The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 11

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the ca.n.a.l, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pa.s.s, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the ca.n.a.l's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which G.o.d so generously surrounds human loneliness.

THE FIGHT.

IN THE morning, if the sun was inviting, I would leave Berlin to go swimming. At the end of the trolley line, on a green bench, sat the motormen, stocky fellows in enormous blunt-toed boots, resting, savoring their smokes, from time to time rubbing their ma.s.sive, metal-redolent hands, and watching a man in a wet leather ap.r.o.n water the flowering sweetbriar along the tracks nearby; the water gushed in a flexible silvery fan from the glistening hose, how flying in the sunlight, now smoothly swooping over the palpitating shrubs. Clutching my rolled-up towel under my arm, I pa.s.sed by them, striding swiftly toward the edge of the forest. There, the thickly growing slender pine trunks, rough and brown below, flesh-colored higher up, were speckled with fragments of shadow, and the sickly gra.s.s underneath was strewn with sc.r.a.ps of newspaper and sc.r.a.ps of sunlight that seemed to supplement each other. Suddenly the sky gaily parted the trees, and I descended along the silvery waves of sand toward the lake, where the voices of bathers would burst forth and subside and dark heads could be glimpsed bobbing on the smooth, luminous surface. All over the sloping bank lay supine or p.r.o.ne bodies with every possible shade of suntan; some still had a pinkish rash on their shoulder blades, others glowed like copper or were the color of strong coffee with cream. I would discard my shirt, and right away the sun overwhelmed me with its blind tenderness.

And every morning, punctually at nine o'clock, the same man would appear next to me. He was a bowlegged, elderly German in trousers and jacket of semimilitary cut, with a large bald head that the sun had smoothed to a red sheen. He brought along an umbrella the color of an aged raven and a neatly tied bundle, which immediately separated into a gray blanket, a beach towel, and a batch of newspapers. He carefully spread the blanket on the sand and, stripping to the bathing trunks he had providently worn under his trousers, arranged himself most comfortably on the blanket, adjusted the umbrella over his head so that his face alone would be in the shade, and went to work on his newspapers. I observed him out of the corner of my eye, noting the dark, woolly, combed-looking growth on his strong crooked legs, and his plump belly with the deep navel gazing heavenward like an eye, and I amused myself trying to guess who this pious sun-worshipper might be.

We spent hours lolling on the sand. Summer clouds glided by in a fluctuating caravan-camel-shaped clouds, tent-shaped clouds. The sun tried to slip in between them, but they would sweep over it with their blinding edge; the air grew dim, then the sun ripened again, but it was the opposite bank that would be illumined first-we remained in the even, colorless shade, while over there the warm light had already spread itself. The shadows of the pines revived on the sand; small naked figures flared up, modeled out of sunlight; and, all of a sudden, like an enormous happy oculus, the radiance opened to engulf our side as well. Then I jumped to my feet, and the gray sand softly scalded my soles as I ran toward the water, which I parted noisily with my body. How nice it was to dry off afterwards in the blazing sun and feel its stealthy lips greedily drink the cool pearls remaining on one's body!

My German slaps shut his umbrella and, his crooked calves cautiously quivering, descends in his turn toward the water, where he first wets his head, as elderly bathers do, and then starts swimming with sweeping gestures. A vendor of hard candy pa.s.ses along the lakesh.o.r.e, hawking his wares. Two others, in bathing suits, hurry past with a pail of cuc.u.mbers, and my neighbors in the sun, somewhat coa.r.s.e, beautifully built fellows, pick up the terse calls of the vendors in artful imitation. A naked infant, all black because of the wet sand sticking to him, waddles past me, and his soft little beak bounces drolly between his plump, clumsy little legs. Close by sits his mother, an attractive young woman, half undressed; she is combing out her long dark hair, holding the hairpins between her teeth. Farther, at the very edge of the forest, sun-browned youths play a hard game of catch, flinging their soccer ball one-handed in a motion that revives the immortal gesture of the Discobolus; and now a breeze sets the pines aboil with an Attic rustle, and I dream that our entire world, like that large, firm ball, has flown back in a wondrous arc into the grip of a naked pagan G.o.d. Meanwhile an airplane, with an aeolian exclamation, soars above the pines, and one of the swarthy athletes interrupts his game to gaze at the sky where two blue wings speed toward the sun with a rapturous Daedalian hum.

