The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 27

THE CIRCLE.

IN THE second place, because he was possessed by a sudden mad hankering after Russia. In the third place, finally, because he regretted those years of youth and everything a.s.sociated with it-the fierce resentment, the uncouthness, the ardency, and the dazzlingly green mornings when the coppice deafened you with its golden orioles. As he sat in the cafe and kept diluting with syphoned soda the paling sweetness of his ca.s.sis, he recalled the past with a constriction of the heart, with melancholy-what kind of melancholy?-well, a kind not yet sufficiently investigated. All that distant past rose with his breast, raised by a sigh, and slowly his father ascended from the grave, squaring his shoulders: Ilya Ilyich Bychkov, le maitre d'ecole chez nous au village, in flowing black tie, picturesquely knotted, and pongee jacket, whose b.u.t.tons began, in the old fashion, high on the breastbone but stopped also at a high point, letting the diverging coat flaps reveal the watch chain across the waistcoat; his complexion was reddish, his head bald yet covered with a tender down resembling the velvet of a deer's vernal antlers; there were lots of little folds along his cheeks, and a fleshy wart next to the nose producing the effect of an additional volute described by the fat nostril. In his high school and college days, Innokentiy used to travel from town on holidays to visit his father at Leshino. Diving still deeper, he could remember the demolition of the old school at the end of the village, the clearing of the ground for its successor, the foundation-stone ceremony, the religious service in the wind, Count Konstantin G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev throwing the traditional gold coin, the coin sticking edgewise in the clay. The new building was of a grainy granitic gray on its outside; its inside, for several years and then for another long spell (that is, when it joined the staff of memory) sunnily smelled of glue; the cla.s.ses were graced with glossy educational appliances such as enlarged portraits of insects injurious to field or forest; but Innokentiy found even more irritating the stuffed birds provided by G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev. Flirting with the common people! Yes, he saw himself as a stern plebeian: hatred (or so it seemed) suffocated him when as a youth he used to look across the river at the great manorial park, heavy with ancient privileges and imperial grants, casting the reflection of its black ama.s.sments onto the green water (with the creamy blur of a racemosa blooming here and there among the fir trees).

The new school was built on the threshold of this century, at a time when G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev had returned from his fifth expedition to central Asia and was spending the summer at Leshino, his estate in the Government of St. Petersburg, with his young wife (at forty he was twice as old as she). To what a depth one has plunged, good G.o.d! In a melting crystalline mist, as if it were all taking place under water, Innokentiy saw himself as a boy of three or four entering the manor house and floating through marvelous rooms, with his father moving on tiptoe, a damp nosegay of lilies of the valley bunched in his fist so tight that they squeaked-and everything around seemed moist too, a luminous, squeaking, quivering haze, which was all one could distinguish-but in later years it turned into a shameful recollection, his father's flowers, tiptoeing progress, and sweating temples darkly symbolizing grateful servility, especially after Innokentiy was told by an old peasant that Ilya Ilyich had been disentangled by "our good master" from a trivial but tacky political affair, for which he would have been banished to the backwoods of the empire had the Count not interceded.

Tanya used to say that they had relatives not only in the animal kingdom but also among plants and minerals. And, indeed, Russian and foreign naturalists had described under the specific name of "G.o.dunovi" a new pheasant, a new antelope, a new rhododendron, and there was even a whole G.o.dunov Range (he himself described only insects). Those discoveries of his, his outstanding contributions to zoology, and a thousand perils, for disregarding which he was famous, could not, however, make people indulgent to his high descent and great wealth. Furthermore, let us not forget that certain sections of our intelligentsia had always held nonapplied scientific research in contempt, and therefore G.o.dunov was rebuked for showing more interest in "Sinkiang bugs" than in the plight of the Russian peasant. Young Innokentiy readily believed the tales (actually idiotic) told about the Count's traveling concubines, his Chinese-style inhumanity, and the secret errands he discharged for the Tsar-to spite the English. The reality of his image remained dim: an ungloved hand throwing a gold piece (and, in the still earlier recollection, that visit to the manor house, the lord of which got confused by the child with a Kalmuck, dressed in sky blue, met on the way through a reception hall). Then G.o.dunov departed again, to Samarkand or to Vernyi (towns from which he usually started his fabulous strolls), and was gone a long time. Meanwhile his family summered in the south, apparently preferring their Crimean country place to their Petropolitan one. Their winters were spent in the capital. There, on the quay, stood their house, a two-floor private residence, painted an olive hue. Innokentiy sometimes happened to walk by; his memory retained the feminine forms of a statue showing its dimpled sugar-white b.u.t.tock through the patterned gauze on a whole-gla.s.sed window. Olive-brown atlantes with strongly arched ribs supported a balcony: the strain of their stone muscles and their agonizingly twisted mouths struck our hotheaded uppergrader as an allegory of the enslaved proletariat. Once or twice, on that quay, in the beginning of the gusty Neva spring, he glimpsed the little G.o.dunov girl with her fox terrier and governess; they positively whirled by, yet were so vividly outlined: Tanya wore boots laced up to the knee and a short navy-blue coat with k.n.o.bbed bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, and as she marched rapidly past, she slapped the pleats of her short navy-blue skirt-with what? I think with the dog leash she carried-and the Ladoga wind tossed the ribbons of her sailor cap, and a little behind her sped her governess, karakul-jacketed, her waist flexed, one arm thrown out, the hand encased in a m.u.f.f of tight-curled black fur.

He lodged at his aunt's, a seamstress, in an Okhta tenement. He was morose, unsociable, applied ponderous groaning efforts to his studies while limiting his ambition to a pa.s.sing mark, but to everybody's astonishment finished school brilliantly and at the age of eighteen entered St. Petersburg University as a medical student-at which point his father's worship of G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev mysteriously increased. He spent one summer as a private tutor with a family in Tver. By May of the following year, 1914, he was back in the village of Leshino-and discovered not without dismay that the manor across the river had come alive.

