Mary

3

That night, as every night, a little old man in a black cape plodded along the curb down the long deserted avenue, poking the point of a gnarled stick into the asphalt as he looked for cigarette-ends — gold, cork or plain paper — and flaking cigar butts. Occasionally, braying like a stag, a motorcar would dash by or something would happen which no one walking in a city ever notices: a star, faster than thought and with less sound than a tear, would fall. Gaudier, gayer than the stars were the letters of fire which poured out one after another above a black roof, paraded in single file and vanished all at once in the darkness.

‘Can — it — be — possible,’ said the letters in a discreet neon whisper, then the night would sweep them away at a single velvet stroke. Again they would start to creep across the sky: ‘Can — it —’

And darkness descended again. But the words insistently lit up once more and finally, instead of disappearing at once, they stayed alight for a whole five minutes, as had been arranged between the advertising agency and the manufacturer.

But then who can tell what it really is that flickers up there in the dark above the houses — the luminous name of a product or the glow of human thought; a sign, a summons; a question hurled into the sky and suddenly getting a jewel-bright, enraptured answer?

And in those streets, now as wide as shiny black seas, at that late hour when the last beer-hall has closed, and a native of Russia, abandoning sleep, hatless and coatless under an old mackintosh, walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour down those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil. Five hackney droshkies stood on the avenue alongside the huge drumlike shape of a street pissoir: five sleepy, warm, gray worlds in coachman’s livery; and five other worlds on aching hooves, asleep and dreaming of nothing but oats streaming out of a sack with a soft crackly sound.

It is at moments like this that everything grows fabulous, unfathomably profound, when life seems terrifying and death even worse. And then, as one swiftly strides through the night-time city, looking at the lights through one’s tears and searching in them for a glorious, dazzling recollection of past happiness — a woman’s face, resurgent after many years of humdrum oblivion — all of a sudden, in one’s mad progress, one is politely stopped by a foot passenger and asked how to get to such and such a street; asked in an ordinary voice, but a voice which one will never hear again.