I wish to tell all this to my neighbor when, breathing heavily, and baring his uneven teeth, he comes out of the water and lies down again on the sand, and it is only my lack of German words that keeps him from understanding me. He does not understand me but still answers with a smile that involves his entire being, the brilliant bald spot on his head, the black thicket of his mustache, his jolly meaty belly with a woolly path running down its center.

His profession was revealed to me, in time, by sheer accident. Once, at twilight, when the roar of motorcars became m.u.f.fled and the hillocks of oranges on hawkers' carts acquired a southern brightness in the blue air, I happened to stroll through a distant district and drop into a tavern to quench the evening thirst so familiar to urban vagabonds. My merry German stood behind the glistening bar, letting a thick yellow stream spurt from the spigot, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g off the foam with a small wooden spatula, and letting it spill lavishly over the rim. A ma.s.sive, ponderous wagon driver with a monstrous gray mustache leaned on the bar, watching the spigot and listening to the beer, which hissed like horse urine. The host raised his eyes, grinned a friendly grin, poured a beer for me too, and flung my coin into the drawer with a clink. Next to him, a young girl in a checkered dress, fair-haired, with pointed pink elbows, was washing gla.s.ses and nimbly drying them with a squeaky cloth. That same night, I learned that she was his daughter, that her name was Emma, and that his last name was Krause. I sat down in a corner and started unhurriedly sipping the light, white-maned beer, with its faintly metallic aftertaste. The tavern was of the usual type-a couple of posters advertising drinks, some deer antlers, and a low, dark ceiling festooned with paper flaglets, remnants of some festival or other. Beyond the bar, bottles glistened on the shelves, and higher up an old-fashioned, hut-shaped cuckoo clock tocked resonantly. A cast-iron stove dragged its annulate pipe along the wall, then folded it into the overhead motley of the flags. The dirty white of the cardboard beer-mug coasters stood out against the bare st.u.r.dy tables. At one of the tables, a sleepy man with appetizing folds of fat on his nape, and a glum, white-toothed fellow-a typesetter or an electrician, judging by his appearance-were shooting c.r.a.ps. All was quiet and peaceful. Unhurriedly, the clock kept breaking off dry little sections of time. Emma clinked her gla.s.ses and kept glancing at the corner where, in a narrow mirror bisected by the gold lettering of an advertis.e.m.e.nt, was reflected the sharp profile of the electrician and his hand holding up the conical black cup with the dice.

The next morning, I walked again past the stocky motormen, past the fan of spraying water in which momentarily hovered a glorious rainbow, and found myself again on the sunlit sh.o.r.e, where Krause was already reclining. He thrust his sweaty face out from under his umbrella and began talking-about the water, about the heat. I lay down, squinting to keep out the sun, and when I reopened my eyes everything around me was a light blue. All of a sudden, among the pines of the sun-dappled lakeside road, a small van drove up, followed by a policeman on a bicycle. Inside the van, yelping desperately, a small captured dog thrashed about. Krause raised himself up and yelled at the top of his voice, "Watch out! Dogcatcher!" At once someone took up that shout, and it pa.s.sed from throat to throat, curving around the circular lake, outdistancing the catcher, and the forewarned owners ran for their dogs, hurriedly muzzled them, and clicked on leashes. Krause listened with pleasure as the resounding repet.i.tions receded, and said with a good-natured wink, "There. That's the last one he'll get."

