He searched in his pants’ pockets for something to wipe his hands and face on — he had never had a kerchief before, but maybe…? There was nothing in his jacket either.
“As for Krapin,” Artiom said. “He cut his old shirts into accurate squares for kerchiefs… Here I’m always considering him to be beneath me — he’s a policeman, after all, and I know by heart several long poems of Andrei Bely — but he’s got kerchiefs, and I don’t.”
The thought of Krapin was a warm, familial one… Artiom for some reason was convinced that he would go back there tomorrow, and his bed would still be covered in Galia’s sheets — the fox-chef hadn’t taken them back — and all of it would happen, and no one, not a single person, would ever know how he, choking from fear, sat in a wood pile.
Artiom wiped his hands on
