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“I could not and cannot drink. The company of people is worse than insomnia for me.”

“I had long intended to construct a kind of flattened world, in which everything would be in here—a world that could be locked with a key inside one’s room.”

“I felt like a man who had made an important practical discovery. What if, since ‘I’ has slipped away from me, what if I try to live in the dative case? To me: bread female peace.”

“We lived as separated drops. As strays.”

“The misfortune with ‘I’, written about above, is helped by the symbols of mathematical logic… after all, once the coordinates unclamp, and—space is vast, while the point has no magnitude.”

The journalist Stamm, whose “Letters from the Province” were signed by Idr and other pseudonyms, decided to travel—following his letters—to Moscow.

Stamm believed in his elbows and in Idr’s ability to exchange drops of ink for rubles, but he was tormented by the question of living space. He knew that on the metropolitan chessboard, not every piece had a square reserved. People who had been to Moscow warned him: it was packed, right up to the rooftops. People slept: in hallways, on back staircases, on boulevard benches, in asphalt furnaces, and in garbage cans.

Therefore, as soon as Stamm stepped from the train carriage onto the platform of the Moscow station, he began repeating the same word into dead and living, human and telephone ears: room…

But the black telephone ear, having listened, hung indifferently on the steel hook. Human ears were hidden under astrakhan and fur collars—the frost that day made the snow acutely crunchy—the word, as if passing under new and new layers of glossy carbon paper, faded and spread into muffled, thumping letters with each attempt.

Citizen Stamm was very nervous and easily impressed: when, having spun like a top on a string, he lay down that evening on three hard chairs whose backs kept shoving him onto the floor,—the phantom of the garbage can, hospitably tipping back its wooden lid, clearly presented itself to his consciousness.

But it is not said far from the truth: morning is wiser than evening. Perhaps even more intricate. Getting up at dawn from his chairs, which immediately sullenly dispersed to the corners of the room, Stamm apologized for the trouble, thanked them for the shelter, and gloomily shuffled through the half-deserted streets of Moscow, dressed in snow and frost. But before he had taken a hundred steps, almost at the very first intersection, he stumbled upon a swiftly scuttling little man in a shabby and destitute demi-saison coat. The man’s eyes were hidden under a cap, his lips tightly wrapped in a scarf. And despite this, the man saw him, stopped, and spoke:

“Ah, you too?”

“Yes.”

“Where so early?”

“I’m looking for a room.”

Stamm could not make out the answer: the words were stuck in the double wrap of the scarf. But he saw: the man reached inside his coat, searched for something with his fingers wiggling beneath the fabric, and then pulled out a narrow notebook. For a minute, he wrote something in it, blowing on his chilled fingers. And an hour later, a three-by-four-inch slip of paper, torn from the notebook, miraculously turned into a living space the size of twenty square arshins (about 100 square feet).

The desired space was found on the top floor of a huge grey building, in one of the side streets tracing curved zigzags from Povarskaya Street to Nikitskaya Street. The room seemed somewhat narrow and dark to Stamm, but when the electricity was turned on, cheerful blue roses appeared on the walls, stretching in long vertical lines across the wallpaper. Stamm liked the blue roses. He went to the window: hundreds and hundreds of rooftops, crowding right up to the windows. With a satisfied expression, he turned to the landlady—a quiet, elderly woman with a black shawl over her shoulders:

“Very good. I’ll take it. May I have the key?”

There was no key. The landlady, lowering her eyes and somehow nervously wrapping herself in the shawl, said that the key was lost, but that… Stamm did not wait to hear:

“Nonsense. I can manage with a padlock for now. I’m going for my things.”

And another hour later, the new lodger was busy at the door, screwing in the iron loop for a padlock. As happily excited as Stamm was, one trivial circumstance bothered him: while fitting the temporary bolt, he noticed that the old lock seemed to be broken. Traces of blows and deep scratches were visible on the iron box for the key. Just above, on the wooden frame, were clear marks from an axe. Stamm was very suspicious and spent a long time examining the door with a match in his hand (it was dark in the corridor connecting the room to the entrance hall). But he noticed nothing new except the distinct white number “24,” inscribed in the middle of the brown door panel and apparently necessary for counting the rooms in the building.