I began to visit his tavern fairly often. I very much liked Emma-her naked elbows, the small birdlike face, the vapid, tender eyes. But what I liked most was the way she looked at her lover, the electrician, as he lazily leaned on the bar. I had a side view of him-the baleful, malevolent wrinkle beside his mouth, his glowing, wolflike eye, the blue bristles on his sunken, long-unshaven cheek. She looked at him with such apprehension and such love when he spoke to her while transfixing her with his unflinching gaze, and she nodded so trustingly, with her pale lips half open, that I, in my corner, had a blissful sensation of joy and well-being, as if G.o.d had confirmed to me the immortality of the soul or a genius had praised my books. I also committed to memory the electrician's hand, wet with beer foam; the thumb of that hand gripping the mug; the huge black nail with a crack in the middle.

The last time I was there, the evening, as I remember it, was muggy and pregnant with the promise of an electrical storm. Then the wind began gusting violently and people in the square ran for the subway stairs; in the ashen dark outside, the wind tore at their clothes as in the painting The Destruction of Pompeii. The host felt hot in the dim little tavern; he had unb.u.t.toned his collar and was gloomily eating his supper in the company of two shopkeepers. It was getting late and the rain was rustling against the windowpanes when the electrician arrived. He was soaking wet and chilled, and muttered something in annoyance when he saw that Emma was not at the bar. Krause kept silent, munching on a boulder-gray sausage.

I sensed that something extraordinary was about to happen. I had had a lot to drink, and my soul-my avid, sharp-eyed inner self-craved a spectacle. It all began very simply. The electrician walked to the bar, casually poured himself a gla.s.s of brandy from a flat bottle, swallowed, wiped his mouth with his wrist, gave his cap a slap, and headed for the door. Krause lowered his knife and fork crosswise onto his plate and loudly said, "Wait! That'll be twenty pfennigs!"

The electrician, with his hand already on the doork.n.o.b, looked back. "I thought I was at home here."

"You don't intend to pay?" asked Krause.

Emma suddenly appeared from beneath the clock at the back of the bar, looked at her father, then at her lover, and froze. Above her, the cuckoo hopped out of its hut and hid again.

"Leave me alone," the electrician said slowly, and went out.

Whereupon, with astounding agility, Krause rushed after him, yanking open the door.

I drank the rest of my beer and ran out too, feeling a gust of moist wind rush pleasantly over my face.

They were standing face-to-face on the black, rain-l.u.s.trous sidewalk, and both were yelling. I could not catch all the words in the crescendo of this roaring ruckus, but there was one word that was distinctly and continually repeated: twenty, twenty, twenty. Several people had already stopped to have a look at the quarrel-I myself was enthralled by it, by the reflections of the streetlamp on the distorted faces, the strained sinew in Krause's naked neck; for some reason it brought back a splendid scuffle I had once had in a seaport dive with a beetle-black Italian, during which my hand had somehow got into his mouth and I had fiercely tried to squeeze, to tear, the wet skin inside his cheek.

The electrician and Krause yelled louder and louder. Past me slipped Emma and stopped, not daring to approach, only shouting in desperation, "Otto! Father! Otto! Father!" And at each of her shouts the swell of a contained, expectant cackle ran through the small crowd.

The two men switched to hand-to-hand combat eagerly, with a m.u.f.fled thumping of fists. The electrician hit in silence, while Krause emitted a short grunt with every blow. Skinny Otto's back bent; some dark blood began to trickle from one nostril. Suddenly he tried to seize the heavy hand that was pummeling his face, but, failing in this, swayed and crashed facedown onto the sidewalk. People ran toward him, screening him from my sight.

I remembered having left my hat on the table and went back into the tavern. Inside, it seemed oddly light and quiet. Emma sat at a corner table with her head lying on an outstretched arm. I went over to her and stroked her hair. She raised her tear-stained face, then dropped her head again. I cautiously kissed the delicate part in her kitchen-scented hair, found my hat, and walked out.

In the street, a crowd was still gathered. Krause, breathing heavily, the way he did when he came out of the lake, was explaining something to a policeman.

