The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 13

By nine o'clock he had collected two more. One of them he noticed in a cafe where he had a sandwich and two drams of Dutch gin. She was talking with great animation to her companion, a beard-fingering foreigner, in an impenetrable language-Polish or Russian-and her gray eyes had a slight slant, her thin aquiline nose wrinkled when she laughed, and her elegant legs were exposed to the knee. While Erwin watched her quick gestures, the reckless way in which she tap-tapped cigarette ash all over the table, a German word, like a window, flashed open in her Slavic speech, and this chance word ("offenbar") was the "evident" sign. The other girl, number seven on the list, turned up at the Chinese-style entrance of a small amus.e.m.e.nt park. She wore a scarlet blouse with a bright-green skirt, and her bare neck swelled as she shrieked in glee, fighting off a couple of slap-happy young boors who were grabbing her by the hips and trying to make her accompany them.

"I'm willing, I'm willing!" she cried out at last, and was rushed away.

Varicolored paper lanterns enlivened the place. A sledgelike affair with wailing pa.s.sengers hurtled down a serpentine channel, disappeared in the angled arcades of medieval scenery, and dived into a new abyss with new howls. Inside a shed, on four bicycle seats (there were no wheels, just the frames, pedals, and handlebars), sat four girls in jerseys and shorts-a red one, a blue one, a green one, a yellow one-their bare legs working at full tilt. Above them hung a dial on which moved four pointers, red, blue, green, and yellow. At first the blue one was first, then the green overtook it. A man with a whistle stood by and collected the coins of the few simpletons who wanted to place their bets. Erwin stared at those magnificent legs, naked nearly up to the groin and pedaling with pa.s.sionate power.

They must be terrific dancers, he thought; I could use all four.

The pointers obediently gathered into one bunch and came to a stop.

"Dead heat!" shouted the man with the whistle. "A sensational finish!"

Erwin drank a gla.s.s of lemonade, consulted his watch, and made for the exit.

Eleven o'clock and eleven women. That will do, I suppose.

He narrowed his eyes as he imagined the pleasures awaiting him. He was glad he had remembered to put on clean underwear.

How slyly Frau Monde put it, reflected Erwin with a smile. Of course she will spy on me and why not? It will add some spice.

He walked, looking down, shaking his head delightedly, and only rarely glancing up to check the street names. Hoffmann Street, he knew, was quite far, but he still had an hour, so there was no need to hurry. Again, as on the previous night, the sky swarmed with stars and the asphalt glistened like smooth water, absorbing and lengthening the magic lights of the town. He pa.s.sed a large cinema whose radiance flooded the sidewalk, and at the next corner a short peal of childish laughter caused him to raise his eyes.

He saw before him a tall elderly man in evening clothes with a little girl walking beside-a child of fourteen or so in a low-cut black party dress. The whole city knew the elderly man from his portraits. He was a famous poet, a senile swan, living all alone in a distant suburb. He strode with a kind of ponderous grace; his hair, the hue of soiled cotton wool, reached over his ears from beneath his fedora. A stud in the triangle of his starched shirt caught the gleam of a lamp, and his long bony nose cast a wedge of shadow on one side of his thin-lipped mouth. In the same tremulous instant Erwin's glance lit on the face of the child mincing at the old poet's side; there was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl-the old man's granddaughter, no doubt-one might suspect that her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved closer together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice-and although Erwin gave no command mentally, he knew that his swift secret wish had been fulfilled.

"Oh, of course, of course," replied the old man coaxingly, bending toward the child.

They pa.s.sed, Erwin caught a whiff of perfume. He looked back, then went on.

"Hey, careful," he suddenly muttered as it dawned upon him that this made twelve-an even number: I must find one more-within half an hour.

It vexed him a little to go on searching, but at the same time he was pleased to be given yet another chance.

I'll pick up one on the way, he said to himself, allaying a trace of panic. I'm sure to find one!

"Maybe, it will be the nicest of all," he remarked aloud as he peered into the glossy night.

