The Gift

Chapter Five

ABOUT a fortnight after The Life of Chernyshevski appeared it was greeted by the first, artless echo. Valentin Linyov (in a Russian émigré paper published in Warsaw) wrote as follows:

“Boris Cherdyntsev’s new book opens with six lines of verse which the author for some reason calls a sonnet (?) and this is followed by a pretentiously capricious description of the well-known Chernyshevski’s life.

“Chernyshevski, says the author, was the son of ‘a kindly cleric’ (but does not mention when and where he was born); he finished the seminary and when his father, having lived a holy life which inspired even Nekrasov, died, his mother sent the young man to study in St. Petersburg, where he immediately, practically on the station, became intimate with the then “molders of opinion,” as they were called, Pisarev and Belinski. The youth entered the university and devoted himself to technical inventions, working very hard and having his first romantic adventure with Lyubov’ Yegorovna Lobachevski, who infected him with a love for art. After a clash on romantic grounds with some officer or other in Pavlovsk, however, he was forced to return to Saratov, where he proposed to his future bride and soon afterwards married her.

“He returned to Moscow, devoted himself to philosophy, wrote a great deal (the novel What Are We to Do?) and became friends with the outstanding writers of his time. Gradually he was drawn into revolutionary work and after one turbulent meeting, where he spoke together with Dobrolyubov and the well-known Professor Pavlov, who was still quite a young man at that time, Chernyshevski was forced to go abroad. For a while he lived in London collaborating with Herzen, but then he returned to Russia and was immediately arrested. Accused of planning the assassination of Alexander the Second, Chernyshevski was sentenced to death and publicly executed.

“This in brief is the story of Chernyshevski’s life, and everything would have been all right if the author had not found it necessary to equip his account of it with a host of unnecessary details which obscure the sense, and with all sorts of long digressions on the most diversified themes. And worst of all, having described the scene of the hanging and put an end to his hero, he is not satisfied with this and for the space of still many more unreadable pages he ruminates on what would have happened ‘if’—if Chernyshevski, for example, had not been executed but had been exiled to Siberia, like Dostoevski.

“The author writes in a language having little in common with Russian. He loves to invent words. He loves long, tangled sentences, as for example: ‘Fate sorts (?) them in anticipation (?) of the researcher’s needs (?)’! or else he places solemn but not quite grammatical maxims in the mouths of his characters, like ‘The poet himself chooses the subjects for his poems, the multitude has no right to direct his inspiration.’ “

Almost simultaneously with this entertaining review appeared that of Christopher Mortus (Paris)—which so aroused Zina’s indignation that from that time her eyes glared and her nostrils dilated at the very least mention of this name.

“When speaking of a new young author [wrote Mortus quietly] one usually experiences the feeling of a certain awkwardness: will one not rattle him, will one not injure him by a too ‘glancing’ remark? It seems to me that in the present instance there are no grounds for such fears. Godunov-Cherdyntsev is a novice, true, but a novice endowed with extreme self-confidence, and to rattle him is probably no easy matter. I do not know whether his book presages any future ‘achievements’ or not, but if this is a beginning it cannot be called a particularly reassuring one.

“Let me qualify this. Strictly speaking, it is completely unimportant whether Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s effort is creditable or not. One man writes well, another badly, and everyone is awaited at the end of the road by the Theme ‘which none can evade.’ It is a question, I think, of something quite different. That golden time has passed irretrievably when the critic or reader could be interested above all by the ‘artistic’ quality or exact degree of talent of a book. Our émigré literature—I am speaking of genuine, ‘undoubted’ literature—people of faultless taste will understand menas become plainer, more serious, drier—at the expense of art, perhaps, but in compensation producing (in certain poems by Tsypovich and Boris Barski and in the prose of Koridonov…) sounds of such sorrow, such music and such ‘hopeless,’ heavenly charm that in truth it is not worth regretting what Lermontov called ‘the dull songs of the earth.’

“In itself the idea of writing a book about an outstanding public figure of the sixties contains nothing reprehensible. One sits down and writes it—fine; it comes out—fine; worse books than that have come out. But the author’s general mood, the ‘atmosphere’ of his thinking fills one with queer and unpleasant misgivings. I will refrain from discussing the question: how appropriate is the appearance of such a book at the present time? After all, no one can forbid a person to write what he pleases! But it seems to me—and I am not alone in feeling this—that at the bottom of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book there lies something which is in essence profoundly tactless, something jarring and offensive…. It is his right, of course (although even this could be questioned), to take this or that attitude toward the ‘men of the sixties,’ but in ‘debunking’ them he cannot but awake in any sensitive reader surprise and disgust. How irrelevant all this is! How inopportune! Let me define my meaning. The fact that it is precisely now, precisely today, that this tasteless operation is being performed is in itself an affront to that significant, bitter, palpitating something which is ripening in the catacombs of our era. Oh, of course, the ‘men of the sixties,’ and in particular Chernyshevski, expressed in their literary judgments much that was mistaken and perhaps ridiculous. Who is not guilty of this sin? And is it such a big sin, after all? But in the general ‘intonation’ of their criticism there transpired a certain kind of truth—a truth which, no matter how paradoxical it seems, has become close and comprehensible to us precisely today, precisely now. I am talking not of their attacks on bribe-takers nor of the emancipation of women…. That, of course, is not the point! I think I shall be properly understood (insofar as another can be understood) if I say that in some final and infallible sense their and our needs coincide. Oh, I know, we are more sensitive, more spiritual, more ‘musical’ than they were, and our final aim—beneath that resplendent black sky under which life streams on—is not simply ‘the commune’ or ‘the overthrow of the despot.’ But to us, as to them, Nekrasov and Lermontov, especially the latter, are closer than Pushkin. I shall take just this simplest of examples because it immediately clarifies our affinity—if not kinship—with them. That chilliness, that foppishness, that ‘irresponsible’ quality they sensed in a certain part of Pushkin’s poetry is perceptible to us, too. One may object that we are more intelligent, more receptive…. All right, I agree; but essentially it is not a question of Chernyshevski’s ‘rationalism’ (or Belinski’s or Dobrolyubov’s, names and dates do not matter), but of the fact that then, as now, spiritually progressive people understood that mere ‘art’ and the ‘lyre’ were not a sufficient pabulum. We, their refined and weary grandchildren, also want something that is above all human; we demand the values which are essential to the soul. This ‘utilitarianism’ is more elevated, perhaps, than theirs, but in some respects it is more urgent even than the one they preached.

“I have digressed from the immediate theme of my article. But then, sometimes, one can express one’s opinion with much more exactitude and authenticity by wandering ‘around the theme’—in its fertile environs…. As a matter of fact, the analysis of any book is awkward and pointless, and, moreover, we are interested not in the way an author executed his ‘task’ nor even in the ‘task’ itself, but only in the author’s attitude toward it.

“And let me add this: are they really so necessary, these excursions into the realm of the past, with their stylized squabbles and artificially vivified way of life? Who wants to know about Chernyshevski’s relations with women? In our bitter, tender, ascetic times there is no place for this kind of mischievous research, for this idle literature—which, anyway, is not devoid of a certain arrogant audacity that is bound to repel even the most well-disposed of readers.”

After this, reviews poured. Professor Anuchin of Prague University (a well-known public figure, a man of shining moral purity and of great personal courage—the same Professor Anuchin who in 1922, not long before his deportation from Russia, when some revolvered leatherjackers had come to arrest him but became interested in his collection of ancient coins and were slow in taking him away, had calmly said, pointing to his watch: “Gentlemen, history does not wait.”) printed a detailed analysis of The Life of Chernyshevski in an émigré magazine appearing in Paris.

“Last year [he wrote], a remarkable book came out by Professor Otto Lederer of Bonn University, Three Despots (Alexander the Misty, Nicholas the Chill, and Nicholas the Dull). Motivated by a passionate love for the freedom of the human spirit and a burning hatred for its suppressors, Dr. Lederer in certain of his appraisals was unjust—taking no account at all, for instance, of that national Russian fervor which so powerfully gave body to the symbol of the throne; but excessive zeal, and even blindness, in the process of exposing evil is always more understandable and forgivable than the least mockery—no matter how witty it may be—of that which public opinion feels to be objectively good. However, it is precisely this second road, the road of eclectic mordancy, that has been chosen by Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev in his interpretation of the life and works of N. G. Chernyshevski.

“The author has undoubtedly acquainted himself throughly and in his own way conscientiously with his subject; undoubtedly, also, he has a talented pen—certain ideas he puts forward, and juxtapositions of ideas, are undoubtedly shrewd; but with all this his book is repellent. Let us try to examine calmly this impression.

“A certain epoch has been taken and one of its representatives chosen. But has the author assimilated the concept of ‘epoch’? No. First of all one senses in him absolutely no consciousness of that classification of time, without which history turns into an arbitrary gyration of multicolored spots, into some kind of impressionistic picture with a walking figure upside down against a green sky that does not exist in nature. But this device (which destroys, by the way, any scholarly value of the work in question, in spite of its swaggering erudition) does not, nevertheless, constitute the author’s chief fault. His chief fault is in the manner in which he portrays Chernyshevski.

“It is completely unimportant that Chernyshevski understood less about questions of poetry than a young esthete of today. It is completely unimportant that in his philosophical conceptions Chernyshevski kept aloof from those transcendental subtleties which please Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev. What is important is that, whatever Chernyshevski’s views may have been on art and science, they represented the Weltanschauung of the most progressive men of his era, and were moreover indissolubly linked with the development of social ideas, with their ardent, beneficial, activating force. It is in this aspect, in this sole true light, that Chernyshevski’s system of thought acquires a significance which far transcends the sense of those groundless arguments—unconnected in any way with the epoch of the sixties—which Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev uses in venomously ridiculing his hero.

“But he makes fun, not only of his hero: he also makes fun of his reader. How else can one qualify the fact that among the well-known authorities on Chernyshevski a nonexistent authority is cited, to whom the author pretends to appeal? In a certain sense it would be possible if not to forgive then at least to understand scientifically the scoffing at Chernyshevski, if Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev were a heated supporter of those whom Chernyshevski attacked. It would at least be a point of view, and reading the book the reader would make a constant adjustment for the author’s partisan approach, in that way arriving at the truth. But the pity is that with Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev there is nothing to adjust to and the point of view is ‘everywhere and nowhere’; not only that, but as soon as the reader, as he descends the course of a sentence, thinks he has at last sailed into a quiet backwater, into a realm of ideas which may be contrary to those of Chernyshevski but are apparently shared by the author—and therefore can serve as a basis for the reader’s judgment and guidance—the author gives him an unexpected fillip and knocks the imaginary prop from under him, so that he is once more unaware as to whose side Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev is on in his campaign against Chernyshevski—whether he is on the side of the advocates of art for art’s sake, or of the government, or of some other of Chernyshevski’s enemies whom the reader does not know. As far as jeering at the hero himself is concerned, here the author passes all bounds. There is no detail too repulsive for him to disdain. He will probably reply that all these details are to be found in the ‘Diary’ of the young Chernyshevski; but there they are in their place, in their proper environment, in the correct order and perspective, among many other thoughts and feelings which are much more valuable. But the author has fished out and put together precisely these, as if someone had tried to restore the image of a person by making an elaborate collection of his combings, fingernail parings, and bodily excretions.

“In other words the author is sneering throughout the whole of his book at the personality of one of the purest and most valorous sons of liberal Russia—not to speak of the passing kicks with which he rewards other progressive Russian thinkers, a respect for whom is in our consciousness an immanent part of their historical essence. In his book, which lies absolutely outside the humanitarian tradition of Russian literature and therefore outside literature in general, there are no factual untruths (if one does not count the fictitious ‘Strannolyubski’ already mentioned, two or three doubtful details, and a few slips of the pen), but that ‘truth’ which it contains is worse than the most prejudiced lie, for such a truth goes in direct contradiction to that noble and chaste truth (an absence of which deprives history of what the great Greek called ‘tropotos’) which is one of the inalienable treasures of Russian social thought. In our day, thank God, books are not burned by bonfire, but I must confess that if such a custom were still in existence, Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book could justifiably be considered the first candidate for fueling a public square.”

After that Koncheyev had his say in the literary annual The Tower. He began by drawing a picture of flight during an invasion or an earthquake, when the escapers carry away with them everything that they can lay hands on, someone being sure to burden himself with a large, framed portrait of some long-forgotten relative. “Just such a portrait [wrote Koncheyev] is for the Russian intelligentsia the image of Chernyshevski, which was spontaneously but accidentally carried away abroad by the émigrés, together with other, more useful things,” and this is how Koncheyev explained the stupefaction occasioned by the appearance of Fyodor Konstantinovich’s book: “Somebody suddenly confiscated the portrait.” Further on, having finished once and for all with considerations of an ideological nature and embarked upon an examination of the book as a work of art, Koncheyev began to praise it in such a way that as he read the review Fyodor felt a burning radiance forming around his face and quicksilver racing through his veins. The article ended with the following: “Alas! Among the emigration one will hardly scrape up a dozen people capable of appreciating the fire and fascination of this fabulously witty composition; and I would maintain that in today’s Russia you could not find even one to appreciate it, if I had not happened to know of the existence of two such people, one living on the north bank of the Neva and the other—somewhere in distant Siberian exile.”

The monarchist organ The Throne devoted to The Life of Chernyshevski a few lines in which it pointed out that any sense or value in the unmasking of “one of the ideological mentors of Bolshevism” was completely undermined by “the cheap liberalizing of the author, who goes wholly over to the side of his sorry, but pernicious hero as soon as the long-suffering Russian Tsar finally has him safely tucked away…. And in general,” added the reviewer, Pyotr Levchenko, “it is high time one ceased writing about so-called cruelties of ‘the tsarist regime’ with regard to ‘pure souls’ who are of no interest to anybody. The Red Freemasonry will only rejoice over Count Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s work. It is lamentable that the bearer of such a name should engage in hymning ‘social ideals’ which have long since turned into cheap idols.”

The pro-Communist Russian-language daily in Berlin, Up! (this was the one which Vasiliev’s Gazeta invariably termed “the reptile”), had an article devoted to the celebration of the centenary of Chernyshevski’s birth, and concluded thus: “They have also bestirred themselves in our blessed emigration: a certain Godunov-Cherdyntsev with swashbuckling brashness has hurried to concoct a booklet—for which he has dragged in material from all over the place—and has given out his vile slander as The Life of Chernyshevski. Some Prague professor or other has hastened to find this work ‘talented and conscientious’ and everyone chummily joined in. It is dashingly written and in no way differs in its internal style from Vasiliev’s leaders about ‘The imminent end of Bolshevism.’ ” The last dig was particularly amusing in view of the fact that in his Gazeta Vasiliev resolutely opposed the slightest reference to Fyodor’s book, telling him honestly (although the other had not asked) that had he not been on such friendly terms with him he would have printed a devastating review—“not even a damp spot would have remained” of the author of The Life of Chernyshevski. In short, the book found itself surrounded by a good, thundery atmosphere of scandal which helped sales; and at the same time, in spite of the attacks, the name of Godunov-Cherdyntsev immediately came to the fore, rising over the motley storm of critical opinion, in full view of everyone, vividly and firmly. But there was one man whose opinion Fyodor was no longer able to ascertain. Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski had died not long before the book appeared.