I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was right in this affair. The story could have been given a different twist, and made to depict compa.s.sionately how a girl's happiness had been mortified for the sake of a copper coin, how Emma spent the whole night crying, and how, after falling asleep toward morning, she saw again, in her dreams, the frenzied face of her father as he pummeled her lover. Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles a.s.sembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way.

THE RETURN OF CHORB.

THE KELLERS left the opera house at a late hour. In that pacific German city, where the very air seemed a little l.u.s.terless and where a transverse row of ripples had kept shading gently the reflected cathedral for well over seven centuries, Wagner was a leisurely affair presented with relish so as to overgorge one with music. After the opera Keller took his wife to a smart nightclub renowned for its white wine. It was past one in the morning when their car, flippantly lit on the inside, sped through lifeless streets to deposit them at the iron wicket of their small but dignified private house. Keller, a thickset old German, closely resembling Oom Paul Kruger, was the first to step down on the sidewalk, across which the loopy shadows of leaves stirred in the streetlamp's gray glimmer. For an instant his starched shirtfront and the droplets of bugles tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his wife's dress caught the light as she disengaged a stout leg and climbed out of the car in her turn. The maid met them in the vestibule and, still carried by the momentum of the news, told them in a frightened whisper about Chorb's having called. Frau Keller's chubby face, whose everlasting freshness somehow agreed with her Russian merchant-cla.s.s parentage, quivered and reddened with agitation.

"He said she was ill?"

The maid whispered still faster. Keller stroked his gray brush of hair with his fat palm, and an old man's frown overcast his large, somewhat simian face, with its long upper lip and deep furrows.

"I simply refuse to wait till tomorrow," muttered Frau Keller, shaking her head as she gyrated heavily on one spot, trying to catch the end of the veil that covered her auburn wig. "We'll go there at once. Oh dear, oh dear! No wonder there's been no letters for quite a month."

Keller punched his gibus open and said in his precise, sightly guttural Russian: "The man is insane. How dare he, if she's ill, take her a second time to that vile hotel?"

But they were wrong, of course, in thinking that their daughter was ill. Chorb said so to the maid only because it was easier to utter. In point of fact he had returned alone from abroad and only now realized that, like it or not, he would have to explain how his wife had perished, and why he had written nothing about it to his in-laws. It was all very difficult. How was he to explain that he wished to possess his grief all by himself, without tainting it by any foreign substance and without sharing it with any other soul? Her death appeared to him as a most rare, almost unheard-of occurrence; nothing, it seemed to him, could be purer than such a death, caused by the impact of an electric stream, the same stream which, when poured into gla.s.s receptacles, yields the purest and brightest light.

Ever since that spring day when, on the white highway a dozen kilometers from Nice, she had touched, laughing, the live wire of a storm-felled pole, Chorb's entire world ceased to sound like a world: it retreated at once, and even the dead body that he carried in his arms to the nearest village struck him as something alien and needless.

In Nice, where she had to be buried, the disagreeable consumptive clergyman kept in vain pressing him for details: Chorb responded only with a languid smile. He sat daylong on the shingly beach, cupping colored pebbles and letting them flow from hand to hand; and then, suddenly, without waiting for the funeral, he traveled back to Germany.

He pa.s.sed in reverse through all the spots they had visited together during their honeymoon journey. In Switzerland where they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he recognized nothing except the hotels. As to the Black Forest, through which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did not impede memory. And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving-to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in pa.s.sing-light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of gla.s.s licked smooth by the sea waves. He thought that if he managed to gather all the little things they had noticed together-if he re-created thus the near past-her image would grow immortal and replace her forever. Nighttime, though, was unendurable. Night imbued with sudden terror her irrational presence. He hardly slept at all during the three weeks of his trek-and now he got off, quite drugged with fatigue, at the railway station, which had been last autumn their point of departure from the quiet town where he had met and married her.

