Arkady Ivanovich Gulagsky was drunk on poetry. He lay on his back on the roof of his father’s house singing:

“Last cloud of a storm that is scattered and over,

“Alone in the skies of bright azure you hover…”

Which was not technically true. The sky was low and dark with a thin line of vivid sunset squeezed between earth and clouds to the west. In addition, the winds were autumn-cold, and he hadn’t bothered to don a jacket before climbing out through an attic dormer window. But Arkady didn’t care. He had a bottle of Pushkin in one hand and a liquid anthology of world poetry in the other. They came from his father’s wine cellar. The cellar was a locked room in a locked basement, but Arkady had grown up in that house and knew all its secrets. Nothing in it could be kept from him. He had slipped through a casement window into the basement and then, up among the joists, found the wide, loose board that could be pulled open a good foot, and so squeezed within and, groping in the dark, stolen two bottles at random. It was an indication of his characteristic good fortune that the one happened to be the purest Pushkin, just as it was an indication of his extreme callowness that he had chosen to drink it in tandem with a poorly organized selection of foreign verses and short prose extracts in mediocre translations.

The bells began ringing from every church in the town. Arkady smiled. “How it swells!” he murmured.“How it dwells on the future!-how it tells of the rapture that impels to the swinging and the ringing of the bells, bells, bells”-he belched-“bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells-doesn’t this ever end?-rhyming and the chiming of the bells! I wonder what all the fuss is about?”