Vladimir Nabokov. Un hombre ocupado
Vladimir Nabokov. A BUSY MAN
At sunrise Grafitski said good-bye to his guests. On the little table in the hallway there lay, he noticed, now torn open and discarded, the telegram that had so delighted his neighbor. Graf abstractly read it: "SOGLASEN PRODLENIE" ("EXTENSION AGREED"), then he returned to his room, introduced some order, and, yawning, replete with a strange sense of boredom (as if he had planned the length of his life according to the prediction, and now had to start its construction all over again), sat down in an armchair and flipped through a dilapidated book (somebody's birthday present)—a Russian anthology of good stories and puns, pu