And a few minutes later he experienced the familiar delicious contraction-that chill in the solar plexus. A woman in front of him was walking along with rapid and light steps. He saw her only from the back and could not have explained why he yearned so poignantly to overtake precisely her and have a look at her face. One might, naturally, find random words to describe her bearing, the movement of her shoulders, the silhouette of her hat-but what is the use? Something beyond visible outlines, some kind of special atmosphere, an ethereal excitement, lured Erwin on and on. He marched fast and still could not catch up with her; the humid reflections of lights flickered before him; she tripped along steadily, and her black shadow would sweep up, as it entered a streetlamp's aura, glide across a wall, twist around its edge, and vanish.

"Goodness, I've got to see her face," Erwin muttered. "And time is flying."

Presently he forgot about time. That strange silent chase in the night intoxicated him. He managed at last to overtake her and went on, far ahead, but had not the courage to look back at her and merely slowed down, whereupon she pa.s.sed him in her turn and so fast that he did not have time to raise his eyes. Again he was walking ten paces behind her and by then he knew, without seeing her face, that she was his main prize. Streets burst into colored light, petered out, glowed again; a square had to be crossed, a s.p.a.ce of sleek blackness, and once more with a brief click of her high-heeled shoe the woman stepped onto a sidewalk, with Erwin behind, bewildered, disembodied, dizzy from the misty lights, the damp night, the chase.

What enticed him? Not her gait, not her shape, but something else, bewitching and overwhelming, as if a tense shimmer surrounded her: mere fantasy, maybe, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy, or maybe it was that which changes a man's entire life with one divine stroke-Erwin knew nothing, he just sped after her over asphalt and stone, which seemed also dematerialized in the iridescent night.

Then trees, vernal lindens, joined the hunt: they advanced whispering on either side, overhead, all around him; the little black hearts of their shadows intermingled at the foot of each streetlamp, and their delicate sticky aroma encouraged him.

Once again Erwin came near. One more step, and he would be abreast of her. She stopped abruptly at an iron wicket and fished out her keys from her handbag. Erwin's momentum almost made him b.u.mp into her. She turned her face toward him, and by the light a streetlamp cast through emerald leaves, he recognized the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup on a graveled path, and immediately remembered, immediately understood all her charm, tender warmth, priceless radiance.

He stood staring at her with a wretched smile.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said quietly. "Leave me alone."

The little gate opened, and slammed. Erwin remained standing under the hushed lindens. He looked around, not knowing which way to go. A few paces away, he saw two blazing bubbles: a car standing by the sidewalk. He went up to it and touched the motionless, dummylike chauffeur on the shoulder.

"Tell me what street is this? I'm lost."

"Hoffmann Street," said the dummy dryly.

And then a familiar, husky, soft voice spoke out of the depths of the car.

"h.e.l.lo. It's me."

Erwin leaned a hand on the car door and limply responded.

"I am bored to death," said the voice, "I'm waiting here for my boyfriend. He is bringing the poison. He and I are dying at dawn. How are you?"

"Even number," said Erwin, running his finger along the dusty door.

"Yes, I know," calmly rejoined Frau Monde. "Number thirteen turned out to be number one. You bungled the job rather badly."

"A pity," said Erwin.

"A pity," she echoed, and yawned.

Erwin bowed, kissed her large black glove, stuffed with five outspread fingers, and with a little cough turned into the darkness. He walked with a heavy step, his legs ached, he was oppressed by the thought that tomorrow was Monday and it would be hard to get up.

TERROR.

HERE is what sometimes happened to me: after spending the first part of the night at my desk-that part when night trudges heavily uphill-I would emerge from the trance of my task at the exact moment when night had reached the summit and was teetering on that crest, ready to roll down into the haze of dawn; I would get up from my chair, feeling chilly and utterly spent, turn on the light in my bedroom, and suddenly see myself in the looking gla.s.s. Then it would go like this: during the time I had been deep at work, I had grown disacquainted with myself, a sensation akin to what one may experience when meeting a close friend after years of separation: for a few empty, lucid, but numb moments you see him in an entirely different light even though you realize that the frost of this mysterious anesthesia will presently wear off, and the person you are looking at will revive, glow with warmth, resume his old place, becoming again so familiar that no effort of the will could possibly make you recapture that fleeting sensation of estrangedness. Precisely thus I now stood considering my own reflection in the gla.s.s and failing to recognize it as mine. And the more keenly I examined my face-those unblinking alien eyes, that sheen of tiny hairs along the jaw, that shade along the nose-and the more insistently I told myself "This is I, this is So-and-so," the less clear it became why this should be "I," the harder I found it to make the face in the mirror merge with that "I" whose ident.i.ty I failed to grasp. When I spoke of my odd sensations, people justly observed that the path I had taken led to the madhouse. In point of fact, once or twice, late at night, I peered so lengthily at my reflection that a creepy feeling came over me and I put out the light in a hurry. Yet next morning, while shaving, it would never occur to me to question the reality of my image.

