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was not subject to the customary interpretation; the senator’s code of rules had not foreseen anything of this kind …
    As he contemplated the flowing silhouettes – the bowlers, feathers, service caps, service caps, service caps, feathers – Apollon Apollonovich likened them to points in the celestial vault; but one of those points, breaking loose from its orbit, rushed at him with dizzying speed, assuming the form of an enormous and crimson sphere, or rather, what I mean is:
    – as he contemplated the flowing silhouettes (service caps, service caps, feathers), Apollon Apollonovich saw on the corner among the service caps, among the feathers, among thebowlers, a pair of furious eyes: the eyes expressed a certain inadmissible quality; the eyes recognized the senator; and, having recognized, grew furious; perhaps the eyes had been waiting on the corner; and, having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed.
    This furious stare was a stare consciously thrown and belonged to a raznochinets with a small black moustache, wearing a coat with a turned-up collar; subsequently going more deeply into the details of the circumstance, Apollon Apollonovich more concluded than remembered something else as well: in his right hand the raznochinets was holding a little bundle tied with a wet napkin.
    The matter was so simple: squeezed by the stream of droshkys, the carriage had stopped at a crossroads (the policeman there was lifting his white baton); the stream of raznochintsy that was moving past, squeezed by the flight of the droshkys towards the stream of the ones that were racing perpendicularly, cutting across the Nevsky – this stream now simply pressed itself against the senator’s carriage, breaking the illusion that he, Apollon Apollonovich, as he flew along the Nevsky, was flying billions of versts away from the human myriapod that was trampling the very same prospect: rendered uneasy, Apollon Apollonovich moved close to the windows of the carriage, having seen that he was separated from the crowd by only a thin wall and a space of four inches; at this point he caught sight of the raznochinets ; and began calmly to study him; there was something worthy of notice in the whole of that unprepossessing figure; and no doubt a physiognomist, encountering that figure in the street by chance, would have stopped in amazement: and then in the midst of his activities would have remembered that face he had seen; the peculiarity of that face consisted merely in the difficulty of classifying that face among any of the existing categories – no more than that …
    This observation would have flickered through the senator’s head had this observation lasted a second or two longer; but last it did not.The stranger raised his eyes and – on the other side of the mirror-like carriage window, removed from him by a space of four inches, he saw not a face, but … a skull in a top hat and an enormous pale green ear.
    In that same quarter of a second the senator saw in the stranger’s eyes – that same immensity of chaos from which by the nature ofthings the foggy, many-chimneyed distance and Vasily Island surveyed the senator’s house.
    It was precisely at that moment that the stranger’s eyes widened, lit up, flashed: and it was precisely at that moment that, separated by a space of four inches and the carriage wall, quickly on the other side of the window hands were thrown up, covering eyes.
    The carriage flew past; with it, into those damp spaces, flew Apollon Apollonovich; to where from where – on clear days rose splendidly – the golden needle, the clouds and the crimson sunset; to where from where today came swarms of grimy clouds.
    There in the swarms of grimy smoke, as he leaned back against the wall of the carriage, in his eyes he still saw the same thing: the swarms of grimy smoke; his heart began to thump; and expanded, expanded, expanded; in his breast there came into being the sensation of a growing, crimson sphere that was