It was around eight o'clock of the evening. Beyond the houses the cathedral tower was sharply set off in black against a golden-red stripe of sunset. In the station square stood in file the selfsame decrepit fiacres. The identical newspaper seller uttered his hollow crepuscular cry. The same black poodle with apathetic eyes was in the act of raising a thin hindleg near a Morris pillar, straight at the scarlet lettering of a playbill announcing Parsifal.

Chorb's luggage consisted of a suitcase and a big tawny trunk. A fiacre took him through the town. The cabby kept indolently flapping his reins, while steadying the trunk with one hand. Chorb remembered that she whom he never named liked to take rides in cabs.

In a lane at the corner of the munic.i.p.al opera house there was an old three-storied hotel of a disreputable type with rooms that were let by the week, or by the hour. Its black paint had peeled off in geographical patterns; ragged lace curtained its bleary windows; its inconspicuous front door was never locked. A pale but jaunty lackey led Chorb down a crooked corridor reeking of dampness and boiled cabbage into a room which Chorb recognized-by the picture of a pink baigneuse in a gilt frame over the bed-as the very one in which he and his wife had spent their first night together. Everything amused her then-the fat man in his shirtsleeves who was vomiting right in the pa.s.sage, and the fact of their having chosen by chance such a beastly hotel, and the presence of a lovely blond hair in the washbasin; but what tickled her most was the way they had escaped from her house. Immediately upon coming home from church she ran up to her room to change, while downstairs the guests were gathering for supper. Her father, in a dress coat of st.u.r.dy cloth, with a flabby grin on his apish face, clapped this or that man on the shoulder and served ponies of brandy himself. Her mother, in the meantime, led her closest friends, two by two, to inspect the bedroom meant for the young couple: with tender emotion, whispering under her breath, she pointed out the colossal eiderdown, the orange blossoms, the two pairs of brand-new bedroom slippers-large checkered ones, and tiny red ones with pompons-that she had aligned on the bedside rug, across which a Gothic inscription ran: "WE ARE TOGETHER UNTO THE TOMB." Presently, everybody moved toward the hors d'oeuvres-and Chorb and his wife, after the briefest of consultations, fled through the back door, and only on the following morning, half an hour before the express train was to leave, reappeared to collect their luggage. Frau Keller had sobbed all night; her husband, who had always regarded Chorb (dest.i.tute Russian emigre and litterateur) with suspicion, now cursed his daughter's choice, the cost of the liquor, the local police that could do nothing. And several times, after the Chorbs had gone, the old man went to look at the hotel in the lane behind the opera house, and henceforward that black, purblind house became an object of disgust and attraction to him like the recollection of a crime.

While the trunk was being brought in, Chorb kept staring at the rosy chromo. When the door closed, he bent over the trunk and unlocked it. In a corner of the room, behind a loose strip of wallpaper, a mouse made a scuffing noise and then raced like a toy on rollers. Chorb turned on his heel with a start. The lightbulb hanging from the ceiling on a cord swayed ever so gently, and the shadow of the cord glided across the green couch and broke at its edge. It was on that couch that he had slept on his nuptial night. She, on the regular bed, could be heard breathing with the even rhythm of a child. That night he had kissed her once-on the hollow of the throat-that had been all in the way of lovemaking.

The mouse was busy again. There exist small sounds that are more frightening than gunfire. Chorb left the trunk alone and paced the room a couple of times. A moth struck the lamp with a ping. Chorb wrenched the door open and went out.

