And exactly at midnight something crashed, rang, scattered, and jumped in the first room. And all at once a man's high voice shrieked desperately to the music, "Hallelujah!" Those were the opening notes of the famous Griboyedov jazz band.
"The show is over! Maestro! Whoop it up! A march!" The conductor, half out of his mind, hardly aware of what he was doing, swung his baton, and the band did not start up, or even strike up, but precisely–to use the tom's revolting expression–whooped up an incredible, utterly disreputable march.
The lights went out, there was darkness for a while, and in it a nervous tenor was heard singing from far away: "There great heaps of gold do shine, and all those heaps of gold are mine..."
Then somewhere, already ceasing to comprehend anything, she saw dark cellars where some sort of lamps burned, where grils served meat sizzling on red-hot coals, where her health was drunk from big mugs. Then she saw polar bears playing concertinas and dancing the Kamarinsky on a platform.
All windows were open. In each window there was a lamp under an orange shade, and from all windows, all doors, all gateways, roofs and attics, cellars and courtyards, came the hoarse blasts of the polonaise from the opera Yevgeny Onegin.
"You see, doctor, there's some sort of a mass hypniosis here, and you must ..." He did not finish the sentence, began to gag on his words, and suddenly burst out in a tenor, "Shilka and Nerchinsk..."