More about that river, about its steep bank, about its old bathhouse. This was a wooden structure standing on piles; a stepped path, with a toad on every other step, led down to it, and not everyone could have found the beginning of that clayey descent in the alder thicket at the back of the church. His constant companion in riparian pastimes was Vasiliy, the blacksmith's son, a youth of indeterminable age (he could not say himself whether he was fifteen or a full twenty), st.u.r.dily built, ungainly, in skimpy patched trousers, with huge bare feet dirty carrot in color, and as gloomy in temper as was Innokentiy at the time. The pinewood piles cast concertina-shaped reflections that wound and unwound on the water. Gurgling and smacking sounds came from under the rotten planks of the bathhouse. In a round, earth-soiled tin box depicting a horn of plenty-it had once contained cheap fruit drops-worms wriggled listlessly. Vasiliy, taking care that the point of the hook would not stick through, pulled a plump segment of worm over it, leaving the rest to hang free; then seasoned the rascal with sacramental spittle and proceeded to lower the lead-weighted line over the outer railing of the bathhouse. Evening had come. Something resembling a broad fan of violet-pink plumes or an aerial mountain range with lateral spurs spanned the sky, and the bats were already flitting, with the overstressed soundlessness and evil speed of membraned beings. The fish had begun to bite, and scorning the use of a rod, simply holding the tensing and jerking line between finger and thumb, Vasiliy tugged at it ever so slightly to test the solidity of the underwater spasms-and suddenly landed a roach or a gudgeon. Casually, and even with a kind of devil-may-care crackling snap, he would wrench the hook out of the toothless round little mouth and place the frenzied creature (rosy blood oozing from a torn gill) in a gla.s.s jar where already a chevin was swimming, its lower lip stuck out. Angling was especially good in warm overcast weather when rain, invisible in the air, covered the water with mutually intersecting widening circles, among which appeared here and there a circle of different origin, with a sudden center: the jump of a fish that vanished at once or the fall of a leaf that immediately sailed away with the current. And how delicious it was to go bathing beneath that tepid drizzle, on the blending line of two h.o.m.ogeneous but differently shaped elements-the thick river water and the slender celestial one! Innokentiy took his dip intelligently and indulged afterwards in a long rubdown with a towel. The peasant boys, per contra, kept floundering till complete exhaustion; finally, shivering, with chattering teeth and a turbid snot trail from nostril to lip, they would hop on one foot to pull their pants up to their wet thighs.

That summer Innokentiy was gloomier than ever and scarcely spoke to his father, limiting himself to mumbles and "hms." Ilya Ilyich, on his part, experienced an odd embarra.s.sment in his son's presence-mainly because he a.s.sumed, with terror and tenderness, that Innokentiy lived wholeheartedly in the pure world of the underground as he had himself at that age. Schoolmaster Bychkov's room: motes of dust in a slanting sunbeam; lit by that beam, a small table he had made with his own hands, varnishing the top and adorning it with a pyrographic design; on the table, a photograph of his wife in a velvet frame-so young, in such a nice dress, with a little pelerine and a corset-belt, charmingly oval-faced (that ovality coincided with the idea of feminine beauty in the 1890s); next to the photograph a crystal paperweight with a mother-of-pearl Crimean view inside, and a c.o.c.kerel of cloth for wiping pens; and on the wall above, between two cas.e.m.e.nt windows, a portrait of Leo Tolstoy, entirely composed of the text of one of his stories printed in microscopic type. Innokentiy slept on a leathern couch in an adjacent smaller chamber. After a long day in the open air he slept soundly; sometimes, however, a dream image would take an erotic turn, the force of its thrill would carry him out of the sleep circle, and for several moments he would remain lying as he was, squeamishness preventing him from moving.

In the morning he would go to the woods, a medical manual under his arm and both hands thrust under the ta.s.seled cord girting his white Russian blouse. His university cap, worn askew in conformance to left-wing custom, allowed locks of brown hair to fall on his b.u.mpy forehead. His eyebrows were knitted in a permanent frown. He might have been quite good-looking had his lips been less blubbery. Once in the forest, he seated himself on a thick birch bole which had been felled not long before by a thunderstorm (and still quivered with all its leaves from the shock), and smoked, and obstructed with his book the trickle of hurrying ants or lost himself in dark meditation. A lonely, impressionable, and touchy youth, he felt overkeenly the social side of things. He loathed the entire surroundings of the G.o.dunovs' country life, such as their menials-"menials," he repeated, wrinkling his nose in voluptuous disgust. In their number he included the plump chauffeur, with his freckles, corduroy livery, orange-brown leggings, and starched collar propping a fold of his russet neck that used to flush purple when, in the carriage shed, he cranked up the no less revolting convertible upholstered in glossy red leather; and the senile flunky with gray side-whiskers who was employed to bite off the tails of newborn fox terriers; and the English tutor who could be seen striding across the village, hatless, raincoated, white-trousered-which had the village boys allude wittily to underpants and bare-headed religious processions; and the peasant girls, hired to weed the avenues of the park morning after morning under the supervision of one of the gardeners, a deaf little hunchback in a pink shirt, who in conclusion would sweep the sand near the porch with particular zest and ancient devotion. Innokentiy with the book still under his arm-which hindered his crossing his arms, something he would have liked to do-stood leaning against a tree in the park and considered sullenly various items, such as the shiny roof of the white manor which was not yet astir.

The first time he saw them that summer was in late May (Old Style) from the top of a hill. A cavalcade appeared on the road curving around its base: Tanya in front, astraddle, boylike, on a bright bay; next Count G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev himself, an insignificant-looking person riding an oddly small mouse-gray pacer; behind them the breeched Englishman; then some cousin or other; and coming last, Tanya's brother, a boy of thirteen or so, who suddenly spurred his mount, overtook everybody, and dashed up the steep bit to the village, working his elbows jockey-fashion.

After that there followed several other chance encounters and finally-all right, here we go. Ready? On a hot day in mid-June- On a hot day in mid-June the mowers went swinging along on both sides of the path leading to the manor, and each mower's shirt stuck in alternate rhythm now to the right shoulder blade, now to the left. "May G.o.d a.s.sist you!" said Ilya Ilyich in a pa.s.serby's traditional salute to men at work. He wore his best hat, a panama, and carried a bouquet of mauve bog orchids. Innokentiy walked alongside in silence, his mouth in circular motion (he was cracking sunflower seeds between his teeth and munching at the same time). They were nearing the manor park. At one end of the tennis court the deaf pink dwarf gardener, now wearing a workman's ap.r.o.n, soaked a brush in a pail and, bent in two, walked backward as he traced a thick creamy line on the ground. "May G.o.d a.s.sist you," said Ilya Ilyich in pa.s.sing.

The table was laid in the main avenue; Russian dappled sunlight played on the tablecloth. The housekeeper, wearing a gorget, her steely hair smoothly combed back, was already in the act of ladling out chocolate which the footmen were serving in dark-blue cups. At close range the Count looked his age: there were ashy streaks in his yellowish beard, and wrinkles fanned out from eye to temple; he had placed his foot on the edge of a garden bench and was making a fox terrier jump: the dog jumped not only very high, trying to hap the already wet ball he was holding, but actually contrived, while hanging in midair, to jerk itself still higher by an additional twist of its entire body. Countess Elizaveta G.o.dunov, a tall rosy woman in a big wavery hat, was coming up from the garden with another lady to whom she was vivaciously talking, and making the Russian two-hand splash gesture of uncertain dismay. Ilya Ilyich stood with his bouquet and bowed. In this varicolored haze (as perceived by Innokentiy, who, despite having briefly rehea.r.s.ed on the eve an att.i.tude of democratic scorn, was overcorne by the greatest embarra.s.sment) there flickered young people, running children, somebody's black shawl embroidered with gaudy poppies, a second fox terrier, and above all, above all, those eyes gliding through shine and shade, those features still indistinct but already threatening him with fatal fascination, the face of Tanya whose birthday was being feted.