When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them….

Is it not possible to understand more simply, in a way more satisfying to the spirit without the aid of this elegant atheist and equally without the aid of popular faiths? For religion subsumes a suspicious facility of general access that destroys the value of its revelations. If the poor in spirit enter the heavenly kingdom I can imagine how gay it is there. I have seen enough of them on earth. Who else makes up the population of heaven? Swarms of screaming revivalists, grubby monks, lots of rosy, shortsighted souls of more or less Protestant manufacture—what deathly boredom! I am running a high temperature for the fourth day now, and can no longer read. Strange—I used to think before that Yasha was always near me, that I had learned to communicate with ghosts, but now, when I am perhaps dying, this belief in ghosts seems to me something earthly, linked with the very lowest earthly sensations and not at all the discovery of a heavenly America.

Somehow simpler. Somehow simpler. Somehow at once! One effort—and I’ll understand all. The search for God: the longing of any hound for a master; give me a boss and I shall kneel at his enormous feet. All this is earthly. Father, headmaster, rector, president of the board, tsar, God. Numbers, numbers—and one wants so much to find the biggest number, so that all the rest may mean something and climb somewhere. No, that way you end up in padded dead ends—and everything ceases to be interesting.

Of course I am dying. These pincers behind and this steely pain are quite comprehensible. Death steals up from behind and grasps you by the sides. Funny that I have thought of death all my life, and if I have lived, have lived only in the margin of a book I have never been able to read. Now who was it? Oh, years ago in Kiev… Goodness, what was his name? Would take out a library book in a language he didn’t know, make notes in it and leave it lying about so visitors would think: He knows Portuguese, Aramaic. Ich habe dasselbe getan. Happiness, sorrow—exclamation marks en marge, while the context is absolutely unknown. A fine affair.

It is terribly painful to leave life’s womb. The deathly horror of birth. L’enfant qui naît ressent les affres de sa mère. My poor little Yasha! It is very queer that in dying I get further away from him, when the opposite should have been true—ever nearer and nearer…. His first word was muha, a fly. And immediately afterwards there was a telephone call from the police: to come and identify the body. How will I leave him now? In these rooms… He will have nobody to haunt… Because she would not notice… Poor girl. How much? Five thousand eight hundred… plus that other money… which makes, let me see… And afterwards? David might help—but then he might not.

…In general, there has been nothing in life except getting ready for an examination—which all the same nobody can get ready for. “Dreadful is death to man and mite alike.” Will all my friends go through it? Incredible! Eine alte Geschichte: the name of a film Sandra and I went to see the day before his death.

Oh, no. Under no circumstances. She can keep talking about it as much as she pleases. Was it yesterday that she talked about it? Or ages ago? No, they won’t be taking me to any hospital. I’ll lie here. I’ve had enough of hospitals. It would mean to go mad again just before the end. No, I’ll stay here. How difficult it is to turn one’s thoughts over: like logs. I feel much too ill to die.

“What did he write his book about, Sandra? Well, tell me, you should remember! We talked about it once. About some priest—no? Oh, you never… anything… Bad, difficult …”

After this he hardly spoke, having fallen into a twilight condition; Fyodor was admitted to him and forever remembered the white bristle on his sunken cheeks, the dull shade of his bald head, and the hand crusted with gray eczema, stirring like a crawfish on the sheet. The following day he died, but before that he had a moment of lucidity, complaining of pains and then saying (it was darkish in the room because of the lowered blinds): “What nonsense. Of course there is nothing afterwards.” He sighed, listened to the trickling and drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme distinctness: “There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.”

And meanwhile outside the spring sun was playing on the roof tiles, the sky was dreamy and cloudless, the tenant upstairs was watering the flowers on the edge of her balcony, and the water trickled down with a drumming sound.

In the window of the mortician’s on the corner of Kaiserallee there was exhibited as an enticement (just as Cook’s exhibits a Pullman model) a miniature crematorium interior: rows of little chairs before a little pulpit, little dolls sitting on them the size of a bent auricular finger, and in front, and somewhat apart, one could recognize the little widow by the square inch of handkerchief she had raised to her face. The German seductivity of this model had always amused Fyodor, so that now it was somewhat disgusting to enter a real crematorium, where from beneath laurels in tubs a real coffin with a real body was lowered to the sounds of heavyweight organ music into exemplary nether regions, right into the incinerator. Mme. Chernyshevski did not hold a handkerchief but sat motionless and straight, her eyes shimmering through the black crepe veil. The faces of friends and acquaintances bore the guarded expressions usual in such cases: a mobility of the pupils accompanied by a certain tension in the muscles of the neck. The lawyer Charski sincerely blew his nose; Vasiliev, who as a public figure had had a great deal of funeral experience, carefully followed the parson’s pauses (Alexander Yakovlevich had turned out at the last minute to be a Protestant). Engineer Kern flashed the lenses of his pince-nez impassively. Goryainov repeatedly freed his fat neck from its collar but did not go so far as to clear his throat; the ladies who had used to visit the Chernyshevskis all sat together; the writers also sat together—Lishnevski, Shahmatov and Shirin; there were many people whom Fyodor did not know—for instance, a prim gentleman with a blond little beard and unusually red lips (a cousin, it seemed, of the dead man), and also some Germans with top hats on their knees, who tactfully sat in the back row.

Upon the conclusion of the service the mourners, according to the scheme of the crematorium’s master of ceremonies, were supposed to go up to the widow one at a time and offer words of condolence, but Fyodor resolved to avoid this and went out onto the street. Everything was wet, sunny and somehow nudely bright; on a black football field trimmed with young grass, schoolgirls in shorts were doing calisthenics. Behind the crematorium’s shiny, gutta-percha gray dome one could see the turquoise turrets of a mosque, and on the other side of the square gleamed the green cupolas of a white Pskovan-type church, which had recently grown up out of the corner house and thanks to architectural camouflage seemed almost detached. On a terrace by the entrance to the park two badly wrought bronze boxers, also recently erected, had frozen in attitudes that completely disagreed with the reciprocal harmony of pugilism: instead of its collected, crouched, round-muscled grace there were two naked soldiers scrapping in a bathhouse. A kite being flown from an open space behind some trees made a red little rhombus high in the blue sky. With surprise and vexation Fyodor noticed that he was unable to keep his thoughts on the image of the man who had just been reduced to ashes and gone up in smoke; he tried to concentrate, to imagine to himself the recent warmth of their live relationship, but his soul refused to budge and lay there, sleepy eyes shut, content with its cage. The braked line from King Lear, consisting entirely of five “nevers”—that was all he could think of. “And so I’ll never see him again,” he told himself, unoriginally, but this thin goad snapped without displacing his soul. He tried to think about death, but reflected instead that the soft sky, edged on one side with a long cloud like a pale and tender border of fat, would have resembled a slice of ham had the blue been pink. He tried to imagine some kind of extension of Alexander Yakovlevich beyond the corner of life—but at the same time could not help noticing through the window of a cleaning and pressing shop near the Orthodox church, a worker with devilish energy and an excess of steam, as if in hell, torturing a pair of flat trousers. He tried to confess something to Alexander Yakovlevich, and repent at least for the cruel mischievous thoughts he had fleetingly had (concerning the unpleasant surprise he was preparing for him with his book)- and suddenly he recalled a vulgar triviality: how Shchyogolev had once said in some connection or other: “When good friends of mine die, I always think that up there they will do something to improve my destiny here, ho, ho, ho!” He was in a troubled and obscured state of mind which was incomprehensible to him, just as everything was incomprehensible, from the sky to that yellow tram rumbling along the clear track of the Hohenzollerdamm (along which Yasha had once gone to his death), but gradually his annoyance with himself passed and with a kind of relief—as if the responsibility for his soul belonged not to him but to someone who knew what it all meant—he felt that all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well—the seams and sleaziness of the spring day, the ruffle of the air, the coarse, variously intercrossing threads of confused sounds—was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him.

He found himself by the bronze boxers; in the flower beds around them rippled pale, black-blotched pansies (somewhat similar facially to Charlie Chaplin); he sat on a bench where once or twice at night he had sat with Zina—for of late a kind of restlessness had carried them far beyond the bounds of the dark, quiet lane where they had at first sought shelter. Nearby a woman sat knitting; next to her a small child, entirely clothed in light blue wool, ending above in the pompon of a cap and below in foot straps, was ironing the bench with a toy tank; sparrows twittered in the bushes and from time to time made concerted raids on the turf, on the statues; a sticky smell came from the poplar buds, and far beyond the square the domed crematorium now had a sated, clean-licked look. From a distance Fyodor could see tiny figures dispersing… he could even make out someone leading Alexandra Yakolevna to a toy automobile (tomorrow he would have to call on her), and a group of her friends gathering at the tram stop; he saw them concealed for a moment by the immobilized tram and then, with legerdemain magic, they were gone when the shutter was removed.

Fyodor was about to walk home when a lisping voice called him from behind: it belonged to Shirin, author of the novel The Hoary Abyss (with an Epigraph from the Book of Job) which had been received very sympathetically by the émigré critics. (“Oh Lord, our Father! Down Broadway in a feverish rustle of dollars, hetaeras and businessmen in spats, shoving, falling and out of breath, were running after the golden calf, which pushed its way, rubbing against walls between the skyscrapers, then turned its emaciated face to the electric sky and howled. In Paris, in a low-class dive, the old man Lachaise, who had once been an aviation pioneer but was now a decrepit vagabond, trampled under his boots an ancient prostitute, Boule de Suif. Oh Lord, why—? Out of a Moscow basement a killer came out, squatted by a kennel and began to coax a shaggy pup: little one, he repeated, little one… In London, lords and ladies danced the Jimmie and imbibed cocktails, glancing from time to time at a platform where at the end of the eighteenth ring a huge Negro had laid his fair-haired opponent on the carpet with a knockout. Amid arctic snows the explorer Ericson sat on an empty soapbox and thought gloomily: The pole or not the pole?… Ivan Chervyakov carefully trimmed the fringe of his only pair of pants. Oh Lord, why dost Thou permit all this?”) Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes—which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot. A blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete unin-formedness about the surrounding world—and a complete inability to put a name to anything) is a quality quite frequently met with among the average Russian literati, as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material. It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him—not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright—enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent. But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day.

As he walked now across the park with Shirin, Fyodor derived disinterested pleasure from the amusing thought that he had for companion a deaf and blind man with blocked nostrils who regarded this state with complete indifference, although he was not averse at times to sighing naively about the intellectual’s alienation from nature: recently Lishnevski had related that Shirin had arranged to meet him about some business in the Zoological Garden and when after an hour’s conversation Lishnevski had casually drawn his attention to a hyena in its cage, it transpired that Shirin had hardly realized that one keeps animals in a zoological garden, and glancing briefly at the cage had remarked automatically: “Yes, the likes of us don’t know much about the animal world,” and immediately continued discussing that which particularly disturbed him in life: the activities and composition of the Committee of the Society of Russian Writers in Germany. And now he was in an extreme degree of agitation since “a certain event had come to a head.”

Chairman of the Committee was Georgiy Ivanovich Vasiliev, and for this of course there were good reasons: his pre-Soviet reputation, his many years of editorial activity, and most important—that inexorable almost awesome honesty for which his name was famous. On the other hand, his bad temper, polemical harshness, and (despite great public experience) complete ignorance of people, not only did not harm this honesty but on the contrary imparted a certain tang to it. Shirin’s dissatisfaction was directed not against him but against the five remaining members of the Committee, first because not one of them (as two-thirds, incidentally, of the whole membership of the society) was a professional writer, and secondly because three of them (including the treasurer and the vice-president) were—if not scoundrels as the partial Shirin maintained—then at least shade-lovers in their bashful but deft activities. For some time past now a rather comical (in Fyodor’s opinion) and absolutely outrageous (in Shirin’s terminology) affair had been going on with the Union’s funds. Every time a member asked for a loan or a grant (the difference between which was about the same as that between a ninety-nine-year lease and life ownership) one had to track down these funds which at the least attempt to catch up with them became amazingly fluid and ethereal, as if they were always situated equidistantly between three points represented by the treasurer and two members of the Committee. The chase was complicated by the fact that for a long time now Vasiliev had not been on speaking terms with these three members, refusing even to communicate with them in writing, and in recent times had been dispensing loans and grants out of his own pocket, leaving others to get the money from the Union to repay him. In the end the money would be extracted in dribs and drabs, but then it usually turned out that the treasurer had borrowed it from an outsider, so that transactions never caused any change in the phantasmal state of the exchequer. Lately members of the Society who appealed particularly often for aid had begun to grow visibly nervous. A general meeting had been called for next month and Shirin had prepared for it a plan of resolute action.

“There was a time,” he said, striding down a path in the park with Fyodor and automatically following its cunningly unobstrusive convolutions, “there was a time when all the people who went on the Committee of our Union were highly respectable, like Podtyagin, Ivan Luzhin, Zilanov, but some died and others are in Paris. Somehow Gurman oozed through into it and then gradually pulled his pals in. For this trio the passive participation of the extremely decent—I’m saying nothing—but completely inert Kern and Goryainov is a convenient cover, a kind of camouflage. And Gurman’s strained relations with Georgiy Ivanovich is a guarantee of inactivity on his part also. The ones to blame for all this are us, the members of the Union. If it were not for our idleness, carelessness, lack of organization, indifferent attitude to the Union and flagrant impracticality in social work it would never have happened that Gurman and his chums from year to year elected either themselves or else people congenial to them. It is time to put an end to this. Their list as always will be circulated at the coming elections… But we will then put out our own, one hundred percent professional: president—Vasiliev, vice-president—Getz, members of the board: Lishnevski, Shahmatov, Vladimirov, you and I—and then we’ll reconstitute the Inspection Committee, the more so since Belenki and Chernyshevski have dropped out.”

“Oh no, please,” said Fyodor (admiring in passing Shirin’s definition of death), “don’t count on me. I never went and never will go on any committee.”

“Stop it!” exclaimed Shirin, frowning. “That’s not fair.”

“On the contrary, very fair. And anyway—if I am a member of the Union it’s only out of absentmindedness. To tell the truth, Koncheyev is right to stand aside from all this.”

“Koncheyev!” said Shirin angrily. “Koncheyev is an absolutely useless handicraftsman working on his own, and is completely devoid of any general interests. But you ought to be interested in the fate of the Union if only because you—excuse my directness—borrow money from it.”

“That’s just it. You can see for yourself that if I go on the Committee I shan’t possibly be able to give handouts to myself.”

