person
Yermolay
also: Ермолай, дворник
Miguyev's caretaker, plucking at a balalaika in the yard; his offhand cover story about a washerwoman's baby vanishing from a porch inadvertently hands the panicking Miguyev an alibi, and his crude remarks about needing "a woman about" the household unwittingly needle Miguyev's guilt over Agnia.
Reading notes
- An Act of Lawlessness §34 without a woman about, that is
Yermolay's crude, unapologetic complaint -- that with Agnia gone from the household he has had to let "strange women" into the yard for lack of one of his own -- is period coarse-comic servants'-quarters talk, translated unsoftened; it lands as darkly ironic since the household's departed "own" woman is Agnia, whose absence is Miguyev's doing, not Yermolay's.