Everybody was now seated. He found himself at the shade end of the long table, at which end convives did not indulge so much in mutual conversation as keep looking, all their heads turned in the same direction, at the brighter end where there was loud talk, and laughter, and a magnificent pink cake with a satiny glaze and sixteen candles, and the exclamations of children, and the barking of both dogs that had all but jumped onto the table-while here at this end the garlands of linden shade linked up people of the meanest rank: Ilya Ilyich, smiling in a sort of daze; an ethereal but ugly damsel whose shyness expressed itself in onion sweat; a decrepit French governess with nasty eyes who held in her lap under the table a tiny invisible creature that now and then emitted a tinkle; and so forth. Innokentiy's direct neighbor happened to be the estate steward's brother, a blockhead, a bore, and a stutterer; Innokentiy talked to him only because silence would have been worse, so that despite the paralyzing nature of the conversation, he desperately tried to keep it up; later, however, when he became a frequent visitor, and chanced to run into the poor fellow, Innokentiy never spoke to him, shunning him as a kind of snare or shameful memory.

Rotating in slow descent, the winged fruit of a linden lit on the tablecloth.

At the n.o.bility's end G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev raised his voice, speaking across the table to a very old lady in a lacy gown, and as he spoke encircled with one arm the graceful waist of his daughter who stood near and kept tossing up a rubber ball on her palm. For quite a time Innokentiy tussled with a luscious morsel of cake that had come to rest beyond the edge of his plate. Finally, following an awkward poke, the d.a.m.ned raspberry stuff rolled and tumbled under the table (where we shall leave it). His father either smiled vacantly or licked his mustache. Somebody asked him to pa.s.s the biscuits; he burst into happy laughter and pa.s.sed them. All at once, right above Innokentiy's ear, there came a rapid gasping voice: unsmilingly, and still holding that ball, Tanya was asking him to join her and her cousins; all hot and confused, he struggled to rise from table, pushing against his neighbor in the process of disengaging his right leg from under the shared garden bench.

When speaking of her, people exclaimed, "What a pretty girl!" She had light-gray eyes, velvet-black eyebrows, a largish, pale, tender mouth, sharp incisors, and-when she was unwell or out of humor-one could distinguish the dark little hairs above her lip. She was inordinately fond of all summer games, tennis, badminton, croquet, doing everything deftly, with a kind of charming concentration-and, of course, that was the end of the artless afternoons of fishing with Vasiliy, who was greatly perplexed by the change and would pop up in the vicinity of the school toward evening, beckoning Innokentiy with a hesitating grin and holding up at face level a canful of worms. At such moments Innokentiy shuddered inwardly as he sensed his betrayal of the people's cause. Meanwhile he derived not much joy from the company of his new friends. It so happened that he was not really admitted to the center of their existence, being kept on its green periphery, taking part in open-air amus.e.m.e.nts, but never being invited into the house. This infuriated him; he longed to be asked for lunch or dinner just to have the pleasure of haughtily refusing; and, in general, he remained constantly on the alert, sullen, suntanned, and s.h.a.ggy, the muscles of his clenched jaws twitching-and feeling that every word Tanya said to her playmates cast an insulting little shadow in his direction, and, good G.o.d, how he hated them all, her boy cousins, her girlfriends, the frolicsome dogs. Abruptly, everything dimmed in noiseless disorder and vanished, and there he was, in the deep blackness of an August night, sitting on a bench at the bottom of the park and waiting, his breast p.r.i.c.kly because of his having stuffed between shirt and skin the note which, as in an old novel, a barefooted little girl had brought him from the manor. The laconic style of the a.s.signation led him to suspect a humiliating practical joke, yet he succ.u.mbed to the summons-and rightly so: a light crunch of footfalls detached itself from the even rustle of the night. Her arrival, her incoherent speech, her nearness struck him as miraculous; the sudden intimate touch of her cold nimble fingers amazed his chast.i.ty. A huge, rapidly ascending moon burned through the trees. Shedding torrents of tears and blindly nuzzling him with salt-tasting lips, Tanya told him that on the following day her mother was taking her to the Crimea, that everything was finished, and-oh, how could he have been so obtuse! "Don't go anywhere, Tanya!" he pleaded, but a gust of wind drowned his words, and she sobbed even more violently. When she had hurried away he remained on the bench without moving, listening to the hum in his ears, and presently walked back in the direction of the bridge along the country road that seemed to stir in the dark, and then came the war years-ambulance work, his father's death-and after that, a general disintegration of things, but gradually life picked up again, and by 1920 he was already the a.s.sistant of Professor Behr at a spa in Bohemia, and three or four years later worked, under the same lung specialist, in Savoy, where one day, somewhere near Chamonix, Innokentiy happened to meet a young Soviet geologist; they got into conversation, and the latter mentioned that it was here, half a century ago, that Fedchenko, the great explorer of Fergana, had died the death of an ordinary tourist; how strange (the geologist added) that it should always turn out that way: death gets so used to pursuing fearless men in wild mountains and deserts that it also keeps coming at them in jest, without any special intent to harm, in all other circ.u.mstances, and to its own surprise catches them napping. Thus perished Fedchenko, and Severtsev, and G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev, as well as many foreigners of cla.s.sic fame-Speke, Dumont d'Urville. And after several years more spent in medical research, far from the cares and concerns of political expatriation, Innokentiy happened to be in Paris for a few hours for a business interview with a colleague, and was already running downstairs, gloving one hand, when, on one of the landings, a tall stoop-shouldered lady emerged from the lift-and he at once recognized Countess Elizaveta G.o.dunov-Cherdyntsev. "Of course I remember you, how could I not remember?" she said, gazing not at his face but over his shoulder as if somebody were standing behind him (she had a slight squint). "Well, come in, my dear," she continued, recovering from a momentary trance, and with the point of her shoe turned back a corner of the thick doormat, replete with dust, to get the key. Innokentiy entered after her, tormented by the fact that he could not recall what he had been told exactly about the how and the when of her husband's death.