On the way downstairs he realized how weary he was, and when he found himself in the alley the blurry blue of the May night made him dizzy. Upon turning into the boulevard he walked faster. A square. A stone Herzog. The black ma.s.ses of the City Park. Chestnut trees now were in flower. Then, it had been autumn. He had gone for a long stroll with her on the eve of the wedding. How good was the earthy, damp, somewhat violety smell of the dead leaves strewing the sidewalk! On those enchanting overcast days the sky would be of a dull white, and the small twig-reflecting puddle in the middle of the black pavement resembled an insufficiently developed photograph. The gray-stone villas were separated by the mellow and motionless foliage of yellowing trees, and in front of the Kellers' house the leaves of a withering poplar had acquired the tone of transparent grapes. One glimpsed, too, a few birches behind the bars of the gate; ivy solidly m.u.f.fed some of their boles, and Chorb made a point of telling her that ivy never grew on birches in Russia, and she remarked that the foxy tints of their minute leaves reminded her of spots of tender rust upon ironed linen. Oaks and chestnuts lined the sidewalk; their black bark was velveted with green rot; every now and then a leaf broke away to fly athwart the street like a sc.r.a.p of wrapping paper. She attempted to catch it on the wing by means of a child's spade found near a heap of pink bricks at a spot where the street was under repair. A little way off the funnel of a workers' van emitted gray-blue smoke which drifted aslant and dissolved between the branches-and a resting workman, one hand on his hip, contemplated the young lady, as light as a dead leaf, dancing about with that little spade in her raised hand. She skipped, she laughed. Chorb, hunching his back a bit, walked behind her-and it seemed to him that happiness itself had that smell, the smell of dead leaves.

At present he hardly recognized the street, enc.u.mbered as it was with the nocturnal opulence of chestnut trees. A streetlamp glinted in front; over the gla.s.s a branch drooped, and several leaves at its end, saturated with light, were quite translucent. He came nearer. The shadow of the wicket, its checkerwork all distorted, swept up toward him from the sidewalk to entangle his feet. Beyond the gate, and beyond a dim gravel walk, loomed the front of the familiar house, dark except for the light in one open window. Within that amber chasm the housemaid was in the act of spreading with an ample sweep of her arms a snow-bright sheet on a bed. Loudly and curtly Chorb called out to her. With one hand he still gripped the wicket and the dewy touch of iron against his palm was the keenest of all memories.

The maid was already hurrying toward him. As she was to tell Frau Keller later, what struck her first was the fact that Chorb remained standing silently on the sidewalk although she had unlocked the little gate at once. "He had no hat," she related, "and the light of the streetlamp fell on his forehead, and his forehead was all sweaty, and the hair was glued to it by the sweat. I told him master and mistress were at the theater. I asked him why he was alone. His eyes were blazing, their look terrified me, and he seemed not to have shaved for quite a time. He said softly: 'Tell them that she is ill.' I asked: 'Where are you staying?' He said: 'Same old place,' and then added: 'That does not matter. I'll call again in the morning.' I suggested he wait-but he didn't reply and went away."

Thus Chorb traveled back to the very source of his recollections, an agonizing and yet blissful test now drawing to a close. All there remained was but a single night to be spent in that first chamber of their marriage, and by tomorrow the test would be pa.s.sed and her image made perfect.

But as he trudged back to the hotel, up the boulevard, where on all the benches in the blue darkness sat hazy figures, Chorb suddenly understood that, despite exhaustion, he would not be able to sleep alone in that room with its naked bulb and whispery crannies. He reached the square and plodded along the city's main avenue-and now he knew what must be done. His quest, however, lasted a long while: This was a quiet and chaste town, and the secret by-street where one could buy love was unknown to Chorb. Only after an hour of helpless wandering, which caused his ears to sing and his feet to burn, did he enter that little lane-whereupon he accosted at once the first girl who hailed him.

"The night," said Chorb, scarcely unclenching his teeth.

The girl c.o.c.ked her head, swung her handbag, and replied: "Twenty-five."

He nodded. Only much later, having glanced at her casually, Chorb noted with indifference that she was pretty enough, though considerably jaded, and that her bobbed hair was blond.

She had been in that hotel several times before, with other customers, and the wan, sharp-nosed lackey, who was tripping down as they were going upstairs, gave her an amiable wink. While Chorb and she walked along the corridor, they could hear, from behind one of the doors, a bed creaking, rhythmically and weightily, as if a log were being sawed in two. A few doors farther the same monotonous creak came from another room, and as they pa.s.sed by the girl looked back at Chorb with an expression of cold playfulness.

