"Mikhail Bulgakov. The Fateful Eggs ("Роковые яйца")" - читать интересную книгу автора

"Tis devils' work!" the priest's widow cried to heaven. "They want to
see me good and done for!"
Her words called forth a loud cock-a-doodle-doo, and lurching sideways
out of the chicken-coop, like a restless drunk out of a tavern, came a tatty
scrawny rooster. Rolling his eyes at them ferociously, he staggered about on
the spot and spread his wings like an eagle, but instead of flying up, he
began to run round the yard in circles, like a horse on a rope. On his third
time round he stopped, vomited, then began to cough and choke, spitting
blood all over the place and finally fell down with his legs pointing up at
the sun like masts. The yard was filled with women's wails, which were
answered by an anxious clucking, clattering and fidgeting from the
chicken-coop.
"What did I tell you? The evil eye," said the guest triumphantly. "You
must get Father Sergius to sprinkle holy water."
At six o'clock in the evening, when the sun's fiery visage was sitting
low among the faces of young sunflowers, Father Sergius, the senior priest
at the church, finished the rite and took off his stole. Inquisitive heads
peeped over the wooden fence and through the cracks. The mournful priest's
widow kissed the crucifix and handed a torn yellow rouble note damp from her
tears to Father Sergius, in response to which the latter sighed and muttered
something about the good Lord visiting his wrath upon us. Father Sergius's
expression suggested that he knew perfectly well why the good Lord was doing
so, only he would not say.
Whereupon the crowd in the street dispersed, and since chickens go to
sleep early no one knew that in the chicken-coop of Drozdova's neighbour
three hens and a rooster had kicked the bucket all at once. They vomited
like Drozdova's hens, only their end came inconspicuously in the locked
chicken-coop. The rooster toppled off the perch head-first and died in that
pose. As for the widow's hens, they gave up the ghost immediately after the
service, and by evening there was a deathly hush in her chicken-coop and
piles of dead poultry.
The next morning the town got up and was thunderstruck to hear that the
story had assumed strange, monstrous proportions. By midday there were only
three chickens still alive in Personal Street, in the last house where the
provincial tax inspector rented lodgings, but they, too, popped off by one
p. m. And come evening, the small town of Glassworks was buzzing like a
bee-hive with the terrible word "plague" passing from mouth to mouth.
Drozdova's name got into The Red Warrior, the local newspaper, in an article
entitled "Does This Mean a Chicken Plague?" and from there raced on to
Moscow.
Professor Persikov's life took on a strange, uneasy and worrisome
complexion. In short, it was quite impossible for him to work in this
situation. The day after he got rid of Alfred Bronsky, he was forced to
disconnect the telephone in his laboratory at the Institute by taking the
receiver off, and in the evening as he was riding along Okhotny Row in a
tram, the Professor saw himself on the roof of an enormous building with
Workers' Paper in black letters. He, the Professor, was climbing into a
taxi, fuming, green around the gills, and blinking, followed by a rotund
figure in a blanket, who was clutching his sleeve. The Professor on the
roof, on the white screen, put his hands over his face to ward off the