And a few moments later Tanya came home, all her features fixed more clearly now by the etching needle of years, with a smaller face and kinder eyes; she immediately lit a cigarette, laughing, and without the least embarra.s.sment recalling that distant summer, while he kept marveling that neither Tanya nor her mother mentioned the dead explorer and spoke so simply about the past, instead of bursting into the awful sobs that he, a stranger, kept fighting back-or were those two displaying, perhaps, the self-control peculiar to their cla.s.s? They were soon joined by a pale dark-haired little girl about ten years of age: "This is my daughter, come here, darling," said Tanya, putting her cigarette b.u.t.t, now stained with lipstick, into a seash.e.l.l that served as an ashtray. Then her husband, Ivan Ivanovich Kutaysov, came home, and the Countess, meeting him in the next room, was heard to identify their visitor, in her domestic French brought over from Russia, as "le fils du maitre d'ecole chez nous au village," which reminded Innokentiy of Tanya saying once in his presence to a girlfriend of hers whom she wanted to notice his very shapely hands: "Regarde ses mains"; and now, listening to the melodious, beautifully idiomatic Russian in which the child replied to Tanya's questions, he caught himself thinking, malevolently and quite absurdly, Aha, there is no longer the money to teach the kids foreign languages!-for it did not occur to him at that moment that in those emigre times, in the case of a Paris-born child going to a French school, this Russian language represented the idlest and best luxury.

The Leshino topic was falling apart; Tanya, getting it all wrong, insisted that he used to teach her the pre-Revolution songs of radical students, such as the one about "the despot who feasts in his rich palace hall while destiny's hand has already begun to trace the dread words on the wall." "In other words, our first stengazeta" (Soviet wall gazette), remarked Kutaysov, a great wit. Tanya's brother was mentioned: he lived in Berlin, and the Countess started to talk about him. Suddenly Innokentiy grasped a wonderful fact: nothing is lost, nothing whatever; memory acc.u.mulates treasures, stored-up secrets grow in darkness and dust, and one day a transient visitor at a lending library wants a book that has not once been asked for in twenty-two years. He got up from his seat, made his adieus, was not detained overeffusively. How strange that his knees should be trembling. That was really a shattering experience. He crossed the square, entered a cafe, ordered a drink, briefly rose to remove his own squashed hat from under him. What a dreadful feeling of uneasiness. He felt that way for several reasons. In the first place, because Tanya had remained as enchanting and as invulnerable as she had been in the past.

A RUSSIAN BEAUTY.

OLGA, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year 1900, in a wealthy, carefree family of n.o.bles. A pale little girl in a white sailor suit, with a side parting in her chestnut hair and such merry eyes that everyone kissed her there, she was deemed a beauty since childhood. The purity of her profile, the expression of her closed lips, the silkiness of her tresses that reached to the small of her back-all this was enchanting indeed.

Her childhood pa.s.sed festively, securely, and gaily, as was the custom in our country since the days of old. A sunbeam falling on the cover of a Bibliotheque Rose volume at the family estate, the cla.s.sical h.o.a.rfrost of the Saint Petersburg public gardens.... A supply of memories, such as these, comprised her sole dowry when she left Russia in the spring of 1919. Everything happened in full accord with the style of the period. Her mother died of typhus, her brother was executed by the firing squad. All these are ready-made formulae, of course, the usual dreary small talk, but it all did happen, there is no other way of saying it, and it's no use turning up your nose.

Well, then, in 1919 we have a grown-up young lady, with a pale, broad face that overdid things in terms of the regularity of its features, but just the same very lovely. Tall, with soft b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she always wears a black jumper and a scarf around her white neck and holds an English cigarette in her slender-fingered hand with a prominent little bone just above the wrist.

Yet there was a time in her life, at the end of 1916 or so, when at a summer resort near the family estate there was no schoolboy who did not plan to shoot himself because of her, there was no university student who would not ... In a word, there had been a special magic about her, which, had it lasted, would have caused ... would have wreaked ... But somehow, nothing came of it. Things failed to develop, or else happened to no purpose. There were flowers that she was too lazy to put in a vase, there were strolls in the twilight now with this one, now with another, followed by the blind alley of a kiss.

She spoke French fluently, p.r.o.nouncing les gens (the servants) as if rhyming with agence and splitting aout (August) in two syllables (a-ou). She naively translated the Russian grabezhi (robberies) as les grabuges (quarrels) and used some archaic French locutions that had somehow survived in old Russian families, but she rolled her r's most convincingly even though she had never been to France. Over the dresser in her Berlin room a postcard of Serov's portrait of the Tsar was fastened with a pin with a fake turquoise head. She was religious, but at times a fit of giggles would overcome her in church. She wrote verse with that terrifying facility typical of young Russian girls of her generation: patriotic verse, humorous verse, any kind of verse at all.

For about six years, that is until 1926, she resided in a boarding-house on the Augsburgerstra.s.se (not far from the clock), together with her father, a broad-shouldered, beetle-browed old man with a yellowish mustache, and with tight, narrow trousers on his spindly legs. He had a job with some optimistic firm, was noted for his decency and kindness, and was never one to turn down a drink.

In Berlin, Olga gradually acquired a large group of friends, all of them young Russians. A certain jaunty tone was established. "Let's go to the cinemonkey," or "That was a heely deely German Diele, dance hall." All sorts of popular sayings, cant phrases, imitations of imitations were much in demand. "These cutlets are grim." "I wonder who's kissing her now?" Or, in a hoa.r.s.e, choking voice: "Mes-sieurs les officiers ..."

At the Zotovs', in their overheated rooms, she languidly danced the fox-trot to the sound of the gramophone, shifting the elongated calf of her leg not without grace and holding away from her the cigarette she had just finished smoking, and when her eyes located the ashtray that revolved with the music she would shove the b.u.t.t into it, without missing a step. How charmingly, how meaningfully she could raise the winegla.s.s to her lips, secretly drinking to the health of a third party as she looked through her lashes at the one who had confided in her. How she loved to sit in the corner of the sofa, discussing with this person or that somebody else's affairs of the heart, the oscillation of chances, the probability of a declaration-all this indirectly, by hints-and how understandingly her eyes would smile, pure, wide-open eyes with barely noticeable freckles on the thin, faintly bluish skin underneath and around them. But as for herself, no one fell in love with her, and this was why she long remembered the boor who pawed her at a charity ball and afterwards wept on her bare shoulder. He was challenged to a duel by the little Baron R., but refused to fight. The word "boor," by the way, was used by Olga on any and every occasion. "Such boors," she would sing out in chest tones, languidly and affectionately. "What a boor ..." "Aren't they boors?"

But presently her life darkened. Something was finished, people were already getting up to leave. How quickly! Her father died, she moved to another street. She stopped seeing her friends, knitted the little bonnets in fashion, and gave cheap French lessons at some ladies' club or other. In this way her life dragged on to the age of thirty.