Another thing: at night, in bed, I would abruptly remember that I was mortal. What then took place within my mind was much the same as happens in a huge theater if the lights suddenly go out, and someone shrilly screams in the swift-winged darkness, and other voices join in, resulting in a blind tempest, with the black thunder of panic growing-until suddenly the lights come on again, and the performance of the play is blandly resumed. Thus would my soul choke for a moment while, lying supine, eyes wide open, I tried with all my might to conquer fear, rationalize death, come to terms with it on a day-by-day basis, without appealing to any creed or philosophy. In the end, one tells oneself that death is still far away, that there will be plenty of time to reason everything out, and yet one knows that one never will do it, and again, in the dark, from the cheapest seats, in one's private theater where warm live thoughts about dear earthly trifles have panicked, there comes a shriek-and presently subsides when one turns over in bed and starts to think of some different matter.

I a.s.sume that those sensations-the perplexity before the mirror at night or the sudden pang of death's foretaste-are familiar to many, and if I dwell on them it is only because they contain just a small particle of that supreme terror that I was destined once to experience. Supreme terror, special terror-I am groping for the exact term but my store of ready-made words, which in vain I keep trying on, does not contain even one that will fit.

I led a happy life. I had a girl. I remember well the torture of our first separation. I had gone on a business trip abroad, and upon my return she met me at the station. I saw her standing on the platform, caged as it were in tawny sunlight, a dusty cone of which had just penetrated through the station's glazed vault. Her face kept rhythmically turning to and fro as the train windows slowly glided by to a stop. With her I always felt easy and at rest. Once only-and here again I feel what a clumsy instrument human speech is. Still, I would like to explain. It is really such nonsense, so ephemeral: we are alone in her room, I write while she darns a silk stocking stretched taut over the back of a wooden spoon, her head bent low; one ear, translucently pink, is half concealed by a strand of fair hair, and the small pearls around her neck gleam touchingly, and her tender cheek appears sunken because of the a.s.siduous pout of her lips. All at once, for no reason at all, I become terrified of her presence. This is far more terrifying than the fact that somehow, for a split second, my mind did not register her ident.i.ty in the dusty sun of the station. I am terrified by there being another person in the room with me; I am terrified by the very notion of another person. No wonder lunatics don't recognize relatives. But she raises her head, all her features partic.i.p.ate in the quick smile she gives me-and no trace is left now of the odd terror I felt a moment ago. Let me repeat: this happened only one single time, and I took it to be a silly trick of my nerves, forgetting that on lonely nights before a lonely mirror I had experienced something quite similar.

She was my mistress for nearly three years. I know that many people could not understand our relationship. They were at a loss to explain what there was in that naive little maiden to attract and hold a poet's affection, but good G.o.d! how I loved her una.s.suming prettiness, gaiety, friendliness, the birdlike flutterings of her soul. It was exactly that gentle simplicity of hers that protected me: to her, everything in the world had a kind of everyday clarity, and it would even seem to me that she knew what awaited us after death, so that there was no reason for us to discuss that topic. At the end of our third year together I again was obliged to go away, for a rather long time. On the eve of my departure we went to the opera. She sat down for a moment on the crimson little sofa in the darkish, rather mysterious vestibule of our loge to take off her huge gray s...o...b..ots, from which I helped her to extricate her slender silk-clad legs-and I thought of those delicate moths that hatch from bulky s.h.a.ggy coc.o.o.ns. We moved to the front of our box. We were gay as we bent over the rosy abyss of the house while waiting for the raising of the curtain, a solid old screen with pale-gold decorations depicting scenes from various operas-Ruslan in his pointed helmet, Lenski in his carrick. With her bare elbow she almost knocked down from the plush parapet her little nacreous opera gla.s.s.