In silence he ushered her into his room-and immediately, with a profound antic.i.p.ation of sleep, started to tear off his collar from its stud. The girl came up very close to him: "And what about a small present?" she suggested, smiling.

Dreamily, absentmindedly, Chorb considered her, as he slowly grasped what she meant.

Upon receiving the banknotes, she carefully arranged them in her bag, uttered a light little sigh, and again rubbed herself against him.

"Shall I undress?" she asked with a shake of her bob.

"Yes, go to bed," muttered Chorb. "I'll give you some more in the morning."

The girl began to undo hastily the b.u.t.tons of her blouse, and kept glancing at him askance, being slightly taken aback by his abstraction and gloom. He shed his clothes quickly and carelessly, got into the bed, and turned to the wall.

"This fellow likes kinky stuff," vaguely conjectured the girl. With slow hands she folded her chemise, placed it upon a chair. Chorb was already fast asleep.

The girl wandered around the room. She noticed that the lid of the trunk standing by the window was slightly ajar; by squatting on her heels, she managed to peep under the lid's edge. Blinking and cautiously stretching out her bare arm, she palpated a woman's dress, a stocking, sc.r.a.ps of silk-all this stuffed in anyhow and smelling so nice that it made her feel sad.

Presently she straightened up, yawned, scratched her thigh, and, just as she was, naked, but in her stockings, drew aside the window curtain. Behind the curtain the cas.e.m.e.nt was open and one could make out, in the velvety depths, a corner of the opera house, the black shoulder of a stone Orpheus outlined against the blue of the night, and a row of light along the dim facade which slanted off into darkness. Down there, far away, diminutive dark silhouettes swarmed as they emerged from bright doorways onto the semicircular layers of illumined porch steps, to which glided up cars with shimmering headlights and smooth glistening tops. Only when the breakup was over and the brightness gone, the girl closed the curtain again. She switched off the light and stretched on the bed beside Chorb. Just before falling asleep she caught herself thinking that once or twice she had already been in that room: she remembered the pink picture on its wall.

Her sleep lasted not more than an hour: a ghastly deep-drawn howl roused her. It was Chorb screaming. He had woken up sometime after midnight, had turned on his side, and had seen his wife lying beside him. He screamed horribly, with visceral force. The white specter of a woman sprang off the bed. When, trembling, she turned on the light, Chorb was sitting among the tumbled bedclothes, his back to the wall, and through his spread fingers one eye could be seen burning with a mad flame. Then he slowly uncovered his face, slowly recognized the girl. With a frightened mutter she was hastily putting on her chemise.

And Chorb heaved a sigh of relief, for he realized that the ordeal was over. He moved onto the green couch, and sat there, clasping his hairy shins and with a meaningless smile contemplating the harlot. That smile increased her terror; she turned away, did up one last hook, laced her boots, busied herself with the putting on of her hat.

At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps came from the corridor.

One could hear the voice of the lackey repeating mournfully: "But look here, there's a lady with him." And an irate guttural voice kept insisting: "But I'm telling you she's my daughter."

The footsteps stopped at the door. A knock followed.

The girl s.n.a.t.c.hed her bag from the table and resolutely flung the door open. In front of her stood an amazed old gentleman in a l.u.s.ter-less top hat, a pearl stud gleaming in his starched shirt. From over his shoulder peered the tear-stained face of a stout lady with a veil on her hair. Behind them the puny pale lackey strained up on tiptoe, making big eyes and gesturing invitingly. The girl understood his signs and shot out into the corridor, past the old man, who turned his head in her wake with the same puzzled look and then crossed the threshold with his companion. The door closed. The girl and the lackey remained in the corridor. They exchanged a frightened glance and bent their heads to listen. But in the room all was silence. It seemed incredible that inside there should be three people. Not a single sound came from there.

"They don't speak," whispered the lackey, and put his finger to his lips.

A GUIDE TO BERLIN.