She was still the same beauty, with that enchanting slant of the widely s.p.a.ced eyes and with that rarest line of lips into which the geometry of the smile seems to be already inscribed. But her hair lost its shine and was poorly cut. Her black tailored suit was in its fourth year. Her hands, with their glistening but untidy fingernails, were roped with veins and were shaking from nervousness and from her wretched continuous smoking. And we'd best pa.s.s over in silence the state of her stockings....

Now, when the silken insides of her handbag were in tatters (at least there was always the hope of finding a stray coin); now, when she was so tired; now, when putting on her only pair of shoes she had to force herself not to think of their soles, just as when, swallowing her pride, she entered the tobacconist's, she forbade herself to think of how much she already owed there; now that there was no longer the least hope of returning to Russia, and hatred had become so habitual that it almost ceased to be a sin; now that the sun was getting behind the chimney, Olga would occasionally be tormented by the luxury of certain advertis.e.m.e.nts, written in the saliva of Tantalus, imagining herself wealthy, wearing that dress, sketched with the aid of three or four insolent lines, on that ship-deck, under that palm tree, at the bal.u.s.trade of that white terrace. And then there was also another thing or two that she missed.

One day, almost knocking her off her feet, her one-time friend Vera rushed like a whirlwind out of a telephone booth, in a hurry as always, loaded with parcels, with a s.h.a.ggy-eyed terrier whose leash immediately became wound twice around her skirt. She pounced upon Olga, imploring her to come and stay at their summer villa, saying that it was fate itself, that it was wonderful and how have you been and are there many suitors. "No, my dear, I'm no longer that age," answered Olga, "and besides...." She added a little detail and Vera burst out laughing, letting her parcels sink almost to the ground. "No, seriously," said Olga, with a smile. Vera continued coaxing her, pulling at the terrier, turning this way and that. Olga, starting all at once to speak through her nose, borrowed some money from her.

Vera adored arranging things, be it a party with punch, a visa, or a wedding. Now she avidly took up arranging Olga's fate. "The matchmaker within you has been aroused," joked her husband, an elderly Balt (shaven head, monocle). Olga arrived on a bright August day. She was immediately dressed in one of Vera's frocks, her hairdo and make-up were changed. She swore languidly, but yielded, and how festively the floorboards creaked in the merry little villa! How the little mirrors, suspended in the green orchard to frighten off birds, flashed and sparkled!

A Russified German named Forstmann, a well-off athletic widower, author of books on hunting, came to spend a week. He had long been asking Vera to find him a bride, "a real Russian beauty." He had a ma.s.sive, strong nose with a fine pink vein on its high bridge. He was polite, silent, at times even morose, but knew how to form, instantly and while no one noticed, an eternal friendship with a dog or with a child. With his arrival Olga became difficult. Listless and irritable, she did all the wrong things and she knew that they were wrong. When the conversation turned to old Russia (Vera tried to make her show off her past), it seemed to her that everything she said was a lie and that everyone understood that it was a lie, and therefore she stubbornly refused to say the things that Vera was trying to extract from her and in general would not cooperate in any way.

On the veranda, they would slam their cards down hard. Everyone would go off together for a stroll through the woods, but Forstmann conversed mostly with Vera's husband, and, recalling some pranks of their youth, the two of them would turn red with laughter, lag behind, and collapse on the moss. On the eve of Forstmann's departure they were playing cards on the veranda, as they usually did in the evening. Suddenly, Olga felt an impossible spasm in her throat. She still managed to smile and to leave without undue haste. Vera knocked on her door but she did not open. In the middle of the night, having swatted a mult.i.tude of sleepy flies and smoked continuously to the point where she was no longer able to inhale, irritated, depressed, hating herself and everyone, Olga went into the garden. There, the crickets stridulated, the branches swayed, an occasional apple fell with a taut thud, and the moon performed calisthenics on the whitewashed wall of the chicken coop.

Early in the morning, she came out again and sat down on the porch step that was already hot. Forstmann, wearing a dark blue bathrobe, sat next to her and, clearing his throat, asked if she would consent to become his spouse-that was the very word he used: "spouse." When they came to breakfast, Vera, her husband, and his maiden cousin, in utter silence, were performing nonexistent dances, each in a different corner, and Olga drawled out in an affectionate voice "What boors!" and next summer she died in childbirth.

That's all. Of course, there may be some sort of sequel, but it is not known to me. In such cases, instead of getting bogged down in guesswork, I repeat the words of the merry king in my favorite fairy tale: Which arrow flies forever? The arrow that has. .h.i.t its mark.

BREAKING THE NEWS.

EUGENIA ISAKOVNA MINTS was an elderly emigre widow, who always wore black. Her only son had died on the previous day. She had not yet been told.

It was a March day in 1935, and after a rainy dawn, one horizontal section of Berlin was reflected in the other-variegated zigzags intermingling with flatter textures, et cetera. The Chern.o.bylskis, old friends of Eugenia Isakovna, had received the telegram from Paris around seven a.m., and a couple of hours later a letter had come by airmail. The head of the factory office where Misha had worked announced that the poor young man had fallen into an elevator shaft from the top floor, and had remained in agony for forty minutes: although unconscious, he kept moaning horribly and uninterruptedly, till the very end.

In the meantime Eugenia Isakovna got up, dressed, flung with a crosswise flick a black woolen shawl over her sharp thin shoulders and made herself some coffee in the kitchen. The deep, genuine fragrance of her coffee was something she prided herself upon in relation to Frau Doktor Schwarz, her landlady, "a stingy, uncultured beast": it had now been a whole week since Eugenia Isakovna had stopped speaking to her-and that was not their first quarrel by far-but, as she told her friends, she did not care to move elsewhere for a number of reasons, often enumerated and never tedious. A manifest advantage that she had over this or that person with whom she might decide to break off relations lay in her being able simply to switch off her hearing aid, a portable gadget resembling a small black handbag.

As she carried the pot of coffee back to her room across the hallway, she noticed the flutter of a postcard, which, upon having been pushed by the mailman through a special slit, settled on the floor. It was from her son, of whose death the Chern.o.bylskis had just learned by more advanced postal means, in consequence of which the lines (virtually inexistent) that she now read, standing with the coffeepot in one hand, on the threshold of her sizable but inept room, could have been compared by an objective observer to the still visible beams of an already extinguished star. My darling Moolik (her son's pet-name for her since childhood), I continue to be plunged up to the neck in work and when evening comes I literally fall off my feet, and I never go anywhere- Two streets away, in a similar grotesque apartment crammed with alien bagatelles, Chern.o.bylski, not having gone downtown today, paced from one room to another, a large, fat, bald man, with huge arching eyebrows and a diminutive mouth. He wore a dark suit but was collarless (the hard collar with inserted tie hung yokelike on the back of a chair in the dining room) and he gestured helplessly as he paced and spoke: "How shall I tell her? What gradual preparation can there be when one has to yell? Good G.o.d, what a calamity. Her heart will not bear it, it will burst, her poor heart!"