“Bosh. Why not? It’s a completely legal procedure. You will simply get up and go to the lavatory—and so become for a moment, so to speak, an ordinary member, while your colleagues discuss your request. All these are empty excuses that you’ve just thought up.”

“How’s your new novel?” asked Fyodor. “Is it nearly finished?”

“We’re not talking about my novel now. I ask you very seriously to give your assent. We need young blood. Lishnevski and I have given much thought to this list.”

“Under no circumstances,” said Fyodor. “I don’t want to play the fool.”

“Well, if you call your public duty playing the fool …”

“If I go on the Committee I shall certainly be playing the fool, so I am refusing precisely out of respect for duty.”

“Very sad,” said Shirin. “Will we really have to take Rostislav Strannyy instead of you?”

“Of course! Wonderful! I adore Rostislav.”

“Actually I had reserved him for the Inspection Committee. There’s also Busch, of course… But do think it over, please. It’s not a trifling matter. We shall have a regular battle with these gangsters. I am preparing a speech that will really make them sit up. Think it over, do, you still have a whole month.”

During that month Fyodor’s book came out and two or three notices had had time to appear, so that he set off for the general meeting with the pleasant feeling that he would find more than one enemy reader there. It took place as usual in the upper premises of a large café, and when he arrived everybody was already there. A phenomenally dexterous waiter with darting eyes was serving beer and coffee. The members of the Society were seated at little tables. The creative writers formed a close-knit group, and one could already hear the energetic “psst, psst” of Shahmatov, who had been served the wrong order. In the back behind a long table sat the Committee: the bulky, extremely gloomy Vasiliev, with Goryainov and engineer Kern on his right, and the three others on his left. Kern, whose main interest was turbines but who had once been on friendly terms with Alexander Blok, and the former official of a former government department, Goryainov, who could recite marvelously “Woe from Wit” as well as Ivan the Terrible’s dialogue with the Lithuanian ambassador (when he used to do a splendid imitation of a Polish accent), bore themselves with quiet distinction: they had betrayed long ago their three unrighteous colleagues. Of these, Gurman was a fat man with a bald head half occupied by a coffee-colored birthmark, massive sloping shoulders, and a disdainfully offended expression on his thick, purplish lips. His relationship to literature was limited to a brief and entirely commercial connection with some German publisher of technical guides; the principal theme of his personality, the pith of his existence, was speculation—he was particularly keen on Soviet bills of exchange. Next to him sat a small but sturdily resilient barrister, with a jutting jaw, a rapacious gleam in his right eye (the left one was half-closed by nature), and a whole store of metal in his mouth—an alert, fiery man, something of a swashbuckler in his own way, who was always challenging people to arbitration, and he would talk of this (I called him out, he refused) with the precise severity of a hardened duelist. Gurman’s other friend, loose-fleshed, gray-skinned, languid, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, his whole aspect resembling a peaceful toad that wants only one thing—to be left in complete peace in a damp place—had somewhen somewhere written notes on economic questions, although the evil-tongued Lishnevski denied him even this, swearing that his sole printed effort was a letter in pre-Revolution days to the editor of an Odessa newspaper in which he had indignantly dissociated himself from a villainous namesake, who subsequently turned out to be his relative, then his double, and finally himself, as if there was in action here the irrevocable law of capillary attraction and fusion.

Fyodor sat between the novelists Shahmatov and Vladimirov, by a wide window behind which the night gleamed wetly black, with two-toned (the Berlin imagination did not stretch to any more) illuminated signs—ozone-blue and oporto-red—and rumbling electric trains with rapidly and distinctly lighted insides gliding above the square along a viaduct, against whose archivolts below slow, grinding trams seemed to keep butting without finding a loophole.

Meanwhile the chairman of the board had stood up and proposed the election of a chairman for the meeting. There sounded from various places: “Kraevich, let’s have Kraevich …” and Professor Kraevich (no relation to the author of the textbook on physics—he was a professor of international law), a mobile, angular old man in a knitted waistcoat and unbuttoned jacket, swept up to the presidium table extraordinarily fast, holding his left hand in his trouser pocket and tossing up his pince-nez on the end of its cord with his right; he sat down between Vasiliev and Gurman (who was slowly and gloomily twisting a cigarette into an amber holder), immediately stood up again, and pronounced the meeting opened.

I wonder, thought Fyodor, glancing sideways at Vladimirov, I wonder if he has read my book? Vladimirov put down his glass and looked at Fyodor, but said nothing. Beneath his jacket he was wearing an English sports sweater with a black-and-orange border along its triangular opening; the receding hair on either side of his forehead exaggerated the latter’s dimensions, his large nose was strongly boned, his grayish-yellow teeth glistened unpleasantly beneath his slightly raised lip and his eyes looked out with intelligence and indifference—he had studied, it seemed, at an English university and flaunted a pseudo-British manner. At twenty-nine he was already the author of two novels—outstanding for the force and swiftness of their mirror-like style—which irritated Fyodor perhaps for the very reason that he felt a certain affinity with him. As a conversationalist Vladimirov was singularly unattractive. One blamed him for being derisive, supercilious, cold, incapable of thawing to friendly discussions—but that was also said about Koncheyev and about Fyodor himself, and about anyone whose thoughts lived in their own private house and not in a barrack-room or a pub.

When a secretary had also been elected, Professor Kraevich proposed that all should stand to honor the memory of the two deceased members of the Society; and during this five-second petrification the excommunicated waiter scanned the tables, having forgotten who had ordered the ham sandwich he had just brought in on a tray. Everyone stood as he could. Gurman, for example, his skew-bald head lowered, was holding his hand palm upwards on the table, as if he had just cast the dice and had frozen in astonishment at his loss.

“Allo! Hier!” shouted Shahmatov, who had been waiting anxiously for the moment when with a clatter of relief life would be seated again—and then the waiter quickly raised his index finger (he had remembered), glided over to him, and with a tinkle put the plate down on the imitation marble. Shahmatov immediately began to cut the sandwich, holding his knife and fork crosswise; on the edge of the plate a yellow blob of mustard projected, as is usually the case, a yellow horn. Shahmatov’s complaisantly Napoleonic face with its strand of steely-blue hair slanting toward the temple appealed particularly to Fyodor at these gastronomic moments. Next to him, drinking tea with lemon, and himself very lemony, with sadly arched eyebrows, sat the satirist from the Gazeta, whose pseudonym, Foma Mur, contained according to his own assertion “a complete French novel (femme, amour), a page of English literature (Thomas Moore), and a touch of Jewish skepticism (Thomas the Apostle).” Shirin was sharpening a pencil over an ashtray: he was very much offended at Fyodor for refusing “to figure” in the election list. Of the writers, there were also: Rostislav Strannyy—a rather dreadful person with a bracelet on his hairy wrist; the parchment-pale, raven-haired poetess, Anna Aptekar; a theater critic—a skinny, singularly quiet young man with an elusive something about him recalling a daguerreotype of the Russian forties; and, of course, kindly Busch, his eyes resting paternally on Fyodor, who, with half an ear cocked to the Society president’s report, had now transferred his gaze from Busch, Lishnevski, Shirin and the other writers to the general mass of those present, among whom were several journalists, as for instance old Stupishin, whose spoon was working its way through a wedge of mocha cake, many reporters, and—sitting alone and admitted here on God knows what basis—Lyubov Markovna in her timorously gleaming pince-nez; and in general there was a large number of those whom Shirin severely termed “the outside element”: the imposing lawyer Charski, holding his fourth cigarette of the night in his white, always trembling hand; a bearded little jobber who had once published an obituary notice in a Bundist paper; a gentle, pale old man, tasting of apple paste, who enthusiastically discharged his duties as the precentor of a church choir; an enormous, enigmatic fat man who lived as a hermit in a pine wood near Berlin, some said in a cave, and had there compiled a collection of Soviet anecdotes; a separate group of rowdies, conceited failures; a pleasant young man of unknown means and position (“a Soviet agent,” said Shirin simply and darkly); another lady—someone’s former secretary; her husband—the brother of a well-known publisher; and all these people, from the illiterate bum with a heavy, drunken gaze, who wrote denunciatorily mystical verses which not a single newspaper had yet agreed to publish, to the repulsively small, almost portable lawyer, Poshkin, who when talking to people said “I pot” for “I put” and “coshion” for “cushion” as if establishing an alibi for his name; all of these, in Shirin’s opinion, damaged the Society’s dignity and were liable to immediate expulsion.

“And now,” said Vasiliev, after finishing his report, “I bring to the notice of the meeting that I resign as Chairman of the Society and will not stand for re-election.”

He sat down. A little chill ran through the assembly. Beneath the burden of sorrow, Gurman closed his heavy lids. An electric train slid bowlike over a bass string.

“Next comes…” said Professor Kraevich, raising his pince-nez to his eyes and looking at the agenda, “the treasurer’s report. If you please.”

Gurman’s resilient neighbor, immediately adopting a challenging tone of voice, flashing his good eye and powerfully twisting his valuable-crammed mouth, commenced to read… figures were emitted like sparks, metallic words bounced… “entered the current year”… “debited”… “audited”… while Shirin, in the meantime, swiftly began to note something on the reverse side of a cigarette pack, added it up, and triumphantly exchanged glances with Lishnevski.

Having read to the end, the treasurer shut his mouth with a click, while some distance off a member of the Auditorial Committee had already risen, a Georgian socialist with a pockmarked face and black hair like a shoe-brush, and briefly enumerated his favorable impressions. After this Shirin asked for the floor and at once there was a whiff of something jolly, alarming, and improper.

He began by seizing on the fact that the expenditure for the New Year’s charity dance was inexplicably large; Gurman wanted to reply… the chairman, aiming his pencil at Shirin, asked him if he had finished…. “Let him speak, no cutting short!” shouted Shahmatov from his seat—and the chairman’s pencil, quivering like a serpent’s tongue, was aimed at him before returning to Shirin, who, however, bowed and sat down. Gurman rose heavily, carrying his sorrowful burden with disdain and resignation, and began to speak… but Shirin soon interrupted him and Kraevich grasped his bell. Gurman finished, after which the treasurer instantly asked for the floor, but Shirin was already up and continuing: “The explanation of the honorable gentleman from the stock exchange …” The chairman rang his bell and requested more moderation, threatening to refuse permission to speak. Shirin again bowed and said that he had only one question: in the funds, according to the treasurer’s words, there were three thousand and seventy-six marks and fifteen pfennigs—could he see this money right now?

“Bravo,” shouted Shahmatov—and the least attractive member of the Union, the mystical poet, guffawed, applauded and almost fell off his chair. The treasurer, paling to a snowy shine, began to speak in a rapid patter… While he was speaking and being interrupted by impossible exclamations from the audience, a certain Shuf, lean, clean-shaven, looking somewhat like a Red Indian, left his corner, went up to the committee table unnoticed on his rubber soles, and suddenly slammed his red fist down on it, so that even the bell gave a jump. “You’re lying,” he bellowed and returned to his seat.

A row was breaking out on all sides when to Shirin’s chagrin it transpired that there was yet another faction wishing to seize power—namely the group that was always left out, and that included both the mystic and the Red Indian, as well as the little bearded fellow and several seedy and unbalanced individuals, one of whom suddenly began to read from a piece of paper a list of candidates for election to the committee, all of whom were completely unacceptable. The battle took a new turn, sufficiently tangled, now that there were three warring sides. Such expressions flew about as “black marketeer,” “you’re not fit to duel” and “you’ve already been thrashed.” Even Busch spoke, trying to drown insulting ejaculations, but because of the natural obscurity of his style no one could understand what he was talking about until, sitting down, he explained that he was fully in agreement with the preceding speaker. Gurman, his nostrils alone expressing sarcasm, busied himself with his cigarette holder. Vasiliev left his seat and retired to a corner, where he pretended to read a newspaper. Lishnevski delivered a crushing speech directed mainly against the board member resembling a peaceful toad, who merely spread his hands and directed a helpless glance at Gurman and the treasurer, both of whom tried not to look at him. Finally, when the poet-mystic stood up, shakily swaying, and with a highly promising smile on his sweaty, leathery face began to speak in verse, the chairman furiously rang his bell and announced an interval, after which the elections were due to be held. Shirin flew over to Vasiliev and commenced to talk to him persuasively, while Fyodor, feeling suddenly bored, found his mackintosh and made his way out onto the street.

He was angry with himself: fancy sacrificing for the sake of this preposterous divertissement the fixed star of his nightly meeting with Zina! The desire to see her at once tortured him with its paradoxical impossibility: if she had not slept six yards from the head of his bed, access to her would have been much easier. A train stretched over the viaduct: the yawn begun by a woman in the lighted window of the first car was completed by another woman—in the last one. Fyodor Konstantinovich strolled toward the tram stop along an oily-black, blaring street. The illuminated sign of a music hall ran up the steps of vertically placed letters, they went out all together, and the light again scrambled up: what Babylonian word would reach up to the sky?… a compound name for a trillion tints: diamondimlunalilithlilasafieryviolentviolet and so on—and how many more! Perhaps he should try to phone? He only had a dime in his pocket and he had to decide: to phone meant that in any case he would not be able to take the tram, but to phone for nothing, that is not to get Zina herself (to get her through her mother was not permitted by the code) and then to return on foot would be a bit too galling. I’ll risk it. He went into a beerhouse, rang, and everything was over in a twinkle! he got the wrong number, that very number which the anonymous Russian was always trying to get who always got the Shchyogolevs. So what—he would have to hoof it, as Boris Ivanovich would say.

At the next corner his approach automatically triggered off the doll-like mechanism of the prostitutes who always patrolled there. One of them even tried to look like somebody lingering by a shop window, and it was sad to think that these pink corsets on their golden dummies were known to her by heart, by heart…. “Sweety,” said another with a questioning smile. The night was warm with a dusting of stars. He walked at a swift pace and his bared head felt light from the narcotic night air—and further on when he walked along gardens there came floating to him phantoms of lilacs, the darkness of foliage, and wonderful naked odors spreading on the lawns.

He was hot, and his forehead was burning when finally, quietly clicking the door shut behind him, he found himself in the dark hall. The opaque glass in the upper part of Zina’s door resembled a radiant sea: she must be reading in bed, he thought, but while he stood and looked at this mysterious glass she coughed, rustled, and the light went out. What an absurd torture. Go in there, go in… Who would know? People like her mother and stepfather sleep with insensible, hundred percent sleep of peasants. Zina’s punctiliousness: she would never open at the clinking tap of a fingernail. But she knows I am standing in the dark hall and suffocating. This forbidden room during recent months had become a sickness, a burden, a part of himself, but inflated and sealed off: the pneumothorax of the night.

He stood for another moment—and on tiptoe stole into his room. All in all, French emotions. Fama Mour. Sleep, sleep—the heaviness of spring is utterly untalented. Take oneself in hand: a monastic pun. What next? What exactly are we waiting for? In any case I won’t find a better wife. But do I need a wife at all? “Put that lyre away, I’ve no room to move …” No, I would never hear that from her—that’s the point.