IN THE morning I visited the zoo and now I am entering a pub with my friend and usual pot companion. Its sky-blue sign bears a white inscription, "LoWENBRaU," accompanied by the portrait of a lion with a winking eye and mug of beer. We sit down and I start telling my friend about utility pipes, streetcars, and other important matters.

1 THE PIPES.

In front of the house where I live a gigantic black pipe lies along the outer edge of the sidewalk. A couple of feet away, in the same file, lies another, then a third and a fourth-the street's iron entrails, still idle, not yet lowered into the ground, deep under the asphalt. For the first few days after they were unloaded, with a hollow clanging, from trucks, little boys would run on them up and down and crawl on all fours through those round tunnels, but a week later n.o.body was playing any more and thick snow was falling instead; and now, when, cautiously probing the treacherous glaze of the sidewalk with my thick rubberheeled stick, I go out in the flat gray light of early morning, an even stripe of fresh snow stretches along the upper side of each black pipe while up the interior slope at the very mouth of the pipe which is nearest to the turn of the tracks, the reflection of a still illumined tram sweeps up like bright-orange heat lightning. Today someone wrote "Otto" with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o's flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel.

2 THE STREETCAR.

The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished. Already I feel it has an air of antiquity, a kind of old-fashioned charm. Everything about it is a little clumsy and rickety, and if a curve is taken a little too fast, and the trolley pole jumps the wire, and the conductor, or even one of the pa.s.sengers, leans out over the car's stern, looks up, and jiggles the cord until the pole is back in place, I always think that the coach driver of old must sometimes have dropped his whip, reined in his four-horse team, sent after it the lad in long-skirted livery who sat beside him on the box and gave piercing blasts on his horn while, clattering over the cobblestones, the coach swung through a village.

The conductor who gives out tickets has very unusual hands. They work as nimbly as those of a pianist, but instead of being limp, sweaty, and soft-nailed, the ticketman's hands are so coa.r.s.e that when you are pouring change into his palm and happen to touch that palm, which seems to have developed a harsh chitinous crust, you feel a kind of moral discomfort. They are extraordinarily agile and efficient hands, despite their roughness and the thickness of the fingers. I watch him with curiosity as he clamps the ticket with his broad black fingernail and punches it in two places, rummages in his leather purse, scoops up coins to make change, immediately slaps the purse shut, and yanks the bell cord, or, with a shove of his thumb, throws open the special little window in the forward door to hand tickets to people on the front platform. And all the time the car sways, pa.s.sengers standing in the aisle grab at the overhead straps, and surge back and forth-but he will not drop a single coin or a single ticket torn from his roll. In these winter days the bottom half of the forward door is curtained with green cloth, the windows are clouded with frost, Christmas trees for sale throng the edge of the sidewalk at each stop, the pa.s.sengers' feet are numb with cold, and sometimes a gray worsted mitten clothes the conductor's hand. At the end of the line the front car uncouples, enters a siding, runs around the remaining one, and approaches it from behind. There is something reminiscent of a submissive female in the way the second car waits as the first, male, trolley, sending up a small crackling flame, rolls up and couples on. And (minus the biological metaphor) I am reminded of how, some eighteen years ago in Petersburg, the horses used to be unhitched and led around the potbellied blue tram.

The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-b.u.t.toned conductor's uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor's purse, the advertis.e.m.e.nt over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine-everything will be enn.o.bled and justified by its age.

I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.

3 WORK.

Here are examples of various kinds of work that I observe from the crammed tram, in which a compa.s.sionate woman can always be relied upon to cede me her window seat-while trying not to look too closely at me.

At an intersection the pavement has been torn up next to the track; by turns, four workmen are pounding an iron stake with mallets; the first one strikes, and the second is already lowering his mallet with a sweeping, accurate swing; the second mallet crashes down and is rising skyward as the third and then the fourth bang down in rhythmical succession. I listen to their unhurried clanging, like four repeated notes of an iron carillon.