All this was unbelievable, and at the same time it was actually happening, I clearly realized with my brain that it was all true. But my brain, watching it all at a distance, kept silent, prompting nothing, just giving way to curiosity. “So, Karamora,” I said to myself, “right about face!”

I was still expecting, I think, that someone would cry out:

“Stop. Where are you going?”

But no one raised a voice.

In the beginning—the first month or two—Simonov alone stood out among all the improbable facts as the one firm reality.

He was a man in the fifties, of middle height and stocky build. His gray hair was cut short. He had an indefinitely shaped “Russian” nose, soft, slightly reddish, a small inconspicuous mustache, light eyes, glancing at the world calmly, even a trifle sleepily. There are many people of that appearance. One meets them often, they are to be found in every profession, working in innumerable institutions, living on every street, in every town. I used to look upon them as the commonest of types. And it was precisely this commonness of his appearance which lent Simonov in my eyes the peculiar character of reality in all the improbable atmosphere in which I lived and in the midst of the unusual work which I performed. All that he said revealed the attitude of the official already familiar to me, the official to whom the fundamental and final aims of his work are either incomprehensible or alien. Badly informed in questions of history and politics, he was completely indifferent to the interests of the monarchy, of the Czar, to all that he was called to protect, and he indicted the bourgeoisie with particular gusto.

I asked him why he had undertaken so troublesome a job.

“Obviously, because of the pleasure it causes me,” he said in his low, husky voice, tapping his cigarette- holder against the lid of his cigarette case, and smiling with a lazy, slightly forced smile, he continued:

“You are a revolutionary for your own pleasure. I—for mine—enter into a combat with you, try to catch you, succeed in doing so. And then I suggest: let’s hunt together! That’s all to the good. I find my work still more interesting because of it.”

For the first time on that occasion I vaguely felt that there was something wrong, something treacherous in him, and soon I became convinced that under a common appearance this man concealed thoughts of an unusual character, or, maybe, they were the usual thoughts of the man-in-the-street, in an extreme form.

I tried to talk to him of all the inequality existing in the world; this, it is affirmed, is the main source of all the miseries of life. In answer he shrugged his shoulders, blew out clouds of smoke, and replied calmly:

“What have I to do with it? I didn’t arrange the world that way and I don’t care. Neither should you care. You’ve been messed about with by the intelligentsia. You read the wrong books. You ought to read Brehm’s Life of Animals.”

A cigarette always stuck between his teeth, his face buried in a cloud of smoke, he half closed his eyes, stared at the ceiling and said with a drawl:

“There’s no greater joy than to make a fool of a person, get the better of him. Remember your games as a child and follow them up through your life: rounders and aunt Sally, then the games with the girls, games of cards—all one’s life is a game. Among you fellows there are also quite a number who play a game with yourselves.”

With these words he reminded me of the party struggle, the joy I experienced when I was able to “outwit” my comrades.