“What is this ruination of yours? An old hag with a crutch?[35] A witch who smashed out all the window glass and put out all the lamps? She simply doesn’t exist. What do you mean by that word?” Filipp Filippovich demanded angrily from the poor cardboard duck hanging upside down near the buffet, and answered for it. “Here’s what it is: if I, instead of operating every evening, start singing in chorus in my apartment, ruination will befall me! If I start, forgive me for saying this, start missing the toilet bowl when I piss, and so do Zina and Darya Petrovna, there will be ruination in the toilet. Therefore, ruination is not in the toilets, it’s in people’s heads! That means, when those baritones shout ‘Beat the ruination!’ I laugh.” (Filipp Filippovich’s face contorted so much that the bitten one gaped.) “I swear, it makes me laugh! It means that every one of them should smack himself on the head! And then, when he beats the world revolution, Engels and Nikolai Romanov,[36] the oppressed Malayans[37] and other such hallucinations out of his head and starts cleaning out the sheds – his actual job – the ruin will vanish on its own. You cannot serve two gods at once! It is impossible simultaneously to sweep the trolley tracks and save some Spanish beggars! No one can manage that, Doctor, and especially not people who are already two hundred years behind the Europeans in development and still can’t button their own trousers very effectively!”
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