Nabokov, Vladimir-he Complet Short Stories

THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

_What startling beauty of phrase,__ __twists of thought, depths of sorrow and bursts of wit!_

_... It was Nabokov's gift to bring Paradise wherever he alighted."_

_--John Updike, The New York Times Book Review_

From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels _Lolita, Pale Fire, _and _Ada, or Ardor, _comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these sixty-six tales--twelve of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, _The Stories of Vladimir __Nabokov _offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

"Some of the most nape-tingling prose and devilish inventions in twentieth-century letters. . . . An authentic literary event."

--_Time_

This edition includes the newly discovered story "Easter Rain."

by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in the United States in hardcover

by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995,

in slightly different form.

The Library of Congress has cataloged

the Knopf edition as follows: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977.

[Short stories] The stories of Vladimir Nabokov.--1st American ed.

p. cm.

ISBN: 0-394-58615-8 I. Manners and customs--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3527.A15A6 1995 813'.54--dc20 95-23466

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-72997-6 www.vintagebooks.com

Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

_To Vera_

_ _

_Contents_

_Preface__ __xiii_

THE WOOD-SPRITE 3

RUSSIAN SPOKEN HERE 6

SOUNDS 14

WINGSTROKE 25

GODS 44

A MATTER OF CHANCE 51

THE SEAPORT 60

REVENGE 67

BENEFICENCE 74

DETAILS OF A SUNSET 79

THE THUNDERSTORM 86

LA VENEZIANA 90

BACHMANN 116

THE DRAGON 125

CHRISTMAS 131

A LETTER THAT NEVER REACHED RUSSIA 137

THE FIGHT 141

THE RETURN OF CHORB 147

A GUIDE TO BERLIN 155

A NURSERY TALE 161

TERROR 173

RAZOR 179

THE PASSENGER 183

THE DOORBELL 189

AN AFFAIR OF HONOR 199

THE CHRISTMAS STORY 222

THE POTATO ELF 228

THE AURELIAN 248

A DASHING FELLOW 259

A BAD DAY 268

THE VISIT TO THE MUSEUM 277

A BUSY MAN 286

TERRA INCOGNITA 297

THE REUNION 304

LIPS TO LIPS 312

ORACHE 325

MUSIC 332

PERFECTION 338

THE ADMIRALTY SPIRE 348

THE LEONARDO 358

IN MEMORY OF L. I. SHIGAEV 368

THE CIRCLE 375

A RUSSIAN BEAUTY 385

BREAKING THE NEWS 390

TORPID SMOKE 396

RECRUITING 401

A SLICE OF LIFE 406

SPRING IN FIALTA 413

CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE 430

TYRANTS DESTROYED 438

LIK 461

MADEMOISELLE O 480

VASILIY SHISHKOV 494

ULTIMA THULE 500

SOLUS REX 523

THE ASSISTANT PRODUCER 546

"THAT IN ALEPPO ONCE ..." 560

A FORGOTTEN POET 569

TIME AND EBB 580

CONVERSATION PIECE, 1945 587

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS 598

FIRST LOVE 604
SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF A DOUBLE MONSTER 612

THE VANE SISTERS 619

LANCE 632

EASTER RAIN 643

_Notes__ __649_

_Appendix__ __667_

_Preface_

HAVING APPEARED individually in periodicals and in various assortments in previous volumes, fifty-two of Vladimir Nabokov's stories were eventually published, during his lifetime, in four definitive English collections: _Nabokov's Dozen _and three other thirteen-story "dozens"--_A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, __Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, _and _Details of a. Sunset and Other __Stories._

Nabokov had long expressed the intention of issuing a final batch, but was not sure whether there were enough stories that met his standard to make up a fifth Nabokovian--or numerical--dozen. His creative life was too full, and was truncated too suddenly, for him to make a final selection. He had penciled a brief list of stories he considered worthy of publication and labeled it "bottom of the barrel." He was referring, he explained to me, not to their quality, but to the fact that, among the materials available for consultation at the moment, they were the final ones worthy of publication. Nonetheless, after our archive had been organized and thoroughly checked, Vera Nabokov and I came up with a happy total of thirteen, all of which, in our circumspect estimation, Nabokov might have deemed suitable. Hence Nabokov's "bottom of the barrel" list, reproduced following this preface, should be considered partial and preliminary; it contains only eight of the thirteen newly collected stories, and also includes _The En__chanter, _which does not appear in the present collection but has been published in English as a separate short novel (New York, Putnam's, 1986; New York, Vintage International, 1991). Nor do the author's working titles correspond in every case to those decided upon for this volume.

From the list entitled "Stories written in English," also reproduced following the preface, Nabokov omitted "First Love" (first published in _The New Yorker _as "Colette"), either through an oversight or because of its transformation into a chapter _of Speak, Memory _(original title: _Conclusive Evidence). _Some alignment instructions--albeit in Russian--in the upper left-hand corner suggest that this list was a fair copy prepared for typing. The two facsimile lists contain a few inaccuracies. "The Vane Sisters," for example, was written in 1951.

The four "definitive" volumes mentioned above had been painstakingly assorted and orchestrated by Nabokov using various criteria--theme, period, atmosphere, uniformity, variety. It is appropriate that each of them conserve its "book" identity for future publication as well. The thirteen stories published in France and Italy as, respectively, _La Venitienne _and _La veneziana _have also perhaps earned the right to appear as a separate English-language volume. These thirteen have made other individual and collective debuts in Europe, and the four previous dozens have appeared worldwide, sometimes in different constellations such as the recent _Russkaya Dyuzhena (Russian Dozen) _in Israel. I shall not touch on publication in post-Perestroyka Russia, which, with few exceptions, has been mega-copy piracy in every sense until now, although improvements shimmer on the horizon.

The present comprehensive collection, while not intended to eclipse the previous groupings, is deliberately arranged in chronological sequence, or the best possible approximation thereof. To this end, the order used in previous volumes has occasionally been altered, and the newly collected pieces have been integrated where appropriate. Date of composition was the criterion of choice. When this was not available or not dependable, date of first publication or other mentions became the guide. Eleven of the newly incorporated thirteen have never before been translated into English. Five of them remained unpublished until the recent appearance of the "new" thirteen in several European languages. Further bibliographical essentials and certain other interesting details appear at the back of this volume.

One obvious bonus of the new arrangement is a convenient overview of Nabokov's development as a writer of fiction. It is interesting, too, that the vectors are not always linear, and a strikingly mature short story may suddenly crop up amid the younger, simpler tales. While illuminating the evolution of the creative process, and affording exciting insights into the themes and methods to be used later--particularly in the novels--Vladimir Nabokov's stories are nevertheless among his most immediately accessible work. Even when linked in some way to the larger fictions, they are self-contained. Even when they can be read on more than one level, they require few literary prerequisites. They offer the reader immediate gratification whether or not he has ventured into Nabokov's larger and more complex writings or delved into his personal history.

My translations of the "new" thirteen are my responsibility alone. The translation of most of the previously published Russian stories was the fruit of a cloudless collaboration between father and son, but the father had authorial license to alter his own texts in their translated form as, on occasion, he deemed appropriate. It is conceivable he might have done so, here and there, with the newly translated stories as well. It goes without saying that, as lone translator, the only liberty I have taken was the correction of the obvious slip or typo, and of editorial blunders from the past. The worst of those was the omission of the entire, wonderful, final page of "The Assistant Producer" in all English-language editions, it seems, subsequent to the first. Incidentally, in the song that twice meanders through the story, the Don Cossack who heaves his bride into the Volga is Stenka Razin.

I confess that, during the long gestation of this collection, I have taken advantage of queries and comments from hawk-eyed translators and editors of recent and concurrent translations into other tongues, and of fine-toothed inspections by those who are publishing a few of the stories individually in English. No matter how intense and pedantic the checking, a flounder or several will slip through the net. Nevertheless, future editors and translators should be aware that the present volume reflects what, at the time of its publication, are the most accurate versions of the English texts and, especially with regard to the thirteen newly collected pieces, of the underlying Russian originals (which were at times very hard to decipher, contained possible or probable author's or copyist's slips necessitating sometimes difficult decisions, and on occasion had one or more variants).

To be fair, I would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, spontaneously submitted draft translations of two stories. One came from Charles Nicol, the other from Gene Barabtarlo. Both are appreciated, and both yielded _trouvailles. _However, in order to maintain an appropriately homogeneous style, I have stuck, by and large, to my own English locutions. I am indebted to Brian Boyd, Dieter Zimmer, and Michael Juliar for their invaluable bibliographical research. Above all, I am grateful to Vera Nabokov for her infinite wisdom, her superlative judgment, and the willpower that compelled her, with failing eyesight and enfeebled hands, to jot a preliminary translation of several passages of "Gods" in her very last days.

It would take much more than a brief preface to trace themes, methods, and images as they weave and develop in these stories, or the echoes of Nabokov's youth in Russia, his university years in England, the emigre period in Germany and France, and the America he was inventing, as he put it, after having invented Europe. To choose at random from the thirteen newly collected stories, "La Veneziana," with its astonishing twist, echoes Nabokov's love for painting (to which he intended, as a boy, to dedicate his life) against a backdrop that includes tennis, which he played and described with a special flair. The other twelve range from fable ("The Dragon") and political intrigue ("Russian Spoken Here") to a poetical, personal impressionism ("Sounds" and "Gods").

Nabokov gives in his notes (which appear at the end of this volume) certain insights regarding the previously collected stories. Among the many things one might add is the eerie doubling of space-time (in "Terra Incognita" and "The Visit to the Museum") that foreshadows the atmosphere of _Ada, Pale Fire, _and, to a degree, _Transparent Things _and _Look at the Harlequins! _Nabokov's predilection for butterflies is a central theme of "The Aurelian" and flickers through many other stories. But what is stranger, music, for which he never professed a special love, often figures prominently in his writing ("Sounds," "Bachmann," "Music," "The Assistant Producer").

Particularly touching to me personally is the sublimation, in "Lance" (as my father told me), of what my parents experienced in my mountain-climbing days. But perhaps the deepest, most important theme, be it subject or undercurrent, is Nabokov's contempt for cruelty--the cruelty of humans, the cruelty of fate--and here the instances are too numerous to name.

DMITRI NABOKOV

_St. Petersburg, Russia, and Montreux, Switzerland_

_June 1995_

We had published the stories without "Easter Rain" when he heard rumors that a scholar residing in Sweden had found the story in Leipzig. The Iron Curtain had been raised by then, and he went to check. There it was: a complete set of _Russkoe Ekho. _And now they had Xerox machines.

Thus "Easter Rain"--first discovered by Svetlana Polsky, though we only learned her name some years later; translated into English in collaboration with Peter Constantine for the Spring 2002 issue of _Conjunctions_--now joins this volume.

DMITRI NABOKOV

_Vevy, Switzerland __May 2002_

A note from Georg Heepe, editorial director of Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, traces the discovery of "Easter Rain," now appended to this edition. It reads in part:

When we were preparing the first German edition of the complete stories in 1987-88, Nabokov scholar Dieter Zimmer searched all the accessible libraries, likely and unlikely, for the April 1925 issue of the Russian emigre magazine _Russkoe Ekho _that he knew in-cluded "Easter Rain." He went even into what was then East Berlin on a day's permit, and thought of the Deutsche Buecherei in Leipzig as well. But the chance seemed too slight, the bureaucratic procedures too forbidding. And there was one more consideration. There would have been no copy machines.

THE WOOD-SPRITE

I WAS pensively penning the outline of the inkstand's circular, quivering shadow. In a distant room a clock struck the hour, while I, dreamer that I am, imagined someone was knocking at the door, softly at first, then louder and louder. He knocked twelve times and paused expectantly.

"Yes, I'm here, come in. . . ."

The doorknob creaked timidly, the flame of the runny candle tilted, and he hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the pollen of the frosty, starry night.

I knew his face--oh, how long I had known it!

His right eye was still in the shadows, the left peered at me timorously, elongated, smoky-green. The pupil glowed like a point of rust. . . . That mossy-gray tuft on his temple, the pale-silver, scarcely noticeable eyebrow, the comical wrinkle near his whiskerless mouth---how all this teased and vaguely vexed my memory!

I got up. He stepped forward.

His shabby little coat seemed to be buttoned wrong--on the female side. In his hand he held a cap--no, a dark-colored, poorly tied bundle, and there was no sign of any cap. ...

Yes, of course I knew him--perhaps had even been fond of him, only I simply could not place the where and the when of our meetings. And we must have met often, otherwise I would not have had such a firm recollection of those cranberry lips, those pointy ears, that amusing Adam's apple. . . .

With a welcoming murmur I shook his light, cold hand, and touched the back of a shabby armchair. He perched like a crow on a tree stump, and began speaking hurriedly.

"It's so scary in the streets. So I dropped in. Dropped in to visit you. Do you recognize me? You and I, we used to romp together and halloo at each other for days at a time. Back in the old country. Don't tell me you've forgotten?"

His voice literally blinded me. I felt dazzled and dizzy--I remembered the happiness, the echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness. . . .

No, it can't be: I'm alone. . . . It's only some capricious delirium. Yet there really was somebody sitting next to me, bony and implausible, with long-eared German bootees, and his voice tintinnabulated, rustled--golden, luscious-green, familiar--while the words were so simple, so human. ...

"There--you remember. Yes, I am a former Forest Elf, a mischievous sprite. And here I am, forced to flee like everyone else."

He heaved a deep sigh, and once again I had visions of billowing nimbus, lofty leafy undulations, bright flashes of birch bark like splashes of sea foam, against a dulcet, perpetual, hum. . . . He bent toward me and glanced gently into my eyes. "Remember our forest, fir so black, birch all white? They've cut it all down. The grief was unbearable--I saw my dear birches crackling and falling, and how could I help? Into the marshes they drove me, I wept and I howled, I boomed like a bittern, then left lickety-split for a neighboring pinewood.

"There I pined, and could not stop sobbing. I had barely grown used to it, and lo, there was no more pinewood, just blue-tinted cinders. Had to do some more tramping. Found myself a wood--a wonderful wood it was, thick, dark, and cool. Yet somehow it was just not the same thing. In the old days I'd frolic from dawn until dusk, whistle furiously, clap my hands, frighten passersby. You remember yourself-- you lost your way once in a dark nook of my woods, you and some little white dress, and I kept tying the paths up in knots, spinning the tree trunks, twinkling through the foliage. Spent the whole night playing tricks. But I was only fooling around, it was all in jest, vilify me as they might. But now I sobered up, for my new abode was not a merry one. Day and night strange things crackled around me. At first I thought a fellow elf was lurking there; I called, then listened. Something crackled, something rumbled. . . . But no, those were not the kinds of sounds we make. Once, toward evening, I skipped out into a glade, and what do I see? People lying around, some on their backs, some on their bellies. Well, I think, I'll wake them up, I'll get them moving! And I went to work shaking boughs, bombarding with cones, rustling, hooting. ... I toiled away for a whole hour, all to no avail. Then I took a closer look, and I was horror-struck. Here's a man with his head hanging by one flimsy crimson thread, there's one with a heap of thick worms for a stomach. ... I could not endure it. I let out a howl, jumped in the air, and off I ran. ...

"Long I wandered through different forests, but I could find no peace. Either it was stillness, desolation, mortal boredom, or such horror it's better not to think about it. At last I made up my mind and changed into a bumpkin, a tramp with a knapsack, and left for good: Rus', adieu! Here a kindred spirit, a Water-Sprite, gave me a hand. Poor fellow was on the run too. He kept marveling, kept saying--what times are upon us, a real calamity! And even if, in olden times, he had had his fun, used to lure people down (a hospitable one, he was!), in recompense how he petted and pampered them on the gold river bottom, with what songs he bewitched them! These days, he says, only dead men come floating by, floating in batches, enormous numbers of them, and the river's moisture is like blood, thick, warm, sticky, and there's nothing for him to breathe. . . . And so he took me with him. "He went off to knock about some distant sea, and put me ashore on a foggy coast--go, brother, find yourself some friendly foliage. But I found nothing, and ended up here in this foreign, terrifying city of stone. Thus I turned into a human, complete with proper starched collars and bootees, and I've even learned human talk. ..."

He fell silent. His eyes glistened like wet leaves, his arms were crossed, and, by the wavering light of the drowning candle, some pale strands combed to the left shimmered so strangely.

"I know you too are pining," his voice shimmered again, "but your pining, compared to mine, my tempestuous, turbulent pining, is but the even breathing of one who is asleep. And think about it: not one of our Tribe is there left in Rus'. Some of us swirled away like wisps of fog, others scattered over the world. Our native rivers are melancholy, there is no frisky hand to splash up the moon-gleams. Silent are the orphaned bluebells that remain, by chance, unmown, the pale-blue _gusli _that once served my rival, the ethereal Field-Sprite, for his songs. The shaggy, friendly, household spirit, in tears, has forsaken your besmirched, humiliated home, and the groves have withered, the pathetically luminous, magically somber groves. . . .

"It was we, Rus', who were your inspiration, your unfathomable beauty, your agelong enchantment! And we are all gone, gone, driven into exile by a crazed surveyor.

"My friend, soon I shall die, say something to me, tell me that you love me, a homeless phantom, come sit closer, give me your hand. ..."

The candle sputtered and went out. Cold fingers touched my palm. The familiar melancholy laugh pealed and fell still.

When I turned on the light there was no one in the armchair. . . . No one! . . . Nothing was left but a wondrously subtle scent in the room, of birch, of humid moss. ...

RUSSIAN SPOKEN HERE

Martin martinich's tobacco shop is located in a corner building. No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for Martin's business is booming. The window is of modest size, but well arranged. Small mirrors make the display come alive. At the bottom, amid the hollows of hilly azure velvet, nestles a motley of cigarette boxes with names couched in the glossy international dialect that serves for hotel names as well; higher up, rows of cigars grin in their lightweight boxes.

In his day Martin was a well-off landowner. He is famed in my childhood recollections for a remarkable tractor, while his son Petya and I succumbed simultaneously to Meyn Ried and scarlet fever, so that now, after fifteen years chock-full of all kinds of things, I enjoyed stopping by the tobacco shop on that lively corner where Martin sold

his wares.

Since last year, moreover, we have more than reminiscences in common. Martin has a secret, and I have been made party to that secret. "So, everything as usual?" I ask in a whisper, and he, glancing over his shoulder, replies just as softly, "Yes, thank heaven, all is quiet." The secret is a quite extraordinary one. I recall how I was leaving for Paris and stayed at Martin's till evening the day before. A man's soul can be compared to a department store and his eyes to twin display windows. Judging by Martin's eyes, warm, brown tints were in fashion. Judging by those eyes, the merchandise inside his soul was of superb quality. And what a luxuriant beard, fairly glistening with robust Russian gray. And his shoulders, his stature, his mien. ... At one time they used to say he could slit a handkerchief with a sword--one of the exploits of Richard Coeur de Lion. Now a fellow emigre would say with envy, "The man did not give in!"

His wife was a puffy, gentle old woman with a mole by her left nostril. Ever since the time of revolutionary ordeals her face had had a touching tic: she would give quick sidewise glances skyward. Petya had the same imposing physique as his father. I was fond of his mild-mannered glumness and unexpected humor. He had a large, flaccid face (about which his father used to say, "What a mug--three days would not suffice to circumnavigate it") and reddish-brown, permanently tousled hair. Petya owned a tiny cinema in a sparsely populated part of town, which brought a very modest income. And there we have the whole family.

I spent that day before my departure sitting by the counter and watching Martin receive his customers--first he would lean lightly, with two fingers, on the countertop, then step to the shelves, produce a box with a flourish, and ask, as he opened it with his thumbnail, _"Einen Rauchen?"_--I remember that day for a special reason: Petya suddenly came in from the street, disheveled and livid with rage. Martin's niece had decided to return to her mother in Moscow, and Petya had just been to see the diplomatic representatives. While one of the representatives was giving him some information, another, who was obviously involved with the government political directorate, whispered barely audibly, "All kinds of White Guard scum keep hanging around."

"I could have made mincemeat of him," said Petya, slamming his fist into his palm, "but unfortunately I could not forget about my aunt in Moscow."

"You already have a peccadillo or two on your conscience," good-naturedly rumbled Martin. He was alluding to a most amusing incident. Not long ago, on his nameday, Petya had visited the Soviet bookstore, whose presence blemishes one of Berlin's most charming streets. They sell not only books there, but also various handmade bric-a-brac. Petya selected a hammer adorned with poppies and emblazoned with an inscription typical for a Bolshevik hammer. The clerk inquired if he would like something else. Petya said, "Yes, I would," nodding at a small plaster bust of Mister Ulyanov.* [Lenin's real name. --D.N.] He paid fifteen marks for bust and hammer, whereupon, without a word, right there on the counter, he popped that bust with that hammer, and with such force that Mister Ulyanov disintegrated.

I was fond of that story, just as I was fond, for instance, of the dear silly sayings from unforgettable childhood that warm the cockles of one's heart. Martin's words made me glance with a laugh at Petya. But Petya jerked his shoulder sullenly and scowled. Martin rummaged in the drawer and proffered him the most expensive cigarette in the shop. But even this did not dispel Petya's gloom.

I returned to Berlin a half-year later. One Sunday morning I felt an urge to see Martin. On weekdays you could get through via the shop, since his apartment--three rooms and kitchen--was directly behind it. But of course on a Sunday morning the shop was closed, and the window had shut its grated visor. I glanced rapidly through the grating at the red and gold boxes, at the swarthy cigars, at the modest inscription in a corner: "Russian spoken here," remarked that the display had in some way grown even gayer, and walked through the courtyard to Martin's place. Strange thing--Martin himself appeared to me even jollier, jauntier, more radiant than before. And Petya was downright unrecognizable: his oily, shaggy locks were combed back, a broad, vaguely bashful smile did not leave his lips, he kept a kind of sated silence, and a curious, joyous preoccupation, as if he carried a precious cargo within him, softened his every movement. Only the mother was pale as ever, and the same touching tic flashed across her face like faint summer lightning. We sat in their neat parlor, and I knew that the other two rooms--Petya's bedroom and that of his parents--were just as cozy and clean, and I found that an agreeable thought. I sipped tea with lemon, listened to Martin's mellifluous speech, and I could not rid myself of the impression that something new had appeared in their apartment, some kind of joyous, mysterious palpitation, as happens, for instance, in a home where there is a young mother-to-be. Once or twice Martin glanced with a preoccupied air at his son, whereupon the other would promptly rise, leave the room, and, on his return, nod discreetly toward his father, as if to say everything was going splendidly.

There was also something new and, to me, enigmatic in the old man's conversation. We were talking about Paris and the French, and suddenly he inquired, "Tell me, my friend, what's the largest prison in Paris!1" I replied I didn't know and started telling him about a French revue that featured blue-painted women.

"You think that's something!" interrupted Martin. "They say, for example, that women scratch the plaster off the walls in prison and use it to powder their faces, necks, or whatever." In confirmation of his words he fetched from his bedroom a thick tome by a German crim-inologist and located in it a chapter about the routine of prison life. I tried changing the subject, but, no matter what theme I selected, Martin steered it with artful convolutions so that suddenly we would find ourselves discussing the humaneness of life imprisonment as opposed to execution, or the ingenious methods invented by criminals to break out into the free world.

I was puzzled. Petya, who loved anything mechanical, was picking with a penknife at the springs of his watch and chuckling to himself. His mother worked at her needlepoint, now and then nudging the toast or the jam toward me. Martin, clutching his disheveled beard with all five fingers, gave me a sidelong flash of his tawny eye, and suddenly something within him let go. He banged the palm of his hand on the table and turned to his son. "I can't stand it any longer, Petya--I'm going to tell him everything before I burst." Petya nodded silently. Martin's wife was getting up to go to the kitchen. "What a chatterbox you are," she said, shaking her head indulgently. Martin placed his hand on my shoulder, gave me such a shake that, had I been an apple tree in the garden, the apples would literally have come tumbling off me, and glanced into my face. "I'm warning you," he said. "I'm about to tell you such a secret, such a secret . . . that I just don't know. Mind you--mum's the word! Understand?"

And, leaning close to me, bathing me in the odor of tobacco and his own pungent old-man smell, Martin told me a truly remarkable tale. [In this narrative, all traits and distinguishing marks that might hint at the identity of the real Martin are of course deliberately distorted. I mention this so that curiosity seekers will not search in vain for the "tobacco shop in the corner building." --V.N.]

"It happened," began Martin, "shortly after your departure. In walked a customer. He had obviously not noticed the sign in the window, for he addressed me in German. Let me emphasize this: if he had noticed the sign he would not have entered a modest emigre shop. I recognized him right off as a Russian by his pronunciation. Had a Russian mug too. I, of course, launched into Russian, asked him what price range, what kind. He gave me a look of disagreeable surprise: 'What made you think I was Russian?' I gave him a perfectly friendly answer, as I recall, and began counting out his cigarettes. At that moment Petya entered. When he saw my customer he said with utter calm, 'Now here's a pleasant encounter.' Then my Petya walks up close to him and bangs him on the cheek with his fist. The other froze. As Petya explained to me later, what had happened was not just a knockout with the victim crumpling to the floor, but a special kind of knockout: it turns out Petya had delivered a delayed-action punch, and the man went out on his feet. And looked as if he were sleeping standing up. Then he started slowly tilting back like a tower. Here Petya walked around behind him and caught him under the armpits. It was all highly unexpected. Petya said, 'Give me a hand, Dad.' I asked what he thought he was doing. Petya only repeated, 'Give me a hand.' I know my Petya well--no point in smirking, Petya--and know he has his feet on the ground, ponders his actions, and does not knock people unconscious for nothing. We dragged the unconscious one from the shop into the corridor and on to Petya's room. Right then I heard a ring-- someone had stepped into the shop. Good thing, of course, that it hadn't happened earlier. Back into the shop I went, made my sale, then, luckily, my wife arrived with the shopping, and I immediately put her to work at the counter while I, without a word, went lickety-split into Petya's room. The man was lying with eyes closed on the floor, while Petya was sitting at his table, examining in a pensive kind of way certain objects like that large leather cigar case, half a dozen obscene postcards, a wallet, a passport, an old but apparently efficient revolver. He explained right away: as I'm sure you have imagined, these items came from the man's pockets, and the man himself was none other than the representative--you remember Petya's story--who made the crack about the White scum, yes, yes, the very same one! And, judging by certain papers, he was a GPU man if I ever saw one. 'Well and good,' I say to Petya, 'so you've punched a guy in the mug. Whether he deserved it or not is a different matter, but please explain to me, what do you intend to do now? Evidently you forgot all about your aunt in Moscow.' 'Yes, I did,' said Petya. 'We must think of something.'

"And we did. First we got hold of some stout rope, and plugged his mouth with a towel. While we were working on him he came to and opened one eye. Upon closer examination, let me tell you, the mug turned out to be not only repulsive but stupid as well--some kind of mange on his forehead, mustache, bulbous nose. Leaving him lying on the floor, Petya and I settled down comfortably nearby and started a judicial inquiry. We debated for a good while. We were concerned not so much with the affront itself--that was a trifle, of course--as much as with his entire profession, so to speak, and with the deeds he had committed in Russia. The defendant was allowed to have the last word. When we relieved his mouth of the towel, he gave a kind of moan, gagged, but said nothing except 'You wait, you just wait. . . .' The towel was retied, and the session resumed. The votes were split at first. Petya demanded the death sentence. I found that he deserved to die, but proposed substituting life imprisonment for execution. Petya thought it over and concurred. I added that although he had certainly committed crimes, we were unable to ascertain this; that his employment in itself alone constituted a crime; that our duty was limited to rendering him harmless, nothing more. Now listen to the rest.

"We have a bathroom at the end of the corridor. Dark, very dark little room, with an enameled iron bathtub. The water goes on strike pretty often. There is an occasional cockroach. The room is so dark because the window is extremely narrow and is situated right under the ceiling, and besides, right opposite the window, three feet away or less, there's a good, solid brick wall. And it was here in this nook that we decided to keep the prisoner. It was Petya's idea--yes, yes, Petya, give Caesar his due. First of all, of course, the cell had to be prepared. We began by dragging the prisoner into the corridor so he would be close by while we worked. And here my wife, who had just locked up the shop for the night and was on her way to the kitchen, saw us. She was amazed, even indignant, but then understood our reasoning. Docile girl. Petya began by dismembering a stout table we had in the kitchen--knocked off its legs and used the resulting board to hammer shut the bathroom window. Then he unscrewed the taps, removed the cylindrical water heater, and laid a mattress on the bathroom floor. Of course next day we added various improvements: we changed the lock, installed a deadbolt, reinforced the window board with metal--and all of it, of course, without making too much noise. As you know, we have no neighbors, but nonetheless it behooved us to act cautiously. The result was a real prison cell, and there we put the GPU chap. We undid the rope, untied the towel, warned him that if he started yelling we would reswaddle him, and for a long time; then, satisfied that he had understood for whom the mattress had been placed in the bathtub, we locked the door and, taking turns, stood guard all night.

"That moment marked the beginning of a new life for us. I was no longer simply Martin Martinich, but Martin Martinich the head warden. At first the inmate was so stunned by what had happened that his behavior was subdued. Soon, however, he reverted to a normal state and, when we brought his dinner, launched into a hurricane of foul language. I cannot repeat the man's obscenities; I shall limit myself to saying that he placed my dear late mother in the most curious situations. It was decided to inculcate in him thoroughly the nature of his legal status. I explained that he would remain imprisoned until the end of his days; that if I died first I would transmit him to Petya like a bequest; that my son in his turn would transmit him to my future grandson and so forth, causing him to become a kind of family tradition. A family jewel. I mentioned in passing that, in the unlikely eventuality of our having to move to a different Berlin flat, he would be tied up, placed in a special trunk, and would make the move with us easy as pie. I went on to explain to him that in one case only would he be granted amnesty. Namely, he would be released the day the Bolshevik bubble burst. Finally I promised that he would be well fed--far better than when, in my time, I had been locked up by the Cheka--and that, by way of special privilege, he would receive books. And in fact, to this day I don't believe he has once complained about the food. True, at first Petya proposed that he be fed dried roach, but search as he might, that Soviet fish was unavailable in Berlin. We are obliged to give him bourgeois food. Exactly at eight every morning Petya and I go in and place by his tub a bowl of hot soup with meat and a loaf of gray bread. At the same time we take out the chamber pot, a clever apparatus we acquired just for him. At three he gets a glass of tea, at seven some more soup. This nutritional system is modeled on the one in use in the best European jails.