His wife wept, smoked, sc.r.a.ped her head through her spa.r.s.e gray hair, telephoned the Lipshteyns, Lenochka, Dr. Orshanski-and could not make herself go to Eugenia Isakovna first. Their lodger, a woman pianist with a pince-nez, big-bosomed, very compa.s.sionate and experienced, advised the Chern.o.bylskis not to hurry too much with the telling-"All the same there will be that blow, so let it be later."

"But on the other hand," cried Chern.o.bylski hysterically, "neither can one postpone it! Clearly one cannot! She is the mother, she may want to go to Paris-who knows? I don't-or she may want him to be brought here. Poor, poor Mishuk, poor boy, not yet thirty, all life before him! And to think that it was I who helped him, found him a job, to think that, if it had not been for that lousy Paris-"

"Now, now, Boris Lvovich," soberly countered the lady lodger, "who could foresee? What have you to do with it? It is comical-In general, I must say, incidentally, that I don't understand how he could fall. You understand how?"

Having finished her coffee and rinsed her cup in the kitchen (while not paying any attention whatsoever to the presence of Frau Schwarz), Eugenia Isakovna, with black net bag, handbag, and umbrella, went out. The rain, after hesitating a little, had stopped. She closed her umbrella and proceeded to walk along the shining sidewalk, still holding herself quite straight, on very thin legs in black stockings, the left sagging slightly. One also noted that her feet seemed disproportionately large and that she set them down somewhat draggingly, with toes turned out. When not connected with her hearing aid she was ideally deaf, and very deaf when connected. What she took for the hum of the town was the hum of her blood, and against this customary background, without ruffling it, there moved the surrounding world-rubbery pedestrians, cotton-wool dogs, mute tramcars-and overhead crept the ever-so-slightly rustling clouds through which, in this or that place, blabbed, as it were, a bit of blue. Amid the general silence, she pa.s.sed, impa.s.sive, rather satisfied on the whole, black-coated, bewitched and limited by her deafness, and kept an eye on things, and reflected on various matters. She reflected that tomorrow, a holiday, So-and-so would drop in; that she ought to get the same little pink gaufrettes as last time, and also marmelad (candied fruit jellies) at the Russian store, and maybe a dozen dainties in that small pastry shop where one can always be sure that everything is fresh. A tall bowler-hatted man coming toward her seemed to her from a distance (quite some distance, in fact) frightfully like Vladimir Markovich Vilner, Ida's first husband, who had died alone, in a sleeping-car, of heart failure, so sad, and as she went by a watchmaker's she remembered that it was time to call for Misha's wrist.w.a.tch, which he had broken in Paris and had sent her by okaziya (i.e., "taking the opportunity of somebody's traveling that way"). She went in. Noiselessly, slipperily, never brushing against anything, pendulums swung, all different, all in discord. She took her purselike gadget out of her larger, ordinary handbag, introduced with a quick movement that had been shy once the insert into her ear, and the familiar faraway voice of the watchmaker replied-began to vibrate-then faded away, then jumped at her with a crash: "Freitag ... Freitag-"

"All right, I hear you, next Friday."

Upon leaving the shop, she again cut herself off from the world. Her faded eyes with yellowish stains about the iris (as if its color had run) acquired once more a serene, even gay, expression. She went along streets which she had not only learned to know well during the half-dozen years since her escape from Russia, but which had now become as full of fond entertainment as those of Moscow or Kharkov. She kept casting casual looks of approval on kids, on small dogs, and presently she yawned as she went, affected by the resilient air of early spring. An awfully unfortunate man, with an unfortunate nose, in an awful old fedora, pa.s.sed by: a friend of some friends of hers who always mentioned him, and by now she knew everything about him-that he had a deranged daughter, and a despicable son-in-law, and diabetes. Having reached a certain fruit stall (discovered by her last spring) she bought a bunch of wonderful bananas; then she waited quite a time for her turn in a grocery, with her eyes never leaving the profile of an impudent woman, who had come later than she but nevertheless had squeezed nearer than she to the counter: there came a moment when the profile opened like a nutcracker-but here Eugenia Isakovna took the necessary measures. In the pastry shop she carefully chose her cakes, leaning forward, straining on tiptoe like a little girl, and moving hither and thither a hesitant index-with a hole in the black wool of the glove. Hardly had she left and grown engrossed in a display of men's shirts next door than her elbow was grasped by Madame Shuf, a vivacious lady with a somewhat exaggerated make-up; whereupon Eugenia Isakovna, staring away into s.p.a.ce, nimbly adjusted her complicated machine, and only then, with the world become audible, gave her friend a welcoming smile. It was noisy and windy; Madame Shuf stooped and exerted herself, red mouth all askew, as she endeavored to aim the point of her voice straight into the black hearing aid: "Do you have-news-from Paris?"

"Oh I do, even most regularly," answered Eugenia Isakovna softly, and added, "Why don't you come to see me, why do you never ring me up?"-and a gust of pain rippled her gaze because well-meaning Madame Shuf shrieked back too piercingly.

They parted. Madame Shuf, who did not know anything yet, went home, while her husband, in his office, was uttering akhs and tsks, and shaking his head with the receiver pressed to it, as he listened to what Chern.o.bylski was telling him over the telephone.

"My wife has already gone to her," said Chern.o.bylski, "and in a moment I'll go there also, though kill me if I know how to begin but my wife is after all a woman, maybe she'll somehow manage to pave the way."

Shuf suggested they write on bits of paper, and give her to read, gradual communications: "Sick." "Very sick." "Very, very sick."

"Akh, I also thought about that, but it doesn't make it easier. What a calamity, eh? Young, healthy, exceptionally endowed. And to think that it was I who got that job for him, I who helped him with his living expenses! What? Oh, I understand all that perfectly, but still these thoughts drive me crazy. Okay, we're sure to meet there."

Fiercely and agonizingly baring his teeth and throwing back his fat face, he finally got his collar fastened. He sighed as he started to go. He had already turned into her street when he saw her from behind walking quietly and trustfully in front of him, with a net bag full of her purchases. Not daring to overtake her, he slowed down. G.o.d grant she does not turn! Those dutifully moving feet, that narrow back, still suspecting nothing. Ah, it shall bend!

She noticed him only on the staircase. Chern.o.bylski remained silent as he saw her ear was still bare.

"Why, how nice to drop in, Boris Lvovich. No, don't bother-I've been carrying my load long enough to bring it upstairs too; but hold this umbrella if you like, and then I'll unlock the door."