Then, when all in the audience had taken their seats, and the orchestra drew in its breath and prepared to blast forth, something happened: every light went out in the huge rosy theater, and such a dense darkness swooped upon us that I thought I had gone blind. In this darkness everything at once began to move, a shiver of panic began to rise and resolved itself in feminine cries, and because men's voices very loudly called for calm, the cries became more and more riotous. I laughed and began talking to her, but then felt that she had clutched my wrist and was silently worrying my cuff. When light again filled the house I saw that she was pale and that her teeth were clenched. I helped her to get out of the loge. She shook her head, chiding herself with a deprecatory smile for her childish fright-but then burst into tears and asked to be taken home. It was only in the close carriage that she regained her composure and, pressing her crumpled handkerchief to her swimming bright eyes, began to explain how sad she felt about my going away tomorrow, and how wrong it would have been to spend our last evening at the opera, among strangers.

Twelve hours later I was in a train compartment, looking out of the window at the misty winter sky, the inflamed little eye of the sun, which kept up with the train, the white snow-covered fields which kept endlessly opening up like a giant fan of swan's down. It was in the foreign city I reached next day that I was to have my encounter with supreme terror.

To begin with, I slept badly for three nights in a row and did not sleep at all during the fourth. In recent years I had lost the habit of solitude, and now those solitary nights caused me acute unrelieved anguish. The first night I saw my girl in dream: sunlight flooded her room, and she sat on the bed wearing only a lacy nightgown, and laughed, and laughed, could not stop laughing. I recalled my dream quite by accident, a couple of hours later, as I was pa.s.sing a lingerie store, and upon remembering it realized that all that had been so gay in my dream-her lace, her thrown-back head, her laughter-was now, in my waking state, frightening. Yet, I could not explain to myself why that lacy laughing dream was now so unpleasant, so hideous. I had a lot of things to take care of, and I smoked a lot, and all the time I was aware of the feeling that I absolutely must maintain rigid control over myself. When getting ready for bed in my hotel room, I would deliberately whistle or hum but would start like a fearful child at the slightest noise behind me, such as the flop of my jacket slipping from the chairback to the floor.

On the fifth day, after a bad night, I took time out for a stroll. I wish the part of my story to which I am coming now could be set in italics; no, not even italics would do: I need some new, unique kind of type. Insomnia had left me with an exceptionally receptive void within my mind. My head seemed made of gla.s.s, and the slight cramp in my calves had also a vitreous character. As soon as I came out of the hotel-Yes, now I think I have found the right words. I hasten to write them down before they fade. When I came out on the street, I suddenly saw the world such as it really is. You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite s.p.a.ce, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception. Well-on that terrible day when, devastated by a sleepless night, I stepped out into the center of an incidental city, and saw houses, trees, automobiles, people, my mind abruptly refused to accept them as "houses," "trees," and so forth-as something connected with ordinary human life. My line of communication with the world snapped, I was on my own and the world was on its own, and that world was devoid of sense. I saw the actual essence of all things. I looked at houses and they had lost their usual meaning-that is, all that we think when looking at a house: a certain architectural style, the sort of rooms inside, ugly house, comfortable house-all this had evaporated, leaving nothing but an absurd sh.e.l.l, the same way an absurd sound is left: after one has repeated sufficiently long the commonest word without heeding its meaning: house, howss, whowss. It was the same with trees, the same with people. I understood the horror of a human face. Anatomy, s.e.xual distinctions, the notion of "legs," "arms," "clothes"-all that was abolished, and there remained in front of me a mere something-not even a creature, for that too is a human concept, but merely something moving past. In vain did I try to master my terror by recalling how once in my childhood, on waking up, I raised my still sleepy eyes while pressing the back of my neck to my low pillow and saw, leaning toward me over the bed head, an incomprehensible face, noseless, with a hussar's black mustache just below its octopus eyes, and with teeth set in its forehead. I sat up with a shriek and immediately the mustache became eyebrows and the entire face was transformed into that of my mother, which I had glimpsed at first in an unwonted upside-down aspect.