"The books were more of a problem. We held a family council for starters, and stopped at three titles: _Prince Serebryaniy, _Krylov's _Fables, _and _Around the World in Eighty Days. _He announced that he would not read those 'White Guard pamphlets,' but we left him the books, and we have every reason to believe that he read them with pleasure.

"His mood was changeable. He grew quiet. Evidently he was cooking up something. Maybe he hoped the police would start looking for him. We checked the papers, but there was not a word about the vanished Cheka agent. Most likely the other representatives had decided the man had simply defected, and had preferred to bury the affair. To this pensive period belongs his attempt to slip away, or at least to get word to the outside world. He trudged about his cell, probably reached for the window, tried to pry the planks loose, tried pounding, but we made some threat or other and the pounding ceased. And once, when Petya went in there alone, the man lunged at him. Petya grabbed him in a gentle bear hug and sat him back in the tub. After this occurrence he underwent another change, became very good-natured, even joked on occasion, and finally attempted to bribe us. He offered us an enormous sum, promising to obtain it through somebody. When this did not help either, he started whimpering, then went back to swearing worse than before. At the moment he is at a stage of grim submissiveness, which, I'm afraid, bodes no good.

"We take him for a daily walk in the corridor, and twice a week we air him out by an open window; naturally we take all necessary precautions to prevent him from yelling. On Saturdays he takes a bath. We ourselves have to wash in the kitchen. On Sundays I give him short lectures and let him smoke three cigarettes--in my presence, of course. What are these lectures about? All sorts of things. Pushkin, for instance, or Ancient Greece. Only one subject is omitted--politics. He is totally deprived of politics. Just as if such a thing did not exist on the face of the earth. And you know what? Ever since I have kept one So-

viet agent locked up, ever since I have served the Fatherland, I am simply a different man. Jaunty and happy. And business has looked up, so there is no great problem supporting him either. He costs me twenty marks or so a month, counting the electric bill: it's completely dark in there, so from eight a.m. to eight p.m. one weak lightbulb is left on.

"You ask, what milieu is he from? Well, how shall I put it. ... He is twenty-four years old, he is a peasant, it is unlikely that he finished even a village school, he was what is called 'an honest Communist,' studied only political literacy, which in our book signifies trying to make blockheads out of knuckleheads--that's all I know. Oh, if you want I'll show him to you, only remember, mum's the word!"

Martin went into the corridor. Petya and I followed. The old man in his cozy house jacket really did look like a prison warden. He produced the key as he walked, and there was something almost professional in the way he inserted it in the lock. The lock crunched twice, and Martin threw open the door. Far from being some ill-lit hole, it was a splendid, spacious bathroom, of the kind one finds in comfortable German dwellings. Electric light, bright yet pleasing to the eye, burned behind a merry, ornate shade. A mirror glistened on the left-hand wall. On the night table by the bathtub there were books, a peeled orange on a lustrous plate, and an untouched bottle of beer. In the white bathtub, on a mattress covered with a clean sheet, with a large pillow under the back of his head, lay a well-fed, bright-eyed fellow with a long growth of beard, in a bathrobe (a hand-me-down from the master) and warm, soft slippers.

"Well, what do you say?" Martin asked me.

I found the scene comical and did not know what to answer. "That's where the window used to be," Martin indicated with his finger. Sure enough, the window was boarded up to perfection.

The prisoner yawned and turned toward the wall. We went out. Martin fondled the bolt with a smile. "Fat chance he'll ever escape," he said, and then added pensively, "I would be curious to know, though, just how many years he'll spend in there. ..."

SOUNDS

IT was necessary to shut the window: rain was striking the sill and splashing the parquet and armchairs. With a fresh, slippery sound, enormous silver specters sped through the garden, through the foliage, along the orange sand. The drainpipe rattled and choked. You were playing Bach. The piano had raised its lacquered wing, under the wing lay a lyre, and little hammers were rippling across the strings. The brocade rug, crumpling into coarse folds, had slid partway off the piano's tail, dropping an opened opus onto the floor. Every now and then, through the frenzy of the fugue, your ring would clink on the keys as, incessantly, magnificently, the June shower slashed the win-dowpanes. And you, without interrupting your playing, and slightly tilting your head, were exclaiming, in time to the beat, "The rain, the rain ... I am go-ing to drown it out. ..." But you could not.

Abandoning the albums that lay on the table like velvet coffins, I watched you and listened to the fugue, the rain. A feeling of freshness welled in me like the fragrance of wet carnations that trickled down everywhere, from the shelves, from the piano's wing, from the oblong diamonds of the chandelier.

I had a feeling of enraptured equilibrium as I sensed the musical relationship between the silvery specters of rain and your inclined shoulders, which would give a shudder when you pressed your fingers into the rippling luster. And when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that--homogeneous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you ... All was unified,

equivalent, divine. You got up. Rain was still mowing down the sunlight. The puddles looked like holes in the dark sand, apertures onto some other heavens that were gliding past underground. On a bench, glistening like Danish china, lay your forgotten racquet; the strings had turned brown from the rain, and the frame had twisted into a figure eight.

When we entered the lane, I felt a bit giddy from the motley of shadows and the aroma of mushroom rot.

I recall you within a chance patch of sunlight. You had sharp elbows and pale, dusty-looking eyes. When you spoke, you would carve the air with the riblike edge of your little hand and the glint of a bracelet on your thin wrist. Your hair would melt as it merged with the sunlit air that quivered around it. You smoked copiously and nervously. You exhaled through both nostrils, obliquely flicking off the ash. Your dove-gray manor was five versts from ours. Its interior was reverberant, sumptuous, and cool. A photograph of it had appeared in a glossy metropolitan magazine. Almost every morning, I would leap onto the leather wedge of my bicycle and rustle along the path, through the woods, then along the highway and through the village, then along another path toward you. You counted on your husband's not coming in September. And we feared nothing, you and I--not your servants' gossip, not my family's suspicions. Each of us, in a different way, trusted fate.

Your love was a bit muted, as was your voice. One might say you loved askance, and you never spoke about love. You were one of those habitually untalkative women, to whose silence one immediately grows accustomed. But now and then something in you burst forth. Then your giant Bechstein would thunder, or else, gazing mistily straight ahead, you would tell me hilarious anecdotes you had heard from your husband or from his regimental comrades. I remember your hands'-- elongated, pale hands with bluish veins.

On that happy day when the rain was lashing and you played so unexpectedly well came the resolution of the nebulous something that had imperceptibly arisen between us after our first weeks of love. I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean and the long golden drops rustling and pattering in the lane. I glanced at a birch tree's shiny bark and suddenly felt that, in place of arms, I possessed inclined branches covered with little wet leaves and, instead of legs, a thousand slender roots, twining into the earth, imbibing it. I wanted to transfuse myself thus into all of nature, to experience what it was like to be an old boletus mushroom with its spongy yellow underside, or a dragonfly, or the solar sphere. I felt so happy that I suddenly burst out laughing, and kissed you on the clavicle and nape. I would even have recited a poem to you, but you detested poetry.

You smiled a thin smile and said, "It's nice after the rain." Then you thought for a minute and added, "You know, I just remembered-- I've been invited to tea today at ... what's his name ... Pal Palych's. He's a real bore. But, you know, I must go."

Pal Palych was an old acquaintance of mine. We would be fishing together and, all of a sudden, in a creaky little tenor, he would break into "The Evening Bells." I was very fond of him. A fiery drop fell from a leaf right onto my lips. I offered to accompany you.

You gave a shivery shrug. "We'll be bored to death there. This is awful." You glanced at your wrist and sighed. "Time to go. I must change my shoes."

In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.

It happened like this. On one bank of the river was your park, your meadows, and on the other stood the village. The highway was deeply rutted in places. The mud was a lush violet, and the grooves contained bubbly, cafe-au-lait water. The oblique shadows of black log isbas extended with particular clarity.

We walked in the shade along a well-trodden path, past a grocery, past an inn with an emerald sign, past sun-filled courtyards emanating the aromas of manure and of fresh hay.

The schoolhouse was new, constructed of stone, with maples planted around it. On its threshold a peasant woman's white calves gleamed as she wrung out a rag into a bucket.

You inquired, "Is Pal Palych in?" The woman, with her freckles and braids, squinted against the sun. "He is, he is." The pail tinkled

as she pushed it with her heel. "Come in, ma'am. They'll be in the workshop."

We creaked along a dark hallway, then through a spacious classroom.

I glanced in passing at an azure map, and thought, That's how all of Russia is--sunlight and hollows. ... In a corner sparkled a crushed piece of chalk.

Farther on, in the small workshop, there was a pleasant smell of carpenter's glue and pine sawdust. Coatless, puffy, and sweaty, his left leg extended, Pal Palych was planing away appetizingly at a groaning white board. His moist, bald pate rocked to and fro in a dusty ray of sunlight. On the floor under the workbench, the shavings curled like flimsy locks.

I said loudly, "Pal Palych, you have guests!"

He gave a start, immediately got flustered, bestowed a polite smack on the hand you raised with such a listless, familiar gesture, and for an instant poured his damp fingers into my hand and gave it a shake. His face looked as if it had been fashioned of buttery modeling clay, with its limp mustache and unexpected furrows.

"Sorry--I'm not dressed, you see," he said with a guilty smile. He grabbed a pair of shirt cuffs that had been standing like cylinders side by side on the windowsill, and pulled them on hastily.

"What are you working on?" you asked with a glint of your bracelet. Pal Palych was struggling into his jacket with sweeping motions. "Nothing, just puttering," he sputtered, stumbling slightly on the labial consonants. "It's a kind of little shelf. Haven't finished yet. I still have to sand and lacquer it. But take a look at this--I call it the Fly. . . ." With a spinning rub of his joined palms, he launched at miniature wooden helicopter, which soared with a buzzing sound, bumped on the ceiling, and dropped.

The shadow of a polite smile flitted across your face. "Oh, silly me," Pal Palych started again. "You were expected upstairs, my friends. . . . This door squeaks. Sorry. Allow me to go first. I'm afraid my place is a mess. ..."

"I think he forgot he invited me," you said in English as we began climbing the creaky staircase.

I was watching your back, the silk checks of your blouse. From somewhere downstairs, probably the courtyard, came a resonant peasant-woman voice, "Gerosim! Hey, Gerosim!" And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards.

Pal Palych's room was sunny and somewhat cramped. A crimson rug with a yellow lion embroidered in its center was nailed to the wall above the bed. On another wall hung a framed chapter from _Anna Karenin, _set in such a way that the interplay of dark and light type together with the clever placement of the lines formed Tolstoy's face.

Rubbing his hands together, our host seated you. As he did so, he knocked an album off the table with the flap of his jacket. He retrieved it. Tea, yogurt, and some insipid biscuits appeared. From a dresser drawer, Pal Palych produced a flowery tin of Landrin hard candy. When he stooped, a fold of pimply skin bulged behind his collar. The down of a spiderweb on the windowsill contained a yellow, dead bumblebee. "Where is Sarajevo?" you asked suddenly, rustling a newspaper page that you had listlessly picked up from a chair. Pal Palych, busy pouring tea, replied, "In Serbia."

And, with a trembling hand, he carefully gave you the steaming glass in its silver stand.

"There you are. May I offer you some biscuits? . . . And what are they throwing bombs for?" he addressed me with a jerk of his shoulders.

I was examining, for the hundredth time, a massive glass papers weight. The glass contained pinkish azure and St. Isaac's Cathedral specked with golden sandy grains. You laughed and read aloud, "Yesterday, a merchant of the Second Guild named Yeroshin was arrested at the Quisisana Restaurant. It turned out that Yeroshin, under the pretext of . . ." You laughed again. "No, the rest is indecent."

Pal Palych grew flustered, flushed a brownish shade of red, and dropped his spoon. Maple leaves glistened immediately beneath the windows. A wagon rattled past. From somewhere came the plaintive, tender cry "Ice--cream! ..."

He began talking about school, about drunkenness, about the trout that had appeared in the river. I started scrutinizing him, and had the feeling I was really seeing him for the first time, even though we were old acquaintances. An image of him from our first encounter must have remained impressed on my brain and never changed, like something accepted and grown habitual. When thinking in passing about Pal Palych, I had the impression for some reason that he had not only a dark-blond mustache but even a matching little beard. An imaginary beard is a characteristic of many Russian faces. Now, having given him a special look, so to speak, with an internal eye, I saw that in reality his chin was rounded, hairless,[The sharp-eyed bilingual reader familiar with the original Russian may note the substitution of "hairless" for "irresolute." The two words resemble each other in Russian, and "irresolute" was almost certainly the result of a copyist's slip. --D.N.] and had a slight cleft. He had a fleshy nose, and I noticed, on his left eyelid, a pimplelike mole I would have dearly loved to cut off--but cutting would have meant killing. That little grain contained him, totally and exclusively. When I realized all this, and examined all of him, I made the slightest of motions, as if nudging my soul to start it sliding downhill, and glided inside Pal Palych, made myself comfortable inside him, and felt from within, as it were, that growth on his wrinkly eyelid, the starched winglets of his collar, and the fly crawling across his bald spot. I examined all of him with limpid, mobile eyes. The yellow lion over the bed now seemed an old acquaintance, as if it had been on my wall since childhood. The colored postcard, enclosed in its convex glass, became extraordinary, graceful, joyous. It was not you sitting in front of me, in the low wicker armchair to which my back had grown accustomed, but the benefactress of the school, a taciturn lady I hardly knew. And right away, with the same lightness of movement, I glided into you too, perceived the ribbon of a garter above your knee and, a little higher, the tickle of batiste, and thought, in your stead, that it was boring, it was hot, one wanted to smoke. At that instant you produced a gold case from your purse and inserted a cigarette into your holder. And I was within everything--you, the cigarette, the holder, Pal Palych scrabbling awkwardly with his match, the glass paperweight, the dead bumblebee on the windowsill.

Many years have sailed by, and I do not know where he is now, timid, puffy Pal Palych. Sometimes, though, when he is the last thing I am thinking about, I see him in a dream, transposed into the setting of my current existence. He enters a room with his fussy, smiling gait, faded panama in hand; he bows as he walks; he mops his bald spot and ruddy neck with an enormous handkerchief. And when I dream of him you invariably traverse my dream, looking lazy and wearing a low-belted silk top.

I was not loquacious on that wonderfully happy day. I gulped the slippery flakes of curds and strained to hear every sound. When Pal Palych fell silent, I could hear his stomach muttering--a delicate squeak, followed by a tiny gurgle. Whereupon he would demonstratively clear his throat and hurriedly start talking about something. Stumbling, at a loss for the right word, he would frown and drum his fingertips on the table. You reclined in the low armchair, impassive and silent. Turning your head sidewise and lifting your angular elbow, you would glance at me from under your lashes as you adjusted the hairpins in back. You thought I felt awkward in front of Pal Palych because you and I had arrived together, and he might have an inkling about our relationship. And I was amused that you were thinking this, and amused by the dim, melancholy way Pal Palych blushed when you deliberately mentioned your husband and his work.

In front of the school, the sun's hot ochre had splashed beneath the maples. From the threshold, Pal Palych bowed, thanking us for dropping by, then he bowed again from the doorway, and a thermometer sparkled, glassy-white, on the outside wall.

When we had left the village, crossed the bridge, and were climbing the path toward your house, I took you under the elbow, and you flashed that special sidelong smile that told me you were happy. Suddenly I had the desire to tell you about Pal Palych's little wrinkles, about the spangled St. Isaac's, but, as soon as I be^gan, I had a feeling the wrong words were coming out, bizarre words, and when you tenderly said, "Decadent," I changed the subject. I knew what you needed: simple feelings, simple words. Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious.

A workman in a puffed blouse was resonantly and firmly sharpening his scythe. Butterflies floated above the unmowed scabious flowers. Toward us along the path came a young girl with a pale-green kerchief on her shoulders and daisies in her dark hair. I had already seen her three times or so, and her thin, tanned neck had stuck in my memory. As she passed, she gave you an attentive touch of her barely slanted eyes. Then, hopping carefully across the ditch, she disappeared behind the alders. A silvery tremor traversed the matte-textured bushes. You said, "I bet she was having herself a nice walk in my park. How I de-

test these vacationers. . . ." A fox terrier, a plump old bitch, was trotting along the path after her owner. You adored dogs. The little animal crawled up to us on its belly, wriggling, its ears laid back. It rolled over under your proffered hand, showing its pink underbelly, covered with gray maplike spots. "Why, you sweetheart," you said with your special, petting-ruffling voice.

The fox terrier, having rolled around for a while, gave a dainty little squeal and trotted on, scuttling across the ditch.

When we were already approaching the low park gate, you decided you wanted to smoke, but, after rummaging in your handbag, you softly clucked, "How silly of me. I left the holder at his place." You touched my shoulder. "Dearest, run and fetch it. Otherwise I cannot smoke." I laughed as I kissed your fluttery eyelashes and your narrow smile.

You cried out after me, "Just hurry!" I set off at a run, not because there was any great rush, but because everything around me was running--the iridescence of the bushes, the shadows of the clouds on the damp grass, the purplish flowers scurrying for their lives into a gully before the mower's lightning.

Some ten minutes later, panting hotly, I was climbing the steps to the schoolhouse. I banged on the brown door with my fist. A mattress spring squeaked inside. I turned the handle, but the door was locked. "Who's there?" came Pal Palych's flustered voice.

I shouted, "Come on, let me in!" The mattress clinked again, and there was a slapping of unshod feet. "What do you lock yourself in for, Pal Palych?" I noticed right away that his eyes were red.

"Come in, come in. ... Glad to see you. You see, I was asleep. Come on in."

"We forgot a cigarette holder here," I said, trying not to look at him.

We finally found the green-enameled tube under the armchair. I stuck it in my pocket. Pal Palych was trumpeting into his handkerchief,

"She's a wonderful person," he said inopportunely, sitting down heavily on the bed. He sighed and looked askance. "There's something about a Russian woman, a certain--" He got all wrinkled up and rubbed his brow. "A certain"--he emitted a gentle grunt--"spirit of self-sacrifice. There is nothing more sublime in the world. That extraordinarily subtle, extraordinarily sublime spirit of self-sacrifice." He joined his hands behind his head and broke into a lyrical smile.

"Extraordinarily ..." He fell silent, then asked, already with a different tone, one that he often used to make me laugh, "And what else do you have to tell me, my friend?" I felt like giving him a hug, saying something full of warmth, something he needed. "You ought to go for a walk, Pal Palych. Why mope in a stuffy room?"

He gave a dismissive wave. "I've seen all there is to see. You do nothing b-but get all hot out there. . . ." He wiped his puffy eyes and his mustache with a downward motion of his hand. "Maybe tonight I'll go do some fishing." The pimplelike mole on his wrinkled eyelid twitched.

One ought to have asked him, "Dear Pal Palych, why were you lying down just now with your face buried in the pillow? Is it just hay fever, or some major grief? Have you ever loved a woman? And why cry on a day like this, with this nice sunshine and the puddles outside? ..."

"Well, I have to run, Pal Palych," I said, glancing at the abandoned glasses, the typographically re-created Tolstoy, and the boots with earlike loops under the table.

Two flies settled on the red floor. One climbed on top of the other. They buzzed and flew apart.

"No hard feelings," Pal Palych said with a slow exhalation. He shook his head. "I'll grin and bear it--go, don't let me keep you."

I was running again along the path, next to the alder bushes. I felt that I had bathed in another's grief, that I was radiant with his tears. The feeling was a happy one, which I have since experienced only rarely: at the sight of a bowed tree, a pierced glove, a horse's eye. It was happy because it had a harmonious flow. It was happy as any movement or radiance is happy. I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one; tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew--secretly--the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything.

You met me on the paved section of the garden, by the veranda steps, and your first words were, "My husband called from town while I was

gone. He's coming on the ten o'clock. Something must have happened. Maybe he's being transferred."

A wagtail, like a blue-gray wind, quickstepped across the sand. A pause, two or three steps, another pause, more steps. The wagtail, the cigarette holder in my hand, your words, the spots of sunlight on your dress ... It could not have been otherwise.

"I know what you're thinking," you said, knitting your eyebrows. "You're thinking someone will tell him and so forth. But it makes no difference. . . . You know what I've ..."

I looked you straight in the face. I looked with all my soul, directly. I collided with you. Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them--the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books. And, for the first time, your voice was limpid too. "You know what I've decided? Listen. I cannot live without you. That's exactly what I'll tell him. He'll give me a divorce right away. And then, say in the fall, we could ..."

I interrupted you with my silence. A spot of sunlight slid from your skirt onto the sand as you moved slightly away.

What could I say to you? Could I invoke freedom, captivity, say I did not love you enough? No, that was all wrong.

An instant passed. During that instant, much happened in the world: somewhere a giant steamship went to the bottom, a war was declared, a genius was born. The instant was gone.

"Here's your cigarette holder," I said. "It was under the armchair. And you know, when I went in, Pal Palych must have been . . ."

You said, "Good. Now you may leave." You turned and ran quickly up the steps. You took hold of the glass door's handle, and could not open it right away. It must have been torture for you.

I stood in the garden for a while amid the sweetish damp. Then, hands thrust deep into my pockets, I walked along the dappled sand around the house. At the front porch, I found my bicycle. Leaning on the low horns of the handlebar, I rolled off along the park lane. Toads lay here and there. I inadvertently ran over one. _Pop _under the tire. At the end of the lane there was a bench. I leaned the bicycle against a tree trunk and sat down on the invitingly white plank. I thought about how, in the next couple of days, I would get a letter from you, how you would beckon and I would not return. Your house glided into a marvelous, melancholy distance with its winged piano, the dusty volumes of _The Art Review, _the silhouettes in their circular frames. It was delicious losing you. You went off, jerking angularly at the glass door. But a different you departed otherwise, opening your pale eyes under my joyous kisses.

I sat thus until evening. Midges, as if jerked by invisible threads, darted up and down. Suddenly, somewhere nearby, I became aware of a bright dapple--it was your dress, and you were--

Had not the final vibrations died away? Therefore, I felt uneasy that you were here again, somewhere off to the side, beyond my field of vision, that you were walking, approaching. With an effort, I turned my face. It was not you but that girl with the greenish scarf-remember, the one we ran into? And that fox terrier of hers with its comical belly? . . .

She walked past, through gaps in the foliage, and crossed the little bridge leading to a small kiosk with stained-glass windows. The girl is bored, she is strolling through your park; I shall probably make her acquaintance by and by.

I rose slowly, slowly rode out of the motionless park onto the main road, straight into an enormous sunset, and, on the far side of a curve, overtook a carriage. It was your coachman, Semyon, driving at a walk toward the station. When he saw me, he slowly removed his cap, smoothed the glossy strands on the back of his head, then replaced it. A checkered lap rug lay folded on the seat. An intriguing reflection flashed in the eye of the black gelding. And when, with motionless pedals, I flew downhill toward the river, I saw from the bridge the pan-ama and rounded shoulders of Pal Palych, who was sitting below on a projection of the bathing booth, with a fishing rod in his fist.

I braked, and stopped with my hand on the railing.

"Hey, hey, Pal Palych! How're they biting?" He looked upward, and gave me a nice, homey kind of wave.

A bat darted above the rose-colored mirror surface. The reflection of the foliage looked like black lace. Pal Palych, from afar, was shouting something, beckoning with his hand. A second Pal Palych quivered in the black ripples. Laughing aloud, I pushed away from the handrail.

I passed the isbas in one soundless sweep along the firmly packed path. Mooing sounds floated past through the lusterless air; some skittles flew up with a clatter. Then, farther along, on the highway, in the vastness of the sunset, amid the faintly vaporous fields, there was silence.

WINGSTROKE

When the curved tip of one ski crosses the other, you tumble forward. The scalding snow goes up your sleeves, and it is very hard to get back on your feet. Kern, who had not skied for a long time, rapidly worked up a sweat. Feeling slightly dizzy, he yanked off the woolen cap that had been tickling his ears, and brushed the moist sparks from his eyelashes.

All was merriment and azure in front of the six-story hotel. The trees stood disembodied in the radiance. Countless ski tracks flowed like shadowy hair down the shoulders of the snowy hills. And all around, a gigantic whiteness rushed heavenward and sparkled, unfettered, in the sky.

Kern's skis creaked as he made his way up the slope. Noticing his broad shoulders, his equine profile, and the robust gloss on his cheekbones, the English girl he had met yesterday, the third day since his arrival, had taken him for a compatriot. Isabel, Airborne Isabel, as she was dubbed by a crowd of sleek and swarthy young men of the Argentine type, who scurried everywhere in her wake: to the hotel ballroom, up the padded stairs, along the snowy slopes in a play of sparkling dust. Her mien was airy and impetuous, her mouth so red it seemed the Creator had scooped up some torrid carmine and slapped a handful on the nether part of her face. Laughter flitted in her down-flecked eyes. A Spanish comb stood erect like a wing in the steep wave of her black, satin-sheeny hair. This was how Kern had seen her yesterday, when the slightly hollow din of the gong summoned her to dinner from Room 35. And the fact that they were neighbors, and that the number of her room was that of his years, and that she was seated across from him at the long table d'hote, tall, vivacious, in a low-cut black dress, with a band of black silk on her bare neck--all this seemed so significant to Kern that it made a rift in the dull melancholy that had already oppressed him for half a year.

It was Isabel who spoke first, and that did not surprise him. In this huge hotel that blazed, isolated, in a cleft between the mountains, life pulsed tipsy and lighthearted after the dead War years. Besides, to her, to Isabel, nothing was forbidden--not the sidelong flutter of eyelashes, not the melody of laughter in her voice as she said, handing Kern the ashtray, "I think you and I are the only English here," and added, inclining tableward a translucent shoulder restrained by a black ribbon-like strap, "Not counting, of course, a half-dozen little old ladies, and that character over there with the turned-around collar."

Kern replied, "You're mistaken. I have no homeland. It's true I spent many years in London. Besides--"

The next morning, after a half-year of indifference, he suddenly felt the pleasure of entering the deafening cone of an ice-cold shower. At nine, after a substantial and sensible breakfast, he crunched off on his skis across the reddish sand scattered on the naked glare of the path before the hotel veranda. When he had mounted the snowy slope, herringbone-style as befits a skier, there, amid checkered knickers and flushed faces, was Isabel.

She greeted him English fashion--with but the flourish of a smile. Her skis were iridescent with olive-gold. Snow clung to the intricate straps that held her feet. There was an unfeminine strength about her feet and legs, shapely in their sturdy boots and tightly wound puttees. A purple shadow glided behind her along the crusty surface as, hands nonchalantly thrust into the pockets of her leather jacket and her left ski slightly advanced, she sped off down the slope, ever faster, scarf flying, amid sprays of powdered snow. Then, at full speed, she made a sharp turn with one knee deeply flexed, straightened again, and sped on, past the firs, past the turquoise skating rink. A pair of youths in colorful sweaters and a famous Swedish sportsman with a terra-cotta face and colorless, combed-back hair rushed past behind her.

A little later Kern ran into her again near a bluish track along which people flashed with a faint clatter, belly-down on their flat sleds like woolly frogs. With a glint of her skis Isabel disappeared behind the bend of a snowbank, and when Kern, ashamed of his awkward movements, overtook her in a soft hollow amid silver-frosted boughs, she wiggled her fingers in the air, stamped her skis, and was off again. Kern stood for a time among the violet shadows, and suddenly felt a whiff of the familiar terror of silence. The lacework of the branches in the enamel-like air had the chill of a terrifying fairy tale. The trees, the intricate shadows, his own skis all looked strangely toylike. He realized

that he was tired, that he had a blistered heel, and, snagging some protruding branches, he turned back. Skaters glided mechanically across the smooth turquoise. On the snow slope beyond, the terracotta Swede was helping up a snow-covered, lanky chap with horn-rimmed glasses, who was floundering in the sparkling powder like some awkward bird. Like a detached wing, a ski that had come off his foot was sliding down the hill.

Back in his room, Kern changed and, at the sound of the gong's hollow clanging, rang and ordered cold roast beef, some grapes, and a ll.isk of Chianti.

He had a nagging ache in his shoulders and thighs.

Had no business chasing after her, he thought. A man sticks a pair of boards on his feet and proceeds to savor the law of gravity. Ridiculous.

Around four he went down to the spacious reading room, where the mouth of the fireplace exhaled orange heat and invisible people sat in deep leather armchairs with their legs extending from under open newspapers. On a long oaken table lay a disorderly pile of magazines lull of advertisements for toilet supplies, dancing girls, and parliamentary top hats. Kern picked out a ragged copy of the _Tattler _from the previous June and, for a long time, examined the smile of the woman who had, for seven years, been his wife. He recalled her dead face, which had become so cold and hard, and some letters he had found in a small box.

He pushed aside the magazine, his fingernail squeaking on the glossy page.

Then, moving his shoulders laboriously and wheezing on his short piper, he went out onto the enormous enclosed veranda, where a chilled band was playing and people in bright scarves were drinking strong tea, ready to rush out again into the cold, onto the slopes that shone with a humming shimmer through the wide windowpanes. With searching eyes, he scanned the veranda. Somebody's curious gaze pricked him like a needle touching the nerve of a tooth. He turned back abruptly.

In the billiard room, which he had entered sidewise as the oak door yielded to his push, Monfiori, a pale, red-haired little fellow who recognized only the Bible and the carom, was bent over the emerald cloth, sliding his cue back and forth as he aimed at a ball. Kern had made his acquaintance recently, and the man had promptly showered him with citations from the Holy Scriptures. He said he was writing a major book in which he demonstrated that, if one construed the Book of Job in a certain way, then . .... But Kern had stopped listening, for his attention had suddenly been caught by his interlocutor's ears-- pointed ears, packed with canary-colored dust, with reddish fluff on their tips.

The balls clicked and scattered. Raising his eyebrows, Monfiori proposed a game. He had melancholy, slightly bulbous, caprine eyes.

Kern had already accepted, and had even rubbed some chalk on the tip of his cue, but, suddenly sensing a wave of dreadful ennui that made the pit of his stomach ache and his ears ring, said he had a pain in his elbow, glanced out as he passed a window at the mountains' sugary sheen, and returned to the reading room.

There, with his legs intertwined and one patent-leather shoe twitching, he again examined the pearl-gray photograph, the childlike eyes and shaded lips of the London beauty who had been his wife. The first night after her self-inflicted death he followed a woman who smiled at him on a foggy street corner, taking revenge on God, love, and fate.

And now came this Isabel with that red smear for a mouth. If one could only . . .

He clenched his teeth and the muscles of his strong jaws rippled. His entire past life seemed a shaky row of varicolored screens with which he shielded himself from cosmic drafts. Isabel was but the latest bright scrap. How many there had already been of these silk rags, and how he had tried to hang them across the gaping black gap! Voyages, books in delicate bindings, and seven years of ecstatic love. They billowed, these scraps, with the wind outside, tore, fell one by one. The gap cannot be hidden, the abyss breathes and sucks everything in. This he understood when the detective in suede gloves . . .