They entered. Madame Chern.o.bylski and the warmhearted pianist had been waiting there for quite a long time. Now the execution would start.

Eugenia Isakovna liked visitors and her friends often called on her, so that now she had no reason to be astonished; she was only pleased, and without delay started fussing hospitably. They found it hard to arrest her attention while she dashed this way and that, changing her course at an abrupt angle (the plan that spread its glow within her was to fix a real lunch). At last the musician caught her in the corridor by the end of her shawl and the others heard the woman shouting to her that n.o.body, n.o.body would stay for lunch. So Eugenia Isakovna got out the fruit knives, arranged the gaufrettes in one little gla.s.s vase, bonbons in another.... She was made to sit down practically by force. The Chern.o.bylskis, their lodger, and a Miss Osipov who by that time had somehow managed to appear-a tiny creature, almost a dwarf-all sat down, too, at the oval table. In this way a certain array, a certain order had, at least, been attained.

"For G.o.d's sake, begin, Boris," pleaded his wife, concealing her eyes from Eugenia Isakovna, who had begun to examine more carefully the faces around her, without interrupting, however, the smooth flow of her amiable, pathetic, completely defenseless words.

"Nu, chto ya mogu!" ("Well, what can I!") cried Chern.o.bylski, and spasmodically rising started to walk around the room.

The doorbell rang, and the solemn landlady, in her best dress, let in Ida and Ida's sister: their awful white faces expressed a kind of concentrated avidity.

"She doesn't know yet," Chern.o.bylski told them; he undid all three b.u.t.tons of his jacket and immediately b.u.t.toned it up again.

Eugenia Isakovna, her eyebrows twitching but her lips still retaining their smile, stroked the hands of her new visitors and reseated herself, invitingly turning her little apparatus, which stood before her on the tablecloth, now toward this guest, now toward that, but the sounds slanted, the sounds crumbled. All of a sudden the Shufs came in, then lame Lipshteyn with his mother, then the Orshanskis, and Lenochka, and (by sheer chance) aged Madame Tomkin-and they all talked among themselves, but were careful to keep their voices away from her, though actually they collected around her in grim, oppressive groups, and somebody had already walked away to the window and was shaking and heaving there, and Dr. Orshanski, who sat next to her at the table, attentively examined a gaufrette, matching it, like a domino, with another, and Eugenia Isakovna, her smile now gone and replaced by something akin to rancor, continued to push her hearing aid toward her visitors-and sobbing Chern.o.bylski roared from a distant corner: "What's there to explain-dead, dead, dead!" but she was already afraid to look in his direction.

TORPID SMOKE.

WHEN the streetlamps hanging in the dusk came on, practically in unison, all the way to Bayerischer Platz, every object in the unlit room shifted slightly under the influence of the outdoor rays, which started by taking a picture of the lace curtain's design. He had been lying supine (a long-limbed flat-chested youth with a pince-nez glimmering in the semiobscurity) for about three hours, apart from a brief interval for supper, which had pa.s.sed in merciful silence: his father and sister, after yet another quarrel, had kept reading at table. Drugged by the oppressive, protracted feeling so familiar to him, he lay and looked through his lashes, and every line, every rim, or shadow of a rim, turned into a sea horizon or a strip of distant land. As soon as his eye got used to the mechanics of these metamorphoses, they began to occur of their own accord (thus small stones continue to come alive, quite uselessly, behind the wizard's back), and now, in this or that place of the room's cosmos, an illusionary perspective was formed, a remote mirage enchanting in its graphic transparency and isolation: a stretch of water, say, and a black promontory with the minuscule silhouette of an araucaria.

At intervals sc.r.a.ps of indistinct, laconic speech came from the adjacent parlor (the cavernal centerpiece of one of those bourgeois flats which Russian emigre families used to rent in Berlin at the time), separated from his room by sliding doors, through whose ripply matte gla.s.s the tall lamp beyond shone yellow, while lower down there showed through, as if in deep water, the fuzzy dark back of a chair placed in that position to foil the propensity of the door leaves to crawl apart in a series of jerks. In that parlor (probably on the divan at its farthest end) his sister sat with her boyfriend, and, to judge by the mysterious pauses, resolving at last in a slight cough or a tender questioning laugh, the two were kissing. Other sounds could be heard from the street: the noise of a car would curl up like a wispy column to be capitaled by a honk at the crossing; or, vice versa, the honk would come first, followed by an approaching rumble in which the shudder of the door leaves partic.i.p.ated as best it could.

And in the same way as the luminosity of the water and its every throb pa.s.s through a medusa, so everything traversed his inner being, and that sense of fluidity became transfigured into something like second sight. As he lay flat on his couch, he felt carried sideways by the flow of shadows and, simultaneously, he escorted distant foot-pa.s.sengers, and visualized now the sidewalk's surface right under his eyes (with the exhaustive accuracy of a dog's sight), now the design of bare branches against a sky still retaining some color, or else the alternation of shop windows: a hairdresser's dummy, hardly surpa.s.sing the queen of hearts in anatomic development; a picture framer's display, with purple heathscapes and the inevitable Inconnue de la Seine, so popular in the Reich, among numerous portraits of President Hindenburg; and then a lampshade shop with all bulbs aglow, so that one could not help wondering which of them was the workaday lamp belonging to the shop itself.

All at once it occurred to him, as he reclined mummylike in the dark, that it was all rather awkward-his sister might think that he was not at home, or that he was eavesdropping. To move was, however, incredibly difficult; difficult, because the very form of his being had now lost all distinctive marks, all fixed boundaries. For example, the lane on the other side of the house might be his own arm, while the long skeletal cloud that stretched across the whole sky with a chill of stars in the east might be his backbone. Neither the striped obscurity in his room nor the gla.s.s of the parlor door, which was trans.m.u.ted into nighttime seas shining with golden undulations, offered him a dependable method of measuring and marking himself off; that method he found only when in a burst of agility the tactile tip of his tongue, performing a sudden twist in his mouth (as if dashing to check, half-awake, if all was well), palpated and started to worry a bit of soft foreign matter, a shred of boiled beef firmly lodged in his teeth; whereupon he reflected how many times, in some nineteen years, it had changed, that invisible but tangible householdry of teeth, which the tongue would get used to until a filling came out, leaving a great pit that presently would be refurnished.