And a few days later, simply and even somewhat sillily, a solution was indicated to a problem which had seemed so complex that one could not help wondering if there was not a mistake in its construction. Boris Ivanovich, whose affairs during recent years had been getting worse and worse, was most unexpectedly offered by a Berlin firm quite a respectable representative’s position in Copenhagen. In two months, by the first of July, he had to move there for at least a year, and perhaps forever if all went well. Marianna Nikolavna who for some reason loved Berlin (familiar haunts, excellent sanitary arrangements—she herself, though, was filthy) felt sad at going away, but when she thought of the improvements in life awaiting her, her grief was dispersed. Thus it was decided that from July Zina would remain alone in Berlin, continuing to work for Traum, until Shchyogolev “had found her a job” in Copenhagen, where Zina would go “at the first summons” (i.e., that is what the Shchyogolevs thought—Zina had decided quite, quite differently). It remained to regulate the question of the apartment. The Shchyogolevs did not want to sell it, so they began to seek somebody to let it to. They found such a person. A young German with a great commercial future, accompanied by his fiancée—a plain, unmade-up, domestically sturdy girl in a green coat—inspected the apartment—dining room, bedroom, kitchen, Fyodor in bed—and was satisfied. However, he was taking the apartment only from August, so that for another month after the Shchyogolevs’ departure Zina and the lodger would be able to stay there. They counted the days: fifty, forty-nine, thirty, twenty-five—every one of these numbers had its own face: a beehive, a magpie in a tree, the silhouette of a knight, a young man. Their evening meetings had since spring gone beyond the shores of their initial street (lamp, lime, fence), and now their restless wanderings carried them in ever widening circles into distant and ever new corners of the city. Now it was a bridge over a canal, then a trellised bosket in a park, behind which lights ran past, then an unpaved street between misty wastes where dark vans were standing, then some strange arcades which were impossible to find during the daytime. Change of habits before migration; excitement; a languorous pain in the shoulders.

The newspapers diagnosed the still young summer as being exceptionally hot, and indeed there was a long dotted line of beautiful days, interrupted from time to time by the interjection of a thunderstorm. In the morning, while Zina was wilting from the stinking heat in the office (the sweaty armpits of Hamekke’s jacket alone were more than enough… and what about the typists’ necks melting like wax, what about the sticky blackness of carbon paper?), Fyodor would go to spend the whole day in Grunewald, abandoning his lessons and trying not to think of the long-since-due payment for his room. Never before had he got up at seven, it would have seemed monstrous—but now in life’s new light (in which blended somehow the maturing of his gift, a premonition of new labors, and the approach of complete happiness with Zina) he experienced a direct pleasure from the speed and lightness of these early risings, from that burst of motion, from the ideal simplicity of three-second dressing: shirt, trousers and sneakers on bare feet—after which he took a laprobe under his arm, with his swim-trunks wrapped in it, thrust on his way through the hall an orange and a sandwich into his pockets and was already running down the stairs.

A turned-back doormat held the door in a wide-open position while the janitor energetically beat the dust out of another mat by slapping it against the trunk of an innocent lime tree: what have I done to deserve this? The asphalt was still in the dark blue shadow of the houses. On the sidewalk gleamed the first, fresh excrements of a dog. A black hearse, which yesterday had been standing outside a repair shop, rolled cautiously out of a gate and turned down the empty street, and inside it, behind the glass and among artificial white roses, in place of a coffin, lay a bicycle: whose? why? The dairy was already open, but the lazy tobacconist was still asleep. The sun played on various objects along the right side of the street, like a magpie picking out the tiny things that glittered; and at the end of it, where it was crossed by the wide ravine of a railroad, a cloud of locomotive steam suddenly appeared from the right of the bridge, disintegrated against its iron ribs, then immediately loomed white again on the other side and wavily streamed away through the gaps in the trees. Crossing the bridge after this, Fyodor, as usual, was gladdened by the wonderful poetry of railroad banks, by their free and diversified nature: a growth of locusts and sallows, wild grass, bees, butterflies—all this lived in isolation and unconcern in the harsh vicinity of coal dust glistening below between the five streams of rails, and in blissful estrangement from the city coulisses above, from the peeled walls of old houses toasting their tattooed backs in the morning sunshine. Beyond the bridge, near the small public garden, two elderly postal workers, having completed their check of a stamp machine and grown suddenly playful, were stealing up from behind the jasmine, one behind the other, one imitating the other’s gestures, toward a third—who with eyes closed was humbly and briefly relaxing on a bench before his working day—in order to tickle his nose with a flower. Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards me—and only me? Save them up for future books? Use them immediately for a practical handbook: How to Be Happy? Or getting deeper, to the bottom of things: understand what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green greasepaint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000 days—from Person Unknown.

He walked farther, past iron railings, past the deep gardens of bankers’ villas with their grotto shadows, boxwood, ivy and lawns pearled with watering—and there among the elms and limes the first pines already appeared, sent out far ahead by the Grunewald pinewoods (or, on the contrary: stragglers behind the regiment?). Whistling loudly and rising (uphill) on the pedals of his three-wheeled bicycle, a baker’s roundsman went by; a water-sprayer crawled slowly by with a wet hissing sound—a whale on wheels generously irrigating the asphalt. Someone with a briefcase slammed a vermilion-painted garden gate and set off for some unknown office. Fyodor emerged on his heels onto the boulevard (still the same Hohenzollerdamm at whose beginning they burned poor Alexander Yakovlevich), and there, its lock flashing, the briefcase ran for a tram. Now it was not far to the forest and he quickened his step, already feeling the sun’s hot mask on his upturned face. The pickets of a fence flicked by, speckling his vision. On yesterday’s vacant lot a small villa was being built, and since the sky was looking in through the gaps of future windows, and since burdocks and sunlight had taken advantage of the slowness of the work to make themselves comfortable within the unfinished white walls, these had acquired the pensive cast of ruins, like the word “sometime,” which serves both the past and the future. Toward Fyodor came a young girl with a bottle of milk; she bore some resemblance to Zina—or, rather, contained a particle of that fascination, both special and vague, which he found in many girls, but with particular fullness in Zina, so that they all possessed some mysterious kinship with Zina, about which he alone knew, although he was completely incapable of formulating the indicia of this kinship (outside of which women evoked painful disgust in him)—and now, as he looked back at her and caught her long familiar, golden, fugitive outline that promptly vanished forever, he felt for a moment the impact of a hopeless desire, whose whole charm and richness was in its unquenchability. Oh trite demon of cheap thrills, do not tempt me with the catchword “my type.” Not that, not that, but something beyond that. Definition is always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet.

At the end of the boulevard the green edge of the pinewood came into sight, with the gaudy portico of a recently constructed pavilion (in whose atrium was to be found an assortment of rest-rooms—men’s, women’s and children’s), through which—according to the scheme of the local Lenôtres—one had to go in order to enter at first a newly laid-out rock garden, with Alpine flora along geometric paths, which served—still according to that same scheme—as a pleasant threshold to the forest. But Fyodor turned to the left, avoiding the threshold: it was nearer that way. The still wild edge of the pinewood stretched endlessly along an avenue for automobiles, but the next step on the part of the city fathers was inevitable: fence the whole of this free access with endless railings, so that the portico became the entrance of necessity (in the most literal, elementary sense). I built this ornamental thing for you but you weren’t attracted; so now if you please: it is ornamental and regimental. But (by a mental jump back again: f3—gl) it could hardly have been better when this forest—now retreated, now crowded around the lake (and like us, in our own departure from hairy ancestors, having kept only a marginal vegetation)—used to stretch to the very heart of the present city, and a noisy, princely rabble galloped among its wilds with horns and hounds and beaters.

The forest as I found it was still alive, rich, full of birds. There occurred orioles, pigeons and jays; a crow flew by, its wings panting: kshoo, kshoo, kshoo; a redheaded woodpecker was rapping against a pine trunk—and sometimes, I presume, imitating its own rap vocally whereupon it came out particularly loud and convincingly (for the female’s benefit); for there is nothing in nature more bewitchingly divine than her ingenious deceptions cropping up in unexpected places: thus a forest grasshopper (starting his little motor but never able to get it going: tsig-tsig-tsig—and breaks off), having jumped and landed, immediately readjusts the position of his body by turning in such a way as to make the direction of his dark stripes coincide with those of the fallen needles (or with their shadows!). But careful: I like to recall what my father wrote: “When closely—no matter how closely—observing events in nature we must, in the very process of observation, beware of letting our reason—that garrulous dragoman who always runs ahead—prompt us with explanations which then begin imperceptibly to influence the very course of observation and distort it: thus the shadow of the instrument falls upon the truth.”

Give me your hand, dear reader, and let’s go into the forest together. Look: first—at these glades with patches of thistle, nettle or willow herb, among which you will find all kinds of junk: sometimes even a ragged mattress with rusty, broken springs; don’t disdain it! Here is a dark thicket of small firs where I once discovered a pit which had been carefully dug out before its death by the creature that lay therein, a young, slender-muzzled dog of wolf ancestry, folded into a wonderfully graceful curve, paws to paws. And now come bare hillocks with no undergrowth—merely a carpet of brown needles beneath simplistic pines, which have a hammock stretched between them full of someone’s unexacting body—and the wire skeleton of a discarded lampshade is also here, lying on the ground. Further we have a barren, surrounded by locust trees—and there on the gray, burning, sticky sand sits a woman in underwear, her dreadful bare legs stretched out, and darns a stocking, while beside her crawls a child dark-groined from the dust. You can still see from here the thoroughfare and the sparkle of automobile radiators skimming by—but you only have to penetrate a little deeper, and the forest reasserts itself, the pines become nobler, moss creaks underfoot, and some bum is invariably asleep here, a newspaper covering his face: the philosopher prefers moss to roses. Here is the exact spot where a small airplane fell the other day: someone who was taking his girl for a morning ride in the blue got overexuberant, lost control of his joystick, and plunged with a screech and a crackle straight into the pines. I, unfortunately, came too late: they had had time to clear up the wreckage, and two mounted policemen were riding at a walk toward the road—but one could still see the imprint of a daring death beneath the pines, one of which had been shaved from top to bottom by a wing, and the architect Stockschmeisser walking with his dog was explaining to a nurse and child what had happened; but a few days later all traces had disappeared (there was only the yellow wound on the pine tree), and already in complete ignorance an old man and his old woman facing each other—she in her bodice and he in his underpants—were doing uncomplicated gymnastics on the same spot.

Farther on it became very nice: the pines had come into their own, and between their pinkish, scaly trunks the feathery foliage of low rowans and the vigorous greenery of oaks broke the stripiness of the pinewood sun into an animated dapple. In the density of an oak, when you looked from below, the overlapping of shaded and illumined leaves, dark green and bright emerald, seemed to be a jigsaw fitting together of their wavy edges, and on these leaves, now letting the sun caress its yellow-brown silk and now tightly closing its wings, there settled an Angle Wing butterfly with a white bracket on its dark mottled underside; suddenly taking off it alighted on my bare chest, attracted by human sweat. And still higher above my upturned face, the summits and trunks of the pines participated in a complex exchange of shadows, and their leafage reminded me of algae swaying in transparent water. And if I tilted my head back even farther, so that the grass behind (inexpressibly, primevally green from this point of upturned vision) seemed to be growing downward into empty, transparent light, I experienced something similar to what must strike a man who has flown to another planet (with a different gravity, different density and a different stress on the senses)—especially when a family out for a stroll went by upside down, with every step they took becoming a strange, elastic jerk, and a lobbed ball seemed to be falling—ever more slowly—into a dizzy abyss.

If one advanced even further—not to the left where the pinewood stretched endlessly, and not to the right where it was interrupted by a coppice of young birches, freshly and childishly smelling of Russia—the forest again thinned out, lost its undergrowth and straggled down sandy inclines at the foot of which the broad lake rose in pillars of light. The sun changefully illuminated the opposite bank, and when with the onset of a cloud the very air seemed to close, like a great blue eye and then slowly open again, one shore always lagged behind the other in the process of gradually fading and lighting up. There was practically no sandy border on the other side, and the trees descended all together to the dense reeds, while higher up one could find hot, dry slopes overgrown with clover, sorrel and spurge, and fringed with the rich dark green of oaks and beeches, that went trembling down to the damp hollows below, in one of which Yasha Chernyshevski had shot himself.

When in the mornings I entered this world of the forest, whose image I had raised as it were by my own efforts above the level of those artless Sunday impressions (paper trash, a crowd of picnickers) out of which the Berliners’ conception of “Grunewald” was composed; when on these hot, summer weekdays I walked over to its southern side, into its depths, to wild secret spots, I felt as much delight as if this was a primeval paradise within two miles from Agamemnonstrasse. Coming to a favorite nook of mine which magically combined a free flow of sunshine with protection by the shrubbery, I would strip to the skin and lie down supine on the rug, placing my unnecessary trunks beneath my head. Thanks to the suntan coating my entire body (so that only my heels, palms and the raylike lines around my eyes kept their natural tint), I felt myself an athlete, a Tarzan, an Adam, anything you like, only not a naked town-dweller. The awkwardness with which nakedness is usually accompanied depends upon the awareness of our defenseless whiteness, which has long since lost all connection with the colors of the surrounding world and for that reason finds itself in artificial disharmony with it. But the sun’s impact restores the deficiency, makes us equal in our naked rights with nature, and the brazen body no longer experiences shame. All this sounds like a nudist brochure—but one’s own truth is not to blame if it coincides with the truth some poor fellow has borrowed.

The sun bore down. The sun licked me all over with its big, smooth tongue. I gradually felt that I was becoming moltenly transparent, that I was permeated with flame and existed only insofar as it did. As a book is translated into an exotic idiom, so was I translated into sun. The scrawny, chilly, hiemal Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev was now as remote from me as if I had exiled him to the Yakutsk province. He was a pallid copy of me, whereas this aestival one was his magnified bronze replica. My personal I, the one that wrote books, the one that loved words, colors, mental fireworks, Russia, chocolate and Zina—had somehow disintegrated and dissolved; after being made transparent by the strength of the light, it was now assimilated to the shimmering of the summer forest with its satiny pine needles and heavenly-green leaves, with its ants running over the transfigured, most radiant-hued wool of the laprobe, with its birds, smells, hot breath of nettles and spermy odor of sun-warmed grass, with its blue sky where droned a highflying plane that seemed filmed over with blue dust, the blue essence of the firmament: the plane was bluish, as a fish is wet in water.