Kern sensed that he was rocking back and forth, and that some pale girl with pink eyebrows was looking at him from behind a magazine. He took a _Times _from the table and opened the giant sheets. Paper bedspread across the chasm. People invent crimes, museums, games, only to escape from the unknown, from the vertiginous sky. And now this Isabel ...

He tossed the paper aside, rubbed his forehead with an enormous fist, and again felt someone's wondering gaze on him. Then he slowly walked out of the room, past the reading feet, past the fireplace's orange jaw. He lost his way in the resounding corridors, found himself in some hallway, where the white legs of a bowed chair were reflected by the parquet and a broad painting hung on the wall of William Tell piercing the apple on his son's head; then he examined at length his clean-shaven, heavy face, the blood streaks on the whites of his eyes, his checked bow tie in the glistening mirror of a bright bathroom

where water gurgled musically and a golden cigarette butt discarded by someone floated in the porcelain depths.

Beyond the windows the snows were dimming and turning blue. Delicate hues illumined the sky. The flaps of the revolving door at the entrance to the din-filled vestibule slowly glinted as they admitted clouds of vapor and snorting, florid-faced people tired after their snowy games. The stairs breathed with footfalls, exclamations, laughter. Then the hotel grew still: everyone was dressing for dinner.

Kern, who had fallen into a vague torpor in his armchair in his twi-lit room, was awakened by the gong's vibrations. Reveling in his newfound energy, he turned on the lights, inserted cuff links into a fresh, starched shirt, extracted a flattened pair of black pants from under the squeaking press. Five minutes later, aware of a cool lightness, the firmness of the hair on the top of his head, and every detail of his well-creased clothes, he went down to the dining room.

Isabel was not there. Soup was served, then fish, but she did not appear.

Kern examined with revulsion the dull-bronzed youths, the brick-hued face of an old woman with a beauty spot dissimulating a pimple, a man with goatish eyes, and fixed his gloomy gaze on a curly little pyramid of hyacinths in a green pot.

She appeared only when, in the hall where William Tell hung, the instruments of a Negro band had started pounding and moaning.

She smelled of chill air and perfume. Her hair looked moist. Something about her face stunned Kern.

She smiled a brilliant smile, and adjusted the black ribbon on her translucent shoulder.

"You know, I just got back. Barely had time to change and wolf down a sandwich."

Kern asked: "Don't tell me you've been skiing all this time? Why, it's completely dark out."

She gave him an intense look, and Kern realized what had astonished him: her eyes, which sparkled as if they were dusted with frost.

Isabel began gliding softly along the dovelike vowels of English speech: "Of course. It was extraordinary. I hurtled down the slopes in the dark, I flew off the bumps. Right up into the stars."

"You might have killed yourself," said Kern.

She repeated, narrowing her downy eyes, "Right up into the stars," and added, with a glint of her bare clavicle, "and now I want to dance."

The Negro band rattled and wailed in the hall. Japanese lanterns floated colorfully. Moving on tiptoe, alternating quick steps with suspended ones, his palm pressed to hers, Kern advanced, at close quarters, on Isabel. One step, and her slender leg would press into him; another, and she would resiliently yield. The fragrant freshness of her hair tickled his temple, and he could feel, under the edge of his right hand, the supple undulations of her bared back. With bated breath he would enter breaks in the music, then glide on from measure to measure. . . . Around him floated past the intense faces of angular couples with perversely absent eyes. And the opaque song of the strings was punctuated by the patter of primitive little hammers.

The music accelerated, swelled, and ended with a clatter. Everything stopped. Then came applause, demanding more of the same. But the musicians had decided to have a rest.

Pulling a handkerchief out of his cuff and mopping his brow, Kern set off after Isabel, who, with a flutter of her black fan, was heading for the door. They sat down side by side on some wide stairs.

Not looking at him, she said, "Sorry--I had the feeling I was still amid the snow and stars. I didn't even notice whether you danced well or not."

Kern glanced at her as if not hearing, and she was indeed immersed in her own radiant thoughts, thoughts unknown to him.

One step lower sat a youth in a very narrow jacket and a skinny girl with a birthmark on her shoulder blade. When the music started again, the youth invited Isabel to dance a Boston. Kern had to dance with the skinny girl. She smelled of slightly sour lavender. Colored paper streamers swirled out through the hall, tangling themselves about the dancers. One of the musicians stuck on a white mustache, and for some reason Kern felt ashamed for him. When the dance was over he abandoned his partner and rushed off in search of Isabel. She was nowhere to be seen--not at the buffet nor on the staircase.

That's it--bedtime, was Kern's terse thought.

Back in his room he held the drape aside before lying down, and, without thinking, looked into the night. Reflections of windows lay on the dark snow in front of the hotel. In the distance, the metallic summits floated in a funereal radiance.

He had the sensation he had glanced into death. He pulled the folds together tightly so that not a ray of night could leak into the room. But when he switched off the light and lay down, he noticed a glint coming from the edge of a glass shelf. He got up and fiddled a long time around the window, cursing the splashes of moonlight. The floor was cold as marble.

When Kern loosened the cord of his pajamas and closed his eyes, slippery slopes started to rush beneath him. A hollow pounding began

in his heart, as if it had kept silent all day and was now taking advantage of the quiet. He began feeling frightened as he listened to this pounding. He recalled how once, on a very windy day, he was passing a butcher's shop with his wife, and a carcass rocked on its hook with a dull thudding against the wall. That was how his heart felt now. His wife, meanwhile, had her eyes narrowed against the wind and was holding her hat as she said that the wind and the sea were driving her crazy, that they must leave, they must leave. . . .

Kern rolled over onto his other side--gingerly, so his chest would not burst from the convex blows.

"Can't go on like this," he mumbled into the pillow, forlornly folding up his legs. He lay for a while on his back peering at the ceiling, at the wan gleams that had penetrated, as piercing as his ribs.

When his eyes closed again, silent sparks started to glide in front of him, then infinitely unwinding transparent spirals. Isabel's snowy eyes and fiery mouth flashed past, then came sparks and spirals again. For an instant his heart retracted into a lacerating knot. Then it swelled and gave a thump.

Can't go on like this, I'll go crazy. No future, just a black wall. There's nothing left.

He had the impression that the paper streamers were slithering down his face, rustling and ripping into narrow shreds. And the Japanese lanterns flowed with colored undulations in the parquet. He was dancing, advancing.

If I could just unclench her, flip her open. . . . And then . . .

And death seemed to him like a gliding dream, a fluffy fall. No thoughts, no palpitations, no aches.

The lunar ribs on the ceiling had imperceptibly moved. Footfalls passed quietly along the corridor, a lock clicked somewhere, a soft ringing flew past; then footfalls again, the mutter and murmur of footfalls.

That means the ball is over, thought Kern. He turned his stuffy pillow over.

Now, all around, there was an immense, gradually cooling silence. Only his heart oscillated, taut and heavy. Kern groped on the bedside table, located the pitcher, took a swallow from the spout. An icy streamlet scalded his neck and collarbone.

He started thinking of methods to induce sleep. He imagined waves rhythmically running up onto a shoreline. Then plump gray sheep slowly tumbling over a fence. One sheep, two, three . . .

Isabel is asleep next door, thought Kern. Isabel is asleep, wearing yellow pajamas, probably. Yellow becomes her. Spanish color. If I scratched on the wall with my fingernail she'd hear me. Damned palpitations ...

He fell asleep at the very moment he had begun trying to decide whether there was any point in turning on the light and reading something for a while. There's a French novel lying on the armchair. The ivory knife glides, cutting the pages. One, two . . .

He came to in the middle of the room, awakened by a sense of unbearable horror. The horror had knocked him off the bed. He had dreamt that the wall next to which stood his bed had begun slowly collapsing onto him--so he had recoiled with a spasmodic exhalation.

Kern found the headboard by touch, and would have gone back to sleep immediately if it had not been for a noise he heard through the wall. He did not understand right away where this noise was coming from, and the act of straining his hearing made his consciousness, which was ready to glide down the slope of sleep, abruptly grow lucid. The noise occurred again: a twang, followed by the rich sonority of guitar strings.

Kern remembered--it was Isabel who was in the next room. Right away, as if in response to his thought, came a peal of her laughter. Twice, thrice, the guitar throbbed and dissolved. Then an odd, intermittent bark sounded and ceased.

Seated on his bed, Kern listened in wonder. He pictured a bizarre scene: Isabel with a guitar and a huge Great Dane looking up at her with blissful eyes. He put his ear to the chilly wall. The bark rang out again, the guitar twanged as from a fillip, and a strange rustle began undulating as if an ample wind were whirling there in the next room. The rustle stretched out into a low whistle, and once again the night filled with silence. Then a frame banged--Isabel had shut the window.

Indefatigable girl, he thought--the dog, the guitar, the icy drafts.

Now all was quiet. Having expelled all those noises from her room, Isabel had probably gone to bed and was now asleep.

"Damn it! I don't understand anything. I don't have anything. Damn it, damn it," moaned Kern, burying himself in the pillow. A leaden fatigue was compressing his temples. His legs ached and tingled unbearably. He groaned in the darkness for a long time, turning heavily from side to side. The rays on the ceiling were long since extinguished.

The next day Isabel did not appear until lunchtime.

Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike. Then snow began falling, slowly and vertically. The dense flakes, like ornamental spots on a white veil, curtained the view of the mountains, the heavily laden firs, the dulled turquoise of the rink. The plump, soft particles of snow rustled against the window-panes, falling, falling without end. If one watched them for long, one had the impression the entire hotel was slowly drifting upward.

"I was so tired last night," Isabel was saying to her neighbor, a young man with a high olive forehead and piercing eyes, "so tired I decided to loll in bed."

"You look stunning today," drawled the young man with exotic courtesy.

She inflated her nostrils derisively.

Looking at her through the hyacinths, Kern said coldly, "I didn't know, Miss Isabel, that you had a dog in your room, as well as a guitar."

Her downy eyes seemed to narrow even more, against a breeze of embarrassment. Then she beamed with a smile, all carmine and ivory.

"You overdid it on the dance floor last night, Mr. Kern," she replied. The olive youth and the little fellow who recognized only Bible and billiards laughed, the first with a hearty ha-ha, the second very softly, with raised eyebrows.

Kern said with a frown, "I'd like to ask you not to play at night. I don't have an easy time falling asleep."

Isabel slashed his face with a rapid, radiant glance.

"You had better ask your dreams, not me, about that."

And she began talking to her neighbor about the next day's ski competition.

For some minutes already Kern had felt his lips stretching into a spasmodic, uncontrollable sneer. It twitched agonizingly in the corners of his mouth, and he suddenly felt like yanking the tablecloth off the table, hurling the pot with the hyacinths against the wall.

He rose, trying to conceal his unbearable tremor, and, seeing no one, went out of the room.

"What's happening to me," he questioned his anguish. "What's going on here?"

He kicked his suitcase open and started packing. He immediately felt dizzy. He stopped and again began pacing the room. Angrily he stuffed his short pipe. He sat down in the armchair by the window, beyond which the snow was falling with nauseating regularity.

He had come to this hotel, to this wintry, stylish nook called Zermatt, in order to fuse the sensation of white silence with the pleasure of lighthearted, motley encounters, for total solitude was what he feared most. But now he understood that human faces were also intolerable to him, that the snow made his head ring, and that he lacked the inspired vitality and tender perseverance without which passion is powerless. While for Isabel, probably, life consisted of a splendid ski run, of impetuous laughter, of perfume and frosty air.

Who is she? A heliotype diva, broken free? Or the runaway daughter of a swaggering, bilious lord? Or just one of those women from Paris . . . And where does her money come from? Slightly vulgar thought . . .

She does have the dog, though, and it's pointless for her to deny it. Some sleek-haired Great Dane. With a cold nose and warm ears. Still snowing, too, Kern thought haphazardly. And, in my suitcase--a spring seemed to pop open, with a clink, in his brain--I have a Parabellum.

Until evening he again ambled about the hotel, or made dry rustling noises with the newspapers in the reading room. From the vestibule window he saw Isabel, the Swede, and several young men with jackets pulled on over fringed sweaters getting into a swanlike curved sleigh. The roan horses made their merry harnesses ring. The snow was falling silent and dense. Isabel, all spangled with small white stars, was shouting and laughing amid her companions. And when the sled started with a jerk and sped off, she rocked backward, clapping her fur-mittened hands in the air.

Kern turned away from the window.

Go ahead, enjoy your ride. ... It makes no difference. . . .

Then, during dinner, he tried not to look at her. She was filled with a merry, festive gaiety, and paid no attention to him. At nine the Negro music began moaning and clattering again. Kern, in a state of feverish languor, was standing by the doorjamb, gazing at the clinched couples and at Isabel's curly fan.

A soft voice said next to his ear, "Would you care to go to the bar?"

He turned and saw the melancholy caprine eyes, the ears with their reddish fuzz.

Amid the crimson penumbra of the bar the glass tables reflected the flounces of the lampshades.

On high stools at the metal counter sat three men, all three wearing white gaiters, their legs retracted, sucking through straws on bright-colored drinks. On the other side of the bar, where varicolored bottles sparkled on the shelves like a collection of convex beetles, a fleshy, black-mustachioed man in a cherry-colored dinner jacket was mixing cocktails with extraordinary dexterity. Kern and Monfiori selected a table in the bar's velvet depths. A waiter opened a long list of beverages, gingerly and reverently, like an antiquary exhibiting a precious book.

"We're going to have a glass of each in succession," said Monfiori in his melancholy, slightly hollow voice, "and when we get to the end we'll start over, choosing only the ones we found to our liking. Perhaps we'll stop at one and keep savoring it for a long time. Then we'll go back to the beginning again."

He gave the waiter a pensive look. "Is that clear?"

The part in the waiter's hair tipped forward.

"This is known as the roaming of Bacchus," Monfiori told Kern with a doleful chuckle. "Some people approach their daily life in the same way."

Kern stifled a tremulous yawn. "You know this ends by making you throw up."

Monfiori sighed, swigged, smacked his lips, and marked the first item on the list with an X, using an automatic pencil. Two deep furrows ran from the wings of his nose to the corners of his thin mouth.

After his third glass Kern lit a cigarette in silence. After his sixth drink--an oversweet concoction of chocolate and champagne--he had the urge to talk.

He exhaled a megaphone of smoke. Narrowing his eyes, he tapped the ashes from his cigarette with a yellowed nail.

"Tell me, Monfiori, what do you think of this--what's her name--Isabel?"

"You'll get nowhere with her," replied Monfiori. "She belongs to the slippery species. All she seeks is fleeting contact."

"But she plays the guitar at night, and fusses with her dog. That's not good, is it?" said Kern, goggling his eyes at his glass.

With another sigh, Monfiori said, "Why don't you drop her. After all ..."

"Sounds to me like envy--" began Kern.

The other quietly interrupted him: "She's a woman. And I, you see, have other tastes." Clearing his throat modestly, he made another X.

The ruby drinks were replaced by golden ones. Kern had the feeling his blood was turning sweet. His head was growing foggy. The

white spats left the bar. The drumming and crooning of the distant music ceased.

"You say one must be selective . . . ," he spoke thickly and limply, "while I have reached a point . . . Listen to this, for instance--I once had a wife. She fell in love with someone else. He turned out to be a thief. He stole cars, necklaces, furs. . . . And she poisoned herself. With strychnine."

"And do you believe in God?" asked Monfiori with the air of a man getting on his hobby horse. "There is God, after all."

Kern gave an artificial laugh.

"Biblical God. . . . Gaseous vertebrate. ... I am not a believer."

"That's from Huxley," insinuatingly observed Monfiori. "There was a biblical God, though. . . . The point is that He is not alone; there are numerous biblical Gods. ... A host. My favorite one is ... 'He sneezes and there is light. He has eyes like the eyelashes of dawn.' Do you understand what this means? Do you? And there is more: '. . . the fleshy parts of his body are solidly interconnected, and they won't budge.' Well? Well? Do you understand?"

"Wait a minute," shouted Kern.

"No, no--you must think about it. 'He transforms the sea into a seething ointment; he leaves behind a trail of radiance; the abyss is akin to a patch of gray hair!* "

"Wait, will you," interrupted Kern. "I want to tell you that I have decided to kill myself. ..."

Monfiori gave him an opaque, attentive look, covering his glass with his palm. He was silent for a time.

"Just as I thought," he began with unexpected gentleness. "Tonight, as you were watching the people dancing, and before that, when you got up from the table . . . There was something about your face . . . The crease between the brows . . . That special one ... I understood right away . . ." He fell silent, caressing the table's edge.

"Listen to what I'm going to tell you," he continued, lowering his heavy, purplish eyelids with their wartlike lashes. "I search everywhere for the likes of you--in expensive hotels, on trains, in seaside resorts, at night on the quays of big cities." A dreamy little sneer fleeted across his lips.

"I recall, in Florence once . . ." He raised his doelike eyes. "Listen, Kern--I'd like to be present when you do it. ... May I?"

Kern, in a numb slouch, sensed a chill in his chest under his starched shirt. _We're both drunk, _the words rushed through his brainy _and he's spooky._

"May I?" repeated Monfiori with a pout, "Pretty please?" (touch of clammy, hairy little hand).

With a jerk and a groggy sway Kern rose from his chair.

"Go to hell! Let me out. ... I was joking. ..."

The attentive gaze of Monfiori's leechy eyes did not waver.

"I've had enough of you! I've had enough of everything." Kern dashed off with a splashlike gesture of his hands. Monfiori's gaze came unstuck with what seemed like a smack.

"Murk! Puppet! . . . Wordplay! . . . Basta! . . ."

He banged his hip painfully on the edge of the table. The raspberry fatty behind his vacillating bar puffed out his white shirtfront and began to float, as though in a curved mirror, amid his bottles. Kern traversed the gliding ripples of the carpet and, with his shoulder, shoved a falling glass door.

The hotel was fast asleep. Mounting the cushiony stairs with difficulty, he located his room. A key protruded from the adjoining door. Someone had forgotten to lock himself in. Flowers meandered in the dim light of the corridor. Once he was in his room he spent a long time groping along the wall in search of the light switch. Then he collapsed into an armchair by the window.

It struck him that he must write certain letters, farewell letters. But the syrupy drinks had weakened him. His ears filled with a dense, hollow din, and gelid waves breathed on his brow. He had to write a letter, and there was something else troubling him. As if he had left home and forgotten his wallet. The mirrory blackness of the window reflected his stripelike collar and his pale forehead. He had splashed some intoxicating drops on his shirtfront. He must write that letter . . . no, that wasn't it. Suddenly something flashed in his mind's eye. The key! The key protruding from the neighboring door. ...

Kern rose ponderously and went out into the dimly lit corridor. From the enormous key dangled a shiny wafer with the number 35. He stopped in front of this white door. There was an avid tremor in his legs.

A frosty wind lashed his brow. The window of the spacious, illuminated bedroom was wide open. On the wide bed, in open-collared yellow pajamas, Isabel lay supine. A pale hand drooped, with a smouldering cigarette between its fingers. Sleep must have overcome her without warning.

Kern approached the bed. He banged his knee against a chair, on which a guitar uttered a faint twang. Isabel's blue hair lay in tight circles on the pillow. He took a look at her dark eyelids, at the delicate shadow between her breasts. He touched the blanket. Her eyes opened immediately. Then, in a hunchbacked kind of stance, Kern said: "I need your love. Tomorrow I shall shoot myself."

He had never dreamt that a woman, even if taken by surprise, could be so startled. First Isabel remained motionless, then she lunged, looking back at the open window, slipping instantly from the bed, and rushed past Kern with bowed head, as if expecting a blow from above.

The door slammed. Some sheets of letter paper fluttered from the

table.

Kern remained standing in the middle of the spacious bright room. Some grapes glowed purple and gold on the night table.

"Madwoman," he said aloud.

He laboriously shifted his shoulders. Like a steed he trembled with a prolonged shiver from the cold. Then, suddenly, he froze motionless.

Outside the window, swelling, flying, a joyous barking sound approached by agitated jolts. In a wink the square of black night in the window opening filled and came aboil with solid, boisterous fur. In one broad and noisy sweep this roughish fur obscured the night sky from one window frame to the other. Another instant and it swelled tensely, obliquely burst in, and unfolded. Amid the whistling spread of agitated fur flashed a white face. Kern grabbed the guitar by its fingerboard and, with all his strength, struck the white face flying at him. Like some fluffy tempest, the giant wing's rib knocked him off his feet. He was overwhelmed by an animal smell. Kern rose with a lurch.

In the center of the room lay an enormous angel.

He occupied the entire room, the entire hotel, the entire world. His right wing had bent, leaning its angle against the mirrored dresser. The left one swung ponderously, catching on the legs of an overturned chair. The chair banged back and forth on the floor. The brown fur of the wings steamed, iridescent with frost. Deafened by the blow, the angel propped itself on its palms like a sphinx. Blue veins swelled on its white hands, and hollows of shadow showed on its shoulders next to the clavicles. Its elongated, myopic-looking eyes, pale-green like predawn air, gazed at Kern without blinking from beneath straight, joined brows.

Suffocating from the pungent odor of wet fur, Kern stood motionless in the apathy of ultimate fear, examining the giant, steamy wings and the white face.

A hollow din began beyond the door in the corridor, and Kern was overcome by a different emotion: heart-rending shame. He was ashamed to the point of pain, of horror, that in a moment someone might come in and find him and this incredible creature.

The angel heaved a noisy breath, moved. But his arms had grown weak, and he collapsed on his chest. A wing jerked. Grinding his teeth, trying not to look, Kern stooped over him, took hold of the mound of damp, odorous fur and the cold, sticky shoulders. He noticed with sickening horror that the angel's feet were pale and boneless, and that he would be unable to stand on them. The angel did not resist. Kern hurriedly pulled him toward the wardrobe, flung open the mirrored door, began pushing and squeezing the wings into the creaking depths. He seized them by their ribs, trying to bend them and pack them in. Unfurling flaps of fur kept slapping him in the chest. At last he closed the door with a solid shove. At that instant there came a lacerating, unbearable shriek, the shriek of an animal crushed by a wheel. He had slammed the door on one of the wings, that was it. A small corner of the wing protruded from the crack. Opening the door slightly, Kern shoved the curly wedge in with his hand. He turned the key.

It grew very quiet. Kern felt hot tears running down his face. He took a breath and rushed for the corridor. Isabel lay next to the wall, a cowering heap of black silk. He gathered her in his arms, carried her into his room, and lowered her onto the bed. Then he snatched from his suitcase the heavy Parabellum, slammed the clip home, ran out holding his breath, and burst into Room 35.

The two halves of a broken plate lay, all white, on the carpet. The grapes were scattered.

Kern saw himself in the mirrored door of the wardrobe: a lock of hair fallen over an eyebrow, a starched dress shirtfront spattered with red, the lengthwise glint of the pistol's barrel.

"Must finish it off," he exclaimed tonelessly, and opened the wardrobe.

There was nothing but a gust of odorous fluff. Oily brown tufts eddying about the room. The wardrobe was empty. On its floor lay a white squashed hatbox.

Kern approached the window and looked out. Furry little clouds were gliding across the moon and breathing dim rainbows around it. He shut the casements, put the chair back in its place, and kicked some brown tufts under the bed. Then he cautiously went out into the corridor. It was quiet as before. People sleep soundly in mountain hotels. And when he returned to his room what he saw was Isabel with her bare feet hanging from the bed, trembling, with her head between her hands. He felt ashamed, as he had, not long ago, when the angel was looking at him with its odd greenish eyes.

"Tell me, where is he?" asked Isabel breathlessly.

Kern turned away, went to the desk, sat down, opened the blotter, and replied, "I don't know."

Isabel retracted her bare feet onto the bed.

"May I stay here with you for now? I'm so frightened. ..."

Kern gave a silent nod. Dominating the tremor of his hand, he started writing. Isabel began speaking again, in an agitated, toneless voice, but for some reason it appeared to Kern that her fright was of the female, earthly variety.

"I met him yesterday as I was flying on my skis in the dark. Last

night he came to me."

Trying not to listen, Kern wrote in a bold hand:

_"My dear friend, this is my last letter. I could never forget how you __helped me when disaster crashed down on me. He probably lives on a peak __where he hunts alpine eagles and feeds on their meat. . . ."_

Catching himself, he slashed that out and took another sheet. Isabel was sobbing with her face buried in the pillow.

"What shall I do now? He'll come after me for revenge. . . . Oh,

my God. . . ."

_cc__My dear friend," _Kern wrote quickly, _ashe sought unforgettable ca__resses and now she will give birth to a winged little beast. . . ." _Oh, damn! He crumpled the sheet. ,

"Try to get some sleep," he addressed Isabel over his shoulder, "and leave tomorrow. For a monastery."

Her shoulders shook rapidly. Then she grew still.

Kern wrote. Before him smiled the eyes of the one person in the world with whom he could freely speak or remain silent. He wrote to that person that life was finished, that he had begun feeling of late that, in place of the future, a black wall was looming ever closer, and that now something had happened after which a man cannot and must not continue living. _"At noon tomorrow I shall die,i} _wrote Kern, _"to__morrow, because I want to die in full command of my faculties, in the sober light of day. And right now I am in too deep a state of shock."_

When he had finished he sat down in the armchair by the window. Isabel was sleeping, her breathing barely audible. An oppressive fatigue girdled his shoulders. Sleep descended like a soft fog.

He was awakened by a knock on the door. Frosty azure was pouring through the window.

"Come in," he said, stretching.

The waiter noiselessly set a tray with a cup of tea on the table and exited with a bow.

Laughing to himself, Kern thought, "And here I am in a rumpled dinner jacket."

Then, instantly, he remembered what had happened during the night. He shuddered and glanced at the bed. Isabel was gone. Must have returned to her room with the approach of morning. And by now she has undoubtedly left. . . . He had a momentary vision of brown, crumbly wings. Getting up quickly, he opened the door to the corridor.

"Listen," he called to the waiter's departing back. "Take a letter with you."

He went to the desk and rummaged about. The fellow was waiting at the door. Kern slapped all his pockets and took a look under the armchair.

"You may go. I'll give it to the porter later."

The parted hair bent forward, and the door closed softly.

Kern was distressed at having lost the letter. That letter in particular. He had said in it so well, so smoothly and simply, all that needed to be said. Now he could not recall the words. Only senseless sentences surfaced. Yes, the letter had been a masterpiece.

He began writing anew, but it came out cold and rhetorical. He sealed the letter and neatly wrote the address.

He felt a strange lightness in his heart. He would shoot himself at noon, and after all, a man who has resolved to kill himself is a god.

The sugary snow glistened outside the window. He felt drawn out there, for the last time.

The shadows of frosted trees lay on the snow like blue plumes. Sleigh bells jingled somewhere, densely and merrily. There were lots of people out, girls in fur caps moving timorously and awkwardly on their skis, young men exhaling clouds of laughter as they called loudly to each other, elderly people ruddy from the effort, and some sinewy blue-eyed oldster dragging a velvet-covered sled. Kern thought in passing, why not give the old chap a whack in the face, a backhanded one, just for the fun of it, for now everything was permissible. He broke out laughing. He had not felt so good in a long time.

Everyone was drifting to the area where the ski-jumping competition had begun. The site consisted of a steep descent merging halfway down into a snowy platform, which ended abruptly, forming a right-angled projection. A skier glided down the steep section and flew off the projecting ramp into the azure air. He flew with outstretched arms, landed upright on the continuation of the slope, and glided on. The Swede had just broken his own recent record and, far below, in a whirlwind of silvery dust, turned sharply with one bent leg extended.

Two others, in black sweaters, sped past, jumped, and resiliently hit the snow.

"Isabel is jumping next," said a soft voice at Kern's shoulder. Kern thought rapidly, Don't tell me she is still here. . . . How can she . . . and looked at the speaker. It was Monfiori. In a top hat, pushed over his protruding ears, and a little black coat with strips of faded velvet on the collar, he stood out drolly amid the woolly crowd. Should I tell him? thought Kern.

He rejected with revulsion the smelly brown wings--must not think about that.

Isabel mounted the hill. She turned to say something to her companion, gaily, gaily as always. This gaiety gave Kern a scary feeling. He caught what seemed a fleeting glimpse of something above the snows, above the glassy hotel, above the toylike people--a shudder, a shimmer ...

"And how are you today?" asked Monfiori, rubbing his lifeless hands.

Simultaneously voices rang out around them: "Isabel! Airborne Isabel!"

Kern threw back his head. She was hurtling down the steep slope. For an instant he saw her bright face, her glistening lashes. With a soft whistling sound she skimmed off the trampoline, flew up, hung motionless, crucified in midair. And then . . .

No one, of course, could have expected it. In full flight Isabel crumpled spasmodically, fell like a stone, and started rolling amid the snowbursts of her cartwheeling skis.

Right away she was hidden from view by the backs of people rushing toward her. Kern slowly approached with hunched shoulders. He saw it vividly in his mind's eye, as if it were written in a large hand: revenge, wingstroke. The Swede and the lanky type in horn-rimmed glasses bent over Isabel. With professional gestures the bespectacled

man was palpating her motionless body. He muttered, "I can't understand it--her rib cage is crushed. . . ."

He raised up her head. There was a glimpse of her dead, seemingly denuded face.

Kern turned with a crunch of his heel and strode off resolutely toward the hotel. Beside him trotted Monfiori, running ahead, peeking into his eyes.

"I am going upstairs to my room now," said Kern, trying to swallow his sobbing laughter, to restrain it. "Upstairs ... If you wish to accompany me ..."

The laughter neared his throat and bubbled over. Kern was climbing the stairs like a blind man. Monfiori was supporting him, meekly and hastily.

GODS

HERE is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs. Under the snake's-mouth of each pipe stands a green-hooped bucket. Rows of buckets line the black walls on either side of the street. I watch as they fill with cold mercury. The pluvial mercury swells and overflows. The bareheaded lamps float in the distance, their rays standing on end in the rainy murk. The water in the buckets is overflowing. Thus I gain entry to your overcast eyes, to a narrow alley of black glimmer where the nocturnal rain gurgles and rustles. Give me a smile. Why do you look at me so balefully and darkly? It's morning. All night the stars shrieked with infant voices and, on the roof, someone lacerated and caressed a violin with a sharp bow. Look, the sun slowly crossed the wall like a blazing sail. You emanate an enveloping smoky haze. Dust starts swirling in your eyes, millions of golden worlds. You smiled!