And now, too, I tried to "sit up" mentally, so that the visible world might resume its everyday position-but I did not succeed. On the contrary: the closer I peered at people the more absurd their appearance looked to me. Overwhelmed with terror, I sought support in some basic idea, some better brick than the Cartesian one, with the help of which to begin the reconstruction of the simple, natural, habitual worid as we know it. By that time I was resting, I believe, on the bench of a public park. I have no precise recollection of my actions. Just as a man who is having a heart attack on a sidewalk does not give a hoot for the pa.s.sersby, the sun, the beauty of an ancient cathedral, and has only one concern: to breathe, so I too had but one desire: not to go mad. I am convinced that n.o.body ever saw the world the way I saw it during those moments, in all its terrifying nakedness and terrifying absurdity. Near me a dog was sniffing the snow. I was tortured by my efforts to recognize what "dog" might mean, and because I had been staring at it hard, it crept up to me trustingly, and I felt so nauseated that I got up from the bench and walked away. It was then that my terror reached its highest point. I gave up struggling. I was no longer a man, but a naked eye, an aimless glance moving in an absurd world. The very sight of a human face made me want to scream.

Presently I found myself again at the entrance of my hotel. Someone came up to me, p.r.o.nounced my name, and thrust a folded slip of paper into my limp hand. Automatically I unfolded it, and at once my terror vanished. Everything around me became again ordinary and un.o.btrusive: the hotel, the changing reflections in the gla.s.s of the revolving door, the familiar face of the bellboy who had handed me the telegram. I now stood in the middle of the s.p.a.cious vestibule. A man with a pipe and a checked cap brushed against me in pa.s.sing and gravely apologized. I felt astonishment and an intense, unbearable but quite human pain. The telegram said she was dying.

While I traveled back, while I sat at her bedside, it never occurred to me to a.n.a.lyze the meaning of being and nonbeing, and no longer was I terrified by those thoughts. The woman I loved more than anything on earth was dying. This was all I saw or felt.

She did not recognize me when my knee thudded against the side of her bed. She lay, propped up on huge pillows, under huge blankets, herself so small, with hair brushed back from the forehead revealing the narrow scar on her temple ordinarily concealed by a strand brushed low over it. She did not recognize my living presence, but by the slight smile that raised once or twice the corners of her lips, I knew that she saw me in her quiet delirium, in her dying fancy-so that there were two of me standing before her: I myself, whom she did not see, and my double, who was invisible to me. And then I remained alone: my double died with her.

Her death saved me from insanity. Plain human grief filled my life so completely that there was no room left for any other emotion. But time flows, and her image within me becomes ever more perfect, ever more lifeless. The details of the past, the live little memories, fade imperceptibly, go out one by one, or in twos and threes, the way lights go out, now here now there, in the windows of a house where people are falling asleep. And I know that my brain is doomed, that the terror I experienced once, the helpless fear of existing, will sometime overtake me again, and that then there will be no salvation.

RAZOR.

HIS regimental comrades had good reason to dub him "Razor." The man's face lacked a facade. When his acquaintances thought of him they could imagine him only in profile, and that profile was remarkable: nose sharp as a draftsman's triangle; chin st.u.r.dy as an elbow; long, soft eyelashes characteristic of certain very obstinate, very cruel people. His name was Ivanov.

That nickname of former days contained a strange clairvoyance. It is not rare for a man called Stone or Stein to become a perfectly good mineralogist. Captain Ivanov, after an epic escape and sundry insipid ordeals, had ended up in Berlin, and chosen the very trade at which his nickname had hinted-that of a barber.

He worked in a small but clean barbershop that also employed two young professionals, who treated "the Russian captain" with jovial respect. Then there was the owner, a dour lump of a man who would spin the handle of the cash register with a silvery sound, and also a manicurist, anemic and translucent as if she had been drained dry by the contact of innumerable fingers placed, in batches of five, on the small velvet cushion in front of her.