One might dissolve completely that way. Fyodor raised himself and sat up. A streamlet of sweat flowed down his clean-shaven chest and fell into the reservoir of his navel. His flat belly had a brown and mother-of-pearl sheen to it. Over the glistening black ringlets of his pubic hair a lost ant scrambled nervously. His shins shone glossily. Pine needles had got stuck between his toes. With his bathing trunks he wiped his short-cropped head, sticky nape and neck. A squirrel with an arched back loped across the turf, from tree to tree, in a wavy and almost clumsy course. The scrub oaks, elder shrubs, pine trunks—everything was dazzlingly spotted, and a small cloud, in no way defiling the face of the summer day, felt its way slowly past the sun.

He got up, took a step—and immediately the weightless paw of a leafy shadow descended upon his left shoulder; it slipped off again at the next step. Fyodor consulted the position of the sun and dragged his rug a yard or so aside to prevent the shade of the leaves from encroaching upon him. To move around naked was astonishing bliss—the freedom around his loins especially pleased him. He walked between the bushes, listening to the vibration of insects and the rustling of the birds. A wren crept like a mouse through the foliage of a small oak; a sand wasp flew by low down, carrying a benumbed caterpillar. The squirrel he had just seen climbed up the bark of a tree with a spasmodic, scrabbly sound. Somewhere in the vicinity sounded girlish voices, and he stopped in a pattern of shadow, which stayed motionless along his arm but palpitated rythmically on his left side, between the ribs. A golden, stumpy little butterfly, equipped with two black commas, alighted on an oak leaf, half opening its slanting wings, and suddenly shot away like a golden fly. And as often happened on these woodland days, especially when he glimpsed familiar butterflies, Fyodor imagined his father’s isolation in other forests—gigantic, infinitely distant, in comparison with which this one was but brushwood, a tree stump, rubbish. And yet he experienced something akin to that Asiatic freedom spreading wide on the maps, to the spirit of his father’s peregrinations—and here it was most difficult of all to believe that despite the freedom, despite the greenery and the happy, sun-shot dark shade, his father was nonetheless dead.

The voices sounded closer and then receded. A horsefly that had settled unnoticed on his thigh managed to jab him with its blunt proboscis. Moss, turf, sand, each in its own way communicated with the soles of his bare feet, and each in its own way the sun and the shade stroked the hot silk of his body. His senses sharpened by the unrestricted heat were tantalized by the possibility of sylvan encounters, mythical abductions. Le sanglot dont j’étais encore ivre. He would have given a year of his life, even a leap-year, for Zina to be here—or any of her corps de ballet.

He again lay flat, then again got up; with a beating heart he listened to sly, vague, vaguely promising noises; then, pulling on only his trunks and hiding laprobe and clothes under a bush, he went off to wander through the woods around the lake.

Here and there, thinly on weekdays, there occurred more or less orange bodies. He avoided looking closely for fear of switching from Pan to Punch. But sometimes, next to a school satchel and beside her shiny bicycle propped against a tree trunk, a lone nymph would sprawl, her legs bared to the crotch and suede-soft to the eye, and her elbows thrown back, with the hair of her armpits glistening in the sun; temptation’s arrow had hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed, a short distance away at three equidistant points, forming a magic triangle (around whose prize?) and strangers to one another, three motionless hunters visible in between the tree trunks: two young fellows (one lying prone, the other on his side) and an elderly man, coatless, with armbands on his shirt-sleeves, sitting solidly on the grass, motionless and eternal, with sad but patient eyes; and it seemed that these three pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor little German girl, who never raised her ointment-smeared lids.

He descended to the sandy shore of the lake and here in the roar of voices the charmed fabric which he himself had so carefully spun completely fell to pieces, and he saw with revulsion the crumpled, twisted, deformed by life’s nor’easter, more or less naked or more or less clothed—the latter were the more terrible—bodies of bathers (petty bourgeois, idle workers) stirring on the dirty-gray sand. At the point where the shore road went along the lake’s narrow lip, the latter was fenced off by stakes supporting tortured-looking remnants of sagging wire, and the place by these stakes was particularly valued by the beach habitués—partly because trousers could be conveniently hung by their suspenders on them (while underwear was laid on the dusty nettles) and partly because of the vague feeling of security from having a fence at one’s back.

Old men’s gray legs covered with growths and swollen veins; flat feet; the tawny crust of corns; pink porcine paunches; wet, shivering, pale, hoarse-voiced adolescents; the globes of breasts; voluminous posteriors; flabby thighs; bluish varices; gooseflesh; the pimply shoulder blades of bandy-legged girls; the sturdy necks and buttocks of muscular hooligans; the hopeless, godless vacancy of satisfied faces; romps, guffaws, roisterous splashing—all this formed the apotheosis of that renowned German good-naturedness which can turn so easily at any moment into frenzied hooting. And over all this, especially on Sundays when the crowding was vilest of all, there reigned an unforgettable smell, the smell of dust, of sweat, of aquatic slime, of unclean underwear, of aired and dried poverty, the smell of dried, smoked, potted souls a penny a piece. But the lake itself, with vivid green clumps of trees on the other side and a rippling wake of sunshine in the middle, bore itself with dignity.

Having selected a private little creek among the bulrushes, Fyodor took to the water. Its warm opacity enveloped him, sparks of sunshine danced before his eyes. He swam for a long time, half an hour, five hours, twenty-four, a week, another. Finally, on the twenty-eighth of June around three P.M., he came out on the other shore.

Having made his way out of the lakeside spinach he at once found himself in a grove and from there he climbed onto a hot slope where he quickly dried in the sun. On the right was a ravine overgrown with oakbrush and bramble. And today, just as every time that he came here, Fyodor descended into that hollow which always attracted him, as if he had been somehow guilty of the death of the unknown youth who had shot himself here—precisely here. He reflected that Alexandra Yakovlevna used to come here as well, rummaging purposefully among the bushes with her tiny black-gloved hands…. He had not known her then and could not have seen it—but from her account of her multiple pilgrimages he felt it had been exactly like that: the search for something, the rustling of leaves, the prodding umbrella, the radiant eyes, the lips trembling with sobs. He recalled how he had met her this spring—for the last time—after her husband’s death, and the strange sensation that overwhelmed him when looking at her lowered face with its unworldly frown, as if he had never really seen her before and was now making out on her face the resemblance to her deceased husband, whose death was expressed on it through some hitherto concealed, funereal blood relationship. A day later she went away to some relatives in Riga, and already her face, the stories about her son, the literary evenings at her house, and Alexander Yakovlevich’s mental illness—all this that had served its time—now rolled up of its own accord and came to an end, like a bundle of life tied up crosswise, which will long be kept but which will never again be untied by our lazy, procrastinating, ungrateful hands. He was seized by a panicky desire not to allow it to close and get lost in a corner of his soul’s lumber room, a desire to apply all this to himself, to his eternity, to his truth, so as to enable it to sprout up in a new way. There is a way—the only way.

He ascended another slope and there at the top by a path which descended again, sitting on a bench beneath an oak tree, and slowly, pensively tracing the sand with his cane, was a round-shouldered young man in a black suit. How hot he must be, thought the naked Fyodor. The sitter looked up… The sun turned and slightly raised his face with a photographer’s delicate gesture, a bloodless face with wide-set, myopically gray eyes. Between the corners of his starched collar (the type once called in Russia “dog’s delight”) a stud gleamed above the slack knot of his tie.

“How sunburned you are,” said Koncheyev, “it can hardly be good for you. And where, pray, are your clothes?”

“Over there,” said Fyodor, “on the other side, in the woods.”

“Someone might steal them,” remarked Koncheyev. “It’s not for nothing there’s a proverb: Freehanded Russian, light-fingered Prussian.”

Fyodor sat down and said: “There is no such proverb. By the way, do you know where we two are? Beyond those blackberry bushes, down below, is the place where the Chernyshevski boy, the poet, shot himself.”

“Oh, was it here?” said Koncheyev without especial interest. “You know, his Olga recently married a furrier and went off to the United States. Not quite the lancer whom Pushkin’s Olga married, but still …”

“Aren’t you hot?” asked Fyodor.

“Not a bit. I have a weak chest and I always freeze. But of course when one sits next to a naked man one is physically aware that there exist men’s outfitters, and one’s body feels blind. On the other hand it seems to me that any mental work must be completely impossible for you in such a denuded state.”

“A good point,” grinned Fyodor. “One seems to live more superficially—on the surface of one’s own skin….”

“That’s it. All you’re concerned with is patrolling your body and trailing the sun. But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura. Sunlight is good in the degree that it heightens the value of shade. A jail with no jailer and a garden with no gardener—that is I think the ideal arrangement. Tell me, did you read what I said about your book?”

“I did,” replied Fyodor, watching a little geometrid caterpillar that was checking the number of inches between the two writers. “I did indeed. At first I wanted to write you a letter of thanks—you know, with a touching reference to undeservingness and so on—but then I thought that this would have introduced an intolerable human smell into the domain of free opinion. And besides—if I produced a good book I should thank myself and not you, just as you have to thank yourself and not me for understanding what was good—isn’t that true? If we start bowing to one another, then, as soon as one of us stops the other will feel hurt and depart in a huff.”

“I didn’t expect truisms from you,” said Koncheyev with a smile. “Yes, all that is so. Once in my life, only once, I thanked a critic, and he replied: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I really liked your book!’ and that really’ sobered me forever. By the way, I didn’t say everything I could have said about you… You were so taken to task for nonexistent defects that I no longer wanted to harp on those that were obvious to me. Furthermore, in your next work you will either get rid of them or they will develop into special virtues all your own, the way a speck on an embryo turns into an eye. You are a zoologist, aren’t you?”

“In a way—as an amateur. But what are those defects? I wonder if they coincide with the ones I know.”

“First, an excessive trust in words. It sometimes happens that your words in order to introduce the necessary thought have to smuggle it in. The sentence may be excellent, but still it is smuggling, and moreover gratuitous smuggling, since the lawful road is open. But your smugglers under the cover of an obscure style, with all sorts of complicated contrivances, import goods that are duty free anyway. Secondly, there is a certain awkardness in the reworking of the sources: You seem to be undecided whether to enforce your style upon past speeches and events or to make their own more salient. I took the trouble to confront one or two passages in your book with the context in the complete edition of Chernyshevski’s works, same copy you must have used: I found your cigarette ash between the pages. Thirdly, you sometimes bring up parody to such a degree of naturalness that it actually becomes a genuine serious thought, but on this level it suddenly falters, lapsing into a mannerism that is yours and not a parody of a mannerism, although it is precisely the kind of thing you are ridiculing—as if somebody parodying an actor’s slovenly reading of Shakespeare had been carried away, had started to thunder in earnest, but had accidentally garbled a line. Fourthly, one observes in one or two of your transitions something mechanical, if not automatic, which suggests you are pursuing your own advantage, and taking the course you find easier. In one passage, for example, a mere pun serves as such a transition. Fifthly and finally, you sometimes say things chiefly calculated to prick your contemporaries, but any woman will tell you that nothing gets lost so easily as a hairpin—not to speak of the fact that the least swerve of fashion may make pins obsolete: think how many sharp little objects have been dug up whose exact use not a single archaeologist can tell! The real writer should ignore all readers but one, that of the future, who in his turn is merely the author reflected in time. That, I think, is the sum of my complaints against you and generally speaking they are trivial. They are completely eclipsed by the brilliance of your achievements—about which I could still say a fair bit.”

“Oh, that is less interesting,” said Fyodor, who during this tirade (as Turgenev, Goncharov, Count Salias, Grigorovich and Boborykin used to write) had been nodding his head with an approving mien. “You diagnosed my shortcomings very well,” he continued, “and they correspond to my own complaints against myself, although, of course, I put them in a different order—some of the points run together while others are subdivided further. But besides the defects you have noted in my book, I am aware of at least three more—they, perhaps, are the most important of all. Only I’ll never tell you them—and they won’t be there in my next book. Do you want to talk about your poetry now?”

“No thank you, I’d rather not,” said Koncheyev fearfully. “I have reasons for thinking that you like my work, but I am organically averse to discussing it. When I was small, before sleep I used to say a long and obscure prayer which my dead mother—a pious and very unhappy woman—had taught me (she, of course, would have said that these two things are incompatible, but even so it’s true that happiness doesn’t take the veil). I remembered this prayer and kept saying it for years, almost until adolescence, but one day I probed its sense, understood all the words—and as soon as I understood I immediately forgot it, as if I had broken an unrestorable spell. It seems to me that the same thing might happen to my poems—that if I try to rationalize them I shall instantly lose my ability to write them. You, I know, corrupted your poetry long ago with words and meaning—and you will hardly continue writing verse now. You are too rich, too greedy. The Muse’s charm lies in her poverty.”

“You know, it’s odd,” said Fyodor, “once, about three years ago, I imagined most vividly a conversation with you on these subjects—and you know it came out somewhat similar! Although, of course, you shamelessly played up to me and all that. The fact that I know you so well without knowing you makes me unbelievably happy, for that means there are unions in the world which don’t depend at all on massive friendships, asinine affinities or ‘the spirit of the age,’ nor on any mystical organizations or associations of poets, where a dozen tightly knit mediocrities ‘glow’ by their common efforts.”

“At all events I want to warn you,” said Koncheyev frankly, “not to flatter yourself as regards our similarity: you and I differ in many things, I have different tastes, different habits; your Fet, for instance, I can’t stand, and on the other hand I am an ardent admirer of the author of The Double and The Possessed, whom you are disposed to slight…. There is much about you I don’t like—your St. Petersburg style, your Gallic taint, your neo-Voltaireanism and weakness for Flaubert—and I find, forgive me, your obscene sporty nudity simply offensive. But then, with these reservations, it would be true probably to say that somewhere—not here but on another plane, of whose angle, by the way, you have an even vaguer idea than I—somewhere on the outskirts of our existence, very far, very mysteriously and inexpressibly, a rather divine bond is growing between us. But perhaps you feel and say all this because I praised your book in print—that also happens, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I thought of that myself. Especially since formerly I used to envy your fame. But in all conscience—”

“Fame?” interrupted Koncheyev. “Don’t make me laugh. Who knows my poems? A thousand, a thousand five hundred, at the very outside two thousand intelligent expatriates, of whom again ninety percent don’t understand them. Two thousand out of three million refugees! That’s provincial success, but not fame. In the future, perhaps, I shall recoup, but a great deal of time will have to elapse before the Tungus and the Kalmuk of Pushkin’s ‘Exegi monumentum’ begin to tear out of each other’s hands my ‘Communication,’ with the Finn looking enviously on.”

“But there is a comforting feeling,” said Fyodor meditatively. “One can borrow on the strength of the legacy. Doesn’t it amuse you to imagine that one day, on this very spot, on this lakeside, beneath this oak tree, a visiting dreamer will come and sit and imagine in his turn that you and I once sat here?”

“And the historian will dryly tell him that we never took a walk together, that we were hardly acquainted and that if we did meet we only talked about routine trifles.”