We go out on the balcony. It's spring. Below, in the middle of the street, a yellow-curled boy works lickety-split, sketching a god. The god stretches from one sidewalk to the other. The boy is clutching a piece of chalk in his hand, a little piece of white charcoal and he's squatting, circling, drawing with broad strokes. This white god has large white buttons and turned-out feet. Crucified on the asphalt, he looks skyward with round eyes. He has a white arc for a mouth. A log-sized cigar has appeared in his mouth. With helical jabs the boy makes spirals representing smoke. Arms akimbo, he contemplates his work. He adds another button. ... A window frame clanked across the way; a female voice, enormous and happy, rang out summoning him. The boy gave the chalk a punt and dashed inside. On the purplish asphalt remained the white geometric god, gazing skyward.

Your eyes again grew murky. I realized, of course, what you were remembering. In a corner of our bedroom, under the icon, there is a colored rubber ball. Sometimes it hops softly and sadly from the table and rolls gently on the floor.

Put it back in its place under the icon, and then why don't we go take a walk?

Spring air. A little downy. See those lindens lining the street? Black boughs covered with wet green spangles. All the trees in the world arc journeying somewhere. Perpetual pilgrimage. Remember, when we were on our way here, to this city, the trees traveling past the windows of our railroad car? Remember the twelve poplars conferring about how to cross the river? Earlier, still, in the Crimea, I once saw a cypress bending over an almond tree in bloom. Once upon a time the cypress had been a big, tall chimney sweep with a brush on a wire and a ladder under his arm. Head over heels in love, poor fellow, with a little laundry maid, pink as almond petals. Now they have met at last, and are on their way somewhere together. Her pink apron balloons in the breeze; he bends toward her timidly, as if still worried he might get some soot on her. First-rate fable.

All trees are pilgrims. They have their Messiah, whom they seek. Their Messiah is a regal Lebanese cedar, or perhaps he is quite small, some totally inconspicuous little shrub in the tundra. ...

Today some lindens are passing through town. There was an attempt to restrain them. Circular fencing was erected around their trunks. But they move all the same. . . .

The roofs blaze like oblique, sun-blinded mirrors. A winged woman stands on a windowsill washing the panes. She bends over, pouts, brushes a strand of flaming hair from her face. The air is faintly redolent of gasoline and lindens. Who can tell, today, just what emanations gently greeted a guest entering a Pompeian atrium? A half-century from now no one will know the smells that prevailed in our streets and rooms. They will excavate some military hero of stone, of which there are hundreds in every city, and heave a sigh for Phidias of yore. Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. . . . Listen . . . today, we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous. We move in a gigantic, joyous world. A tall pillar on the corner is tightly swathed in wet canvases, across which a paintbrush has scattered colored whirlwinds. The old woman who sells papers has curling gray hairs on her chin, and mad light-blue eyes. Unruly newspapers stick chaotically out of her pouch. Their large type makes me think of flying zebras.

A bus stops at its signpost. Upstairs the conductor ba-bangs with his palm on the iron gunwale. The helmsman gives his huge wheel a mighty turn. A mounting, labored moan, a brief grinding sound. The wide tires have left silver imprints on the asphalt. Today, on this sunny day, anything is possible. Look--a man has jumped from a roof onto a wire and is walking on it, splitting with laughter, his arms widespread, high over the rocking street. Look--two buildings have just had a harmonious game of leapfrog; number three ended up between one and two; it did not fully settle right away--I saw a gap below it, a narrow band of sunlight. And a woman stopped in the middle of a square, threw back her head, and started singing; a crowd gathered around her, then surged back: an empty dress lies on the asphalt, and up in the sky there's a transparent cloudlet.

You're laughing. When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you. But your eyes are instantly extinguished. You say, passionately, fearfully, "Would you like to go ... there? Would you? It's lovely there today, everything's in bloom. . . ."

Certainly it's all in bloom, certainly we'll go. For aren't you and I gods? ... I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . . .

Listen--I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator.

Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.

They are leading camels along the street, on the way from the circus to the zoo. Their plump humps list and sway. Their long, gentle faces are turned up a little, dreamily. How can death exist when they lead camels along a springtime street? At the corner, an unexpected whiff of Russian foliage; a beggar, a divine monstrosity, turned all inside out, feet growing out of armpits, proffers, with a wet, shaggy paw, a bunch of greenish lilies-of-the-val ... I bump a passerby with my shoulder. . . . Momentary collision of two giants. Merrily, magnificently, he swings at me with his lacquered cane. The tip, on the back-swing, breaks a shopwindow behind him. Zigzags shoot across the shiny glass. No--it's only the splash of mirrored sunlight in my eyes. Butterfly, butterfly! Black with scarlet bands. ... A scrap of velvet. . . . It swoops above the asphalt, soars over a speeding car and a tall building, into the humid azure of the April sky. Another, identical butterfly once settled on the white border of an arena; Lesbia, senator's daughter, gracile, dark-eyed, with a gold ribbon on her forehead, entranced

by the palpitating wings, missed the split second, the whirlwind of blinding dust, in which the bull-like neck of one combatant crunched under the other's naked knee.

Today my soul is filled with gladiators, sunlight, the world's din. . . .

We descend a wide staircase into a long, dim underground chamber. Flagstones resound vibrantly under our steps. Representations of burning sinners adorn the gray walls. Black thunder, in the distance, swells in velvet folds. It bursts forth all around us. We rush headlong, as if awaiting a god. We are packed inside a glassy glitter. We gather momentum. We hurtle into a black chasm and speed with a hollow din far underground, hanging on to leather straps. With a pop the amber lamps are extinguished for an instant, during which flimsy globules burn with a hot light in the dark--the bulging eyes of demons, or perhaps our fellow passengers' cigars.

The lights come back on. Look, over there--the tall man in a black overcoat standing by the car's glass door. I faintly recognize that narrow, yellowish face, the bony hump of his nose. Thin lips compressed, attentive furrow between heavy brows, he listens to something being explained by another man, pale as a plaster mask, with a small, circular, sculpted beard. I am certain they are speaking in terza rima. And your neighbor, that lady in the pale-yellow coat sitting with lowered lashes--could that be Dante's Beatrice? Out of the dank nether world we emerge anew into the sunlight. The cemetery is on the distant outskirts. Edifices have grown sparser. Greenish voids. I recall how this same capital looked on an old print.

We walk against the wind along imposing fences. On the same kind of sunny, tremulous day as this we'll head back north, to Russia. There will be very few flowers, only the yellow stars of dandelions along the ditches. The dove-gray telegraph poles will hum at our approach. When, beyond the curve, my heart is jabbed by the firs, the red sand, the corner of the house, I shall totter and fall prone.

Look! Above the vacant green expanses, high in the sky, an airplane progresses with a bassy ring like an aeolian harp. Its glass wings are glinting. Beautiful, no? Oh, listen--here is something that happened in Paris, about 150 years ago. Early one morning--it was autumn, and the trees floated in soft orange masses along the boulevards into the tender sky--early one morning, the merchants had assembled in the marketplace; the stands filled with moist, glistening apples; there were whiffs of honey and damp hay. An old fellow with white down in his auricles was unhurriedly setting up cages containing various birds that fidgeted in the chilly air; then he sleepily reclined on a mat, for the auroral fog still obscured the gilt hands on the town hall's black dial. He had scarcely gone to sleep when someone started tugging at his shoulder. Up jumped the oldster, and saw before him an out-of-breath young man. He was lanky, skinny, with a small head and a pointed little nose. His waistcoat--silvery with black stripes--was buttoned askew, the ribbon on his pigtail had come undone, one of his white stockings was sagging in bunched wrinkles. "I need a bird, any bird--a chicken will do," said the young man, having given the cages a cur* sory, agitated glance. The old man gingerly extracted a small white hen, which put up a fluffy struggle in his swarthy hands. "What's wrong--is it sick?" asked the young man, as if discussing a cow. "Sick? My little fish's belly!" mildly swore the oldster.

The young man flung him a shiny coin and ran off amid the stands, the hen pressed to his bosom. Then he stopped, turned abruptly with a whip of his pigtail, and ran back to the old vendor.

"I need the cage too," he said.

When he went off at last, holding the chicken with the cage in his outstretched hand and swinging the other arm, as if he were carrying a bucket, the old man gave a snort and lay back down on his mat. How business went that day and what happened to him afterwards is of no concern to us at all.

As for the young man, he was none other than the son of the renowned physicist Charles. Charles glanced over his spectacles at the little hen, gave the cage a flick of his yellow fingernail, and said, "Fine--now we have a passenger as well." Then, with a severe glint of his eyeglasses, he added, "As for you and me, my boy, we'll take our time. God only knows what the air is like up there in the clouds."

The same day, at the appointed hour on the Champs de Mars, before an astonished crowd, an enormous, lightweight dome, embroidered with Chinese arabesques, with a gilded gondola attached by silken cords, slowly swelled as it filled with hydrogen. Charles and his son busied themselves amid streams of smoke blown sideways by the wind. The hen peered through the wire netting of her cage with one beady eye, her head tilted to one side. All around moved colorful, spangled caftans, airy women's dresses, straw hats; and, when the sphere lurched upward, the old physicist followed it with his gaze, then broke into tears on his son's shoulder, and a hundred hands on every side began waving handkerchiefs and ribbons. Fragile clouds floated through the tender, sunny sky. The earth receded, quivery, light-green, covered with scudding shadows and the fiery splashes of trees. Far below some toy horsemen hurtled past--but soon the sphere rose out of sight. The hen kept peering downward with one little eye.

The flight lasted all day. The day concluded with an ample, vivid sunset. When night fell, the sphere began slowly descending. Once upon a time, in a village on the shore of the Loire, there lived a gentle, wily-eyed peasant. Out he goes into the field at dawn. In the middle of the field he sees a marvel: an immense heap of motley silk. Nearby, overturned, lay a little cage. A chicken, all white, as if modeled out of snow, was thrusting its head through mesh and intermittently moving its beak, as it searched for small insects in the grass. At first the peasant had a fright, but then he realized that it was simply a present from the Virgin Mary, whose hair floated through the air like autumn spider-webs. The silk his wife sold off piecemeal in the nearby town, the little gilded gondola became a crib for their tightly swaddled firstborn, and the chicken was dispatched to the backyard.

Listen on.

Some time elapsed, and then one fine day, as he passed a hillock of chaff at the barn gate, the peasant heard a happy clucking. He stooped. The hen popped out of the green dust and hawked at the sun as she waddled rapidly and not without some pride. While, amid the chaff, hot and sleek, glowed four golden eggs. And no wonder. At the wind's mercy, the hen had traversed the entire flush of the sunset, and the sun, a fiery cock with a crimson crest, had done some fluttering over her.

I don't know if the peasant understood. For a long time he stood motionless, blinking and squinting from the brilliance and holding in his palms the still warm, whole, golden eggs. Then, his sabots rattling, he rushed across the yard with such a howl that his hired hand thought he must have lopped off a finger with his axe. . . .

Of course all this happened a long, long time ago, long before the aviator Latham, having crashed in mid-Channel, sat, if you will, on the dragonfly tail of his submerging _Antoinette, _smoking a yellowed cigarette in the wind, and watching as, high in the sky, in his little stubby-winged machine, his rival Bleriot flew for the first time from Calais to England's sugary shores.

But I cannot overcome your anguish. Why have your eyes again filled with darkness? No, don't say anything. I know everything. You mustn't cry. He can hear my fable, there's no doubt at all he can hear it. It is to him that it's addressed. Words have no borders. Try to understand! You look at me so balefully and darkly. I recollect the night after the funeral. You were unable to stay home. You and I went out into the glossy slush. Lost our way. Ended up in some strange, narrow street. I did not make out its name, but could see it was inverted, mir-rorlike, in the glass of a streetlamp. The lamps were floating off into the distance. Water dripped from the roofs. The buckets lining both sides of the street, along black walls, were filling with cold mercury. Filling and overflowing. And suddenly, helplessly spreading your hands, you spoke:

"But he was so little, and so warm. ..."

Forgive me if I am incapable of weeping, of simple human weeping, but instead keep singing and running somewhere, clutching at whatever wings fly past, tall, disheveled, with a wave of suntan on my forehead. Forgive me. That's how it must be.

We walk slowly along the fences. The cemetery is already near. There it is, an islet of vernal white and green amid some dusty vacant land. Now you go on alone. I'll wait for you here. Your eyes gave a quick, embarrassed smile. You know me well. . . . The wicket-gate squeaked, then banged shut. I sit alone on the sparse grass. A short way off there is a vegetable garden with some purple cabbage. Beyond the vacant lot, factory buildings, buoyant brick behemoths, float in the azure mist. At my feet, a squashed tin glints rustily inside a funnel of sand. Around me, silence and a kind of spring emptiness. There is no death. The wind comes tumbling upon me from behind like a limp doll and tickles my neck with its downy paw. There can be no death.

My heart, too, has soared through the dawn. You and I shall have a new, golden son, a creation of your tears and my fables. Today I understood the beauty of intersecting wires in the sky, and the hazy mosaic of factory chimneys, and this rusty tin with its inside-out, semidetached, serrated lid. The wan grass hurries, hurries somewhere along the dusty billows of the vacant lot. I raise my arms. The sunlight glides across my skin. My skin is covered with multicolored sparkles.

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this:

"O rainbow-colored gods ..."

A MATTER OF CHANCE

HE had a job as a waiter in the international dining car of a German fast train. His name was Aleksey Lvovich Luzhin. He had left Russia five years before, in 1919, and since then, as he made his way from city to city, had tried a good number of trades and occupations: he had worked as a farm laborer in Turkey, a messenger in Vienna, a housepainter, a sales clerk, and so forth. Now, on either side of the diner, the meadows, the hills overgrown with heather, the pine groves flowed on and on, and the bouillon steamed and splashed in the thick cups on the tray that he nimbly carried along the narrow aisle between the window tables. He waited with masterful dispatch, forking up from the dish he carried slices of beef or ham, depositing them on the plates, and in the process rapidly dipping his close-cropped head, with its tensed forehead and black, bushy eyebrows.

The car would arrive in Berlin at five p.m., and at seven it would depart in the opposite direction, toward the French border. Luzhin lived on a kind of steel seesaw: he had time to think and reminisce only at night, in a narrow nook that smelled of fish and dirty socks. His most frequent recollections were of a house in St. Petersburg, of his study there, with those leather buttons on the curves of overstuffed furniture, and of his wife Lena, of whom he had had no news for five years. At present, he felt his life wasting away. Too-frequent sniffs of cocaine had ravaged his mind; the little sores on the inside of his nostrils were eating into the septum.

When he smiled, his large teeth would flash with an especially clean luster, and this Russian ivory smile somehow endeared him to the other two waiters--Hugo, a thickset, fair-haired Berliner who made out the checks, and quick, red-haired, sharp-nosed Max, who resembled a fox, and whose job it was to take coffee and beer to the compartments. Lately, however, Luzhin smiled less often.

During the leisure hours when the crystal-bright waves of the drug beat at him, penetrating his thoughts with their radiance and transforming the least trifle into an ethereal miracle, he painstakingly noted on a sheet of paper all the various steps he intended to take in order to trace his wife. As he scribbled, with all those sensations still blissfully taut, his jottings seemed exceedingly important and correct to him. In the morning, however, when his head ached and his shirt felt clammy and sticky, he looked with bored disgust at the jerky, blurry lines. Recently, though, another idea had begun to occupy his thoughts. He began, with the same diligence, to elaborate a plan for his own death; he would draw a kind of graph indicating the rise and fall of his sense of fear; and, finally, so as to simplify matters, he set himself a definite date--the night between the first and second of August. His interest was aroused not so much by death itself as by all the details preceding it, and he would get so involved with these details that death itself would be forgotten. But as soon as he sobered up, the picturesque setting of this or that fanciful method of self-destruction would pale, and only one thing remained clear: his life had wasted away to nothing and there was no use continuing it.

The first day of August ran its course. At six-thirty in the evening, in the vast, dimly lit buffet of the Berlin station, old Princess Maria Ukhtomski sat at a bare table, obese, all in black, with a sallow face like a eunuch's. There were few people around. The brass counterweights of the suspended lamps glimmered under the high, misty ceiling. Now and then a chair was moved back with a hollow reverberation.

Princess Ukhtomski cast a stern glance at the gilt hand of the wall clock. The hand lurched forward. A minute later it shuddered again. The old lady rose, picked up her glossy black _sac de voyage _and, leaning on her big-knobbed man's cane, shuffled toward the exit.

A porter was waiting for her at the gate. The train was backing into the station. One after another, the lugubrious, iron-colored German carriages moved past. The varnished brown teak of one sleeping car bore under the center window a sign with the inscription berlin-paris; that international car, as well as the teak-lined diner, in a window of which she glimpsed the protruding elbows and head of a carroty-haired waiter, were alone reminiscent of the severely elegant prewar Nord-Express.

The train stopped with a clang of bumpers, and a long, sibilant sigh of brakes.

The porter installed Princess Ukhtomski in a second-class compartment of a Schnellzug car--a smoking compartment as she requested. In one corner, by the window, a man in a beige suit with an insolent face and an olive complexion was already trimming a cigar.

The old Princess settled across from him. She checked, with a slow, deliberate look, whether all her things had been placed in the overhead net. Two suitcases and a basket. All there. And the glossy _sac de voyage _in her lap. Her lips made a stern chewing movement.

A German couple lumbered into the compartment, breathing heavily.

Then, a minute before the train's departure, in came a young woman with a big painted mouth and a tight black toque that covered her forehead. She arranged her belongings and stepped out into the corridor. The man in the beige suit glanced after her. She raised the window with inexperienced jerks and leaned out to say good-bye to someone. The Princess caught the patter of Russian speech.

The train started. The young woman returned to the compartment. That smile that lingered on her face died out, and was replaced by a weary look. The brick rear walls of houses went gliding past; one of them displayed the painted advertisement of a colossal cigarette, stuffed with what looked like golden straw. The roofs, wet from a rainstorm, glistened under the rays of the low sun.

Old Princess Ukhtomski could control herself no longer. She in* quired gently in Russian: "Do you mind if I put my bag here?"

The woman gave a start and replied, "Not at all, please do."

The olive-and-beige man in the corner peered at her over his paper.

"Well, I'm on my way to Paris," volunteered the Princess with a slight sigh. "I have a son there. I am afraid to stay in Germany, you know."

She produced an ample handkerchief from her _sac de voyage _and firmly wiped her nose, left to right and back again.

"Yes, afraid. People say there's going to be a Communist revolution in Berlin. Have you heard anything?"

The young woman shook her head. She glanced suspiciously at the man with the paper and at the German couple.

"I don't know anything. I arrived from Russia, from Petersburg, the day before yesterday."

Princess Ukhtomski's plump, sallow face expressed intense curiosity. Her diminutive eyebrows crept upward.

"You don't say!"

With her eyes fixed on the tip of her gray shoe, the woman said rapidly, in a soft voice: "Yes, a kindhearted person helped me to get out. I'm going to Paris too now. I have relatives there."

She started taking off her gloves. A gold wedding ring slipped off her finger. Quickly she caught it.

"I keep losing my ring. Must have grown thinner or something." She fell silent, blinking her lashes. Through the corridor window beyond the glass compartment door the even row of telegraph wires could be seen swooping upward.

Princess Ukhtomski moved closer to her neighbor. "Tell me," she inquired in a loud whisper. "The sovietchiks aren't doing so well now, are they?"

A telegraph pole, black against the sunset, flew past, interrupting the smooth ascent of the wires. They dropped as a flag drops when the wind stops blowing. Then furtively they began rising again. The express was traveling swiftly between the airy walls of a spacious fire-bright evening. From somewhere in the ceilings of the compartments a slight crackling kept coming, as if rain were falling on the steel roofs. The German cars swayed violently. The international one, its interior upholstered in blue cloth, rode more smoothly and silently than the others. Three waiters were laying the tables in the diner. One of them, with close-cropped hair and beetling brows, was thinking about the little vial in his breast pocket. He kept licking his lips and sniffling. The vial contained a crystalline powder and bore the brand name Kramm. He was distributing knives and forks and inserting sealed bottles into rings on the tables, when suddenly he could stand it no longer. He flashed a fluttered smile toward Max Fuchs, who was lowering the thick blinds, and darted across the unsteady connecting platform into the next car. He locked himself in the toilet. Carefully calculating the jolts of the train, he poured a small mound of the powder on his thumbnail; greedily applied it to one nostril, then to the other; inhaled; with a flip of his tongue licked the sparkling dust off his nail; blinked hard a couple of times from the rubbery bitterness, and left the toilet, boozy and buoyant, his head filling with icy delicious air. As he crossed the diaphragm on his way back into the diner, he thought: how simple it would be to die right now! He smiled. He had best wait till nightfall. It would be a pity to cut short the effect of the enchanting poison.

"Give me the reservation slips, Hugo. I'll go hand them out."
"No, let Max go. Max works faster. Here, Max."

The red-haired waiter clutched the book of coupons in his freckled fist. He slipped like a fox between the tables and into the blue corridor of the sleeper. Five distinct harp strings swooped desperately upward alongside the windows. The sky was darkening. In the second-class compartment of a German car an old woman in black, resembling a eunuch, heard out with subdued _ochs _the account of a distant, dreary life.

"And your husband--did he stay behind?"

The young woman's eyes opened wide and she shook her head: "No. He has been abroad for quite a time. Just happened that way. In the very beginning of the Revolution he traveled south to Odessa. They were after him. I was supposed to join him there, but didn't get out in time."

"Terrible, terrible. And you have had no news of him?" "None. I remember I decided he was dead. Started to wear my ring on the chain of my cross--I was afraid they'd take that away too. Then, in Berlin, friends told me that he was alive. Somebody had seen him. Only yesterday I put a notice in the emigre paper."

She hastily produced a folded page of the _Rul' _from her tattered silk vanity bag.

"Here, take a look."

Princess Ukhtomski put on her glasses and read: "Elena Nikolayev-na Luzhin seeks her husband Aleksey Lvovich Luzhin."

"Luzhin?" she queried, taking off her glasses. "Could it be Lev Sergeich's son? He had two boys. I don't recall their names--"

Elena smiled radiantly. "Oh, how nice. That's a surprise. Don't tell me you knew his father."

"Of course, of course," began the Princess in a complacent and kindly tone. "Lyovushka Luzhin, formerly of the Uhlans. Our estates were adjacent. He used to visit us." "He died," interposed Elena.

"Yes, yes, I heard. May his soul rest in peace. He would always arrive with his borzoi hound. I don't remember his boys well, though. I've been abroad since 1917. The younger one had light hair, I believe. And he had a stutter." Elena smiled again. "No, no, that was his elder brother."

"Oh, well, I got them mixed up, my dear," the Princess said comfortably. "My memory is not so good. I wouldn't even have remem bered Lyovushka if you had not mentioned him yourself. But now it all comes back to me. He used to ride over for evening tea and-- Oh, let me tell you--" The Princess moved a little closer and went on, in a clear, slightly lilting voice, without sadness, for she knew that happy things can only be spoken of in a happy way, without grieving because they have vanished:

"Let me tell you," she went on, "we had a set of amusing plates--
with a gold rim running around and, in the very center, a mosquito so
lifelike that anyone who didn't know tried to brush it off."

The compartment door opened. A red-haired waiter was handing out reservation slips for dinner. Elena took one. So did the man sitting in the corner, who for some time had been trying to catch her eye.

"I brought my own food," said the Princess. "Ham and a bun." Max went through all the cars and trotted back to the diner. In passing, he nudged his Russian fellow worker, who was standing in the car's vestibule with a napkin under his arm. Luzhin looked after Max with glistening, anxious eyes. He felt a cool, ticklish vacuum replacing his bones and organs, as if his whole body were about to sneeze the next instant, expelling his soul. He imagined for the hundredth time how he would arrange his death. He calculated every little detail, as if he were composing a chess problem. He planned to get off at night at a certain station, walk around the motionless car and place his head against the buffer's shieldlike end when another car, that was to be coupled on, approached the waiting one. The buffers would clash. Between their meeting ends would be his bowed head. It would burst like a soap bubble and turn into iridescent air. He should get a good foothold on the crosstie and press his temple firmly against the cold metal of the bumper.

"Can't you hear me? Time to go make the dinner call." It was now Hugo speaking. Luzhin responded with a frightened smile and did what he was told, opening for an instant the compart* ment doors as he went, announcing loudly and hurriedly, "First call for dinner!"

In one compartment his eye fell fleetingly on the plump, yellowish face of an old woman who was unwrapping a sandwich. He was struck by something very familiar about that face. As he hurried back through the cars, he kept thinking who she might be. It was as if he had already seen her in a dream. The sensation that his body would sneeze up his soul any instant now became more concrete--any moment now I'll remember whom that old woman resembled. But the more he strained his mind, the more irritatingly the recollection would slip away. He was morose when he returned to the diner, with his nostrils dilating and a spasm in his throat that would not let him swallow. "Oh, the hell with her--what nonsense."

The passengers, walking unsteadily and holding on to the walls, began to move through the corridors in the direction of the diner. Reflections were already glimmering in the darkened windows, even though a yellow streak of sunset was still visible there. Elena Luzhin noticed with alarm that the man in the beige suit had waited to get up when she had. He had nasty, glassy, protuberant eyes that seemed filled with dark iodine. He walked along the passage in such a way as almost to step on her, and when a jolt threw her off balance (the cars were rocking violently) he would pointedly clear his throat. For some reason she suddenly thought he must be a spy, an informer, and she knew it was silly to think so--she was no longer in Russia, after all--yet she could not get rid of the idea.

He said something as they passed through the corridor of the sleeper. She quickened her step. She crossed the joggy connecting plates to the diner, which came after the sleeper. And here, suddenly, in the vestibule of the diner, with a kind of rough tenderness the man clutched her by the upper arm. She stifled a scream and yanked away her arm so violently that she nearly lost her footing.

The man said in German, with a foreign accent, "My precious!"

Elena made a sudden about-face. Back she went, across the connecting platform, through the sleeping car, across another platform. She felt unbearably hurt. She would rather not have dinner at all than sit facing that boorish monster. "God knows what he took me for," she reflected, "and all just because I use lipstick."

"What's the matter, my dear? Aren't you having dinner?"

Princess Ukhtomski had a ham sandwich in her hand.

"No, I don't feel like it any more. Excuse me, I'm going to take a nap."

The old woman raised her thin brows in surprise, then resumed munching.

As for Elena, she leaned her head back and pretended to sleep. Soon she did doze off. Her pale, tired face twitched occasionally. The wings of her nose shone where the powder had worn off. Princess Ukhtomski lit a cigarette that had a long cardboard mouthpiece.

A half-hour later the man returned, sat down imperturbably in his corner, and worked on his back teeth with a toothpick for a while. Then he shut his eyes, fidgeted a little, and curtained his head with a flap of his overcoat, which was hanging on a hook by the window. Another half-hour went by and the train slowed. Platform lights passed like specters alongside the fogged-up windows. The car stopped with a prolonged sigh of relief. Sounds could be heard: somebody coughing in the next compartment, footsteps running past on the station platform. The train stood for a long time, while distant nocturnal whistles called out to each other. Then it jolted and began to move.

Elena awoke. The Princess was dozing, her open mouth a black cave. The German couple was gone. The man, his face covered by his coat, slept too, his legs grotesquely spread.

Elena licked her dry lips and wearily rubbed her forehead. Suddenly she gave a start: the ring was missing from her fourth finger.

For an instant she gazed, motionless, at her naked hand. Then, with a pounding heart, she began searching hastily on the seat, on the floor. She glanced at the man's sharp knee.

"Oh, my Lord, of course--I must have dropped it on the way to the dining car when I jerked free--"

She hurried out of the compartment; arms spread, swaying this way and that, holding back her tears, she traversed one car, another. She reached the end of the sleeping car and, through the rear door, saw-nothing but air, emptiness, the night sky, the dark wedge of the roadbed disappearing into the distance.

She thought she had got mixed up and gone the wrong way. With a sob, she headed back.

Next to her, by the toilet door, stood a little old woman wearing a gray apron and an armband, who resembled a night nurse. She was holding a little bucket with a brush sticking out of it.

"They uncoupled the diner," said the little old woman, and for some reason sighed. "After Cologne there will be another."

In the diner that had remained behind under the vault of a station and would continue only next morning to France, the waiters were cleaning up, folding the tablecloths. Luzhin finished, and stood in the open doorway of the car's vestibule. The station was dark and deserted. Some distance away a lamp shone like a humid star through a gray cloud of smoke. The torrent of rails glistened slightly. He could not understand why the face of the old lady with the sandwich had disturbed him so deeply. Everything else was clear, only this one blind spot remained.

Red-haired, sharp-nosed Max also came out into the vestibule. He was sweeping the floor. He noticed a glint of gold in a corner. He bent down. It was a ring. He hid it in his waistcoat pocket and gave a quick look around to see if anyone had noticed. Luzhin's back was motionless in the doorway. Max cautiously took out the ring; by the dim light he distinguished a word in script and some figures engraved on the inside. Must be Chinese, he thought. Actually, the inscription read "1-viii-1915. aleksey." He returned the ring to his pocket.

Luzhin's back moved. Quietly he got off the car. He walked diagonally to the next track, with a calm, relaxed gait, as if taking a stroll.

A through train now thundered into the station. Luzhin went to the edge of the platform and hopped down. The cinders crunched under his heel.

At that instant, the locomotive came at him in one hungry bound. Max, totally unaware of what happened, watched from a distance as the lighted windows flew past in one continuous stripe.

THE SEAPORT

THE low-ceilinged barbershop smelled of stale roses. Horseflies hummed hotly, heavily. The sunlight blazed on the floor in puddles of molten honey, gave the lotion bottles tweaks of sparkle, transluced through the long curtain hanging in the entrance, a curtain of clay beads and little sections of bamboo strung alternately on close-hung cord, which would disintegrate in an iridescent clitter-clatter every time someone entered and shouldered it aside. Before him, in the murkish glass, Nikitin saw his own tanned face, the long sculptured strands of his shiny hair, the glitter of the scissors that chirred above his ear, and his eyes were attentive and severe, as always happens when you contemplate yourself in mirrors. He had arrived in this ancient port in the south of France the day before, from Constantinople, where life had grown unbearable for him. That morning he had been to the Russian Consulate and the employment office, had roamed about the town, which, down narrow alleyways, crept seaward, and now, exhausted, prostrated by the heat, he had dropped in to have a haircut and to refresh his head. The floor around his chair was already strewn with small bright mice--the cuttings of his hair. The barber filled his palm with lather. A delicious chill ran through the crown of his head as the barber's fingers firmly rubbed in the thick foam. Then an icy gush made his heart jump, and a fluffy towel went to work on his face and his wet hair.

