his little drills into me and asked:
“Taking a walk?”
I was silent. My arms were heavy.
“Well, do you feel better now?”
“Yes, thank you. I think I am getting normal again.”
He let me go. He lifted his eyes, looked upward, and I noticed his Adam’s apple for the first time; it resembles a broken spring, sticking out from beneath the upholstery of a divan.
Above us, not very high (about 50 meters) aeros were buzzing. By their low, slow flight and by the observation tubes which hung down, I