“But nevertheless try! Try to experience that strange, future, retrospective thrill…. All the little hairs on the soul stand on end! It would be a good thing in general to put an end to our barbaric perception of time; I find it particularly charming when people talk about the earth freezing in a trillion years and everything disappearing unless our printing shops are moved in good time to a neighboring star. Or the drivel about eternity: so much time has been allotted to the universe that the date of its end should already have come, just as it is impossible in a single segment of time to imagine whole an egg lying on a road along which an army is endlessly marching. How stupid! Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies its constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future. Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past—an essentially phantom process—a mere reflection of the material metamorphoses taking place within us. In these circumstances the attempt to comprehend the world is reduced to an attempt to comprehend that which we ourselves have deliberately made incomprehensible. The absurdity at which searching thought arrives is only a natural, generic sign of its belonging to man, and striving to obtain an answer is the same as demanding of chicken broth that it began to cluck. The theory I find most tempting—that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness—is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others. ‘You will understand when you are big,’ those are really the wisest words that I know. And if one adds to this that nature was seeing double when she created us (oh, this accursed pairing which is impossible to escape: horse-cow, cat-dog, rat-mouse, flea-bug), that symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds (a top that spins for sufficiently long will begin, perhaps, to live, grow and multiply), and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle….”

“Herrliches Wetter—in der Zeitung steht es aber, dass es morgen bestimmt regnen wird,” said finally the young German who was sitting beside Fyodor on the bench and who had seemed to him to resemble Koncheyev.

Imagination again—but what a pity! I had even thought up a dead mother for him in order to trap truth…. Why can a conversation with him never blossom out into reality, break through to realization? Or is this a realization, and nothing better is needed… since a real conversation would be only disillusioning—with the stumps of stuttering, the chaff of hemming and hawing, the debris of small words?

“Da kommen die Wolken schon,” continued the Koncheyevoid German, pointing his finger at a full-breasted cloud rising in the west. (A student, most probably. Perhaps with a philosophical or musical vein. Where is Yasha’s friend now? He would hardly be likely to come here.)

“Halb fünf ungefähr,” he added in response to Fyodor’s question, and gathering his cane he left the bench. His dark, stooping figure receded along the shady footpath. (Perhaps a poet? After all, there must be poets in Germany. Puny ones, local ones—but all the same not butchers. Or only a garnish for the meat?)

He was too lazy to swim back to the other side; he followed leisurely the trail that skirted the lake along its northern edge. At the spot where a wide sandy declivity reached the water, with the uncovered roots of apprehensive pines supporting the sliding bank, there were some more people, and down below on a strip of grass lay three naked corpses, white, pink and brown, like a triple sample of the sun’s action. Further on, along the bend of the lake, there was a marshy stretch, and the dark almost black soil of the path stuck refreshingly to his bare heels. He went upwards again over a needle-scattered slope, and walked through the speckled forest toward his lair. All was cheerful, sad, sunny, shady—he did not feel like returning home but it was time. For a moment he lay down by an old tree that had seemed to have beckoned to him—“Show you something interesting.” A little song sounded among the trees, and presently there came into view, walking at a brisk pace, five nuns—round-faced, wearing black dresses and white coifs—and the little song, half schoolgirlish, half angelic, hovered about them the whole time, while first one and then another bent down on the move to pluck a modest flower (invisible to Fyodor, although he was lying close by) and then straightened up very nimbly, simultaneously drawing level with the others, taking up the rhythm and adding this ghost-flower to a ghostly nosegay with an idyllic gesture (the thumb and index touching for an instant, the other fingers delicately curved)—and it all looked so much like a staged scene—and how much skill there was in everything, what an infinity of grace and art, what a director lurked behind the pines, how well everything was calculated—their walking slightly out of order and then leveling out again, three in front and two behind, and the fact that one of the girls behind giggled briefly (a very cloistral sense of humor) because suddenly one of those in front had, with a touch of expansiveness, almost splashed her hands over a particularly heavenly note, and the way the song dwindled as it receded, while a shoulder continued to stoop and fingers sought a stalk of grass (but the latter, merely swaying, remained to gleam in the sun… where had this happened before—what had straightened up and started to sway? …)—and now they all departed through the trees on quick feet in button shoes, and some half-naked little boy, pretending to seek a ball in the grass, rudely and automatically repeated a snatch of their song (in what musicians call a “clowning refrain”). How it had been mounted! How much labor had gone into this light, swift scene, into this deft traverse, what muscles there were beneath that heavy-looking, black cloth, which would be exchanged after the intermission for gossamer ballet skirts!

A cloud blocked the sun, the light in the forest drifted and gradually faded. Fyodor walked to the clearing where he had left his clothes. In the hole beneath a bush which always sheltered them so obligingly he now found only a single sneaker; his rug, his shirt and his trousers had vanished. There is a story to the effect that a passenger who inadvertently dropped his glove out of a train window promptly threw out its mate so that at least the person who found them should have a pair. In this case the thief had acted the other way: the old, badly worn sneakers were probably no good to him, but in order to make fun of his victim he had separated the pair. Furthermore, a scrap of newspaper had been left in the sneaker with a penciled inscription: “Vielen Dank.”

Fyodor wandered all around finding no one and nothing. The shirt was frayed and he did not mind losing it, but he was somewhat grieved about the plaid laprobe (brought all the way from Russia) and the good flannel pants quite recently bought. Together with the trousers had gone twenty marks, obtained two days before for at least partial payment of his room. Also gone were a small pencil, a handkerchief, and a bunch of keys. The latter somehow was worst of all. If nobody happened to be at home, which might easily be the case, it would be impossible to get into the apartment.

The edge of a cloud dazzlingly caught fire, and the sun slipped out. It emitted such hot, blissful strength that forgetting his vexation Fyodor lay down on the moss and began to watch the next snowy colossus draw near, eating up the blue as it advanced: the sun slid into it smoothly, its rim of funeral fire quivering and splitting as it glided through the white cumulus—and then, finding a way out, it first threw out three rays and then expanded, filling the eyes with spotted fire, blackballing them (so that no matter where you looked domino patterns glided past)—and as the light got stronger or died away, all the shadows in the forest breathed and did push-ups.

A small incidental relief was supplied by the fact that thanks to the Shchyogolevs’ going away the following day to Denmark there would be an extra set of keys—which meant he could keep quiet about the loss of his bunch. Going away, going away, going away! He imagined what he had constantly been imagining during the past two months-the beginning (tomorrow night!) of his full life with Zina-the release, the slaking- and meanwhile a sun-charged cloud, filling up, growing, with swollen, turquoise veins, with a fiery itch in its thunder-root, rose in all its turgid, unwieldy magnificence and embraced him, the sky and the forest, and to resolve this tension seemed a monstrous joy incapable of being borne by man. A ripple of wind ran over his chest, his excitement slowly subsided, the air grew dark and sultry, it was necessary to hurry home. Once more he searched under the bushes, then shrugged his shoulders, pulled the elastic belt of his trunks tighter—and set out on his way back.

When he left the forest and started to cross a street, the tarry stickiness of the asphalt under his bare foot proved to be a pleasant novelty. It was also interesting to walk on the sidewalk. Dream lightness. An elderly passerby in a black felt hat stopped, looked back after him and made a coarse remark—but immediately, by way of happy compensation, a blind man, sitting with a concertina against a stone wall, mumbled his small request for alms and squeezed out a polygon of music as if there were nothing out of the way (it was odd, though—surely he must have heard that I was barefoot). Two schoolboys shouted at the naked passerby as they rode past clinging to the back of a tram, and then the sparrows returned to the turf between the rails whence they had been frightened by the clattering yellow car. Drops of rain had begun to fall, and it was as if someone were applying a silver coin to different parts of his body. A young policeman detached himself from a newspaper stand and came over to him.

“It’s forbidden to walk about the city like that,” he said, looking Fyodor in the navel.

“Everything’s been stolen,” explained Fyodor briefly.

“That mustn’t happen,” said the policeman.

“Yes, but it happened all the same,” said Fyodor nodding (several people had already stopped by them and were following the dialogue with curiosity).

“Whether you’ve been robbed or not, you can’t go about the streets naked,” said the policeman, growing angry.

“Quite, but I have to get somehow to the taxi stand—see?”

“You can’t in that state.”

“Unfortunately I am unable to turn into smoke or grow a suit.”

“And I’m telling you you can’t walk about like that,” said the policeman. (“Unheard-of shamelessness,” commented someone’s thick voice from the back.)

“In that case,” said Fyodor, “it remains for you to fetch me a taxi while I stand here.”

“Standing in the nude is also impossible,” said the policeman.

“I’ll take off my trunks and imitate a statue,” suggested Fyodor.

The policeman took out his notebook and so fiercely tore the pencil out of the pencil-hold that he dropped it on the sidewalk. Some workman or other servilely picked it up.

“Name and address,” said the policeman, boiling.

“Count Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” said Fyodor.

“Stop being funny and tell me your name,” roared the policeman.

Another one came up, with a higher rank, and inquired what the matter was.

“My clothes were stolen in the forest,” said Fyodor patiently and suddenly felt that he was completely wet from the rain. One or two standers-by had run beneath the shelter of an awning and an old woman standing by his elbow put up her umbrella, nearly gouging his eye out.

“Who stole them?” asked the sergeant.

“I don’t know and what’s more, I don’t care,” said Fyodor. “Right now I want to go home and you are detaining me.”

The rain suddenly grew heavier and swept across the asphalt; the whole of its surface seemed to be covered with jumping little candles. The policemen (all matted and blackened by the damp) probably considered the cloudburst to be an element in which bathing trunks were, if not appropriate, then at least permissible. The younger one again tried to obtain Fyodor’s address, but his senior waved his hand, and the two of them, slightly quickening their sedate pace, retreated under the awning of a grocer’s shop. The glistening Fyodor Konstantinovich ran through the noisy splashing of the rain, turned a corner, and shot into an automobile.

Arriving home and telling the driver to wait, he pressed the button which until 8 P.M. automatically opened the front door and hurled himself up the stairs. He was let in by Marianna Nikolavna; the hall was full of people and things: Shchyogolev in his shirt-sleeves, two fellows struggling with a box (in which, it seems, Was the radio), a comely milliner with a hatbox, a coil of wire, a pile of linen from the laundry …

“You’re crazy!” cried Marianna Nikolavna.

“For God’s sake pay the taxi,” said Fyodor, wriggling his cold body through the people and things—and finally, over a barricade of trunks, he crashed his way through to his room.

They had supper all together that evening, and later on were to come the Kasatkins, the Baltic baron, another person or two…. At table Fyodor gave an embellished account of his misadventure, and Shchyogolev laughed heartily, while Marianna Nikolavna wanted to know (not without reason) how much cash there had been in the pants. Zina only shrugged her shoulders and with unusual frankness urged Fyodor to help himself to the vodka, obviously fearing that he had caught a chill.

“Well—our last evening!” said Boris Ivanovich, having laughed to his heart’s content. “May you prosper, signor. Someone told me the other day that you dashed off a pretty nasty paper on Petrashevski. Very laudable. Listen, Mamma, there’s another bottle there, no point in taking it with us, give it to the Kasatkins.”

“… so you’re going to remain an orphan [he continued, starting on the Italian salad and devouring it with the utmost sloppiness]. I don’t think our Zinaida Oscarovna will look after you too well. Eh, princess?”

“… Yes, that’s how it is, my dear chap, one twist of fate, and the king is mate. I never thought that fortune would smile on me—touch wood, touch wood. Why, only last winter I was wondering what to do: tighten my belt or sell Marianna Nikolavna for scrap? You and I had a year and a half of cohabitation, if you’ll excuse the expression, and tomorrow we part—probably forever. Man is fate’s plaything. Happy today, pappy tomorrow.”

When supper was over and Zina had gone down to let the guests in, Fyodor retreated noiselessly to his room, where everything was animated by rain and wind. He half-closed the casements of his window, but a moment later the night said: “No,” and with a kind of wide-eyed insistence, disdaining blows, entered again. “I was so tickled to learn that Tanya has a little girl, and I am terribly glad for her and for you. The other day I wrote Tanya a long, lyrical letter, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that I put the wrong address on it: instead of ‘122’ I put some other number, without thinking, just as I did once before, I don’t know why this happens—one writes an address heaps of times, automatically and correctly, and then all of a sudden one hesitates, one looks at it consciously, and one sees you’re not sure of it, it seems unfamiliar—very queer… You know, like taking a simple word, say ‘ceiling’ and seeing it as ‘sealing’ or ‘sea-ling’ until it becomes completely strange and feral, something like ‘iceling’ or ‘inglice.’ I think that some day that will happen to the whole of life. In any case wish Tanya from me everything gay, green and Leshino-summery. Tomorrow my landlord and landlady are going away and I am beside myself with joy: beside myself—a very pleasant situation, like on a rooftop at night. I’ll stay at Agamemnonstrasse another month and then move. I don’t know how things will work out. By the way, my Chernyshevski is selling rather well. Who exactly was it told you that Bunin praised it? They already seem ancient history to me now, my exertions over the book, and all those little storms of thought, those cares of the pen—and now I am completely empty, clean, and ready to receive new lodgers. You know, I’m black as a gypsy from the Grunewald sun. Something is beginning to take shape—I think I’ll write a classical novel, with ‘types,’ love, fate, conversations …”

The door suddenly opened, Zina half entered and without letting go of the door handle threw something on his desk.

“Pay this to Mamma,” she said; she glanced at him through slitted eyes and disappeared.

He unfolded the banknote. Two hundred marks. The amount seemed colossal, but a moment’s calculation showed that it would only just suffice for the two past months—eighty plus eighty, and thirty-five for the coming one, from now on without board. But everything grew confused when he began to consider that for the past month he had not been taking lunch, but on the other hand had been receiving bigger suppers; besides that he had contributed during that time ten (or fifteen?) marks, and on the other hand he owed for telephone conversations and for one or two other trifles, such as today’s taxi. The solution to the problem was beyond him, it bored him; he thrust the money beneath a dictionary.