Parting the undulating rain of curtain with his shoulder, Nikitin went out into a steep alley. Its right side was in the shade; on the left a narrow stream quivered along the curb in the torrid radiance; a black-haired, toothless girl with swarthy freckles was collecting the shimmering rivulet with her resonant pail; and the stream, the sun, the violet shade--everything was flowing and slithering downward to the sea: another step and, in the distance, between some walls, loomed its compact sapphire brilliance. Infrequent pedestrians walked on the shady side. Nikitin happened upon a climbing Negro in a Colonial uniform, with a face like a wet galosh. On the sidewalk stood a straw chair from whose seat a cat departed with a cushioned bound. A brassy Provencal voice started jabbering in some window. A green shutter banged. On a vendor's stand, amid purple mollusks that gave off a whiff of seaweed, lay lemons shot with granulated gold.

Reaching the sea, Nikitin paused to look excitedly at the dense blue that, in the distance, modulated into blinding silver, and at the play of light delicately dappling the white topside of a yacht. Then, unsteady from the heat, he went in search of the small Russian restaurant whose address he had noted on a wall of the consulate.

The restaurant, like the barbershop, was hot and none too clean. In back, on a wide counter, appetizers and fruit showed through billows of protective grayish muslin. Nikitin sat down and squared his shoulders; his shirt stuck to his back. At a nearby table sat two Russians, evidently sailors of a French vessel, and, a little farther off, a solitary old fellow in gold-rimmed glasses was making smacking and sucking noises as he lapped borscht from his spoon. The proprietress, wiping her puffy hands with a towel, gave the newcomer a maternal look. Two shaggy pups were rolling on the floor in a flurry of little paws. Nikitin whistled, and a shabby old bitch with green mucus at the corners of her gentle eyes came and put her muzzle in his lap.

One of the seamen addressed him in a composed and unhurried tone: "Send her away. She'll get fleas all over you."

Nikitin cosseted the dog's head a little and raised his radiant eyes.

"Oh, I'm not afraid of that. . . . Constantinople . . . The barracks . . . You can imagine ..."

"Just get here?" asked the seaman. Even voice. Mesh T-shirt. All cool and competent. Dark hair neatly trimmed in back. Clear forehead. Overall appearance decent and placid.

"Last night," Nikitin replied.

The borscht and the fiery dark wine made him sweat even more. He was happy to relax and have a peaceful chat. Bright sunlight poured through the aperture of the door together with the tremulous sparkle of the alley rivulet; from his corner under the gas meter, the elderly Russian's spectacles scintillated.

"Looking for work?" asked the other sailor, who was middle-aged, blue-eyed, had a pale walrus mustache, and was also clean-cut, well groomed, levigated by sun and salty wind.

Nikitin said with a smile, "I certainly am. . . . Today I went to the employment office. . . . They have jobs planting telegraph poles, weaving hawsers--I'm just not sure. ..."

"Come work with us," said the black-haired one. "As a stoker or something. No nonsense there, you can take my word. . . . Ah, there you are, Lyalya--our profound respects!"

A young girl entered, wearing a white hat, with a sweet, plain face. She made her way among the tables and smiled, first at the puppies, then at the seamen. Nikitin had asked them something but forgot his question as he watched the girl and the motion of her low hips, by which you can always recognize a Russian damsel. The owner gave her daughter a tender look, as if to say, "You poor tired thing," for she had probably spent all morning in an office, or else worked in a store. There was something touchingly homespun about her that made you think of violet soap and a summer flag stop in a birch forest. There was no France outside the door, of course. Those mincing movements . . . Sunny nonsense.

"No, it's not complicated at all," the seaman was saying, "here's how it works--you have an iron bucket and a coal pit. You start scraping. Lightly at first, so long as the coal goes sliding down into the bucket by itself, then you scrape harder. When you've filled the bucket you set it on a cart. You roll it over to the chief stoker. A bang of his shovel and--one!--the firebox door's open, a heave of the same shovel and--two!--in goes the coal--you know, fanned out so it will come down evenly. Precision work. Keep your eye on the dial, and if that pressure drops ..."

In a window that gave on the street appeared the head and shoulders of a man wearing a panama and a white suit.

"How are you, Lyalya dearest?"

He leaned his elbows on the windowsill.

"Of course it _is _hot in there, a real furnace--you wear nothing to work but pants and a mesh T-shirt. The T-shirt is black when you're finished. As I was saying, about the pressure--'fur' forms in the firebox, an incrustation hard as stone, which you break up with a poker this long. Tough work. But afterwards, when you pop out on deck, the sunshine feels cool even if you're in the tropics. You shower, then down you go to your quarters, straight into your hammock--that's heaven, let me tell you. . . ."

Meanwhile, at the window: "And he insists he saw me in a car, you see?" (Lyalya in a high-pitched, excited voice).

Her interlocutor, the gentleman in white, stood leaning on the sill

from the outside, and the square window framed his rounded shoulders, his soft, shaven face half-lit by the sun--a Russian who had been lucky.

"He goes on to tell me I was wearing a lilac dress, when I don't even own a lilac dress," yelped Lyalya, "and he persists: _czhay voo zasyur.'"_

The seaman who had been talking to Nikitin turned and asked, "Couldn't you speak Russian?"

The man in the window said, "I managed to get this music, Lyalya. Remember?"

That was the momentary aura, and it felt almost deliberate, as if someone were having fun inventing this girl, this conversation, this small Russian restaurant in a foreign port--an aura of dear workaday provincial Russia, and right away, by some miraculous, secret association of thoughts, the world appeared grander to Nikitin, he yearned to sail the oceans, to put into legendary bays, to eavesdrop everywhere on other people's souls.

"You asked what run we're on? Indochina," spontaneously said the seaman.

Nikitin pensively tapped a cigarette out of its case; a gold eagle was etched on the wooden lid.

"Must be wonderful."

"What do you think? Sure it is."

"Well, tell me about it. Something about Shanghai, or Colombo."

"Shanghai? I've seen it. Warm drizzle, red sand. Humid as a greenhouse. As for Ceylon, for instance, I didn't get ashore to visit it--it was my watch, you know."

Shoulders hunched, the white-jacketed man was saying something to Lyalya through the window, softly and significantly. She listened, her head cocked, fondling the dog's curled-over ear with one hand. Extending its fire-pink tongue, panting joyously and rapidly, the dog looked through the sunny chink of the door, most likely debating whether or not it was worthwhile to go lie some more on the hot threshold. And the dog seemed to be thinking in Russian.

Nikitin asked, "Where should I apply?"

The seaman winked at his mate, as if to say, "See, I brought him round." Then he said, "It's very simple. Tomorrow morning bright and early you go to the Old Port, and at Pier Two you'll find our _Jean-Bart. _Have a chat with the first mate. I think he'll hire you."

Nikitin took a keen and candid look at the man's clear, intelligent forehead. "What were you before, in Russia?" he asked.

The man shrugged and gave a wry smile.

"What was he? A fool," Droopy Mustache answered for him in a bass voice.

Later they both got up. The younger man pulled out the wallet he carried inserted in the front of his pants behind his belt buckle, in the manner of French sailors. Something elicited a high-pitched laugh from Lyalya as she came up and gave them her hand (palm probably a little damp). The pups were tumbling about the floor. The man standing at the window turned away, whistling absently and tenderly. Nikitin paid and went out leisurely into the sunlight.

It was about five in the afternoon. The sea's blueness, glimpsed at the far ends of alleys, hurt his eyes. The circular screens of the outdoor toilets were ablaze.

He returned to his squalid hotel and, slowly stretching his intertwined hands behind his head, collapsed onto the bed in a state of blissful solar inebriation. He dreamt he was an officer again, walking along a Crimean slope overgrown with milkweed and oak shrubs, mowing off the downy heads of thistles as he went. He awoke because he had started laughing in his sleep; he awoke, and the window had already turned a twilight blue.

He leaned out into the cool chasm, meditating: Wandering women. Some of them Russian. What a big star.

He smoothed his hair, rubbed the dust off the knobby tips of his shoes with a corner of the blanket, checked his wallet--only five francs left--and went out to roam some more and revel in his solitary idleness.

Now it was more crowded than it had been in the afternoon. Along the alleys that descended toward the sea, people were sitting, cooling off. Girl in a kerchief with spangles. . . . Flutter of eyelashes. . . . Paunchy shopkeeper, sitting astride a straw chair, elbows propped on its reversed back, smoking, with a flap of shirt protruding on his belly from beneath his unbuttoned waistcoat. Children hopping in a squatting posture as they sailed little paper boats, by the light of a streetlamp, in the black streamlet running next to the narrow sidewalk. There were smells of fish and wine. From the sailors' taverns, which shone with a yellow gleam, came the labored sound of hurdy-gurdies, the pounding of palms on tables, metallic exclamations. And, in the upper part of town, along the main avenue, the evening crowds shuffled and laughed, and women's slender ankles and the white shoes of naval officers flashed beneath clouds of acacias. Here and there, like the colored flames of some petrified fireworks display, cafes blazed in the purple twilight. Round tables right out on the sidewalk, shadows

of black plane trees on the striped awning, illuminated from within. Nikitin stopped, picturing a mug of beer, ice-cold and heavy. Inside, beyond the tables, a violin wrung its sounds as if they were human hands, accompanied by the full-bodied resonance of a rippling harp. The more banal the music, the closer it is to the heart.

At an outer table sat a weary streetwalker all in green, swinging the pointed tip of her shoe.

I'll have the beer, decided Nikitin. No I won't . . . Then again ...

The woman had doll-like eyes. There was something very familiar about those eyes, about those elongated, shapely legs. Gathering up her purse, she got up as if in a hurry to get somewhere. She wore a long jacketlike top of knitted emerald silk that adhered low on her hips. Past she went, squinting from the music.

It would be strange indeed, mused Nikitin. Something akin to a falling star hurtled through his memory, and, forgetting about his beer, he followed her as she turned into a dark, glistening alley. A streetlamp stretched her shadow. The shadow flashed along a wall and skewed. She walked slowly and Nikitin checked his pace, afraid, for some reason, to overtake her.

Yes, there's no question. . . . God, this is wonderful. ...

The woman stopped on the curb. A crimson bulb burned over a black door. Nikitin walked past, came back, circled the woman, stopped. With a cooing laugh she uttered a French word of endearment.

In the wan light, Nikitin saw her pretty, fatigued face, and the moist luster of her minute teeth.

"Listen," he said in Russian, simply and softly. "We've known each other a long time, so why not speak our native language?"

She raised her eyebrows. "Inglish? Yew spik Inglish?"

Nikitin gave her an intent look, then repeated somewhat helplessly, "Come, you know and I know."

_T'es Polonais, alors?" _inquired the woman, dragging out the final rolled syllable as they do in the South.

Nikitin gave up with a sardonic smile, thrust a five-franc note into her hand, turned quickly, and started across the sloping square. An instant later he heard rapid footfalls behind him, and breathing, and the rustle of a dress. He looked back. There was no one. The square was deserted and dark. The night wind propelled a newspaper sheet across i he flagstones.

He heaved a sigh, smiled once more, thrust his fists deep into his pockets, and, looking at the stars, which flashed and waned as if fanned by a gigantic bellows, began descending seaward. He sat down on the ancient wharf with his feet dangling over the edge, above the rhythmic, moonlit swaying of the waves, and sat thus for a long time, head thrown back, leaning on the palms of his stretched-back hands.

A falling star shot by with the suddenness of a missed heartbeat. A strong, clean gust blew through his hair, pale in the nocturnal radiance.

REVENGE

OSTEND, the stone wharf, the gray strand, the distant row of hotels, were all slowly rotating as they receded into the turquoise haze of an autumn day.

The professor wrapped his legs in a tartan lap robe, and the chaise longue creaked as he reclined into its canvas comfort. The clean, ochre-red deck was crowded but quiet. The boilers heaved discreetly.

An English girl in worsted stockings, indicating the professor with a motion of her eyebrow, addressed her brother who was standing nearby: "Looks like Sheldon, doesn't he?"

Sheldon was a comic actor, a bald giant with a round, flabby face. "He's really enjoying the sea," the girl added sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story.

Her brother, an ungainly, red-haired student on his way back to his university after the summer holidays, took the pipe out of his mouth and said, "He's our biology professor. Capital old chap. Must say hello to him." He approached the professor, who, lifting his heavy eyelids, recognized one of the worst and most diligent of his pupils.

"Ought to be a splendid crossing," said the student, giving a light squeeze to the large, cold hand that was proffered him.

"I hope so," replied the professor, stroking his gray cheek with his fingers. "Yes, I hope so," he repeated weightily, "I hope so."

The student gave the two suitcases standing next to the deck chair a cursory glance. One of them was a dignified veteran, covered with the white traces of old travel labels, like bird droppings on a monument. The other one--brand-new, orange-colored, with gleaming locks--for some reason caught his attention.

"Let me move that suitcase before it falls over," he offered, to keep up the conversation.

The professor chuckled. He did look like that silver-browed comic, or else like an aging boxer. . . .

"The suitcase, you say? Know what I have in it?" he inquired, with a hint of irritation in his voice. "Can't guess? A marvelous object! A special kind of coat hanger ..."

"A German invention, sir?" the student prompted, remembering that the biologist had just been to Berlin for a scientific congress.

The professor gave a hearty, creaking laugh, and a golden tooth flashed like a flame. "A divine invention, my friend--divine. Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you're a polyp?" The student grinned. He knew that the professor was given to obscure jokes. The old man was the object of much gossip at the university. They said he tortured his spouse, a very young woman. The student had seen her once. A skinny thing, with incredible eyes. "And how is your wife, sir?" asked the red-haired student.

The professor replied, "I shall be frank with you, dear friend. I've been struggling with myself for quite some some time, but now I feel compelled to tell you. . . . My dear friend, I like to travel in silence. I trust you'll forgive me."

But here the student, whistling in embarrassment and sharing his sister's lot, departs forever from these pages.

The biology professor, meanwhile, pulled his black felt hat down over his bristly brows to shield his eyes against the sea's dazzling shimmer, and sank into a semblance of sleep. The sunlight falling on his gray, clean-shaven face, with its large nose and heavy chin, made it seem freshly modeled out of moist clay. Whenever a flimsy autumn cloud happened to screen the sun, the face would suddenly darken, dry out, and petrify. It was all, of course, alternating light and shade rather than a reflection of his thoughts. If his thoughts had indeed been reflected on his face, the professor would have hardly been a pretty sight. The trouble was that he had received a report the other day from the private detective he had hired in London that his wife was unfaithful to him. An intercepted letter, written in her minuscule, familiar hand, began, _"My dear darling Jack, I am still all full of your __last kiss.v _The professor's name was certainly not Jack--that was the whole point. The perception made him feel neither surprise nor pain, not even masculine vexation, but only hatred, sharp and cold as a lancet. He realized with utter clarity that he would murder his wife. There could be no qualms. One had only to devise the most excruciating, the most ingenious method. As he reclined in the deck chair, he reviewed

for the hundredth time all the methods of torture described by travelers and medieval scholars. Not one of them, so far, seemed adequately painful. In the distance, at the verge of the green shimmer, the sugary-white cliffs of Dover were materializing, and he had still not made a decision. The steamer fell silent and, gently rocking, docked. The professor followed his porter down the gangplank. The customs officer, after rattling off the items ineligible for import, asked him to open a suitcase--the new, orange one. The professor turned the lightweight key in its lock and swung open the leather flap. Some Russian lady behind him loudly exclaimed, "Good Lord!" and gave a nervous laugh. Two Belgians standing on either side of the professor cocked their heads and gave a kind of upward glance. One shrugged his shoulders and the other gave a soft whistle, while the English turned away with indifference. The official, dumbfounded, goggled his eyes at the suitcase's contents. Everybody felt very creepy and uncomfortable. The biologist phlegmatically gave his name, mentioning the university museum. Expressions cleared up. Only a few ladies were chagrined to learn that no crime had been committed.

"But why do you transport it in a suitcase?" inquired the official with respectful reproach, gingerly lowering the flap and chalking a scrawl on the bright leather. "I was in a hurry," said the professor with a fatigued squint. "No time to hammer together a crate. In any case it's a valuable object and not something I'd send in the baggage hold." And, with a stooped but springy gait, the professor crossed to the railway platform past a policeman who resembled a gargantuan toy. But suddenly he paused as if remembering something and mumbled with a radiant, kindly smile, "There--I have it. A most clever method." Whereupon he heaved a sigh of relief and purchased two bananas, a pack of cigarettes, newspapers reminiscent of crackling bedsheets, and, a few minutes later, was speeding in a comfortable compartment of the Continental Express along the scintillating sea, the white cliffs, the emerald pastures of Kent.

They were wonderful eyes indeed, with pupils like glossy inkdrops on dove-gray satin. Her hair was cut short and golden-pale in hue, a luxuriant topping of fluff. She was small, upright, flat-chested. She had been expecting her husband since yesterday, and knew for certain he would arrive today. Wearing a gray, open-necked dress and velvet slippers, she was sitting on a peacock ottoman in the parlor, thinking what a pity it was her husband did not believe in ghosts and openly despised the young medium, a Scot with pale, delicate eyelashes, who occasionally visited her. After all, odd things did happen to her. Recently, in her sleep, she had had a vision of a dead youth with whom, before she was married, she had strolled in the twilight, when the blackberry blooms seem so ghostly white. Next morning, still aquiver, she had penciled a letter to him--a letter to her dream. In this letter she had lied to poor Jack. She had, in fact, nearly forgotten about him; she loved her excruciating husband with a fearful but faithful love; yet she wanted to send a little warmth to this dear spectral visitor, to reassure him with some words from earth. The letter vanished mysteriously from her writing pad, and the same night she dreamt of a long table, from under which Jack suddenly emerged, nodding to her gratefully. Now, for some reason, she felt uneasy when recalling that dream, almost as if she had cheated on her husband with a ghost.

The drawing room was warm and festive. On the wide, low win-dowsill lay a silk cushion, bright yellow with violet stripes.

The professor arrived just when she had decided his ship must have gone to the bottom. Glancing out the window, she saw the black top of a taxi, the driver's proffered palm, and the massive shoulders of her husband who had bent down his head as he paid. She flew through the rooms and trotted downstairs swinging her thin, bared arms.

He was climbing toward her, stooped, in an ample coat. Behind him a servant carried his suitcases.

She pressed against his woolen scarf, playfully bending back the heel of one slender, gray-stockinged leg. He kissed her warm temple. With a good-natured smile he lifted away her arms. "I'm covered with dust. . . . Wait. . . . ," he mumbled, holding her by the wrists. Frowning, she tossed her head and the pale conflagration of her hair. The professor stooped and kissed her on the lips with another little grin. At supper, thrusting out the white breastplate of his starched shirt and energetically moving his glossy cheekbones, he recounted his brief journey. He was reservedly jolly. The curved silk lapels of his dinner jacket, his bulldog jaw, his massive bald head with ironlike veins on its temples--all this aroused in his wife an exquisite pity: the pity she always felt because, as he studied the minutiae of life, he refused to enter her world, where the poetry of de la Mare flowed and infinitely tender astral spirits hurtled.

"Well, did your ghosts come knocking while I was away?" he asked, reading her thoughts. She wanted to tell him about the dream, the letter, but felt somehow guilty.

"You know something," he went on, sprinkling sugar on some pink rhubarb, "you and your friends are playing with fire. There can be really terrifying occurrences. One Viennese doctor told me about some incredible metamorphoses the other day. Some woman--some kind of fortune-telling hysteric--died, of a heart attack I think, and, when the doctor undressed her (it all happened in a Hungarian hut, by candlelight), he was stunned at the sight of her body; it was entirely covered with a reddish sheen, was soft and slimy to the touch, and, upon closer examination, he realized that this plump, taut cadaver consisted entirely of narrow, circular bands of skin, as if it were all bound evenly and tightly by invisible strings, something like that advertisement for French tires, the man whose body is all tires. Except that in her case these tires were very thin and pale red. And, as the doctor watched, the corpse gradually began to unwind like a huge ball of yarn. . . . Her body was a thin, endless worm, which was disentangling itself and crawling, slithering out through the crack under the door while, on the bed, there remained a naked, white, still humid skeleton. Yet this woman had a husband, who had once kissed her--kissed that worm."

The professor poured himself a glass of port the color of mahogany and began gulping the rich liquid, without taking his narrowed eyes off his wife's face. Her thin, pale shoulders gave a shiver. "You yourself don't realize what a terrifying thing you've told me," she said in agitation. "So the woman's ghost disappeared into a worm. It's all terrifying. ..."

"I sometimes think," said the professor, ponderously shooting a cuff and examining his blunt fingers, "that, in the final analysis, my science is an idle illusion, that it is we who have invented the laws of physics, that anything--absolutely anything--can happen. Those who abandon themselves to such thoughts go mad. ..."

He stifled a yawn, tapping his clenched fist against his lips.

"What's come over you, my dear?" his wife exclaimed softly. "You never spoke this way before. ... I thought you knew everything, had everything mapped out. ..."

For an instant the professor's nostrils flared spasmodically, and a gold fang flashed. But his face quickly regained its flabby state. He stretched and got up from the table. "I'm babbling nonsense," he said calmly and tenderly. "I'm tired. I'll go to bed. Don't turn on the light when you come in. Get right into bed with me--with me," he repeated meaningfully and tenderly, as he had not spoken for a long time.

These words resounded gently within her when she remained alone in the drawing room.

She had been married to him for five years and, despite her husband's capricious disposition, his frequent outbursts of unjustified jealousy, his silences, sullenness, and incomprehension, she felt happy, for she loved and pitied him. She, all slender and white, and he, massive, bald, with tufts of gray wool in the middle of his chest, made an impossible, monstrous couple--and yet she enjoyed his infrequent, forceful caresses.

A chrysanthemum, in its vase on the mantel, dropped several curled petals with a dry rustle. She gave a start and her heart jolted disagreeably as she remembered that the air was always filled with phantoms, that even her scientist husband had noted their fearsome apparitions.

She recalled how Jackie had popped out from under the table and started nodding his head with an eerie tenderness. It seemed to her that all the objects in the room were watching her expectantly. She was chilled by a wind of fear. She quickly left the drawing room, restraining an absurd cry. She caught her breath and thought, What a silly thing I am, really. ... In the bathroom she spent a long time examining the sparkling pupils of her eyes. Her small face, capped by fluffy gold, seemed unfamiliar to her.

Feeling light as a young girl, with nothing on but a lace nightgown, trying not to brush against the furniture, she went to the darkened bedroom. She extended her arms to locate the headboard of the bed, and lay down on its edge. She knew she was not alone, that her husband was lying beside her. For a few instants she motionlessly gazed upward, feeling the fierce, muffled pounding of her heart.

When her eyes had become accustomed to the dark, intersected by the stripes of moonlight pouring through the muslin blind, she turned her head toward her husband. He was lying with his back to her, wrapped in the blanket. All she could see was the bald crown of his head, which seemed extraordinarily sleek and white in the puddle of moonlight.

He's not asleep, she thought affectionately. If he were, he would be snoring a little.

She smiled and, with her whole body, slid over toward her husband, spreading her arms under the covers for the familiar embrace. Her fingers felt some smooth ribs. Her knee struck a smooth bone. A skull, its black eye sockets rotating, rolled from its pillow onto her shoulder.

Electric light flooded the room. The professor, in his crude dinner jacket, his starched bosom, eyes, and enormous forehead glistening, emerged from behind a screen and approached the bed.

The blanket and sheets, jumbled together, slithered to the rug. His wife lay dead, embracing the white, hastily cobbled skeleton of a hunchback that the professor had acquired abroad for the university museum.

BENEFICENCE

I had inherited the studio from a photographer. A lilac-hued canvas still stood by the wall, depicting part of a balustrade and a whitish urn against the background of an indistinct garden. And it was in a wicker armchair, as if on the very threshold of those gouache depths, that I sat, thinking of you, until morning. It got very cold at daybreak. Roughcast clay heads gradually floated out of the murk into the dusty haze. One of them (your likeness) was wrapped in a wet rag. I traversed this hazy chamber--something crumbled and crackled underfoot--and, with the end of a long pole, hooked and pulled open in succession the black curtains that hung like shreds of tattered banners across the slanting glass. Having ushered in the morning--a squinty, wretched morning--I started laughing, and had no idea why; perhaps it was simply because I had spent the entire night sitting in a wicker armchair, surrounded by rubbish and shards of plaster of Paris, amid the dust of congealed plasticine, thinking of you.

Here is the kind of feeling I would experience whenever your name was mentioned in my presence: a bolt of black, a scented, forceful motion--that's how you threw back your arms when adjusting your veil. Long had I loved you; why, I know not. With your deceitful, savage ways, dwelling as you did in idle melancholy.

Recently I had come across an empty matchbox on your bedside table. On it there was a small funereal mound of ashes and a golden cigarette butt--a coarse, masculine one. I implored you to explain. You laughed unpleasantly. Then you burst into tears and I, forgiving everything, embraced your knees and pressed my wet eyelashes to the warm black silk. After that I did not see you for two weeks.

The autumn morning shimmered in the breeze. I carefully stood the pole in a corner. The tiled roofs of Berlin were visible through the window's broad span, their outlines varying with the iridescent inner irregularities of the glass; in their midst, a distant cupola rose like a bronze watermelon. The clouds were scudding, rupturing, fleetingly revealing an astonished, gossamer autumnal blue.

The day before I had spoken to you on the phone. It was I who had given in and called. We agreed to meet today at the Brandenburg Gate. Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with lightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend.

After dinner, when I went outside to meet you, my head began to whirl from the crisp air and the torrents of yellow sunlight. Every ray echoed in my temples. Large, rustling, russet leaves waddled as they raced along the sidewalk.

I reflected while I walked that you would probably not come to the rendezvous. And that, if you did, we would quarrel again anyway. I knew only how to sculpt and how to love. This was not enough for you.

The massive gates. Wide-hipped buses squeezing through the por-tals and rolling on down the boulevard, which receded into the restless blue glitter of the windy day. I waited for you under an oppressive vault, between chilly columns, near the grate of the guardhouse window. People everywhere: Berlin clerks were leaving their offices, ill shaven, each with a briefcase under his arm and, in his eyes, the turbid nausea that comes when you smoke a bad cigar on an empty stomach--their weary, predatory faces, their high starched collars, Hashed by endlessly; a woman passed with a red straw hat and a gray karakul coat; then a youth in velvet pants buttoned under the knees; and others still.

I waited, leaning on my cane, in the cold shadow of the corner columns. I did not believe you would come.

By one of the columns, near the guardhouse window, was a stand with postcards, maps, fan-spreads of colored photos, and by it on a stool sat a brown little old woman, short-legged, plump, with a round, speckled face, and she too was waiting.

I wondered which of us would wait longer, and who would come first--a customer, or you. The old woman's mien conveyed something like this: "I just happen to be here. ... I sat down for a minute. . . . Yes, there's some kind of stand nearby, with excellent, curious knickknacks. . . . But I have nothing to do with it. . . ."

People passed ceaselessly between the columns, skirting the corner of the guardhouse; some glanced at the postcards. The old woman would tense every nerve and fix her bright tiny eyes on the passerby, as if transmitting a thought: Buy it, buy it. ... But the other, after a quick survey of the colored cards and the gray ones, walked on, and she, with seeming indifference, lowered her eyes and went back to the red book she was holding in her lap.

I did not believe you would come. But I waited for you as I had never waited before, smoking restlessly, peeking beyond the gate toward the uncluttered plaza at the start of the boulevard; then I would retreat anew into my nook, trying not to give the appearance of waiting, trying to imagine that you were walking, approaching while I was not looking, that if I took another peek around that corner I would see your seal-fur coat and the black lace hanging from your hat brim down over your eyes--and I deliberately did not look, cherishing the self-deception.

There was a rush of cold wind. The woman got up and started pushing her postcards more firmly into their slots. She wore a kind of yellow velours jacket with gathers at the waist. The hem of her brown skirt was hiked up higher in front than in back, which made her look as if she were thrusting out her belly when she walked. I could make out meek, kindhearted creases on her round little hat and her worn duck bootees. She was busily arranging her tray of wares. Her book, a guide to Berlin, lay on the stool, and the autumn wind absently turned the pages and ruffled the map that had fallen out from them like a flight of stairs.

I was getting cold. My cigarette smouldered lopsidedly and bitterly. I felt the waves of a hostile chill on my chest. No customer had appeared.

Meanwhile the knickknack woman got back on her perch and, since the stool was too tall for her, she had to do some squirming, with the soles of her blunt bootees leaving the sidewalk by turns. I tossed away the cigarette and flicked it with the end of my cane, provoking a fiery spray.

An hour had passed already, maybe more. How could I think you would come? The sky had imperceptibly turned into one continuous storm cloud, the passersby walked even faster, hunched over, holding on to their hats, and a lady who was crossing the square opened her umbrella as she went. It would be a real miracle if you were to arrive now.

The old woman had meticulously placed a marker in her book and paused as if lost in thought. My guess is she was conjuring up a rich foreigner from the Adlon Hotel who would buy all her wares, and overpay, and order more, many more picture postcards and guidebooks of all kinds. And she probably was not very warm either in that velours jacket. You _had _promised you would come. I remembered the phone call, and the fleeting shadow of your voice. God, how I wanted to see you. The ill wind started gusting again. I turned up my collar.

Suddenly the window of the guardhouse opened, and a green soldier hailed the old woman. She quickly scrambled down from her stool and, with her thrust-out belly, scuttled up to the window. With a relaxed motion, the soldier handed her a streaming mug and closed the sash. His green shoulder turned and withdrew into the murky depths.

Gingerly carrying the mug, the woman returned to her seat. It was coffee with milk, judging by the brown fringe of skin sticking to the rim.

Then she began drinking. I have never seen a person drink with such utter, profound, concentrated relish. She forgot her stand, the postcards, the chill wind, her American client, she just sipped, sucked, disappeared totally into her coffee--exactly as I forgot about my vigil and saw only the velours jacket, the bliss-dimmed eyes, the stubby hands clutching the mug in their woolen mittens. She drank for a long time, drank in slow swallows, reverently licking off the fringe of skin, heating her palms on the warm tin. And a dark, sweet warmth poured into my soul. My soul, too, was drinking and heating itself, and the brown little woman tasted of coffee with milk.

She finished. For a moment she paused, motionless. Then she rose and headed for the window to return the mug.