He was now prompted to move not so much by the shamelessly frank silence behind the door as by the urge to seek out a nice, pointed little tool, to aid the solitary blind toiler. He stretched, raised his head, and switched on the light near his couch, thus entirely restoring his corporeal image. He perceived himself (the pince-nez, the thin, dark mustache, the bad skin on his forehead) with that utter revulsion he always experienced on coming back to his body out of the languorous mist, promising-what? What shape would the force oppressing and teasing his spirit finally take? Where did it originate, this thing growing in me? Most of my day had been the same as usual-university, public library-but later, when I had to trudge to the Osipovs on Father's errand, there was that wet roof of some pub on the edge of a vacant lot, and the chimney smoke hugged the roof, creeping low, heavy with damp, sated with it, sleepy, refusing to rise, refusing to detach itself from beloved decay, and right then came that thrill, right then.

Under the table lamp gleamed an oilcloth-bound exercise book, and next to it, on the ink-mottled blotter, lay a razor blade, its apertures encircled with rust. The light also fell on a safety pin. He unbent it, and following his tongue's rather fussy directions, removed the mote of meat, swallowed it-better than any dainties; after which the contented organ calmed down.

Suddenly a mermaid's hand was applied from the outside to the ripply gla.s.s of the door; then the leaves parted spasmodically and his sister thrust in her s.h.a.ggy head.

"Grisha dear," she said, "be an angel, do get some cigarettes from Father."

He did not respond, and the bright slits of her furry eyes narrowed (she saw very poorly without her horn-rimmed gla.s.ses) as she tried to make out whether or not he was asleep on the couch.

"Get them for me, Grishenka," she repeated, still more entreatingly. "Oh, please! I don't want to go to him after what happened yesterday."

"Maybe I don't want to either," he said.

"Hurry, hurry," tenderly uttered his sister, "come on, Grisha dear!"

"All right, lay off," he said at last, and carefully reuniting the two halves of the door, she dissolved in the gla.s.s.

He examined again his lamp-lit island, remembering hopefully that he had put somewhere a pack of cigarettes which one evening a friend had happened to leave behind. The shiny safety pin had disappeared, while the exercise book now lay otherwise and was half-open (as a person changes position in sleep). Perhaps, between my books. The light just reached their spines on the shelves above the desk. Here was haphazard trash (predominantly), and manuals of political economy (I wanted something quite different, but Father won out); there were also some favorite books that at one time or another had done his heart good: Gumilyov's collection of poems Shatyor (Tent), Pasternak's Sestra moya Zhizn' (Life, My Sister), Gazdanov's Vecher u Kler (Evening at Claire's), Radiguet's Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel, Sinn's Zashchita Luzhina (Luzhin's Defense), Ilf and Petrov's Dvenadtsat' Stul'ev (Twelve Chairs), Hoffmann, Holderlin, Baratynski, and an old Russian guidebook. Again that gentle mysterious shock. He listened. Would the thrill be repeated? His mind was in a state of extreme tension, logical thought was eclipsed, and when he came out of his trance, it took him some time to recall why he was standing near the shelves and fingering books. The blue-and-white package that he had stuck between Professor Sombart and Dostoyevski proved to be empty. Well, it had to be done, no getting out of it. There was, however, another possibility.

In worn bedroom slippers and sagging pants, listlessly, almost noiselessly, dragging his feet, he pa.s.sed from his room to the hallway and groped for the switch. On the console under the looking gla.s.s, next to the guest's smart beige cap, there remained a crumpled piece of soft paper: the wrappings of liberated roses. He rummaged in his father's overcoat, penetrating with squeamish fingers into the insensate world of a strange pocket, but did not find there the spare pack he had hoped to obtain, knowing as he did his father's heavyish providence. Nothing to be done, I must go to him.

Here, that is at some indeterminate point of his somnambulic itinerary, he again stepped into a zone of mist, and this time the renewed vibration within him possessed such power, and, especially, was so much more vivid than all external perceptions, that he did not immediately identify as his proper confines and countenance the stoop-shouldered youth with the pale, unshaven cheek and the red ear who glided soundlessly by in the mirror. He overtook his own self and entered the dining room.

There, at the table which long since, before going to bed, the maid had laid for late-evening tea, sat his father: one finger was grating in his black, gray-streaked beard; between the finger and thumb of his other hand he held aloft a pince-nez by its springy clips; he sat studying a large plan of Berlin badly worn at the folds. A few days ago, at the house of some friends, there had been a pa.s.sionate, Russian-style argument about which was the shortest way to walk from a certain street to another, neither of which, incidentally, did any of the arguers ever frequent; and now, to judge by the expression of displeased astonishment on his father's inclined face, with those two pink figure-eights on the sides of his nose, the old man had turned out to be wrong.

"What is it?" he asked, glancing up at his son (with the secret hope, perhaps, that I would sit down, divest the teapot of its cozy, pour a cup for him, for myself). "Cigarettes?" he went on in the same interrogatory tone, having noticed the direction in which his son gazed; the latter had started to go behind his father's back to reach for the box, which stood on the far side of the table, but his father was already handing it across so that there ensued a moment of muddle.

"Is he gone?" came the third question.

"No," said the son, taking a silky handful of cigarettes.

On his way out of the dining room he noticed his father turn his whole torso in his chair to face the wall clock as if it had said something, and then begin turning back-but there the door I was closing closed, and I did not see that bit to the end. I did not see it to the end, I had other things on my mind, yet that too, and the distant seas of a moment ago, and my sister's flushed little face, and the indistinct rumble on the circular rim of the transparent night-everything, somehow or other, helped to form what now had at last taken shape. With terrifying clarity, as if my soul were lit up by a noiseless explosion, I glimpsed a future recollection; it dawned upon me that exactly as I recalled such images of the past as the way my dead mother had of making a weepy face and clutching her temples when mealtime squabbles became too loud, so one day I would have to recall, with merciless, irreparable sharpness, the hurt look of my father's shoulders as he leaned over that torn map, morose, wearing his warm indoor jacket powdered with ashes and dandruff; and all this mingled creatively with the recent vision of blue smoke clinging to dead leaves on a wet roof.

Through a c.h.i.n.k between the door leaves, unseen, avid fingers took away what he held, and now he was lying again on his couch, but the former languor had vanished. Enormous, alive, a metrical line extended and bent; at the bend a rhyme was coming deliciously and hotly alight, and as it glowed forth, there appeared, like a shadow on the wall when you climb upstairs with a candle, the mobile silhouette of another verse.

Drunk with the italianate music of Russian alliteration, with the longing to live, the new temptation of obsolete words (modern bereg reverting to breg, a farther "sh.o.r.e," holod to hlad, a more cla.s.sic "chill," veter to vetr, a better Boreas), puerile, perishable poems, which, by the time the next were printed, would have been certain to wither as had withered one after the other all the previous ones written down in the black exercise book; but no matter: at this moment I trust the ravishing promises of the still breathing, still revolving verse, my face is wet with tears, my heart is bursting with happiness, and I know that this happiness is the greatest thing existing on earth.