Ivanov was very good at his work, although he was somewhat handicapped by his poor knowledge of German. However, he soon figured out how to deal with the problem: tack a "nicht" onto the first sentence, an interrogative "was?" onto the next, then "nicht" again, continuing to alternate in the same way. And even though it was only in Berlin that he had learned haircutting, it was remarkable how closely his manner resembled that of the tonsors back in Russia, with their well-known penchant for a lot of superfluous scissor-clicking-they'll click away, take aim, and snip a lock or two, then keep their blades going lickety-split in the air as if impelled by inertia. This deft, gratuitous whirring was the very thing that earned him the respect of his colleagues.

Without doubt scissors and razors are weapons, and there was something about this metallic chirr that gratified Ivanov's warlike soul. He was a rancorous, keen-witted man. His vast, n.o.ble, splendid homeland had been ruined by some dull buffoon for the sake of a well-turned scarlet phrase, and this he could not forgive. Like a tightly coiled spring, vengeance lurked, biding its time, within his soul.

One very hot, bluish summer morning, taking advantage of the nearly total absence of customers during those workaday hours, both of Ivanov's colleagues took an hour off. Their employer, dying from the heat and from long-ripening desire, had silently escorted the pale, unresisting little manicurist to a back room. Left alone in the sundrenched shop, Ivanov glanced through one newspaper, then lit a cigarette and, all in white, stepped outside the doorway and started watching the pa.s.sersby.

People flashed past, accompanied by their blue shadows, which broke over the edge of the sidewalk and glided fearlessly underneath the glittering wheels of cars that left ribbonlike imprints on the heat-softened asphalt, resembling the ornate lacework of snakes. Suddenly a short, thickset gentleman in black suit and bowler, with a black briefcase under his arm, turned off the sidewalk and headed straight for white Ivanov. Blinking from the sun, Ivanov stepped aside to let him into the barbershop.

The newcomer's reflection appeared in all the mirrors at once: in profile, three-quarter-face, and showing the waxen bald spot in back from which the black bowler had ascended to snag a hat hook. And when the man turned squarely toward the mirrors, which sparkled above marble surfaces aglitter with green and gold scent bottles, Ivanov instantly recognized that mobile, puffy face with the piercing little eyes and a plump mole by the right lobe of his nose.

The gentleman silently sat down in front of the mirror, then, mumbling indistinctly, tapped his untidy cheek with a stubby finger: Meaning, I want a shave. In a kind of astonished haze, Ivanov spread a sheet over him, whipped up some tepid lather in a porcelain bowl, started brushing it on to the man's cheeks, rounded chin, and upper lip, gingerly circ.u.mnavigated the mole, began rubbing in the foam with his index finger. But he did all this mechanically, so shaken was he by having encountered this person again.

Now a flimsy white mask of soap covered the man's face up to his eyes, minuscule eyes that glittered like the tiny wheels of a watch movement. Ivanov had opened his razor and begun to sharpen it on a strap when he recovered from his amazement and realized that this man was in his power.

Then, bending over the waxy bald spot, he brought the blue blade close to the soapy mask and said very softly, "My respects to you, comrade. How long has it been since you left our part of the world? No, don't move, please, or I might cut you prematurely."

The glittering little wheels started moving faster, glanced at Ivanov's sharp profile, and stopped. Ivanov removed some excess flakes of lather with the blunt side of the razor and continued, "I remember you very well, comrade. Sorry if I find it distasteful to p.r.o.nounce your name. I remember how you interrogated me some six years ago, in Kharkov. I remember your signature, dear friend.... But, as you see, I am still alive."

Then the following happened. The little eyes darted about, then suddenly shut tight, eyelids compressed like those of the savage who thought closing his eyes made him invisible.

Ivanov tenderly moved his blade along the cold, rustling cheek.

"We're absolutely alone, comrade. Understand? One little slip of the razor, and right away there will be a good deal of blood. Here is where the carotid throbs. So there will a good deal, even a great deal of blood. But first I want your face decently shaved, and, besides, I have something to recount to you."

Cautiously, with two fingers, Ivanov lifted the fleshy tip of the man's nose and, with the same tenderness, began shaving above the upper lip.

"The point, comrade, is that I remember everything. I remember perfectly, and I want you to remember too...." And, in a soft voice, Ivanov began his account, as he unhurriedly shaved the rec.u.mbent, motionless face. The tale he told must have been terrifying indeed, because from time to time his hand would stop, and he would stoop very close to the gentleman sitting like a corpse under the shroudlike sheet, his convex eyelids lowered.