But she stopped halfway, and her lips gathered into a little smile. She scuttled rapidly back to her stand, snatched up two colored postcards, and, hurrying back to the iron grille of the window, softly tapped on the glass with her small woolly fist. The grille opened, a green sleeve glided out, with a gleaming button on the cuff, and she thrust mug and cards into the dark window with a series of hasty nods. The soldier, examining the photographs, turned away into the interior, slowly shutting the sash behind him.

Here I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in t he speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.

And at that instant you arrived at last--or, rather, not you but a German couple, he in a raincoat, legs in long stockings like green bottles; she slender and tall, in a panther coat. They approached the stand, the man began selecting, and my little old coffeewoman, flushed, puffed up, looked now into his eyes, now at the cards, fussing, moving her eyebrows tensely like an old cabbie urging on his nag with his whole body. But the German had barely had time to pick something out when, with a shrug of her shoulder, his wife tugged him away by the sleeve. It was then I noticed that she resembled you. The similarity was not in the features, not in the clothes, but in that squeamish, unkind grimace, in that cursory, indifferent glance. The two of them walked on without buying anything, and the old woman only smiled, replaced her postcards in their slots, and again became absorbed in her red book. There was no point in waiting any longer. I departed along darkening streets, peering into the faces of passersby, capturing smiles and amazing little motions--the bobbing of a girl's pigtail as she tossed a ball against a wall, the heavenly melancholy reflected in a horse's purplish, oval eye. I captured and collected all of it. The oblique, plump raindrops grew more frequent, and I recalled the cool coziness of my studio, the muscles, foreheads, and strands of hair that I had modeled, and felt in my fingers the subtle tingle of my thought starting to sculpt.

It grew dark. The rain was gusting. The wind greeted me turbu-lently at every corner. Then a streetcar clanged past, its windows agleam with amber, its interior filled with black silhouettes. I hopped aboard as it passed and began drying my rain-soaked hands.

The people in the car looked sullen and swayed sleepily. The black windowpanes were specked with a multitude of minute raindrops, like a night sky overcast with a beadwork of stars. We were clattering along a street lined with noisy chestnut trees, and I kept imagining that the humid boughs were lashing the windows. And when the tram halted one could hear, overhead, the chestnuts plucked by the wind knocking against the roof. Knock--then again, resiliently, gently: knock, knock. The tram would chime and start, the gleam of the streetlamps shattered in the wet glass, and, with a sensation of poignant happiness, I awaited the repetition of those meek, lofty sounds. The brakes slammed on for a stop. Again a round, solitary chestnut dropped, and, after a moment, another thumped and rolled along the roof: knock, knock. . . .

DETAILS OF A SUNSET

THE last streetcar was disappearing in the mirrorlike murk of the street and, along the wire above it, a spark of Bengal light, crackling and quivering, sped into the distance like a blue star.

"Well, might as well just plod along, even though you are pretty drunk, Mark, pretty drunk. ..."

The spark went out. The roofs glistened in the moonlight, silvery angles broken by oblique black cracks.

Through this mirrory darkness he staggered home: Mark Standfuss, a salesclerk, a demigod, fair-haired Mark, a lucky fellow with a high starched collar. At the back of his neck, above the white line of that collar, his hair ended in a funny, boyish little tag that had escaped the barber's scissors. That little tag was what made Klara fall in love with him, and she swore that it was true love, that she had quite forgotten the handsome ruined foreigner who last year had rented a room from her mother, Frau Heise.

"And yet, Mark, you're drunk. ..."

That evening there had been beer and songs with friends in honor of Mark and russet-haired, pale Klara, and in a week they would be married; then there would be a lifetime of bliss and peace, and of nights with her, the red blaze of her hair spreading all over the pillow, and, in the morning, again her quiet laughter, the green dress, the coolness of her bare arms.

In the middle of a square stood a black wigwam: the tram tracks were being repaired. He remembered how today he had got under her short sleeve, and kissed the touching scar from her smallpox vaccination. And now he was walking home, unsteady on his feet from too much happiness and too much drink, swinging his slender cane, arid among the dark houses on the opposite side of the empty street a night echo clop-dopped in time with his footfalls; but grew silent when he turned at the corner where the same man as always, in apron and peaked cap, stood by his grill, selling frankfurters, crying out in a tender and sad birdlike whistle: _"Wiirstchen, wiirstchen . . ."_

Mark felt a sort of delicious pity for the frankfurters, the moon, the blue spark that had receded along the wire, and, as he tensed his body against a friendly fence, he was overcome with laughter, and, bending, exhaled into a little round hole in the boards the words "Klara, Klara, oh my darling!"

On the other side of the fence, in a gap between the buildings, was a rectangular vacant lot. Several moving vans stood there like enormous coffins. They were bloated from their loads. Heaven knows what was piled inside them. Oakwood trunks, probably, and chandeliers like iron spiders, and the heavy skeleton of a double bed. The moon cast a hard glare on the vans. To the left of the lot, huge black hearts were flattened against a bare rear wall--the shadows, many times magnified, of the leaves of a linden tree that stood next to a streetlamp on the edge of the sidewalk.

Mark was still chuckling as he climbed the dark stairs to his floor. He reached the final step, but mistakenly raised his foot again, and it came down awkwardly with a bang. While he was groping in the dark in search of the keyhole, his bamboo cane slipped out from under his arm and, with a subdued little clatter, slid down the staircase. Mark held his breath. He thought the cane would turn with the stairs and knock its way down to the bottom. But the high-pitched wooden click abruptly ceased. Must have stopped. He grinned with relief and, holding on to the banister (the beer singing in his hollow head), started to descend again. He nearly fell, and sat down heavily on a step, as he groped around with his hands.

Upstairs the door onto the landing opened. Frau Standfuss, with a kerosene lamp in her hand, half-dressed, eyes blinking, the haze of her hair showing from beneath her nightcap, came out and called, "Is that you, Mark?"

A yellow wedge of light encompassed the banisters, the stairs, and his cane, and Mark, panting and pleased, climbed up again to the landing, and his black, hunchbacked shadow followed him up along the wall.

Then, in the dimly lit room, divided by a red screen, the following conversation took place:

"You've had too much to drink, Mark."

"No, no, Mother . . . I'm so happy ..."

"You've got yourself all dirty, Mark. Your hand is black. . . ."

". . .so very happy. . . . Ah, that feels good . . . water's nice and cold. Pour some on the top of my head . . . more. . . . Everybody congratulated me, and with good reason. . . . Pour some more on."

"But they say she was in love with somebody else such a short time ago--a foreign adventurer of some kind. Left without paying five marks he owed Frau Heise. ..."

"Oh, stop--you don't understand anything. . . . We did such a lot of singing today. . . . Look, I've lost a button. ... I think they'll double my salary when I get married. ..."

"Come on, go to bed. . . . You're all dirty, and your new pants too."

That night Mark had an unpleasant dream. He saw his late father. His father came up to him, with an odd smile on his pale, sweaty face, seized Mark under the arms, and began to tickle him silently, violently, and relentlessly.

He only remembered that dream after he had arrived at the store where he worked, and he remembered it because a friend of his, jolly Adolf, poked him in the ribs. For one instant something flew open in his soul, momentarily froze still in surprise, and slammed shut. Then again everything became easy and limpid, and the neckties he offered his customers smiled brightly, in sympathy with his happiness. He knew he would see Klara that evening--he would only run home for dinner, then go straight to her house. . . . The other day, when he was telling her how cozily and tenderly they would live, she had suddenly burst into tears. Of course Mark had understood that these were tears of joy (as she herself explained); she began whirling about the room, her skirt like a green sail, and then she started rapidly smoothing her glossy hair, the color of apricot jam, in front of the mirror. And her face was pale and bewildered, also from happiness, of course. It was all so natural, after all. ...

"A striped one? Why certainly."

He knotted the tie on his hand, and turned it this way and that, enticing the customer. Nimbly he opened the flat cardboard boxes. . . .

Meanwhile his mother had a visitor: Frau Heise. She had come without warning, and her face was tear-stained. Gingerly, almost as if she were afraid of breaking into pieces, she lowered herself onto a stool in the tiny, spotless kitchen where Frau Standfuss was washing the dishes. A two-dimensional wooden pig hung on the wall, and a half-open matchbox with one burnt match lay on the stove.

"I have come to you with bad news, Frau Standfuss."

The other woman froze, clutching a plate to her chest.

"It's about Klara. Yes. She has lost her senses. That lodger of mine came back today--you know, the one I told you about. And Klara has gone mad. Yes, it all happened this morning. . . . She never wants to see your son again. . . . You gave her the material for a new dress; it will be returned to you. And here is a letter for Mark. Klara's gone mad. I don't know what to think. . . ."

Meanwhile Mark had finished work and was already on his way home. Crew-cut Adolf walked him all the way to his house. They both stopped, shook hands, and Mark gave a shove with his shoulder to the door which opened into cool emptiness.

"Why go home? The heck with it. Let's have a bite somewhere, you and I." Adolf stood, propping himself on his cane as if it were a tail. "The heck with it, Mark "

Mark gave his cheek an irresolute rub, then laughed. "All right. Only it's my treat."

When, half an hour later, he came out of the pub and said goodbye to his friend, the flush of a fiery sunset rilled the vista of the canal, and a rain-streaked bridge in the distance was margined by a narrow rim of gold along which passed tiny black figures.

He glanced at his watch and decided to go straight to his fiancee's without stopping at his mother's. His happiness and the limpidity of the evening air made his head spin a little. An arrow of bright copper struck the lacquered shoe of a fop jumping out of a car. The puddles, which still had not dried, surrounded by the bruise of dark damp (the live eyes of the asphalt), reflected the soft incandescence of the evening. The houses were as gray as ever; yet the roofs, the moldings above the upper floors, the gilt-edged lightning rods, the stone cupolas, the colonnettes--which nobody notices during the day, for day people seldom look up--were now bathed in rich ochre, the sunset's airy warmth, and thus they seemed unexpected and magical, those upper protrusions, balconies, cornices, pillars, contrasting sharply, because of their tawny brilliance, with the drab facades beneath.

Oh, how happy I am, Mark kept musing, how everything around celebrates my happiness.

As he sat in the tram he tenderly, lovingly examined his fellow passengers. He had such a young face, had Mark, with pink pimples on the chin, glad luminous eyes, an untrimmed tag at the hollow of his nape. . . . One would think fate might have spared him.

In a few moments I'll see Klara, he thought. She'll meet me at the door. She'll say she barely survived until evening.

He gave a start. He had missed the stop where he should have got off. On the way to the exit he tripped over the feet of a fat gentleman who was reading a medical journal; Mark wanted to tip his hat but nearly fell: the streetcar was turning with a screech. He grabbed an overhead strap and managed to keep his balance. The man slowly retracted his short legs with a phlegmy and cross growl. He had a gray mustache which twisted up pugnaciously. Mark gave him a guilty smile and reached the front end of the car. He grasped the iron handrails with both hands, leaned forward, calculated his jump. Down below, the asphalt streamed past, smooth and glistening. Mark jumped. There was a burn of friction against his soles, and his legs started running by themselves, his feet stamping with involuntary resonance. Several odd things occurred simultaneously: from the front of the car, as it swayed away from Mark, the conductor emitted a furious shout; the shiny asphalt swept upward like the seat of a swing; a roaring mass hit Mark from behind. He felt as if a thick thunderbolt had gone through him from head to toe, and then nothing. He was standing alone on the glossy asphalt. He looked around. He saw, at a distance, his own fig-ure, the slender back of Mark Standfuss, who was walking diagonally across the street as if nothing had happened. Marveling, he caught up with himself in one easy sweep, and now it was he nearing the sidewalk, his entire frame filled with a gradually diminishing vibration.

That was stupid. Almost got run over by a bus. . . .

The street was wide and gay. The colors of the sunset had invaded half of the sky. Upper stories and roofs were bathed in glorious light. Up there, Mark could discern translucent porticoes, friezes and frescoes, trellises covered with orange roses, winged statues that lifted skyward golden, unbearably blazing lyres. In bright undulations, ethereally, festively, these architectonic enchantments were receding into the heavenly distance, and Mark could not understand how he had never noticed before those galleries, those temples suspended on high.

He banged his knee painfully. That black fence again. He could not help laughing as he recognized the vans beyond. There they stood, like gigantic coffins. Whatever might they conceal within? Treasures? The skeletons of giants? Or dusty mountains of sumptuous furniture?

Oh, I must have a look. Or else Klara will ask, and I shan't know.

He gave a quick nudge to the door of one of the vans and went inside. Empty. Empty, except for one little straw chair in the center, comically poised askew on three legs.

Mark shrugged and went out on the opposite side. Once again the <-hot evening glow gushed into sight. And now in front of him was the familiar wrought-iron wicket, and further on Klara's window, crossed by a green branch. Klara herself opened the gate, and stood waiting, lifting her bared elbows, adjusting her hair. The russet tufts of her armpits showed through the sunlit openings of her short sleeves.

Mark, laughing noiselessly, ran up to embrace her. He pressed his cheek against the warm, green silk of her dress.

Her hands came to rest on his head.

"I was so lonely all day, Mark. But now you are here."

She opened the door, and Mark immediately found himself in the dining room, which struck him as being inordinately spacious and bright.

"When people are as happy as we are now," she said, "they can do without a hallway," Klara spoke in a passionate whisper, and he felt that her words had some special, wonderful meaning.

And in the dining room, around the snow-white oval of the tablecloth, sat a number of people, none of whom Mark had seen before at his fiancee's house. Among them was Adolf, swarthy, with his square-shaped head; there was also that short-legged, big-bellied old man who had been reading a medical journal in the tram and was still grumbling.

Mark greeted the company with a shy nod and sat down beside Klara, and in that same instant felt, as he had a short time ago, a bolt of atrocious pain pass through his whole frame. He writhed, and Klara's green dress floated away, diminished, and turned into the green shade of a lamp. The lamp was swaying on its cord. Mark was lying beneath it, with that inconceivable pain crushing his body, and nothing could be distinguished save that oscillating lamp, and his ribs were pressing against his heart, making it impossible to breathe, and someone was bending his leg, straining to break it, in a moment it would crack. He freed himself somehow, the lamp glowed green again, and Mark saw himself sitting a little way off, beside Klara, and no sooner had he seen it than he found himself brushing his knee against her warm silk skirt. And Klara was laughing, her head thrown back.

He felt an urge to tell about what had just happened, and, addressing all those present--jolly Adolf, the irritable fat man--uttered with an effort: "The foreigner is offering the aforementioned prayers on the river. ..."

It seemed to him that he had made everything clear, and apparently they had all understood. . . . Klara, with a little pout, pinched his cheek: "My poor darling. It'll be all right. ..."

He began to feel tired and sleepy. He put his arm around Klara's neck, drew her to him, and lay back. And then the pain pounced upon him again, and everything became clear.

Mark was lying supine, mutilated and bandaged, and the lamp was not swinging any longer. The familiar fat man with the mustache, now a doctor in a white gown, made worried growling small noises as he peered into the pupils of Mark's eyes. And what pain! . . . God, in a moment his heart would be impaled on a rib and burst . . . God, any instant now. . . . This is silly. Why isn't Klara here? . . .

The doctor frowned and clucked his tongue.

Mark no longer breathed, Mark had departed--whither, into what other dreams, none can tell.

THE THUNDERSTORM

AT the corner of an otherwise ordinary West Berlin street, under the canopy of a linden in full bloom, I was enveloped by a fierce fragrance. Masses of mist were ascending in the night sky and, when the last star-filled hollow had been absorbed, the wind, a blind phantom, covering his face with his sleeves, swept low through the deserted street. In lusterless darkness, over the iron shutter of a barbershop, its suspended shield--a gilt shaving basin--began swinging like a pendulum.

I came home and found the wind waiting for me in the room: it banged the casement window--and staged a prompt reflux when I shut the door behind me. Under my window there was a deep courtyard where, in the daytime, shirts, crucified on sun-bright clotheslines, shone through the lilac bushes. Out of that yard voices would rise now and then: the melancholy barking of ragmen or empty-bottle buyers; sometimes, the wail of a crippled violin; and, once, an obese blond woman stationed herself in the center of the yard and broke into such lovely song that maids leaned out of all the windows, bending their bare necks. Then, when she had finished, there was a moment of extraordinary stillness; only my landlady, a slatternly widow, was heard sobbing and blowing her nose in the corridor.

In that yard now a stifling gloom swelled, but then the blind wind, which had helplessly slithered into its depths, once again began reaching upward, and suddenly it regained its sight, swept up and, in the amber apertures of the black wall opposite, the silhouettes of arms and disheveled heads began to dart, as escaping windows were being caught and their frames resonantly and firmly locked. The lights went out. The next moment an avalanche of dull sound, the sound of distant thunder, came into motion, and started tumbling through the dark-violet sky. And again all grew still as it had when the beggar woman finished her song, her hands clasped to her ample bosom.

In this silence I fell asleep, exhausted by the happiness of my day, a happiness I cannot describe in writing, and my dream was full of you.

I woke up because the night had begun crashing to pieces. A wild, pale glitter was flying across the sky like a rapid reflection of colossal spokes. One crash after another rent the sky. The rain came down in a spacious and sonorous flow.

I was intoxicated by those bluish tremors, by the keen, volatile chill. I went up to the wet window ledge and inhaled the unearthly air, which made my heart ring like glass.

Ever nearer, ever more grandly, the prophet's chariot rumbled across the clouds. The light of madness, of piercing visions, illumined the nocturnal world, the metal slopes of roofs, the fleeing lilac bushes. The Thunder-god, a white-haired giant with a furious beard blown back over his shoulder by the wind, dressed in the flying folds of a dazzling raiment, stood, leaning backward, in his fiery chariot, restraining with tensed arms his tremendous, jet-black steeds, their manes a violet blaze. They had broken away from the driver's control, they scattered sparkles of crackling foam, the chariot careened, and the flustered prophet tugged at the reins in vain. His face was distorted by the blast and the strain; the whirlwind, blowing back the folds of his garment, bared a mighty knee; the steeds tossed their blazing manes and rushed on ever more violently, down, down along the clouds. Then, with thunderous hooves, they hurtled across a shiny rooftop, the chariot lurched, Elijah staggered, and the steeds, maddened by the touch of mortal metal, sprang skyward again. The prophet was pitched out. One wheel came off. From my window I saw its enormous fiery hoop toll down the roof, teeter at the edge, and jump off into darkness, while the steeds, dragging the overturned chariot, were already speeding along the highest clouds; the rumble died down, and the stormy blaze vanished in livid chasms.

The Thunder-god, who had fallen onto the roof, rose heavily. His sandals started slipping; he broke a dormer window with his foot, grunted, and, with a sweep of his arm grasped a chimney to steady himself. He slowly turned his frowning face as his eyes searched for something--probably the wheel that had flown off its golden axle. Then he glanced upward, his fingers clutching at his ruffled beard, shook his head crossly--this was probably not the first time that it happened--and, limping slightly, began a cautious descent.

In great excitement I tore myself away from the window, hurried to put on my dressing gown, and ran down the steep staircase straight to the courtyard. The storm had blown over but a waft of rain still lingered in the air. To the east an exquisite pallor was invading the sky.

The courtyard, which from above had seemed to brim with dense darkness, contained, in fact, nothing more than a delicate, melting mist. On its central patch of turf darkened by the damp, a lean, stoop-shouldered old man in a drenched robe stood muttering something and looking around him. Upon seeing me, he blinked angrily and said, "That you, Elisha?"

I bowed. The prophet clucked his tongue, scratching the while his bald brown spot.

"Lost a wheel. Find it for me, will you?"

The rain had now ceased. Enormous flame-colored clouds collected above the roofs. The shrubs, the fence, the glistening kennel, were floating in the bluish, drowsy air around us. We groped for a long time in various corners. The old man kept grunting, hitching up the heavy hem of his robe, splashing through the puddles with his round-toed sandals, and a bright drop hung from the tip of his large, bony nose. As I brushed aside a low branch of lilac, I noticed, on a pile of rubbish, amid broken glass, a narrow-rimmed iron wheel that must have belonged to a baby carriage. The old man exhaled warm relief above my ear. Hastily, even a little brusquely, he pushed me aside, and snatched up the rusty hoop. With a joyful wink he said, "So that's where it rolled."

Then he stared at me, his white eyebrows came together in a frown, and, as if remembering something, he said in an impressive voice, "Turn away, Elisha."

I obeyed, even shutting my eyes. I stood like that for a minute or so, and then could not control my curiosity any longer.

The courtyard was empty, except for the old, shaggy dog with its graying muzzle that had thrust its head out of the kennel and was looking up, like a person, with frightened hazel eyes. I looked up too. Elijah had scrambled onto the roof, the iron hoop glimmering behind his back. Above the black chimneys a curly auroral cloud loomed like an orange-hued mountain and, beyond it, a second and a third. The hushed dog and I watched together as the prophet, who had reached the crest of the roof, calmly and unhurriedly stepped upon the cloud and continued to climb, treading heavily on masses of mellow fire. . . .

Sunlight shot through his wheel whereupon it became at once huge and golden, and Elijah himself now seemed robed in flame, blending with the paradisal cloud along which he walked higher and higher until he disappeared in a glorious gorge of the sky.

Only then did the decrepit dog break into a hoarse morning bark. Ripples ran across the bright surface of a rain puddle. The light breeze stirred the geraniums on the balconies. Two or three windows awakened. In my soaked bedslippers and worn dressing gown I ran out into the street to overtake the first, sleepy tramcar, and pulling the skirts of my gown around me, and laughing to myself as I ran, I imagined how, in a few moments, I would be in your house and start telling you about that night's midair accident, and the cross old prophet who fell into my yard.

LA VENEZIANA

IN front of the red-hued castle, amid luxuriant elms, there was a vividly green grass court. Early that morning the gardener had smoothed it with a stone roller, extirpated a couple of daisies, redrawn the lines on the lawn with liquid chalk, and tightly strung a resilient new net between the posts. From a nearby village the butler had brought a carton within which reposed a dozen balls, white as snow, fuzzy to the touch, still light, still virgin, each wrapped like a precious fruit in its own sheet of transparent paper.

It was about five in the afternoon. The ripe sunshine dozed here and there on the grass and the tree trunks, filisred through the leaves, and placidly bathed the court, which had now come alive. There were four players: the Colonel himself (the castle's proprietor), Mrs. Mc-Gore, the host's son Frank, and Simpson, a college friend of his.

A person's motions while playing, like his handwriting in quieter moments, tell a good deal about him. Judging by the Colonel's blunt, stiff strokes, by the tense expression on his fleshy face that looked as if it had just spat out the massive gray mustache towering above his lip; by the fact that, in spite of the heat, he did not unbutton his shirt collar; and by the way he served, legs firmly planted apart like two white poles, one might conclude, firstly, that he had never been a good player, and, secondly, that he was a staid, old-fashioned, stubborn man, subject to occasional outbursts of seething anger. In fact, having hit the ball into the rhododendrons, he would exhale a terse oath through his teeth, or goggle his fishlike eyes at his racquet as if he could not forgive it for such a humiliating miss. Simpson, his partner by chance, a skinny blond youth with meek but mad eyes that fluttered and glinted behind his pince-nez like limp light-blue butterflies, was trying to play as best he could, although the Colonel, of course, never expressed his vexation when the loss of a point was the other's fault. But no matter how hard Simpson tried, no matter how he leaped about, none of his shots were successful. He felt as if he were coming apart at the seams, as if it were his timidity that kept him from hitting accurately, and that, instead of an instrument of play, meticulously and ingeniously assembled out of resonant, amber catgut strung on a superbly calculated frame, he was holding a clumsy dry log from which the ball would rebound with a painful crack, ending up in the net or in the bushes, and even managing to knock the straw hat off the cir-cular pate of Mr. McGore, who was standing beside the court and watching with no great interest as his young wife Maureen and the lightfooted, nimble Frank defeated their perspiring opponents.

If McGore, an old connoisseur of art, and restorer, reframer, and recanvaser of even older paintings, who regarded the world as a rather poor study daubed with unstable paints on a flimsy canvas, had been the kind of curious and impartial spectator it is sometimes so expedient to attract, he might have concluded that tall, dark-haired, cheerful Maureen lived with the same carefree manner with which she played, and that Frank carried over into life as well his ability to return the most difficult shot with graceful ease. But, just as handwriting can of-ten fool a fortune-teller by its superficial simplicity, the game of this white-clad couple in truth revealed nothing more than that Maureen played weak, soft, listless, female tennis, while Frank tried not to whack the ball too hard, recalling that he was not in a university tournament but in his father's park. He moved effortlessly toward the ball, and the long stroke gave a sense of physical fulfillment: every motion tends to describe a full circle, and even though, at its midpoint, it is trans-formed into the ball's linear flight, its invisible continuation is never-ilieless instantaneously perceived by the hand and runs up the muscles all the way to the shoulder, and it is precisely this prolonged internal scintilla that makes the stroke fulfilling. With a phlegmatic smile on his clean-shaven, suntanned face, his bared flawless teeth flashing, Frank would rise on his toes and, without visible effort, swing his naked forearm. That ample arc contained an electric kind of force and the ball would rebound with a particularly taut and accurate ring from his racquet's strings.

He had arrived that morning with his friend to vacation at his fa-ther's, and had found Mr. and Mrs. McGore whom he already knew and who had been visiting at the castle for more than a month; the Colonel, inflamed by a noble passion for paintings, willingly forgave McGore his foreign origin, his unsociable nature, and his lack of humor in exchange for the assistance this famous art expert gave him and for the magnificent, priceless canvases he procured. Especially magnificent was the Colonel's most recent acquisition, the portrait of a woman by Luciani, sold to him by McGore for a most sumptuous sum.

Today, McGore, at the insistence of his wife who was familiar with the Colonel's punctiliousness, had put on a pale summer suit instead of the frock coat he usually wore, but he still did not pass his host's muster: his shirt was starched and had pearl buttons, which was, of course, inappropriate. Also not very appropriate were his reddish-yellow half-boots and the absence of the trouser cuffs the late king had instantaneously made fashionable when he once had to traverse some puddles to cross the road; nor did the old straw hat with a gnawed-looking rim from behind which poked McGore's gray curls appear especially elegant. He had a somewhat simian face, with a protuberant mouth, a long gap between nose and lip, and a whole complex system of wrinkles, so that one could probably read his face as if it were a palm. As he watched the ball flying back and forth across the net, his little greenish eyes darted right, left, right, and paused to blink lazily when the ball's flight was interrupted. The vivid white of three pairs of flannels and one short, cheerful skirt contrasted beautifully in the brilliant sunlight with the apple-hued verdure, but, as we have already remarked, Mr. McGore considered life's Creator only a second-rate imitator of the masters whom he had been studying for forty years.

Meanwhile Frank and Maureen, having won five straight games, were about to win the sixth. Frank, who was serving, tossed the ball high with his left hand, leaned far back as if he were about to fall over, then immediately lunged forward with a broad arching motion, his glossy racquet giving a glancing blow to the ball, which shot across the net and bounced like white lightning past Simpson, who gave it a helpless sidewise look.

"That's it," said the Colonel.

Simpson felt greatly relieved. He was too ashamed of his inept strokes to be capable of enthusiasm for the game, and this shame was intensified by the extraordinary attraction he felt for Maureen. All the players bowed to each other as was the custom, and Maureen gave a sidelong smile as she adjusted the strap on her bared shoulder. Her husband was applauding with an air of indifference.

"We must have a game of singles," remarked the Colonel, slapping his son on the back with gusto as the latter, baring his teeth, pulled on his white, crimson-striped club blazer with a violet emblem on one side.

"Tea!" said Maureen. "I'm dying for some tea."

Everyone moved into the shadow of a giant elm, where the butler and the black-and-white maid had set up a portable table. There was tea dark as Munich beer, sandwiches consisting of cucumber slices on rectangles of crustless bread, a swarthy cake pocked with black raisins, and large strawberries with cream. There were also several earthenware hot ties of ginger ale.

"In my days," began the Colonel, lowering himself with ponderous relish into a folding canvas chair, "we preferred real, full-blooded English sports: rugby, cricket, hunting. There is something foreign about today's games, something skinny-legged. I am a staunch advocate of manly holds, juicy meat, an evening bottle of port--which does not prevent me," concluded the Colonel, as he smoothed his large mus-tache with a little brush, "from enjoying robust old paintings that have the luster of that same hearty wine."

" By the way, Colonel, the _Veneziana _has been hung," said McGore in his dreary voice, laying his hat on the lawn by his chair and rubbing the crown of his head, naked as a knee, around which still curled thick, dirty gray locks. "I picked the best-lighted spot in the gallery. They have rigged a lamp over it. I'd like you to have a look."

The Colonel fixed his glistening eyes in turn on his son, on the embarrassed Simpson, and on Maureen, who was laughing and grimacing from the hot tea.

"My dear Simpson," he exclaimed emphatically, pouncing on his chosen prey, "you haven't seen it yet! Pardon me for tearing you away from your sandwich, my friend, but I feel obligated to show you my new painting. The connoisseurs are going crazy over it. Come on. Of course I don't dare ask Frank."

Frank made a jovial bow. "You're right, Father. Paintings perturb me."

"We'll be right back, Mrs. McGore," said the Colonel as he got up. "Careful, you're going to step on the bottle," he addressed Simpson* who had also risen. "Prepare to be showered with beauty."

The three of them headed for the house across the softly sunlit lawn. Narrowing his eyes, Frank looked after them, looked down at McGore's hat abandoned on the grass by the chair (it exhibited to God, to the blue heavens, to the sun, its whitish underside with a dark greasy spot in the center, on the imprint of a Viennese hat shop), and then, turning toward Maureen, said a few words that will doubtless surprise the unperceptive reader. Maureen was sitting in a low arm-chair, covered with trembling ringlets of sunlight, pressing the gilt meshwork of the racquet to her forehead, and her face immediately be-came older and more severe when Frank said, "Now then, Maureen. It's time for us to make a decision. . . ."

2: McGore and the Colonel, like two guards, led Simpson into a cool, spacious hall, where paintings glistened on the walls and there was no furniture other than an oval table of glossy black wood standing in the center, all four of its legs reflected in the mirrorlike walnut-yellow of the parquet. Having conducted their prisoner to a large canvas in an opaque gilded frame, the Colonel and McGore stopped, the former with his hands in his pockets, the latter pensively picking some dry gray pollenlike matter out of his nostril and scattering it with a light rolling rub of his fingers.

