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DIAMONDS TO SIT ON Bezenchuk. Farther on, the hairdressers ‘Pierre and Constantine’ promised their customers a ‘Manicure’ or ‘Hair Wave in Your Own Home’. A little farther on there was an hotel with another hairdresser’s shop on the ground floor, and behind this, on a large open space, stood a pale anaemic-looking calf tenderly licking a rusty shop sign which was propped up at the side of a gate. You could only just read what was written on it: ‘The Undertakers Welcome.’ Although there were so many undertakers there were very few clients. The Welcomes had gone bankrupt three years ago, just at the time when Hippolyte first settled in the town. As for Bezenchuk, he drank so heavily that one day he tried to pawn his best show coffin.

People did not die so often in the town, and no one knew this better than Hippolyte, for he worked in a Government office where he was in charge of the register of births, marriages, and deaths.

His desk in the office was like the slab off a tombstone. The left-hand corner of it had crumbled away, gnawed by rats, and its jerry legs trembled under the weight of bulging brown files containing entries from which you could gather all the information you might want about the inhabitants and any genealogical trees that had managed to sprout on this poor provincial soil.

On Friday the 15th April 1927 Hippolyte woke up as usual at half-past seven and immediately thrust his nose under a pair of old-fashioned gold-rimmed pince-nez. He never wore spectacles. One day he decided it was unhygienic to wear pince-nez, so he ran off to the optician and bought a pair of rimless glasses with rolled gold sides to them. This happened when his wife was still alive. He liked the spectacles, but as soon as his wife told him he looked the image of a Tsarist Minister he gave them away to the porter in the yard. Although the porter was not at all short-sighted he grew used to the spectacles and wore them with pleasure.

Bezenchuk. Farther on, the hairdressers ‘Pierre and Constantine’ promised their customers a ‘Manicure’ or ‘Hair Wave in Your Own Home’. A little farther on there was an hotel with another hairdresser’s shop on the ground floor, and behind this, on a large open space, stood a pale anaemic-looking calf tenderly licking a rusty shop sign which was propped up at the side of a gate. You could only just read what was written on it: ‘The Undertakers Welcome.’ Although there were so many undertakers there were very few clients. The Welcomes had gone bankrupt three years ago, just at the time when Hippolyte first settled in the town. As for Bezenchuk, he drank so heavily that one day he tried to pawn his best show coffin.

People did not die so often in the town, and no one knew this better than Hippolyte, for he worked in a Government office where he was in charge of the register of births, marriages, and deaths.

His desk in the office was like the slab off a tombstone. The left-hand corner of it had crumbled away, gnawed by rats, and its jerry legs trembled under the weight of bulging brown files containing entries from which you could gather all the information you might want about the inhabitants and any genealogical trees that had managed to sprout on this poor provincial soil.

On Friday the 15th April 1927 Hippolyte woke up as usual at half-past seven and immediately thrust his nose under a pair of old-fashioned gold-rimmed pince-nez. He never wore spectacles. One day he decided it was unhygienic to wear pince-nez, so he ran off to the optician and bought a pair of rimless glasses with rolled gold sides to them. This happened when his wife was still alive. He liked the spectacles, but as soon as his wife told him he looked the image of a Tsarist Minister he gave them away to the porter in the yard. Although the porter was not at all short-sighted he grew used to the spectacles and wore them with pleasure.