“… and with descriptions of nature. I am very glad that you’re reading my thing over again, but now it’s time to forget it—it was only an exercise, a tryout, an essay before the school holidays. I have missed you a great deal and perhaps (I repeat, I don’t know how it will work out …) I’ll visit you in Paris. Generally speaking I’d abandon tomorrow this country, oppressive as a headache—where everything is alien and repulsive to me, where a novel about incest or some brash trash, some cloyingly rhetorical, pseudobrutal tale about war is considered the crown of literature; where in fact there is no literature, and hasn’t been for a long time; where sticking out of the fog of a most monotonous democratic dampness—also pseudo—you have the same old jackboot and helmet; where our native enforced ‘social intent’ in literature has been replaced by social opportunity—and so on, and so on… I could go on much longer—and it is amusing that fifty years ago every Russian thinker with a suitcase used to scribble exactly the same—an accusation so obvious as to have become even banal. Earlier, on the other hand, in the golden middle of last century, goodness, what transports! ‘Little gemütlich Germany’—ach, brick cottages, ach, the kiddies go to school, ach, the peasant doesn’t beat his horse with a club!… Never mind-he has his own German way of torturing it, in a cozy nook, with red-hot iron. Yes, I would have left long ago, but there are certain personal circumstances (not to mention my wonderful solitude in this country, the wonderful, beneficient contrast between my inner habitus and the terribly cold world around me; you know, in cold countries houses are warmer than in the south, better insulated and heated), but even these personal circumstances are capable of taking such a turn that soon, perhaps, I’ll leave the Fetterland and bring them with me. And when will we return to Russia? What idiotic sentimentality, what a rapacious groan must our innocent hope convey to people in Russia. But our nostalgia is not historical—only human—how can one explain this to them? It’s easier for me, of course, than for another to live outside Russia, because I know for certain that I shall return—first because I took away the keys to her, and secondly because, no matter when, in a hundred, two hundred years—I shall live there in my books—or at least in some researcher’s footnote. There; now you have a historical hope, a literary-historical one… ‘I lust for immortality—even for its earthly shadow!’ Today I am writing you non-stop nonsense (non-stop trains of thought) because I am well and happy—and besides that, all this has something to do in a roundabout way with Tanya’s baby.

“The literary review you ask about is called The Tower. I don’t have it but I think you’ll find it in any Russian bookshop. Nothing came from Uncle Oleg. When did he send it? I think you’ve mixed something up. Well, that’s it. Keep well, je t’embrasse. Night, rain quietly falling—it has found its nocturnal rhythm, and can now go on for infinity.”

He heard the hall fill with departing voices, heard somebody’s umbrella fall and the elevator summoned by Zina rumble and come to a halt. All was still again. Fyodor went into the dining room where Shchyogolev sat cracking the last nuts, chewing on one side, and Marianna Nikolavna was clearing the table. Her plump, dark pink face, the glossy wings of her nose, violet eyebrows, apricot hair turning to bristly blue on her fat shaven nape, her azure orb with its mascara-fouled canthus, momentarily immersing its gaze in the dreggy ooze on the bottom of the teapot, her rings, her garnet brooch, the flowery shawl on her shoulders—all this together constituted a crudely but richly daubed picture in a somewhat hackneyed genre. She put on her spectacles and took out a sheet with figures on it when Fyodor asked how much he owed her. At this Shchyogolev raised his eyebrows in surprise: he had been sure that they would not get another penny from their lodger, and being essentially a kindly man he had advised his wife only yesterday not to press Fyodor but to write him a week or two later from Copenhagen with a threat to approach his relatives. After settling up, Fyodor retained three and a half marks out of the two hundred and went off to bed. In the hallway he met Zina returning from below. “Well?” she said, holding her finger on the switch—a half-interrogative, half-urging interjection which meant approximately: “Are you coming this way? I’m putting out the light here, so hurry up.” The dimple on her naked arm, pale-silk-clad legs in velvet slippers, lowered face. Darkness.

He went to bed and began to fall asleep to the whisper of the rain. As always on the border between consciousness and sleep all sorts of verbal rejects, sparkling and tinkling, broke in: “The crystal crunching of that Christian night beneath a chrysolitic star”… and his thought, listening for a moment, aspired to gather them and use them and began to add of its own: Extinguished, Yasnaya Polyana’s light, and Pushkin dead, and Russia far… but since this was no good, the stipple of rhymes extended further: “A falling star, a cruising chrysolite, an aviator’s avatar …” His mind sank lower and lower into a hell of alligator alliterations, into infernal cooperatives of words. Through their nonsensical accumulation a round button on the pillowcase prodded him in the cheek; he turned on his other side and against a dark backdrop naked people ran into the Grunewald lake, and a monogram of light resembling an infusorian glided diagonally to the highest corner of his subpal-pebral field of vision. Behind a certain closed door in his brain, holding on to its handle but turning away from it, his mind commenced to discuss with somebody a complicated and important secret, but when the door opened for a minute it turned out that they were talking about chairs, tables, stables. Suddenly in the thickening mist, by reason’s last tollgate, came the silver vibration of a telephone bell, and Fyodor rolled over prone, falling… The vibration stayed in his fingers, as if a nettle had stung him. In the hall, having already put back the receiver into its black box, stood Zina—she seemed frightened. “That was for you,” she said in a low voice. “Your former landlady, Frau Stoboy. She wants you to come over immediately. There’s somebody waiting for you at her place. Hurry.” He pulled on a pair of flannel trousers and gasping for breath went along the street. At this time of year in Berlin there is something similar to the St. Petersburg white nights: the air was transparently gray, and the houses swam past like a soapy mirage. Some night workers had wrecked the pavement at the corner, and one had to creep through narrow passages between planks, everyone being given at the entrance a small lamp which at the exit was to be left on a hook screwed into a post or else simply on the sidewalk next to some empty milk bottles. Leaving his bottle as well he ran further through the lusterless streets, and the premonition of something incredible, of some impossible superhuman surprise splashed his heart with a snowy mixture of happiness and horror. In the gray murk, blind children wearing dark spectacles came out of a school building in pairs and walked past him; they studied at night (in economically dark schools which in the daytime housed seeing children), and the clergyman accompanying them resembled the Leshino village schoolmaster, Bychkov. Leaning against a lamppost and hanging his tousled head, his scissor-like legs in striped pantaloons splayed wide and his hands stuffed in his pockets, a lean drunkard stood as if just come from the pages of an old Russian satirical rag. There was still light in the Russian bookstore—they were serving books to the night taxi-cab drivers and through the yellow opacity of the glass he noticed the silhouette of Misha Berezovski who was handing out Petrie’s black atlas to someone. Must be hard to work nights! Excitement lashed him again as soon as he reached his former haunts. He was out of breath from running, and the rolled-up laprobe weighed heavy on his arm—he had to hurry, but he could not recall the layout of the streets, and the ashy night confused everything, changing as in a negative image the relationship between dark and light parts, and there was no one to ask, everybody was asleep. Suddenly a poplar loomed and behind it a tall church with a violet-red window divided into harlequin rhombuses of colored light: inside a night service was in progress, and an old lady in mourning with cotton-wool under the bridge of her spectacles hastened to mount the steps. He found his street, but at the end of it a post with a gauntleted hand on it indicated that one had to enter from the other end where the post office was, since at this end a pile of flags had been prepared for tomorrow’s festivities. But he was afraid of losing it in the course of a detour and moreover the post office—that would come afterwards—if Mother had not already been sent a telegram. He scrambled over boards, boxes and a toy grenadier in curls, and caught sight of the familiar house, and there the workmen had already stretched a red strip of carpet across the sidewalk from door to curb, as it used to be done in front of their house on the Neva Embankment on ball nights. He ran up the stairs and Frau Stoboy immediately let him in. Her cheeks glowed and she wore a white hospital overall—she had formerly practiced medicine. “Only don’t get all worked up,” she said. “Go to your room and wait there. You must be prepared for anything,” she added with a vibrant note in her voice and pushed him into the room which he had thought he would never in his life enter again. He grasped her by the elbow, losing control over himself, but she shook him off. “Somebody has come to see you,” said Stoboy, “he’s resting… Wait a couple of minutes.” The door banged shut. The room was exactly as if he had been still living in it: the same swans and lilies on the wallpaper, the same painted ceiling wonderfully ornamented with Tibetan butterflies (there, for example, was Thecla bieti). Expectancy, awe, the frost of happiness, the surge of sobs merged into a single blinding agitation as he stood in the middle of the room incapable of movement, listening and looking at the door. He knew who would enter in a moment, and was amazed now that he had doubted this return: doubt now seemed to him to be the obtuse obstinacy of one half-witted, the distrust of a barbarian, the self-satisfaction of an ignoramus. His heart was bursting like that of a man before execution, but at the same time this execution was such a joy that life faded before it, and he was unable to understand the disgust he had been wont to experience when, in hastily constructed dreams, he had evoked what was now taking place in real life. Suddenly, the door shuddered (another, remote one had opened somewhere beyond it) and he heard a familiar tread, an indoor Morocco-padded step. Noiselessly but with terrible force the door flew open, and on the threshold stood his father. He was wearing a gold embroidered skullcap and a black Cheviot jacket with breast pockets for cigarette case and magnifying glass; his brown cheeks with their two sharp furrows running down from both sides of his nose were particularly smoothly shaven; hoary hairs gleamed in his dark beard like salt; warmly, shaggily, his eyes laughed out of a network of wrinkles. But Fyodor stood and was unable to take a step. His father said something, but so quietly that it was impossible to make anything out, although one somehow knew it to be connected with his return, unharmed, whole, human, and real. And even so it was terrible to come closer—so terrible that Fyodor felt he would die if the one who had entered should move toward him. Somewhere in the rear rooms sounded the warningly rapturous laughter of his mother, while his father made soft chucking sounds hardly parting his lips, as he used to do when taking a decision or seeking something on the page of a book… then he spoke again—and this again meant that everything was all right and simple, that this was the true resurrection, that it could not be otherwise, and also: that he was pleased—pleased with his captures, his return, his son’s book about him—and then at last everything grew easy, a light broke through, and his father with confident joy spread out his arms. With a moan and a sob Fyodor stepped toward him, and in the collective sensation of woolen jacket, big hands and the tender prickle of trimmed mustaches there swelled an ecstatically happy, living, enormous, paradisal warmth in which his icy heart melted and dissolved.

At first the superposition of a thingummy on a thingabob and the pale, palpitating stripe that went upwards were utterly incomprehensible, like words in a forgotten language or the parts of a dismantled engine—and this senseless tangle sent a shiver of panic running through him: I have woken up in the grave, on the moon, in the dungeon of dingy non-being. But something in his brain turned, his thoughts settled and hastened to paint over the truth—and he realized that he was looking at the curtain of a half-open window, at a table in front of the window: such is the treaty with reason—the theater of earthly habit, the livery of temporary substance. He lowered his head onto the pillow and tried to overtake a fugitive sense—warm, wonderful, all-explaining—but the new dream he dreamt was an uninspired compilation, stitched together out of remnants of daytime life and fitted to it.

The morning was overcast and cool, with gray-black puddles on the yard’s asphalt, and one could hear the nasty flat thumping of carpets being beaten. The Shchyogolevs had finished their packing; Zina had gone off to work and at one o’clock was due to meet her mother for lunch at the Vaterland. Luckily they had not suggested that Fyodor join them—on the contrary, Marianna Nikolavna, as she warmed up some coffee for him in the kitchen where he sat in his dressing gown, disconcerted by the bivouac-like atmosphere in the apartment, warned him that a little Italian salad and some ham had been left in the larder for lunch. It turned out, incidentally, that the luckless person who was getting their number by mistake, had rung up the previous night: this time he had been tremendously agitated, something had happened—something which remained unknown.

For the tenth time Boris Ivanovich transferred from one valise to another a pair of shoes on shoe trees, all clean and shiny—he was unusually meticulous over footwear.

Then they dressed and went out, while Fyodor shaved, carried out long and successful ablutions, and cut his toenails—it was especially pleasant to get under a tight corner, and clip!— the parings shot all over the bathroom. The janitor knocked but was unable to enter because the Shchyogolevs had locked the hall door on the American lock, and Fyodor’s keys had gone forever. Through the letter-box, clacking the shutter, the mailman threw in the Belgrade newspaper For Tsar and Church, to which Boris Ivanovich subscribed, and later someone thrust in (leaving it to stick out boatlike) a leaflet advertising a new hairdresser’s. At exactly half past eleven there came a loud barking from the stairs and the agitated descent of the Alsatian which was taken for a walk at this time. With a comb in his hand he went out onto the balcony to see if the weather was clearing up, but although it did not rain, the sky remained hopelessly and wanly white—and one could not believe that yesterday it had been possible to lie in the forest. The Shchyogolevs’ bedroom was cluttered up with paper rubbish, and one of the suitcases was open—at the top a pear-shaped object of rubber was lying on a wafer towel. An itinerant mustache came into the yard with cymbals, a drum, a saxophone—completely hung with metallic music, with bright music on his head, and with a monkey in a red jersey—and sang for a long time, tapping his foot and jangling—without managing, however, to drown out the volleying at the carpets on their trestles. Cautiously pushing the door, Fyodor visited Zina’s room, where he had never been before, and with the bizarre sensation of a glad moving in he looked for a long time at the briskly ticking alarm clock, at the rose in a glass with its stem all studded with bubbles, at the divan that became a bed at night and at the stockings drying on the radiator. He had a bite to eat, sat down at his desk, dipped his pen, and froze over a blank sheet. The Shchyogolevs returned, the janitor came, Marianna Nikolavna broke a bottle of scent—and he still sat over the glowering sheet and only came to himself when the Shchyogolevs were getting ready to go to the station. There were still two hours until the train’s departure, but then the station was a long way off. “I must confess—I like to get there on the cock,” said Boris Ivanovich buoyantly as he took hold of his shirt cuff and sleeve in order to climb into his overcoat. Fyodor tried to help him (the other with a polite exclamation, still only halfway in, shied away and suddenly, in the corner, turned into a horrible hunchback), and then went to say good-bye to Marianna Nikolavna, who with an oddly altered expression (as if she were dimming and coaxing her reflection) was in the act of putting on a blue hat with a blue veil before the wardrobe mirror. All at once Fyodor felt strangely sorry for her and after a moment’s thought he offered to go to the stand for a taxi. “Yes, please,” said Marianna Nikolavna and rushed ponderously to the sofa for her gloves.

There proved to be no cabs at the stand, all had been taken, and he was forced to cross the square and look there. When he finally drove up to the house the Shchyogolevs were already standing below, having carried their suitcases down themselves (the “heavy luggage” had been dispatched the day before).

“Well, God take care of you,” said Marianna Nikolavna, and kissed him with gutta-percha lips on the forehead.

“Sarotska, Sarotska, send us a telegramotska!” cried Boris the parodist, waving his hand, and the taxi turned and sped away.

Forever, thought Fyodor with relief and whistling went upstairs.

Only here did he realize that he was unable to enter the apartment. It was particularly galling to raise the brass postal shutter and look through at a bunch of keys lying starwise on the hall floor: Marianna Nikolavna had pushed them back in after locking the door behind her. He went down the stairs much more slowly than he had gone up. Zina, he knew, was planning to go from work to the station: considering that the train would be leaving in about two hours, and that the bus ride would take an hour, she (and the keys) would not be back in less than three hours. The streets were windy and gray: he had no one to go to, and he never went alone into pubs or cafés, he hated them fiercely. In his pocket there were three and a half marks; he bought some cigarettes, and since the gnawing need to see Zina (now, when everything was allowed) was really what was taking away all light and sense from the street, from the sky and the air, he hastened to the corner where the necessary bus stopped. The fact that he was wearing bedroom slippers and an ancient crumpled suit, spotted in front, with trousers a button short on the fly, baggy knees and a patch of his mother’s making on the bottom, did not disturb him in the least. His tan and the open collar of his shirt gave him a certain pleasant immunity.