“Nonsense,” Stamm dismissed the thought and began unpacking his suitcase.

For the next two days, everything went as it should have. All day—from doorsteps to doorsteps, from meetings to meetings, bowing, shaking hands, talking, listening, asking, demanding. By evening, the briefcase squeezed under his elbow became strangely heavy, pulling down his arm; his steps shortened, lost their sharpness, slowed, and Stamm returned to his room only to glance at the rows of blue wallpaper roses with half-closed eyes and immediately sink into empty, black sleep. On the third evening, he managed to leave somewhat earlier. On a street clock, the minute hand jerked, showing 10:45, when Stamm approached the door of his building. Going up the stairs, he tried not to make noise as he turned the latch of the outer American lock. He then walked down the dark corridor to Room No. 24 and stopped, searching for the key in his pocket. The apartment was already dark and quiet. Only somewhere to the left, behind three walls, a primus stove hummed steadily. Finding the key, he turned it inside the iron box and pushed the door: at the same instant, something, a white spot looming at his fingers, rustled, slid down, and softly hit the floor. Stamm flipped the light switch. On the floor by the threshold, having evidently fallen from the gap of the unlatched door, lay a white banderole packet. Stamm picked it up and read the address: “To the Resident of Room No. 24.”

There was no name. Stamm folded back the corner of the notebook: sharp, jumping letters, nervously linked in a line, looked out. Puzzled, Stamm re-read the strange address, but at the moment he turned the manuscript over, it slipped out of its rather spacious banderole loop and unfolded its four-folded paper body. After this, all that remained was to turn back the first page, on which there were only two words: “The Autobiography of a Corpse.”

“Whoever you may be, man from Room 24,” the manuscript began, “to me, you are the only one of all people to whom I will manage to deliver joy: for if I had not cleared my 20 square arshins by hanging myself on the hook in the left corner near the door of your current dwelling, you would hardly have managed to find yourself a peaceful corner so easily. I write about this in the past tense: a precisely calculated future is conceived as a certain accomplished fact, that is, almost as the past.

We are not acquainted, and it seems too late for us to get acquainted, but this does not prevent me from knowing you at all: you are a provincial, for it is more profitable to rent such rooms to newcomers who are unaware of local circumstances and newspaper chronicles; naturally, you came to ‘conquer Moscow’; you have enough energy, desire to ‘build,’ to ‘make your way,’ in short, you possess that special skill that I never had: the skill of being alive.

Well, I willingly yield my square arshins to you. More precisely: I, a corpse, agree to move over a little. Live: the room is dry, the neighbors are quiet and peaceful people; outside the window—space. True, the wallpaper was tattered and dirty, but I re-papered it for you; and here, I think, I succeeded in guessing your taste: blue roses—flattened in silly verticals—you must like this. Isn’t that right?

In exchange for my solicitude and attention to you, man from Room No. 24, I ask only for simple readerly attention to the following lines of the manuscript. I do not need you, my successor and confessor, to be clever and subtle; no, I need only one extremely rare quality from you: that you be completely alive.

It matters not: for over a month now, I have been tormented by insomnia. Over the next three nights, they will help me tell what has never been told by me to anyone. Subsequently—a neatly soaped noose can be applied as the most radical cure for insomnia.

An old Indian fairy tale tells of a man forced to carry a corpse on his shoulders from night to night—until the corpse, leaning its dead but moving lips to his ear, had fully recounted the story of its long-decayed life. Do not try to cast me to the ground. Like the man in the fairy tale, you will have to shoulder the burden of my three insomnias and listen patiently until the corpse has finished its autobiography.”

Having read up to this line, Stamm once again examined the wide paper ribbon of the banderole: there were neither stamps nor postmarks on it.

“I don’t understand,” he muttered, walking toward the room door, and stopped thoughtfully at the threshold. The hum of the primus had long since subsided. Not a sound behind the walls. Stamm glanced back at the manuscript: it lay open on the table and waited. Hesitating for a minute, he obediently returned, sat down, and searched for the lost line with his eyes.