25
Cobblestones on their own are awkward to walk on; wet with rain, and they are a bother; but cobblestones wet from rain and on a steep slope, and they constituted an absolute hell. And it had been raining. So Colonel Georgievich cursed quietly to himself as he wobbled and slipped on the unkind surface of this street that wanted to dive, rather than lead, as other decent streets did, down into the hilly district on the outskirts of Moskva (Moscow). Why did all these towns have to be built on slopes, he moaned to himself. All right, so his grandmama’s place was also on a hill, but you got up and down the hill by way of a dirt track, not wretched cobblestones. The only bother there was that you had to avoid stepping on dung in the dark.
He would have come down into the town by an easier w