"That is all," Ivanov said with a sigh, "that's the whole story. Tell me, what do you think would be a suitable atonement for all that? What is considered an equivalent of a sharp sword? And again, keep in mind that we are utterly, totally alone.

"Corpses are always shaved," went on Ivanov, running the blade upward along the stretched skin of the man's neck. "Those sentenced to death are shaved too. And now I am shaving you. Do you realize what is going to happen next?"

The man sat without stirring or opening his eyes. Now the lathery mask was gone from his face. Traces of foam remained only on his cheekbones and near his ears. This tensed, eyeless, fat face was so pallid that Ivanov wondered if he had not suffered a fit of paralysis. But when he pressed the flat surface of the razor to the man's neck, his entire body gave a twitch. He did not, however, open his eyes.

Ivanov gave the man's face a quick wipe and spat some talc.u.m on him from a pneumatic dispenser. "That will do for you," he said. "I'm satisfied. You may leave." With squeamish haste he yanked the sheet off the man's shoulders. The other remained seated.

"Get up, you ninny," shouted Ivanov, pulling him up by the sleeve. The man froze, with firmly shut eyes, in the middle of the shop. Ivanov clapped the bowler on his head, thrust the briefcase under his arm, and swiveled him toward the door. Only then did the man jerk into motion. His shut-eyed face flashed in all the mirrors. He stepped like an automaton through the door that Ivanov was holding open, and, with the same mechanical gait, clutching his briefcase with an outstretched petrified hand, gazing into the sunny blur of the street with the glazed eyes of a Greek statue, he was gone.

THE Pa.s.sENGER.

"YES, Life is more talented than we," sighed the writer, tapping the cardboard mouthpiece of his Russian cigarette against the lid of his case. "The plots Life thinks up now and then! How can we compete with that G.o.ddess? Her works are untranslatable, indescribable."

"Copyright by the author," suggested the critic, smiling; he was a modest, myopic man with slim, restless fingers.

"Our last recourse, then, is to cheat," continued the writer, absentmindedly throwing a match into the critic's empty winegla.s.s. "All that's left to us is to treat her creations as a film producer does a famous novel. The producer needs to prevent servant maids from being bored on Sat.u.r.day nights; therefore he alters the novel beyond recognition; minces it, turns it inside out, throws out hundreds of episodes, introduces new characters and incidents he has invented himself-and all this for the sole purpose of having an entertaining film unfold without a hitch, punishing virtue in the beginning and vice at the end, a film perfectly natural in terms of its own conventions and, above all, furnished with an unexpected but all-resolving outcome. Exactly thus do we, writers, alter the themes of Life to suit us in our drive toward some kind of conventional harmony, some kind of artistic conciseness. We spice our savorless plagiarisms with our own devices. We think that Life's performance is too sweeping, too uneven, that her genius is too untidy. To indulge our readers we cut out of Life's untrammeled novels our neat little tales for the use of schoolchildren. Allow me, in this connection, to impart to you the following experience.

"I happened to be traveling in the sleeping car of an express. I love the process of settling into viatic quarters-the cool linen of the berth, the slow pa.s.sage of the station's departing lights as they start moving behind the black windowpane. I remember how pleased I was that there was n.o.body in the bunk above me. I undressed, I lay down supine with my hands clasped under my head, and the lightness of the scant regulation blanket was a treat in comparison to the puffiness of hotel featherbeds. After some private musings-at the time I was anxious to write a story about the life of railway-car cleaning women-I put out the light and was soon asleep. And here let me use a device cropping up with dreary frequency in the sort of story to which mine promises to belong. Here it is-that old device which you must know so well: 'In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly.' What follows, however, is something less stale. I woke up and saw a foot."

"Excuse me, a what?" interrupted the modest critic, leaning forward and lifting his finger.