The painting was very fine indeed. Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in half-profile, standing against a warm, black background. Rose-tinted cloth revealed her prominent, dark-hued neck, with extraordinarily tender folds beneath the ear, and the gray lynx fur with which her cherry-red mantlet was trimmed was slipping off her left shoulder. With the elongated fingers of her right hand spread in pairs, she seemed to have been on the point of adjusting the falling fur but to have frozen motionless, her hazel, uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the canvas. Her left hand, with white ripples of cambric encircling the wrist, was holding a basket of yellow fruit; the narrow crown of her headdress glowed atop her dark-chestnut hair. On the left the black was interrupted by a large right-angled opening straight into the twilight air and the bluish-green chasm of the cloudy evening.

Yet it was not those details of stupendous umbral interplay, nor the dark-hued warmth of the entire painting, that struck Simpson. It was something else. Tilting his head slightly to one side and blushing instantly, he said, "God, how she resembles--"

"My wife," finished McGore in a bored voice, scattering his dry pollen.

"It's incredibly good," whispered Simpson, tilting his head the other way, "incredibly ..."

"Sebastiano Luciani," said the Colonel, complacently narrowing his eyes, "was born at the end of the fifteenth century in Venice and died in the mid-sixteenth in Rome. His teachers were Bellini and Giorgione and his rivals Michelangelo and Raffaello. As you can see, he synthesized in his work the power of the former and the tenderness of the latter. It's true he was not overly fond of Santi, and here it was not just

a_ _matter of professional vanity--legend has it that our artist was taken with a Roman lady called Margherita, known subsequently as 'la Fornarina.' Fifteen years before his death he took monastic vows upon receiving from Clement VII a simple and profitable appointment. Ever since then he has been known as Fra Sebastiano del Piombo. _Piombo _means 'lead,' for his duties consisted of applying enormous lead seals to the fiery papal bulls. A dissolute monk, he was fond of carousing and composed indifferent sonnets. But what a master. . . ."

The Colonel gave Simpson a quick glance, noting with satisfaction the impression the painting had made on his speechless guest.

It should again be emphasized, however, that Simpson, unaccustomed as he was to the contemplation of artwork, of course could not fully appreciate the mastery of Sebastiano del Piombo, and the one thing that fascinated him--apart, of course, from the purely physiological effect of the splendid colors on his optic nerves--was the resemblance he had immediately noticed, even though he was seeing Maureen for the first time. And the remarkable thing was that the Vcneziana's face--the sleek forehead, bathed, as it were, in the recondite gloss of some olivaster moon, the totally dark eyes, the placidly expectant expression of her gently joined lips--clarified for him the real beauty of that other Maureen who kept laughing, narrowing her eyes, shifting her pupils in a constant struggle with the sunlight whose bright maculae glided across her white frock as she separated the rustling leaves with her racquet in search of a ball that had rolled into hiding.

Taking advantage of the liberty that an English host allows his guests, Simpson did not return to the tea table, but set off across the garden, rounding the star-shaped flower beds, and soon losing his way amid the checkerboard shadows of an avenue in the park, with its smell of fern and decaying leaves. The enormous trees were so old that their branches had had to be propped up by rusted braces, and they hunched over massively like dilapidated giants on iron crutches.

"God, what a stunning painting," Simpson whispered again. He walked unhurriedly, waving his racquet, stooped, his rubber soles lightly slapping. One must picture him clearly: gaunt, reddish-haired, clad in rumpled white trousers and a baggy gray jacket with half-belt; and also take careful note of the lightweight, rimless pince-nez on his pockmarked buttonlike nose, his weak, slightly mad eyes, and the freckles on his convex forehead, his cheekbones, and his neck, red from the summer sun.

He was in his second year at university, lived modestly, and diligently attended lectures on theology. He and Frank became friends not only because fate had assigned them the same apartment (consisting of two bedrooms and a common parlor), but, above all, like most weak-willed, bashful, secretly rapturous people, he involuntarily clung to someone in whom everything was vivid and firm--teeth, muscles, the physical strength of the soul, which is willpower. For his part, Frank, the pride of his college, who rowed in a racing scull and flew across the field with a leather watermelon under his arm, who knew how to land a punch on the very tip of the chin where there is the same kind of funny bone as in the elbow, a punch that would put an adversary to sleep--this extraordinary, universally liked Frank found something very flattering to his vanity in his friendship with the weak, awkward Simpson. Simpson, incidentally, was privy to something odd that Frank concealed from his other chums, who knew him only as a fine athlete and an exuberant chap, paying no attention whatever to occasional rumors that Frank was exceptionally good at drawing but showed his drawings to no one. He never spoke about art, was ever ready to sing and swig and carouse, yet suddenly a strange gloom would come over him and he would not leave his room or let anyone in, and only his roommate, lowly Simpson, would see what he was up to. What Frank created during these two or three days of ill-humored isolation he either hid or destroyed, and then, as if having paid an agonizing tribute to his vice, he would again become his merry, uncomplicated self. Only once did he bring this up with Simpson.

"You see," he said, wrinkling his limpid forehead and forcefully knocking the ashes from his pipe, "I feel that there is something about art, and painting in particular, that is effeminate, morbid, unworthy of a strong man. I try to struggle with this demon because I know how it can ruin people. If I yield to it completely, then, instead of a peaceful, ordered existence with finite distress and finite delights, with those precise rules without which any game loses its appeal, I shall be doomed to constant chaos, tumult, God knows what. I'll be tormented to my dying day, I shall become like one of those wretches I've run into in Chelsea, those vain, long-haired fools in velvet jackets-- harried, weak, enamored only of their sticky palettes. . . ."

But the demon must have been very potent. At the end of the winter semester, without a word to his father (thereby hurting him deeply), Frank went off in third class to Italy, to return a month later directly to the university, suntanned and joyous, as if he had rid himself once and for all of the murky fever of creation.

Then, with the advent of summer vacation, he invited Simpson for a stay at his father's and Simpson accepted in a burst of gratitude, for he was thinking with horror of the usual return home to his peaceful

northern town where some shocking crime occurred every month, and to his parson father, a gentle, harmless, but totally insane man who devoted more attention to his harp and his chamber metaphysics than to his flock.

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us. That is why Simpson, in front of whom the long-dead Venetian girl had just risen in her cambric and velvet, now reminisced, as he ambled along the violet dirt of the lane, soundless at this evening hour; he reminisced about his friendship with Frank, about his father's harp, about his own cramped, cheerless youth. The resonant forest stillness was complemented now and then by the crackle of a branch touched one knew not by whom. A red squirrel scurried down a tree trunk, ran across to a neighboring trunk with its bushy tail erect, and darted up again. In the soft flow of sunlight between two tongues of foliage midges circled like golden dust, and a bumblebee, entangled in the heavy lacework of a fern, already buzzed with a more reserved, evening tone.

Simpson sat down on a bench spattered with the white traces of dried bird droppings, and hunched over, propping his sharp elbows on his knees. He sensed the onset of an auditory hallucination that had af-flicted him since childhood. When in a meadow, or, as now, in a quiet, already duskening wood, he would involuntarily begin to wonder if, through this silence, he might perhaps hear the entire, enormous world traversing space with a melodious whistle, the bustle of distant cities, the pounding of sea waves, the singing of telegraph wires above the deserts. Gradually his hearing, guided by his thoughts, began to detect those sounds in earnest. He could hear the chugging of a train, even though the tracks might have been dozens of miles away; then the clanging and screeching of wheels and--as his recondite hearing grew ever more acute--the passengers' voices, their coughs and laughter, the rustling of their newspapers, and, finally, plunging totally into his acoustic mirage, he clearly distinguished their heartbeat, and the rolling crescendo of that beat, that drone, that clangor, deafened Simpson. He opened his eyes with a shudder and realized that the pounding was that of his own heart.

"Lugano, Como, Venice . . . ," he murmured as he sat on the bench under a soundless hazelnut tree, and right away he heard the subdued plashing of sunny towns, and then, closer, the tinkling of bells, the whistle of pigeon wings, a high-pitched laugh akin to the laugh of Maureen, and the ceaseless shuffling of unseen passersby. He wanted to halt his hearing there, but his hearing, like a torrent, rushed ever deeper. Another instant and, unable now to halt his extraordinary plunge, he was hearing not only their footfalls but their hearts. Millions of hearts were swelling and thundering, and Simpson, coming fully to his senses, realized that _all _those sounds, _all _those hearts were concentrated in the frenzied beat of his own.

He raised his head. A light wind, like the motion of a silk cape, passed along the avenue. The sun's rays were a gentle yellow.

He rose with a feeble smile and, forgetting his racquet on the bench, went toward the house. It was time to dress for dinner.

3: "It's hot with this fur on, though! No, Colonel, it's only cat. It's true my Venetian rival wore something more expensive. But the color is the same, isn't it? A perfect likeness, in short."

"If I dared I'd coat you with varnish, and send Luciani's canvas up to the attic," courteously countered the Colonel, who, in spite of his strict principles, was not averse to challenging a lady as attractive as Maureen to a flirtatious verbal duel.

"I would split with laughter," she parried.

"I fear, Mrs. McGore, that we make a terribly poor background for you," said Frank, with a broad, boyish grin. "We are crude, complacent anachronisms. Now if your husband were to don a coat of armor--"

"Fiddlesticks," said McGore. "The impression of antiquity can be evoked as easily as the impression of color by pressing one's upper eyelid. On occasion I allow myself the luxury of imagining today's world, our machines, our fashions, as they will appear to our descendants four or five hundred years hence. I assure you that I feel as ancient as a Renaissance monk."

"Have some more wine, my dear Simpson," offered the Colonel.

Bashful, quiet Simpson, who was seated between McGore and his wife, had put his large fork to work prematurely, during the second course when he should have used the small one, so that he had only the small fork and a large knife for the meat course, and now, as he manipulated them, one of his hands had a kind of limp. When the main course was brought around the second time, he helped himself out of nervousness, then noticed he was the only one eating and everyone was waiting impatiently for him to finish. He got so flustered that he pushed away his still-full plate, nearly knocked over his glass, and began slowly reddening. He had already come ablaze several times during dinner, not because he actually had something to be ashamed about, but because he thought how he might blush for no reason, and then the pink blood colored his cheeks, his forehead, even his neck, and it was no more possible to halt that blind, agonizing, hot flush yhan to confine the emerging sun behind its cloud. At the first such onset he deliberately dropped his napkin, but, when he raised his head, he was a fearful sight: at any moment his starched collar would catch lire too. Another time he tried to suppress the onslaught of the hot, silent wave by addressing a question to Maureen--whether or not she liked playing lawn tennis--but Maureen, alas, did not hear him, asked him what he had said, whereupon, as he repeated his foolish phrase, Simpson instantly blushed to the point of tears and Maureen, out of charity, turned away and started on some other topic. __The fact that he was sitting next to her, sensing the warmth of her check and of her shoulder, from which, as in the painting, the gray fur was slipping, and that she seemed about to pull it up, but stopped at Simpson's question, extending and twining her slender, elongated lingers, filled him with such languor that there was a moist sparkle in his eyes from the crystal blaze of the wineglasses, and he kept imagining that the circular table was an illuminated island, slowly revolving, floating somewhere, gently carrying off those seated around it. Through the open French windows one could see, in the distance, the skittle shapes of the terrace balustrade, and the breath of the blue night air was stifling. Maureen's nostrils inhaled this air; her soft, totally dark eyes remained unsmiling as they glided from face to face, even when a smile would faintly raise a corner of her tender, unpainted lips. Her face remained within a somewhat swarthy shadow, and only her forehead was bathed by the levigate light. She said fatuous, funny things. Everyone laughed, and the wine gave the Colonel a nice flush. McGore, who was peeling an apple, encircled it with his palm like a monkey, his small face with its halo of gray hair wrinkled from the ef-fort, and the silver knife tightly clutched in his dark, hairy fist detached endless spirals of red and yellow peel. Frank's face was not visible to Simpson, since between them stood a bouquet of flaming, fleshy dahlias in a sparkling vase.

After supper, which ended with port and coffee, the Colonel, Maureen, and Frank sat down to play bridge, with a dummy since the other two did not play.

The old restorer went out, bandy-legged, onto the darkened balcony and Simpson followed, feeling Maureen's warmth recede behind him.

McGore eased himself with a grunt into a wicker chair near the balustrade and offered Simpson a cigar. Simpson perched sideways on the railing and lit up awkwardly, narrowing his eyes and inflating his

cheeks.

"I guess you liked that old rake del Piombo's Venetian lass," said McGore, releasing a rosy puff of smoke into the dark.

"Very much," replied Simpson, and added, "Of course, I don't know anything about pictures--"

"All the same, you liked it," nodded McGore. "Splendid. That's the first step toward understanding. I, for one, have dedicated my whole life to this."

"She looks absolutely real," Simpson said pensively. "It's enough to make one believe mysterious tales about portraits coming to life. I read somewhere that some king descended from a canvas, and, as

soon as--"

McGore dissolved in a subdued, brittle laugh. "That's nonsense, of course. But another phenomenon does occur--the inverse, so to

speak."

Simpson glanced at him. In the dark of the night his starched shirt-front bulged like a whitish hump, and the flame of his cigar, like a ruby pinecone, illumined his small, wrinkled face from below. He had had a lot of wine and was, apparently, in the mood to talk.

"Here is what happens," McGore continued unhurriedly. "Instead of inviting a painted figure to step out of its frame, imagine someone managing to step into the picture himself. Makes you laugh, doesn't it? And yet I've done it many a time. I have had the good fortune of visiting all the art museums of Europe, from The Hague to Petersburg and from London to Madrid. When I found a painting I particularly liked, I would stand directly in front of it and concentrate all my willpower on one thought: to enter it. It was an eerie sensation, of course. I felt like the apostle about to step off his bark onto the water's surface. But what bliss ensued! Let us say I was facing a Flemish canvas, with the Holy Family in the foreground, against a smooth, limpid, landscape. You know, with a road zigzagging like a white snake, and green hills. Then, finally, I would take the plunge. I broke free from real life and entered the painting. A miraculous sensation! The coolness, the placid air permeated with wax and incense. I became a living part of the painting and everything around me came alive. The pilgrims' silhouettes on the road began to move. The Virgin Mary was saying something in a rapid Flemish patter. The wind rippled through the conventional flowers. The clouds were gliding. ... But the delight did not last long. I would get the feeling that I was softly congealing, cohering with the canvas, merging into a film of oil color. Then I would shut my eyes tight, yank with all my strength, and leap out. There was a gentle plop, as when you pull your foot out of the mud. I would open my eyes, and find myself lying on the floor beneath a splendid but lifeless painting."

Simpson listened with attention and embarrassment. When McGore paused, he gave a barely perceptible start and looked around. Everything was as before. Below, the garden breathed the darkness, one could see the dimly lit dining room through the glass door, and, in the distance, through another open doorway, a bright corner of the parlor with three figures playing cards. What strange things McGore was saying! ...

"You understand, don't you," he continued, shaking off some scaly ash, "that in another instant the painting would have sucked me in forever. I would have vanished into its depths and lived on in its landscape, or else, grown weak with terror, and lacking the strength either to return to the real world or to penetrate the new dimension, I would have jelled into a figure painted on the canvas, like the anachronism hank was talking about. Yet, despite the danger, I have yielded to temptation time after time. . . . Oh, my friend, I've fallen in love with Madonnas! I remember my first infatuation--a Madonna with an azure corona, by the delicate Raffaello. . . . Beyond her, at a distance, two men stood by a column, calmly chatting. I eavesdropped on their conversation--they were discussing the worth of some dagger. . . . But the most enchanting Madonna of all comes from the brush of Bernardo Luini. All his creations contain the quiet and the delicacy of the lake on whose shore he was born, Lago Maggiore. The most delicate of masters. His name even yielded a new adjective, _luinesco. _His host Madonna has long, caressingly lowered eyes, and her apparel has light-blue, rose-red, misty-orange tints. A gaseous, rippling haze encircles her brow, and that of her reddish-haired infant. He raises a pale apple toward her, she looks at it lowering her gentle, elongated eyes . . . Luinesque eyes . . . God, how I kissed them. ..."

McGore fell silent and a dreamy smile tinged his thin lips, lighted by the cigar's flame. Simpson held his breath and, as before, felt he was slowly gliding off into the night.

"Complications did occur," McGore went on after clearing his throat. "I got an ache in my kidneys after a goblet of strong cider that _a _plump Rubens bacchante once served me, and I caught such a chill on the foggy, yellow skating rink of one of the Dutchmen that I went on coughing and bringing up phlegm for a whole month. That's the
kind of thing that can happen, Mr. Simpson."

McGore's chair creaked as he rose and straightened his waistcoat. "Got carried away," he remarked dryly. "Time for bed. God knows how long they'll go on slapping their cards about. I'm off--good

night."

He crossed the dining room and the parlor, nodding to the players as he went, and disappeared in the shadows beyond. Simpson was left alone on his balustrade. His ears rang with McGore's high-pitched voice. The magnificent starry night reached to the very balcony, and the enormous velvety shapes of the black trees were motionless. Through the French window, beyond a band of darkness, he could see the pink-hued parlor lamp, the table, the players' faces rouged by the light. He saw the Colonel rise. Frank followed suit. From afar, as if over the telephone, came the Colonel's voice. "I'm an old man, I turn in early. Good night, Mrs. McGore."

And Maureen's laughing voice: "I'll go in a minute too. Or else my husband will be cross with me. ..."

Simpson heard the door close in the distance behind the Colonel. Then an extraordinary thing happened. From his vantage point in the darkness he saw Maureen and Frank, now alone far off in that lacuna of mellow light, slip into each other's arms, he saw Maureen fling back her head and bend it back farther and farther beneath Frank's violent and prolonged kiss. Then, catching up her fallen fur and giving Frank's hair a ruffle, she disappeared into the distance with a muffled slam of the door. Frank smoothed his hair with a smile, thrust his hands in his pockets, and, whistling softly, crossed the dining room on his way to the balcony. Simpson was so flabbergasted that he froze still, his fingers clutching the railing, and gazed with horror as the starched shirtfront and the dark shoulder approached through the glistening glass. When he came out onto the balcony and saw his friend's silhouette in the dark, Frank gave a slight shudder and bit his lip.

Simpson awkwardly crawled off the railing. His legs were trembling. He made a heroic effort: "Marvelous night. McGore and I have been chatting out here."

Frank said calmly, "He lies a lot, that McGore. On the other hand, when he gets going he's worth a listen."

"Yes, it's very curious. . . ." lamely concurred Simpson. "The Big Dipper," said Frank and yawned with his mouth closed. Then, in an even voice, he added, "Of course I know that you are a perfect gentleman, Simpson."

Next morning a warm drizzle came pattering, shimmering, stretching in thin threads across the dark background of the forest's depths. Only three people came down for breakfast--first the Colonel and listless, wan Simpson; then Frank, fresh, bathed, shaved to a high gloss, with an innocent smile on his overly thin lips.

The Colonel was markedly out of spirits. The night before, during the bridge game, he had noticed something. Bending down hastily to retrieve a dropped card, he had seen Frank's knee pressed against Maureen's. This must be stopped immediately. For some time already the Colonel had had an inkling that something was not right. No wonder Frank had rushed off to Rome, where the McGores always went in the spring. His son was free to do as he liked, but to stand for something like this here, at home, in the ancestral castle--no, the most stringent measures must be taken immediately.

The Colonel's displeasure had a disastrous effect on Simpson. He had the impression that his presence was a burden to his host, and was at a loss for a subject of conversation. Only Frank was placidly jovial as always, and, his teeth asparkle, munched with gusto on hot toast spread with orange marmalade.

When they had finished their coffee, the Colonel lit his pipe and rose.

"Didn't you want to take a look at the new car, Frank? Let's walk over to the garage. Nothing to do in this rain anyway."

Then, sensing that poor Simpson had remained mentally suspended in midair, the Colonel added, "I've got a few good books here, my dear Simpson. Help yourself if you wish."

Simpson came to with a start and pulled some bulky red volume down from the shelf. It turned out to be the _Veterinary Herald _for 1895.

"I need to have a little talk with you," began the Colonel when he and Frank had tugged on their crackling raincoats and walked out into a mist of rain.

Frank gave his father a rapid glance.

"How shall I put it," he pondered, puffing on his pipe. "Listen, Frank," he said, taking the plunge--and the wet gravel crunched more succulently under his soles--"it has come to my attention, it doesn't matter how, or, to put it more simply, I have noticed . . . Dammit*

Frank, what I mean is, what kind of relations do you have with McGore's wife?"

Frank replied quietly and coolly, "I'd rather not discuss that with you, Father," meanwhile thinking angrily to himself: what a scoundrel--he did rat on me!

"Obviously I cannot demand--" began the Colonel, and stopped short. At tennis, after the first bad shot, he still managed to control himself.

"Might be a good idea to fix this footbridge," remarked Frank, hitting a rotten timber with his heel.

"To hell with the bridge!" said the Colonel. This was his second miss, and the veins swelled on his forehead in an irate vee.

The chauffeur, who had been banging around with some buckets by the garage gates, yanked off his checkered cap upon seeing his master. He was a short, stocky man with a cropped yellow mustache.

"Morning, sir," he said amiably and pushed open one of the gates with his shoulder. In the petrol-and-leather-scented penumbra glimmered an enormous, black, brand-new Rolls-Royce.

"And now let us take a walk in the park," said the Colonel in a toneless voice when Frank had had his fill of examining cylinders and levers.

The first thing that happened in the park was that a large, cold drop of water fell from a branch, inside the Colonel's collar. And actually it was this drop that made the cup overflow. After a masticating movement of his lips, as though rehearsing the words, he abruptly thundered: "I warn you, Frank, in my house I shall not stand for any i adventures of the French-novel genre. Furthermore, McGore is my friend--can you understand that or not?"

Frank picked up the racquet Simpson had forgotten on the bench the previous day. The damp had turned it into a figure eight. Rotten racquet, Frank thought with revulsion. His father's words were pounding ponderously past: "I shall not stand for it," he was saying. "If you cannot behave properly, then leave. I am displeased with you, Frank, I am terribly displeased with you. There is something about you that I don't understand. At university you do poorly at your studies. In Italy God knows what you were up to. They tell me you paint. I suppose I'm not worthy of being shown your daubings. Yes, daubings. I can imagine. ... A genius indeed! For you doubtless consider yourself a genius, or, even better, a futurist. And now we have these love affairs , to boot. ... In short, unless--"

Here the Colonel noticed that Frank was whistling softly and nonchalantly through his teeth. The Colonel stopped and goggled his eyes.

Frank flung the twisted racquet into the bushes like a boomerang, smiled, and said, "This is all poppycock, Father. I read in a book on the Afghanistan war about what you did there and what you were decorated for. It was absolutely foolish, featherbrained, suicidal, but it was an exploit. That is what counts. While your disquisitions are poppy-cock. Good day."

And the Colonel remained standing alone in the middle of the lane, frozen in wonderment and wrath.

The distinctive feature of everything extant is its monotony. We par-take of food at predetermined hours because the planets, like trains that are never late, depart and arrive at predetermined times. The average person cannot imagine life without such a strictly established timetable. But a playful and sacrilegious mind will find much to amuse it imagining how people would exist if the day lasted ten hours today, eighty-five tomorrow, and after tomorrow a few minutes. One can say a priori that, in England, such uncertainty with regard to the exact du-rat ion of the coming day would lead first of all to an extraordinary pro-liferation of betting and sundry other gambling arrangements. One could lose his entire fortune because a day lasted a few more hours than he had supposed on the eve. The planets would become like racehorses, and what excitement would be aroused by some sorrel Mars as it tackled the final celestial hurdle! Astronomers would assume bookmakers' functions, the god Apollo would be depicted in a flaming jockey cap, and the world would merrily go mad. Unfortunately, however, that is not the way things are. Exactitude is always grim, and our calendars, where the world's existence is calculated in advance, are like the schedule of some inexorable examination. Of course there is something soothing and insouciant about this regimen devised by a cosmic Frederick Taylor. Yet how splendidly, how ra-diantly the world's monotony is interrupted now and then by the book of a genius, a comet, a crime, or even simply by a single sleepless night. Our laws, though--our pulse, our digestion are firmly linked to the harmonious motion of the stars, and any attempt to disturb this regularity is punished, at worst by beheading, at best by a headache. Then again, the world was unquestionably created with good intentions and it is no one's fault if it sometimes grows boring, if the music of the spheres reminds some of us of the endless repetitions of a hurdy-gurdy.

Simpson was particularly conscious of this monotony. He found it somehow terrifying that today, too, breakfast would be followed by lunch, tea by supper, with inviolable regularity. He wanted to scream at the thought that things would continue like that all his life, he wanted to struggle like someone who has awakened in his coffin. The drizzle was still shimmering outside the window, and having to stay indoors made his ears ring as they do when you have a fever. McGore spent the whole day in the workshop that had been set up for him in one of the castle's towers. He was busy restoring the varnish of a small, dark picture painted on wood. The workshop smelled of glue, turpentine, and garlic, which is used for removing greasy spots from paintings. On a small carpenter's bench near the press sparkled retorts containing hydrochloric acid and alcohol; scattered about lay scraps of flannel, nostriled sponges, assorted scrapers. McGore was wearing an old dressing gown, glasses, a shirt with no starched collar, and a stud nearly the size of a doorbell button protruding right under his Adam's apple; his neck was thin, gray, and covered with senile excrescences, and a black skullcap covered his bald spot. With a delicate rotary rubbing of his fingers already familiar to the reader, he was sprinkling a pinch of ground tar, carefully rubbing it into the painting so that the old, yellowed varnish, abraded by the powdery particles, itself turned into dry dust.

The castle's other denizens sat in the parlor. The Colonel had angrily unfolded a giant newspaper and, as he gradually cooled down, was reading aloud an emphatically conservative article. Then Maureen and Frank got involved in a game of Ping-Pong. The little celluloid ball, with its crackly, melancholy ring, flew back and forth across the green net intersecting the long table, and of course Frank played masterfully, moving only his wrist as he nimbly flicked the thin wooden paddle left and right.

Simpson traversed all the rooms, biting his lips and adjusting his pince-nez. Eventually he reached the gallery. Pale as death, carefully closing behind him the heavy, silent door, he tiptoed up to Fra Bastiano del Piombo's _Veneziana. _She greeted him with her familiar opaque gaze, and her long fingers paused on their way to her fur wrap, to the slipping crimson folds. Caressed by a whiff of honeyed darkness, he glanced into the depths of the window that interrupted the black background. Sand-tinted clouds stretched across the greenish blue; toward them rose dark, fractured cliffs amid which wound a pale-hued trail, while lower down there were indistinct wooden huts, and, in one of them, Simpson thought he saw a point of light flicker for an instant. As he peered through this ethereal window, he sensed that the Venetian lady was smiling, but his swift glance failed to catch that smile; only the shaded right corner of her gently joined lips was slightly raised. At that moment something within him deliciously gave way, and he yielded totally to the picture's warm enchantment. One must bear in mind that he was a man of morbidly rapturous temperament, that he had no idea of life's realities, and that, for him, impressionability took the place of intellect. A cold tremor, like a quick dry hand, brushed his back, and he realized immediately what he must do. However, when he looked around and saw the sheen of parquet, the table, and the blind white gloss of the paintings where the drizzly light pouring through the window fell on them, he had a feeling of shame and fear. And, in spite of another momentary surge of the previous enchantment, he already knew that he could hardly carry out what, a minute ago, he could have done unthinkingly.

Fixing his eyes on the Veneziana's face, he backed away from her and suddenly flung his arms apart. His coccyx banged painfully on something. He looked around and saw the black table behind him. Trying to think about nothing, he climbed onto it, stood up fully erect lacing the Venetian lady, and once again, with an upward sweep of his arms, prepared to fly to her.

"Astonishing way to admire a painting. Invented it yourself, did you?"

It was Frank. He was standing, legs apart, in the doorway and gazing at Simpson with icy derision.

With a wild glint of pince-nez lenses in his direction, Simpson staggered awkwardly, like an alarmed lunatic. Then he hunched over, flushed hotly, and clambered clumsily to the floor.

Frank's face wrinkled with acute revulsion as he silently left the room. Simpson lunged after him.

"Please, I beg you, don't tell anyone. . . ." Without turning or stopping, Frank gave a squeamish shrug.

Toward evening the rain unexpectedly ceased. Someone, remembering, had turned off the taps. A humid orange sunset came aquiver amid the boughs, broadened, was reflected in all the puddles simultaneously. Dour little McGore was dislodged from his tower by force.

He smelled of turpentine, and had burned his hand with a hot iron. He reluctantly pulled on his black coat, turned up the collar, and went out with the others for a stroll. Only Simpson stayed home, on the pretext that he absolutely must answer a letter brought by the evening post. Actually no answer was required, since it was from the university milkman and demanded immediate payment of a bill for two shillings and ninepence.

For a long time Simpson sat in the advancing twilight, leaning back aimlessly in the leather armchair. Then, with a shudder, he realized he was falling asleep, and started thinking how he could get away from the castle as quickly as possible. The simplest way would be to say his father was ill: like many bashful people, Simpson was capable of lying without batting an eyelash. Yet it was difficult for him to leave. Something dark and delicious held him back. How attractive the dark rocks looked in the fenestral chasm. . . . What a joy it would be to embrace her shoulder, take from her left hand the basket with its yellow fruit, to walk off peacefully with her along that pale path into the penumbra of the Venetian evening. . . .

Once again he caught himself falling asleep. He got up and washed his hands. From downstairs sounded the spherical, dignified dinner gong.

Thus from constellation to constellation, from meal to meal, proceeds the world, and so does this tale. But its monotony will now be broken by an incredible miracle, an unheard-of adventure. Of course neither McGore, who had again painstakingly freed of glossy red ribbons the faceted nudity of an apple, nor the Colonel, once more agreeably flushed after four glasses of port (not to mention two of white Burgundy) had any way of knowing what woes the morrow would bring. Dinner was followed by the invariable game of bridge, during which the Colonel noticed with pleasure that Frank and Maureen did not even glance at each other. McGore went off to work; Simpson seated himself in a corner and opened a portfolio of prints, glancing only a couple of times from his corner at the players, having marveled in passing that Frank was so cold toward him, while Maureen seemed to have faded somehow, to have yielded her place to another. . . . How insignificant these thoughts were compared to the sublime anticipation, the enormous excitement that he now tried to outwit by examining indistinct lithographs.

When they were parting company, and Maureen nodded to him with a good-night smile, he absently, unabashedly, smiled back.

That night, sometime after one o'clock, the old watchman, who had once worked as groom for the Colonel's father, was, as usual, taking a short walk along the park lanes. He knew perfectly well that his duty was purely perfunctory, since the location was exceptionally peaceful. He invariably turned in at eight, the alarm would go off with a clatter at one, and the watchman (a giant of an old fellow with venerable gray side-whiskers, which, incidentally, the gardener's children liked to tug) would awaken, light up his pipe, and clamber out into the night. Having once made the rounds of the dark, tranquil park, he would return to his small room, immediately undress, and, clad only in an imperishable undershirt that went very well with his whiskers, go back to bed and sleep through till morning.