It was some kind of a national holiday. Three kinds of flags were sticking out of the house windows: black-yellow-red, black-white-red, and plain red; each one meant something, and funniest of all, this something was able to excite pride or hatred in someone. There were large flags and small flags, on short poles and on long ones, but none of this exhibitionism of civic excitement made the city any more attractive. On the Tauentzienstrasse the bus was held up by a gloomy procession; policemen in black leggings brought up the rear in a slow truck and among the banners there was one with a Russian inscription containing two mistakes: serb instead of serp (sickle) and molt instead of molot (hammer). Suddenly he imagined official festivals in Russia, soldiers in long-skirted overcoats, the cult of firm jaws, a gigantic placard with a vociferous cliché clad in Lenin’s jacket and cap, and amidst the thunder of stupidities, the kettledrums of boredom, and slave-pleasing splendors—a little squeak of cheap truth. There it is, eternalized, ever more monstrous in its heartiness, a repetition of the Hodynka coronation festivities with its free candy packages—look at the size of them (now much bigger than the original ones)—and with its superbly organized removal of dead bodies… Oh, let everything pass and be forgotten—and again in two hundred years’ time an ambitious failure will vent his frustration on the simpletons dreaming of a good life (that is if there does not come my kingdom, where everyone keeps to himself and there is no equality and no authorities—but if you don’t want it, I don’t insist and don’t care).

The Potsdam square, always disfigured by city work (oh, those old postcards of it where everything is so spacious, with the droshki drivers looking so happy, and the trains of tight-belted ladies brushing the dust—but with the same fat flower-girls). The pseudo-Parisian character of Unter-den-Linden. The narrowness of the commercial streets beyond it. Bridge, barge, sea gulls. The dead eyes of old hotels of the second, third, hundredth class. A few more minutes of riding, and there was the station.

He caught sight of Zina in a beige georgette dress and a white little hat running up the steps. She was running with her pink elbows pressed to her sides, holding her handbag under her arm—and when he caught up with her and half embraced her, she turned round with that tender, blurry smile, with that happy sadness in her eyes with which she always greeted him when they met alone. “Listen,” she said, in a flurried voice, “I’m late, let’s run.” But he replied that he had already said good-by to them and would wait for her outside.

The low sun settling behind the rooftops seemed to have fallen out of the clouds that covered the rest of the sky (but they were by now quite soft and aloof, as if painted in melting undulations upon a greenish ceiling); there, in that narrow slit, the sky was on fire, and opposite, a window and some metallic letters shone like copper. A porter’s long shadow, pushing the shadow of a barrow, sucked in that shadow, but at the turning it protruded again at a sharp angle.

“We’ll miss you, Zina,” said Marianna Nikolavna, from the window of the carriage. “But in any case take your vacation in August and come over—we’ll see if you can’t perhaps stay for good.”

“I don’t think so,” said Zina. “Ah yes, I gave you my keys today. Don’t take them with you, please.”

“I left them in the hall… And Boris’s are in the desk… Never mind: Godunov will let you in,” added Marianna Nikolavna appeasingly.

“Well, well. Good luck to it,” said Boris Ivanovich from behind his wife’s plump shoulder and rolled his eyes. “Ah, Zinka, Zinka, just you come over and you shall ride a bicycle and swill milk—that’s the life!”

The train gave a shudder and started to move. Marianna Nikolavna kept waving for a long time. Shchyogolev drew in his head like a tortoise (and having sat down, probably emitted a Russian grunt).

She skipped down the steps—her bag now hung from her fingers, and the last rays of the sun caused a bronze gleam to dance in her eyes as she flew up to Fyodor. They kissed as ardently as if she had just arrived from far off, after a long separation.

“And now let’s go and have some supper,” she said, taking his arm. “You must be starved.”

He nodded. Now how to explain it? Why this strange embarrasment—instead of the exultant, voluble freedom I had been so eagerly looking forward to? It was as if I had grown disused from her, or else was unable to adjust myself and her, the former her, to this freedom.

“What’s the matter with you—you seem out of sorts?” she asked observantly after a silence (they were walking toward the bus stop).

“It’s sad to part with Boris the Brisk,” he replied, trying to see if a joke would resolve his emotional constraint.

“And I think it’s yesterday’s escapade,” said Zina, smiling, and he detected in her tone of voice a high-strung ring, which in its own way corresponded to his own confusion and thus both stressed and augmented it.

“Nonsense. The rain was warm. I feel wonderful.”

The bus rolled up, they boarded it. Fyodor paid for two tickets from his palm. Zina said: “I get my wages only tomorrow, so that all I have now is two marks. How much do you have?”

“Very little. Out of your two hundred I was left only three-fifty and more than a half of that I have blowed.”

“We have enough for supper, though,” said Zina.

“Are you quite sure you like the idea of a restaurant? Because I don’t too much.”

“Never mind, resign yourself. In general now it’s all over with healthy home cooking. I can’t even make an omelette. We must think about how to manage things. But for now I know an excellent place.”

Several minutes of silence. The streetlamps and shop windows were beginning to light up; the streets had grown pinched and gray from that immature light, but the sky was radiant and wide, and the sunset cloudlets were trimmed with flamingo down.

“Look, the photos are ready.”

He took them from her cold fingers. Zina standing in the street before her office, with legs placed tightly together and the shadow of a lime trunk crossing the sidewalk, like a boom lowered in front of her; Zina sitting sideways on a windowsill with a crown of sunshine around her head; Zina at work, badly taken, dark-faced—but to compensate this, her regal typewriter enthroned in the foreground, with a gleam on its carriage lever.

She thrust them back in her bag, took out and put back her monthly tram ticket in its cellophane holder, took out a small mirror, looked into it, baring the filling in her front tooth, replaced the mirror inside, clicked the bag shut, lowered it onto her knees, looked at her shoulder, brushed off a bit of fluff, put on her gloves, turned her head to the window—doing all this in rapid succession, with her features in motion, her eyes blinking and a kind of inner biting and sucking in of her cheeks. But now she sat motionless, looking away, the sinews in her pale neck stretched tight and her white-gloved hands lying on the glossy leather of her handbag.

The defilé of the Brandenburg Gate.

Beyond the Potsdam square, just as they were approaching the canal, an elderly lady with prominent cheekbones (where had I seen her?) and with a goggle-eyed, trembling little dog under her arm made a dive for the exit, swaying and struggling with phantoms, and Zina looked up at her with a fleeting, heavenly glance.

“Did you recognize her?” she asked. “That was Lorentz. I think she’s mad at me because I never ring her up. Quite a superfluous woman, really.”

“There’s a smut on your cheek,” said Fyodor. “Careful, don’t smear it.”

Again the handbag, handkerchief, mirror.

“We soon have to get out,” she said presently. “What?”

“Nothing. I agree. Let’s get out where you like.”

“Here,” she said two stops later, taking his elbow, sitting again from a jolt, rising finally and fishing out her bag as if from water.

The lights had already taken shape; the sky was quite faint. A truck went by with a load of young people returning from some civic orgy, waving something or other and shouting something or other. In the middle of a treeless public garden consisting of a large oblong flower-bed rimmed by a footpath, an army of roses was in bloom. The small, open enclosure of a restaurant (six little tables) opposite this garden was separated from the sidewalk by a whitewashed barrier topped with petunias.

Beside them a boar and his sow were feeding, the waiter’s black fingernail dipped into the sauce, and yesterday a lip with a sore on it had been pressed to the gold border of my beer glass…. The mist of some sorrow had enveloped Zina—her cheeks, her narrowed eyes, her throat pit, her fragile clavicle—and this was somehow enhanced by the pale smoke from her cigarette. The scuffing of passersby seemed to stir up the thickening darkness.

Suddenly, in the frank evening sky, very high …

“Look,” he said. “What a beauty!”

A brooch with three rubies was gliding over the dark velvet—so high that not even the hum of the engine was audible.

She smiled, parting her lips and looking upwards.

“Tonight?” he asked, also looking upwards.

Only now had he entered into the order of feelings he used to promise himself, when formerly he imagined how they would slip together out of a thralldom that had gradually asserted itself in the course of their meetings, and grown habitual, even though it was based on something artificial, something unworthy, in fact, of the significance it had acquired: now it seemed incomprehensible why on any of those four hundred and fifty-five days she and he had not simply moved out of the Shchyogolev’s apartment to dwell together; but at the same time he knew subrationally that this external obstacle was merely a pretext, merely an ostentatious device on the part of fate, which had hastily put up the first barrier to come to hand in order to engage meantime in the important, complicated business that secretly required the very delay in development which had seemed to depend on a natural obstruction.

Pondering now fate’s methods (in this white, illuminated little enclosure, in Zina’s golden presence and with the participation of the warm, concave darkness immediately behind the carved radiance of the petunias), he finally found a certain thread, a hidden spirit, a chess idea for his as yet hardly planned “novel,” to which he had glancingly referred yesterday in the letter to his mother. It was of this that he spoke now, spoke in such a way as if it were really the best and most normal expression of his happiness—which was also expressed in a more accessible edition by such things as the velvetiness of the air, three emerald lime leaves that had got into the lamplight, the icy cold beer, the lunar volcanoes of mashed potato, vague voices, footfalls, the stars among the ruins of clouds….

“Here is what I’d like to do,” he said. “Something similar to destiny’s work in regard to us. Think how fate started it three and a half odd years ago…. The first attempt to bring us together was crude and heavy! That moving of furniture, for example: I see something extravagant in it, a ‘no-holds-barred’ something, for it was quite a job moving the Lorentzes and all their belongings into the house where I had just rented a room! The idea lacked subtlety: to have us meet through Lorentz’s wife. Wishing to speed things up, fate brought in Romanov, who rang me up and invited me to a party at his place. But at this point fate blundered: the medium chosen was wrong, I disliked the man and a reverse result was achieved: because of him I began to avoid an acquaintance with the Lorentzes—so that all this cumbersome construction went to the devil, fate was left with a furniture van on her hands and the expenses were not recovered.”

“Watch out,” said Zina, “she might take offense at this criticism now and revenge herself.”

“Listen further. Fate made a second attempt, simpler this time but promising better success, because I was in need of money and should have grasped at the offer of work—helping an unknown Russian girl to translate some documents; but this also failed. First because the lawyer Charski also turned out to be an unsuitable middleman, and secondly because I hate working on translations into German—so that it again miscarried. Then finally, after this failure, fate decided to take no chances, to install me directly in the place where you lived. As a go-between she chose not the first person to come along, but someone I liked who energetically took the matter in hand and did not allow me to dodge it. At the last minute, true, there occurred a hitch that almost ruined everything: in her haste—or from stinginess—destiny did not produce you at the time of my visit; of course, after talking five minutes to your stepfather—whom fate had been careless enough to let out of his cage—I decided not to take the unattractive room I had glimpsed over his shoulder. And then, at the end of her tether, unable to show me you immediately, fate showed me as a last desperate maneuver your bluish ball dress on the chair—and strange to say, I myself don’t know why but the maneuver worked, and I can imagine what a sigh of relief fate must have heaved.”

“Only that wasn’t my dress, it was my cousin Raissa’s—she’s very nice but a perfect fright—I think she left it for me to take something off or sew something on.”

“Then it was still more ingenious. What resourcefulness! The most enchanting things in nature and art are based on deception. Look, you see—it began with a reckless impetuosity and ended with the finest of finishing touches. Now isn’t that the plot for a remarkable novel? What a theme! But it must be built up, curtained, surrounded by dense life—my life, my professional passions and cares.”

“Yes, but that will result in an autobiography with mass executions of good acquaintances.”

“Well, let’s suppose that I so shuffle, twist, mix, rechew and rebelch everything, add such spices of my own and impregnate things so much with myself that nothing remains of the autobiography but dust—the kind of dust, of course, which makes the most orange of skies. And I shan’t write it now, I’ll be a long time preparing it, years perhaps… In any case I’ll do something else first—I want to translate something in my own manner from an old French sage—in order to reach a final dictatorship over words, because in my Chernyshevski they are still trying to vote.”

“That’s all marvelous,” said Zina. “I like it all immensely. I think you’ll be such a writer as has never been before, and Russia will simply pine for you—when she comes to her senses too late…. But do you love me?”

“What I am saying is in fact a kind of declaration of love,” replied Fyodor.

“A ‘kind of’ is not enough. You know at times I shall probably be wildly unhappy with you. But on the whole it does not matter, I’m ready to face it.”

She smiled, opening her eyes wide and raising her eyebrows, and then she leaned slightly backwards in her chair and began to powder her chin and nose.

“Ah, I must tell you—this is magnificent—he has a famous passage which I think I can say by heart if I go right on, so don’t interrupt me, it’s an approximate translation: there was once a man… he lived as a true Christian; he did much good, sometimes by word, sometimes by deed, and sometimes by silence; he observed the fasts; he drank the water of mountain valleys (that’s good, isn’t it?); he nurtured the spirit of contemplation and vigilance; he lived a pure, difficult, wise life; but when he sensed the approach of death, instead of thinking about it, instead of tears of repentance and sorrowful partings, instead of monks and a notary in black, he invited guests to a feast, acrobats, actors, poets, a crowd of dancing girls, three magicians, jolly Tollenburg students, a traveler from Taprobana, and in the midst of melodious verses, masks and music he drained a goblet of wine and died, with a carefree smile on his face…. Magnificent, isn’t it? If I have to die one day that’s exactly how I’d like it to be.”

“Only minus the dancing girls,” said Zina.

“Well, that’s only a symbol of gay company…. Perhaps, now, we can go?”

“We have to pay,” said Zina. “Call him over.”

After this they were left with eleven pfennigs, counting the blackened coin which she had picked up a day or two before from the sidewalk: it would bring luck. As they walked down the street he felt a quick tremor along his spine, and again that emotional constraint, but now in a different, languorous form. It was a twenty minutes’ slow walk to the house, and the air, the darkness and the honeyed scent of blooming lindens caused a sucking ache at the base of the chest. This scent evanesced in the stretch from linden to linden, being replaced there by a black freshness, and then again, beneath the next canopy, an oppressive and heady cloud would accumulate, and Zina would say, tensing her nostrils: “Ah, smell it,” and again the darkness would be drained of savor and again would be heavy with honey. Will it really happen tonight? Will it really happen now? The weight and the threat of bliss. When I walk with you like this, ever so slowly, and hold you by the shoulder, everything slightly sways, my head hums, and I feel like dragging my feet; my left slipper falls off my heel, we crawl, dawdle, dwindle in a mist—now we are almost all melted…. And one day we shall recall all this—the lindens, and the shadow on the wall, and a poodle’s unclipped claws tapping over the flagstones of the night. And the star, the star. And here is the square and the dark church with the yellow light of its clock. And here, on the corner, the house.

Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase.