What There Was
Nastasya mumbled to herself, cleaning up the room where Rodion Romanovitch used to live. The paper was disgusting, she decided. Those dreadful yellow flowers. Yellow was a bad colour for paper in the first place. No wonder Rodion Romanovitch had gone off his head. She frowned. She'd go mad and start killing old pawnbrokers, too, if she had to live in this tiny little room with this sickening yellow paper.
Poor Rodion. Siberia sounded dreadful. Even the word 'Siberia' sounded like a curse. And she'd heard convicts had their hair shaved off. Pity. Rodion had that lovely dark hair that was so thick. She hated the thought of it swept aside in a little dark pile on the floor. Lord, she couldn't even picture the boy without his hair.
She found a dirty sock under one of the cushions on the sofa, and put it in her pocket to burn in the grate once she got downstairs. Rodion had left tiny little remembrances of his living there all over the room, if one knew what to look for. The sock was certainly his. And that inkspill on the floorboard was his fault too; she recalled his knocking that over with his elbow.
Well, he was gone now. There was no more Rodion Romanovitch. She'd clean up all the signs of Rodion that were still here, see the room rented to someone else, and then watch as someone else grew to match the ugly paper and the smallness.
Except perhaps not the horrid paper. She told herself to remember to ask the landlady if the paper could be changed.
Chapter Five.
Back to Chapter Three.