"I saw a foot," repeated the writer. "The compartment was now lighted. The train stood at a station. It was a man's foot, a foot of considerable size, in a coa.r.s.e sock, through which the bluish toenail had worked a hole. It was planted solidly on a step of the bed ladder close to my face, and its owner, concealed from my sight by the upper bunk roofing me, was just on the point of making a last effort to hoist himself onto his ledge. I had ample time to inspect that foot in its gray, black-checkered sock and also part of the leg: the violet vee of the garter on the side of the stout calf and its little hairs nastily sticking out through the mesh of the long underwear. It was altogether a most repellent limb. While I looked, it tensed, the tenacious big toe moved once or twice; then, finally, the whole extremity vigorously pushed off and soared out of sight. From above came grunting and snuffling sounds leading one to conclude that the man was preparing to sleep. The light went out, and a few moments later the train jerked into motion.

"I don't know how to explain it to you, but that limb anguished me most oppressively. A resilient varicolored reptile. I found it disturbing that all I knew of the man was that evil-looking leg. His figure, his face, I never saw. His berth, which formed a low, dark ceiling over me, now seemed to have come lower; I almost felt its weight. No matter how hard I tried to imagine the aspect of my nocturnal fellow traveler all I could visualize was that conspicuous toenail which showed its bluish mother-of-pearl sheen through a hole in the wool of the sock. It may seem strange, in a general way, that such trifles should bother me, but, per contra, is not every writer precisely a person who bothers about trifles? Anyhow, sleep did not come. I kept listening-had my unknown companion started to snore? Apparently he was not snoring but moaning. Of course, the knocking of train wheels at night is known to encourage aural hallucinations; yet I could not get over the impression that from up there, above me, came sounds of an unusual nature. I raised myself on one elbow. The sounds grew more distinct. The man on the upper berth was sobbing."

"What's that?" interrupted the critic. "Sobbing? I see. Sorry-didn't quite catch what you said." And, again dropping his hands in his lap and inclining his head to one side, the critic went on listening to the narrator.

"Yes, he was sobbing, and his sobs were atrocious. They choked him; he would noisily let his breath out as if having drunk at one gulp a quart of water, whereupon there followed rapid spasms of weeping with the mouth shut-the frightful parody of a cackle-and again he would draw in air and again let it out in short expirations of sobbing, with his mouth now open-to judge by the ha-ha-ing note. And all this against the shaky background of hammering wheels, which by this token became something like a moving stairway along which his sobs went up and came down. I lay motionless and listened-and felt, incidentally, that my face in the dark looked awfully silly, for it is always embarra.s.sing to hear a stranger sobbing. And mind you, I was helplessly shackled to him by the fact of our sharing the same two-berth compartment, in the same unconcernedly rushing train. And he did not stop weeping; those dreadful arduous sobs kept up with me: we both-I below, the listener, and he overhead, the weeping one-sped sideways into night's remoteness at eighty kilometers an hour, and only a railway crash could have cleft our involuntary link.

"After a while he seemed to stop crying, but no sooner was I about to drop off than his sobs started to swell again and I even seemed to hear unintelligible words which he uttered in a kind of sepulchral, belly-deep voice between convulsive sighs. He was silent again, only snuffling a bit, and I lay with my eyes closed and saw in fancy his disgusting foot in its checkered sock. Somehow or other I managed to fall asleep; and at half past five the conductor wrenched the door open to call me. Sitting on my bed-and knocking my head every minute against the edge of the upper berth-I hurried to dress. Before going out with my bags into the corridor, I turned to look up at the upper berth, but the man was lying with his back to me, and had covered his head with his blanket. It was morning in the corridor, the sun had just risen, the fresh, blue shadow of the train ran over the gra.s.s, over the shrubs, swept sinuously up the slopes, rippled across the trunks of flickering birches-and an oblong pondlet shone dazzlingly in the middle of a field, then narrowed, dwindled to a silvery slit, and with a rapid clatter a cottage scuttled by, the tail of a road whisked under a crossing gate-and once more the numberless birches dizzied one with their flickering, sun-flecked palisade.

"The only other people in the corridor were two women with sleepy, sloppily made-up faces, and a little old man wearing suede gloves and a traveling cap. I detest rising early: for me the most ravishing dawn in the world cannot replace the hours of delicious morning sleep; and therefore I limited myself to a grumpy nod when the old gentleman asked me if I, too, was getting off at ... he mentioned a big town where we were due in ten or fifteen minutes.