That night, however, the old watchman noticed something that was not to his liking. He noticed from the park that one window of the castle was feebly illuminated. He knew with absolute precision that it was a window of the hall where the precious paintings were hung. Since he was an exceptionally cowardly old chap, he decided to pretend to himself that he had not noticed that strange light. But his conscientiousness got the upper hand, and he calmly determined that, while it was his duty to ascertain that there were no thieves in the park, he had no obligation to chase thieves within the house. And having thus determined, the old man went back to his quarters with a clear conscience--he lived in a little brick house by the garage--and straightaway fell into a dead man's sleep, which would have been impervious even to the roar of the new black car, had someone started it up in jest, deliberately opening the muffler cutout.

Thus the pleasant, innocuous old fellow, like some guardian angel, momentarily traverses this narrative and rapidly vanishes into the misty domains whence he was evoked by a whim of the pen.

But something really did happen in the castle.

Simpson awoke exactly at midnight. He had just fallen asleep and, as sometimes happens, the very act of falling asleep was what woke him. Propping himself on one arm, he looked into the darkness. His heart was thumping rapidly because he sensed that Maureen had entered his room. Just now, in his momentary dream, he had been talking to her, helping her climb the waxen path between black cliffs with their occasional glossy, oil-paint fissures. Now and then a dulcet breeze made the narrow white headdress quiver gently, like a sheet of thin paper, on her dark hair.

With a stifled exclamation Simpson felt for the switch. The light came in a spurt. There was no one in the room. He felt an acute sting of disappointment and lapsed into thought, shaking his head like a drunk. Then, moving drowsily, he rose from the bed and started to dress, listlessly smacking his lips. He was guided by a vague sensation that he must dress severely and smartly. So it was with a kind of somnolent meticulousness that he buttoned his low waistcoat on his belly, tied the black bow of his tie, and for a long time pinched with two fingers at a nonexistent little worm on the satin lapel of his jacket. Vaguely recollecting that the simplest way into the gallery was from outdoors, he slipped out like a silent breeze through the French window into the dark, humid garden. Looking as if they had been doused with mercury, black bushes glistened in the starlight. Somewhere an owl was hooting. With a light, quick step Simpson walked across the lawn, amid gray bushes, rounding the massive house. For a moment he was sobered by the night's freshness and the intensely shining stars. He stopped, bent over, and then collapsed like an empty suit of clothes onto the grass in the narrow interstice between flower bed and castle wall. A wave of drowsiness came over him, and he tried to shake it off with a jerk of his shoulder. He had to hurry. She was waiting. He thought he heard her insistent whisper. . . .

He was unaware of how he had got up, gone indoors, and switched on the lights, bathing Luciani's canvas in a warm sheen. The Venetian girl stood half-facing him, alive and three-dimensional. Her dark eyes gazed into his without the sparkle, the rosy fabric of her blouse set off with an unhabitual warmth the dark-hued beauty of her neck and the delicate creases under her ear. A gently mocking smile was frozen at the right corner of her expectantly joined lips. Her long fingers, spread in twos, stretched toward her shoulder, from which the fur and velvet were about to fall.

And Simpson, with a profound sigh, moved toward her and effortlessly entered the painting. A marvelous freshness immediately made his head spin. There was a scent of myrtle and of wax, with a very faint whiff of lemon. He was standing in a bare black room of some kind,

by a window that opened on evening, and at his very side stood a real, Venetian, Maureen--tall, gorgeous, all aglow from within. He realized that the miracle had happened, and slowly moved toward her. With a sidewise smile la Veneziana gently adjusted her fur and, lowering her hand into her basket, handed him a small lemon. Without taking his eyes off her now playfully mobile eyes, he accepted the yellow fruit from her hand, and, as soon as he felt its firm, roughish coolness and

the dry warmth of her long fingers, an incredible bliss came to a boil within him and began deliciously burbling. Then, with a start, he looked behind him toward the window. There, along a pale path amid some rocks, walked blue silhouettes with hoods and small lanterns.

Simpson looked about the room in which he was standing, but with-

out any awareness of a floor beneath his feet. In the distance, instead of a fourth wall, a far, familiar hall glimmered like water, with the black island of a table at its center. It was then that a sudden terror made

_ _him compress the cold little lemon. The enchantment had dissolved. He tried looking to his left at the girl but was unable to turn his neck. He was mired like a fly in honey--he gave a jerk and got stuck, feeling his blood and flesh and clothing turning into paint, growing into the varnish, drying on the canvas. He had become part of the painting, depicted in a ridiculous pose next to the Veneziana, and, directly in front of him, even more distinct than before, stretched the hall, rilled with

live, terrestrial air that, henceforth, he would not breathe.

9: Next morning McGore woke up earlier than usual. With his bare, hairy feet, with toenails like black pearls, he groped for his slippers, and softly padded along the corridor to the door of his wife's room. They had had no conjugal relations for more than a year, but he nevertheless visited her every morning and watched with powerless excitement while she did her hair, jerking her head energetically as the comb chir- ruped through the chestnut wing of the taut tresses. Today, entering her room at this early hour, he found the bed made and a sheet of paper pinned to the headboard. McGore produced from the pocket of his dressing gown an enormous eyeglass case and, without putting on the glasses but simply holding them up to his eyes, leaned over the pillow and read the minute, familiar writing on the pinned note. When he had finished he meticulously replaced his glasses in their case, unpinned and folded the sheet, stood lost in thought for an instant, and then shuffled resolutely out of the room. In the corridor he collided with the manservant, who glanced at him with alarm.

"What, is the Colonel up already?" asked McGore.

The manservant answered hurriedly, "Yes, sir. The Colonel is in the picture gallery. I'm afraid, sir, that he's very cross. I was sent to wake up the young gentleman."

Without waiting to hear him out, wrapping his mouse-colored robe around him as he went, McGore set off quickly for the gallery. Also in his dressing gown, from beneath which protruded the folds of his striped pajama bottoms, the Colonel was pacing to and fro along the wall. His mustache bristled and his crimson-flushed countenance was terrifying to behold. Seeing McGore, he stopped, and, after some preliminary lip-chewing, roared, "Here, have a good look!"

McGore, to whom the Colonel's ire mattered little, nevertheless inadvertently looked where his hand was pointing and saw something truly incredible. On the Luciani canvas, next to the Venetian girl, an additional figure had appeared. It was an excellent, if hastily executed, portrait of Simpson. Gaunt, his black jacket strongly highlighted by the lighter background, his feet turned oddly outward, he extended his hands as if in supplication, and his pallid face was distorted by a pitiful, frantic expression.

"Like it?" the Colonel inquired furiously. "No worse than Bastiano himself, is it? The vile brat! That's his revenge for my kindhearted advice. Just wait ..."

The waiter came in, distraught.

"Mr. Frank is not in his room, sir. And his things are gone. Mr. Simpson has disappeared too, sir. He must have gone out for a stroll, sir, seeing as how it's such a fine morning."

"To hell with the morning!" thundered the Colonel. "This very instant, I want--"

"May I be so bold as to inform you," meekly added the waiter, "that the chauffeur was just here and said the new motor car had disappeared from the garage."

"Colonel," McGore said softly, "I think I can explain what's happened."

He glanced at the waiter, who tiptoed out.

"Now then," went on McGore in a bored tone, "your supposition that it was indeed your son who painted in that figure is doubtless right. But, in addition, I gather from a note that was left for me that he departed at daybreak with my wife."

The Colonel was a gentleman and an Englishman. He immediately

felt that to vent one's anger in front of a man whose wife had just run off was improper. Therefore, he went over to a window, swallowed half his anger and blew the other half outdoors, smoothed his mustache, and, regaining his calm, addressed McGore.

"Allow me, my dear friend," he said courteously, "to assure you of my sincerest, deepest sympathy, rather than dwell on the wrath I feel toward the perpetrator of your calamity. Nevertheless, while I understand the state you are in, I must--I am obliged, my friend--to ask an immediate favor of you. Your art will rescue my honor. Today I am expecting young Lord Northwick from London, the owner, as you know, of another painting by the same del Piombo."

McGore nodded. "I'll bring the necessary implements, Colonel."

He was back in a couple of minutes, still in his dressing gown, carrying a wooden case. He opened it immediately, produced a bottle of ammonia, a roll of cotton wool, rags, scrapers, and went to work. As he scraped and rubbed Simpson's dark figure and white face from the varnish he did not give a thought to what he was doing, and what he _was _thinking about should not arouse the curiosity of a reader respectful of another's grief. In half an hour Simpson's portrait was completely gone, and the slightly damp paints of which he had consisted remained on McGore's rags.

"Remarkable," said the Colonel. "Remarkable. Poor Simpson has disappeared without a trace."

On occasion some chance remark sets off very important thoughts. This is what happened now to McGore who, as he was gathering his instruments, suddenly stopped short with a shocked tremor.

How strange, he thought, how very strange. Is it possible that-- He looked at the rags with the paint sticking to them, and abruptly, with an odd frown, wadded them together and tossed them out the window by which he had been working. Then he ran his palm across his forehead with a frightened glance at the Colonel--who, interpreting his agitation differently, was trying not to look at him--and, with uncharacteristic haste, went out of the hall straight into the garden.

There, beneath the window, between the wall and the rhododendrons, the gardener stood scratching the top of his head over a man in black lying facedown on the lawn. McGore quickly approached.

Moving his arm, the man turned over. Then, with a flustered smirk, he got up.

"Simpson, for heaven's sake, what's happened?" asked McGore, peering into his pale countenance.

Simpson gave another laugh.

"I'm awfully sorry. . . . It's so silly. ... I went out for a stroll last night and fell right asleep, here on the grass. Ow, I'm all aches and pains. ... I had a monstrous dream. . . . What time is it?"

Left alone, the gardener gave a disapproving shake of his head as he looked at the matted lawn. Then he bent down and picked up a small dark lemon bearing the imprint of five fingers. He stuck the lemon in his pocket and went to fetch the stone roller he had left on the tennis court.

Thus the dry, wrinkled fruit the gardener happened to find remains the only riddle of this whole tale. The chauffeur, dispatched to the station, returned with the black car and a note Frank had inserted into the leather pouch above the seat.

The Colonel read it aloud to McGore:

_"Dear Father," _wrote Frank, _aI have fulfilled two of your wishes. Tou __did not want any romances going on in your house, so I am leaving, and __taking with me the woman without whom I cannot live. Tou also wanted __to see a sample of my art. That is why I made you a portrait of my former __friend, whom you can tell for me, by the way, that informers only make __me laugh. I painted him at night, from memory, so if the resemblance is __imperfect it is from lack of time, poor light, and my understandable __haste. Tour new car runs fine. I am leaving it for you at the station garage."_

"Splendid," hissed the Colonel. "Except I'd be very curious to know what money you're going to live on."

McGore, paling like a fetus in alcohol, cleared his throat and said, "There is no reason to conceal the truth from you, Colonel. Luciani never painted your _Veneziana. _It is nothing more than a magnificent imitation."

The Colonel slowly rose.

"It was done by your son," went on McGore, and suddenly the corners of his mouth began to tremble and drop. "In Rome. I procured the canvas and paints for him. He seduced me with his talent. Half the sum you paid went to him. Oh, dear God ..."

The Colonel's jaw muscles contracted as he looked at the dirty handkerchief with which McGore was wiping his eyes and realized the poor fellow was not joking.

Then he turned and looked at _la Veneziana. _Her forehead glowed against the dark background, her long fingers glowed more gently, the lynx fur was slipping bewitchingly from her shoulder, and there was a secretly mocking smile at the corner of her lips.

"I'm proud of my son," calmly said the Colonel.

BACHMANN

There was a fleeting mention in the newspapers not long ago that the once famous pianist and composer Bachmann had died, forgotten by the world, in the Swiss hamlet of Marival, at the St. Angelica Home. This brought to my mind the story about a woman who loved him. It was told me by the impresario Sack. Here it is.

Mme. Perov met Bachmann some ten years before his death. In those days the golden throb of the deep and demented music he played was already being preserved on wax, as well as being heard live in the world's most famous concert halls. Well, one evening--one of those limpid-blue autumn evenings when one feels more afraid of old age than of death--Mme. Perov received a note from a friend. It read, "_I want to show you Bachmann. He will be at my house after the concert __tonight. Do come."_

I imagine with particular clarity how she put on a black, decollete dress, flicked perfume onto her neck and shoulders, took her fan and her turquoise knobbed cane, cast a parting glance at herself in the tri-fold depths of a tall mirror, and sunk into a reverie that lasted all the way to her friend's house. She knew that she was plain and too thin, and that her skin was pale to the point of sickliness; yet this faded woman, with the face of a madonna that had not quite come out, was attractive thanks to the very things she was ashamed of: the pallor of her complexion, and a barely perceptible limp, which obliged her to carry a cane. Her husband, an energetic and astute businessman, was away on a trip. Sack did not know him personally.

When Mme. Perov entered the smallish, violet-lighted drawing room where her friend, a stout, noisy lady with an amethyst diadem, was fluttering heavily from guest to guest, her attention was immediately attracted by a tall man with a clean-shaven, lightly powdered face who stood leaning his elbow on the case of the piano, and entertaining with some story three ladies grouped around him. The tails of his dress coat had a substantial-looking, particularly thick silk lining, and, as he talked, he kept tossing back his dark, glossy hair, at the same time inflating the wings of his nose, which was very white and had a rather elegant hump. There was something about his entire figure benevolent, brilliant, and disagreeable.

"The acoustics were terrible!" he was saying, with a twitch of his shoulder, "and everybody in the audience had a cold. You know how it is: let one person clear his throat, and right away several others join in, and off we go." He smiled, throwing back his hair. "Like dogs at night exchanging barks in a village!"

Mme. Perov approached, leaning slightly on her cane, and said the first thing that came into her head:

"You must be tired after your concert, Mr. Bachmann?"

He bowed, very flattered.

"That's a little mistake, madame. The name is Sack. I am only the impresario of our Maestro."

All three ladies laughed. Mme. Perov lost countenance, but laughed too. She knew about Bachmann's amazing playing only from hearsay, and had never seen a picture of him. At that moment the hostess surged toward her, embraced her, and with a mere motion of the eyes as if imparting a secret, indicated the far end of the room, whispering, "There he is--look."

Only then did she see Bachmann. He was standing a little away from the other guests. His short legs in baggy black trousers were set wide apart. He stood reading a newspaper. He held the rumpled page close up to his eyes, and moved his lips as semiliterate people do when reading. He was short, balding, with a modest lick of hair athwart the top of his head. He wore a starched turndown collar that seemed too large for him. Without taking his eyes off the paper he absentmindedly checked the fly of his trousers with one finger, and his lips began to move with even greater concentration. He had a very funny small rounded blue chin that resembled a sea urchin.

"Don't be surprised," said Sack, "he is a barbarian in the literal sense of the word--as soon as he arrives at a party he immediately picks up something and starts reading."

Bachmann suddenly sensed that everybody was looking at him. He slowly turned his face and, raising his bushy eyebrows, smiled a wonderful, timid smile that made his entire face break out in soft little wrinkles.

The hostess hurried toward him.

"Maestro," she said, "allow me to present another of your admirers, Mme. Perov."

He thrust out a boneless, dampish hand. "Very glad, very glad indeed."

And once again he immersed himself in his newspaper.

Mme. Perov stepped away. Pinkish spots appeared on her cheekbones. The joyous to-and-fro flicker of her black fan, gleaming with jet, made the fair curls on her temples flutter. Sack told me later that on that first evening she had impressed him as an extraordinarily "temperamental," as he put it, extraordinarily high-strung woman, despite her unpainted lips and severe hairdo.

"Those two were worth each other," he confided to me with a sigh. "As for Bachmann, he was a hopeless case, a man completely devoid of brains. And then, he drank, you know. The evening they met I had to whisk him away as on wings. He had demanded cognac all of a sudden, and he wasn't supposed to, he wasn't supposed to at all. In fact, we had begged him: 'For five days don't drink, for just five days'--he had to play those five concerts, you see. 'It's a contract, Bachmann, don't forget.' Imagine, some poet fellow in a humor magazine actually made a play on 'unsure feet' and 'forfeit'! We were literally on our last legs. And moreover, you know, he was cranky, capricious, grubby. An absolutely abnormal individual. But how he played . . ."

And, giving his thinning mane a shake, Sack rolled his eyes in silence.

As Sack and I looked through the newspaper clippings pasted in an album as heavy as a coffin, I became convinced that it was precisely then, in the days of Bachmann's first encounters with Mme. Perov, that began the real, worldwide--but, oh, how transitory!--fame of that astonishing person. When and where they became lovers, nobody knows. But after the soiree at her friend's house she began to attend all of Bachmann's concerts, no matter in what city they took place. She always sat in the first row, very straight, smooth-haired, in a black, open-necked dress. Somebody nicknamed her the Lame Madonna.

Bachmann would walk onstage rapidly, as if escaping from an enemy or simply from irksome hands. Ignoring the audience, he would hurry up to the piano and, bending over the round stool, would begin tenderly turning the wooden disc of the seat, seeking a certain mathematically precise level. All the while he would coo, softly and earnestly, appealing to the stool in three languages. He would go on fussing thus for quite a while. English audiences were touched, French, diverted, German, annoyed. When he found the right level, Bachmann would give the stool a loving little pat and seat himself, feeling for the pedals with the soles of his ancient pumps. Then he would take out an ample, unclean handkerchief and, while meticulously wiping his hands with it, would examine the first row of seats with a mischievous yet timid twinkle. At last he would bring his hands down softly onto the keys. Suddenly, though, a tortured little muscle would twitch under one eye; clucking his tongue, he would climb off the stool and again begin rotating its tenderly creaking disc.

Sack thinks that when she came home after hearing Bachmann for the first time, Mme. Perov sat down by the window and remained there till dawn, sighing and smiling. He insists that never before had Bachmann played with such beauty, such frenzy, and that subsequently, with every performance, his playing became still more beautiful, still more frenzied. With incomparable artistry, Bachmann would summon and resolve the voices of counterpoint, cause dissonant chords to evoke an impression of marvelous harmonies, and, in his Triple Fugue, pursue the theme, gracefully, passionately toying with it, as a cat with a mouse: he would pretend he had let it escape, then, suddenly, in a flash of sly glee, bending over the keys, he would overtake it with a triumphant swoop. Then, when his engagement in that city was over, he would disappear for several days and go on a binge.

The habitues of the dubious little taverns burning venomously amid the fog of a gloomy suburb would see a small stocky man with untidy hair around a bald spot and moist eyes pink like sores, who would always choose an out-of-the-way corner, but would gladly buy a drink for anybody who happened to importune him. An old little piano tuner, long since fallen into decay, who drank with him on several occasions, decided that he followed the same trade, since Bachmann, when drunk, would drum on the table with his fingers and, in a thin, high voice, sing a very exact A. Sometimes a hardworking prostitute with high cheekbones would lead him off to her place. Sometimes he tore the violin out of the tavern fiddler's hands, stamped on it, and was thrashed in punishment. He mixed with gamblers, sailors, athletes incapacitated by hernias, as well as with a guild of quiet, courteous thieves.

For nights on end Sack and Mme. Perov would look for him. It is true that Sack searched only when it was necessary to get him in shape for a concert. Sometimes they found him, and sometimes, bleary-eyed, dirty, collarless, he would appear at Mme. Perov's of his own accord; the sweet, silent lady would put him to bed, and only after two or three days would she telephone Sack to tell him that Bachmann had been found.

He combined a kind of unearthly shyness with the prankishness of a spoiled brat. He hardly talked to Mme. Perov at all. When she remonstrated with him and tried to take him by the hands, he would break away and hit her on the fingers with shrill cries, as if the merest touch caused him impatient pain, and presently he would crawl under the blanket and sob for a long time. Sack would come and say it was time to leave for London or Rome, and take Bachmann away.

Their strange liaison lasted three years. When a more or less reanimated Bachmann was served up to the audience, Mme. Perov would invariably be sitting in the first row. On long trips they would take adjoining rooms. Mme. Perov saw her husband several times during this period. He, of course, like everybody else, knew about her rapturous and faithful passion, but he did not interfere and lived his own life.

"Bachmann made her existence a torment," Sack kept repeating. "It is incomprehensible how she could have loved him. The mystery of the female heart! Once, when they were at somebody's house together, I saw the Maestro with my own eyes suddenly begin snapping his teeth at her, like a monkey, and you know why? Because she wanted to straighten his tie. But in those days there was genius in his playing. To that period belongs his Symphony in D Minor and several complex fugues. No one saw him writing them. The most interesting is the so-called Golden Fugue. Have you heard it? Its thematic development is totally original. But I was telling you about his whims and his growing lunacy. Well, here's how it was. Three years passed, and then, one night in Munich, where he was performing ..."

And as Sack neared the end of his story, he narrowed his eyes more sadly and more impressively.

It seems that the night of his arrival in Munich Bachmann escaped from the hotel where he had stopped as usual with Mme. Perov. Three days remained before the concert, and therefore Sack was in a state of hysterical alarm. Bachmann could not be found. It was late autumn, with a lot of rain. Mme. Perov caught cold and took to her bed. Sack, with two detectives, continued to check the bars.

On the day of the concert the police telephoned to say that Bachmann had been located. They had picked him up in the street during the night and he had had an excellent bit of sleep at the station. Without a word Sack drove him from the police station to the theater, consigned him like an object to his assistants, and went to the hotel to get Bachmann's tailcoat. He told Mme. Perov through the door what had happened. Then he returned to the theater.

Bachmann, his black felt hat pushed down onto his brows, was sitting in his dressing room, sadly tapping the table with one finger. People fussed and whispered around him. An hour later the audience began taking their places in the huge hall. The white, brightly lit stage, adorned by sculptured organ pipes on either side, the gleaming black piano, with upraised wing, and the humble mushroom of its stool--all awaited in solemn idleness a man with moist, soft hands who would soon fill with a hurricane of sound the piano, the stage, and the enormous hall, where, like pale worms, women's shoulders and men's bald pates moved and glistened.

And now Bachmann has trotted onstage. Paying no attention to the thunder of welcome that rose like a compact cone and fell apart in scattered, dying claps, he began rotating the disc of the stool, cooing avidly, and, having patted it, sat down at the piano. Wiping his hands, he glanced toward the first row with his timid smile. Abruptly his smile vanished and Bachmann grimaced. The handkerchief fell to the floor. His attentive gaze slid once again across the faces--and stumbled, as it were, upon reaching the empty seat in the center. Bachmann slammed down the lid, got up, walked out to the very edge of the stage, and, rolling his eyes and raising his bent arms like a ballerina, executed two or three ridiculous _pas. _The audience froze. From the back seats came a burst of laughter. Bachmann stopped, said something that nobody could hear, and then, with a sweeping, archlike motion, showed the whole house a fico.

"It happened so suddenly," went Sack's account, "that I could not get there in time to help. I bumped into him when, after the fig-- instead of the fugue--he was leaving the stage. I asked him, 'Bachmann, where are you going?' He uttered an obscenity and disappeared into the greenroom."

Then Sack himself walked out on the stage, to a storm of wrath and mirth. He raised his hand, managed to obtain silence, and gave his firm promise that the concert would take place. Upon entering the greenroom he found Bachmann sitting there as though nothing had happened, his lips moving as he read the printed program.

Sack glanced at those present and, raising a brow meaningfully, rushed to the telephone and called Mme. Perov. For a long time he could get no answer; at last something clicked and he heard her feeble

voice.

"Come here this instant," jabbered Sack, striking the telephone book with the side of his hand. "Bachmann won't play without you. It's a terrible scandal! The audience is beginning to--What?-- What's that?-- Yes, yes, I keep telling you he refuses. Hello? Oh, damn!--I've been cut off. ..."

Mme. Perov was worse. The doctor, who had visited her twice that day, had looked with dismay at the mercury that had climbed so high along the red ladder in its glass tube. As she hung up--the telephone was by the bed--she probably smiled happily. Tremulous and unsteady on her feet, she started to dress. An unbearable pain kept stabbing her in the chest, but happiness called to her through the haze and hum of the fever. I imagine for some reason that when she started pulling on her stockings, the silk kept catching on the toenails of her icy feet. She arranged her hair as best she could, wrapped herself in a brown fur coat, and went out, cane in hand. She told the doorman to call a taxi. The black pavement glistened. The handle of the car door was wet and ice-cold. All the way during the ride that vague, happy smile must have remained on her lips, and the sound of the motor and the hiss of the tires blended with the hot humming in her temples. When she reached the theater, she saw crowds of people opening angry umbrellas as they tumbled out into the street. She was almost knocked off her feet, but managed to squeeze through. In the greenroom Sack was pacing back and forth, clutching now at his left cheek, now at his right.

"I was in an utter rage!" he told me. "While I was struggling with the telephone, the Maestro escaped. He said he was going to the toilet, and slipped away. When Mme. Perov arrived I pounced on her-- why hadn't she been sitting in the theater? You understand, I absolutely did not take into account the fact that she was ill. She asked me, 'So he's back at the hotel now? So we passed each other on the way?' And I was in a furious state, shouting, 'The hell with hotels-- he's in some bar! Some bar! Some bar!' Then I gave up and rushed off. Had to rescue the ticket seller."

And Mme. Perov, trembling and smiling, went to search for Bachmann. She knew approximately where to look for him, and it was thither, to that dark, dreadful quarter that an astonished driver took her. When she reached the street where, according to Sack, Bachmann had been found the day before, she let the taxi go and, leaning on her cane, began walking along the uneven sidewalk, under the slanting streams of black rain. She entered all the bars one by one. Bursts of raucous music deafened her and men looked her over insolently. She would glance around the smoky, spinning, motley tavern and go back out into the lashing night. Soon it began to seem to her that she was continuously entering one and the same bar, and an agonizing weak-

ness descended upon her shoulders. She walked, limping and emitting barely audible moans, holding tightly the turquoise knob of her cane in her cold hand. A policeman who had been watching her for some time approached with a slow, professional step and asked for her address, then firmly and gently led her over to a horse cab on night duty. In the creaking, evil-smelling murk of the cab she lost consciousness and, when she came to, the door was open and the driver, in a shiny oilskin cape, was giving her little pokes in the shoulder with the butt of his whip. Upon finding herself in the warm corridor of the hotel, she was overcome by a feeling of complete indifference to everything. She pushed open the door of her room and went in. Bachmann was sitting on her bed, barefoot and in a nightshirt, with a plaid blanket humped over his shoulders. He was drumming with two fingers on the marble top of the night table, while using his other hand to make dots on a sheet of music paper with an indelible pencil. So absorbed was he that he did not notice the door open. She uttered a soft, moanlike "ach." Bachmann gave a start. The blanket started to slide off his shoulders.

I think this was the only happy night in Mme. Perov's life. I think that these two, the deranged musician and the dying woman, that night found words the greatest poets never dreamt of. When the indignant Sack arrived at the hotel the next morning, Bachmann sat there with an ecstatic, silent smile, contemplating Mme. Perov, who was lying across the wide bed, unconscious under the plaid blanket. Nobody could know what Bachmann was thinking as he looked at the burning face of his mistress and listened to her spasmodic breathing; probably he interpreted in his own fashion the agitation of her body, the flutter and fire of a fatal illness, not the least idea of which entered his head. Sack called the doctor. At first Bachmann looked at them distrustfully, with a timid smile; then he clutched at the doctor's shoulder, ran back, struck himself on the forehead, and began tossing to and fro and gnashing his teeth. She died the same day, without regaining consciousness. The expression of happiness never left her face. On the night table Sack found a crumpled sheet of music paper, but no one was able to decipher the violet dots of music scattered over it.

"I took him away immediately," Sack went on. "I was afraid of what would happen when the husband arrived, you can understand. Poor Bachmann was as limp as a rag doll and kept plugging his ears with his fingers. He would cry out as though someone were tickling him, 'Stop those sounds! Enough, enough music!' I don't really know what gave him such a shock: between you and me, he never loved that unfortunate woman. In any case, she was his undoing. After the funeral Bachmann disappeared without leaving a trace. You can still find his name in the advertisements of player-piano firms, but, generally speaking, he has been forgotten. It was only six years later that fate brought us together again. For an instant only. I was waiting for a train at a small station in Switzerland. It was a glorious evening, I recall. I was not alone. Yes, a woman--but that's a different libretto. And then, what do you know, I see a small crowd gathered around a short man in a shabby black coat and black hat. He was thrusting a coin into a music box, and sobbing uncontrollably. He would put in a coin, listen to the tinny melody, and sob. Then the roll or something broke down. The coin jammed. He began shaking the box, wept louder, gave up, and went away. I recognized him immediately, but, you understand, I was not alone, I was with a lady, and there were people around, sort of gaping. It would have been awkward to go up to him and say _Wie geht's dir, _Bachmann?"

THE DRAGON

HE lived in reclusion in a deep, murky cave, in the very heart of a rocky mountain, feeding only on bats, rats, and mold. Occasionally, it is true, stalactite hunters or snoopy travelers would come peeking into the cave, and that was a tasty treat. Other pleasant memories included a brigand attempting to flee from justice, and two dogs that were once let loose to ascertain if the passage did not go clear through the mountain. The surrounding country was wild, porous snow lay here and there on the rock, and waterfalls rumbled with an icy roar. He had hatched some thousand years ago, and, perhaps because it had happened rather unexpectedly--the enormous egg was cracked open by a lightning bolt one stormy night--the dragon had turned out cowardly and not overly bright. Besides, he was strongly affected by his mother's death. . . . She had long terrorized the neighboring villages, had spat flames, and the king would get cross, and around her lair incessantly prowled knights, whom she would crunch to pieces like walnuts. But once, when she had swallowed a plump royal chef and dozed off on a sun-warmed rock, the great Ganon himself galloped up in iron armor, on a black steed under silver netting. The poor sleepy thing went rearing up, her green and red humps flashing like bonfires, and the charging knight thrust his swift lance into her smooth white breast. She crashed to the ground, and promptly, out of the pink wound, sidled the corpulent chef with her enormous, steaming heart under his arm.

The young dragon saw all this from a hiding place behind the rock and, forever after, could not think about knights without a shudder. He withdrew into the depths of a cave, whence he never emerged. Thus passed ten centuries, equivalent to twenty dragon years.

Then, suddenly, he fell prey to unbearable melancholy. ... In fact, the spoiled food from the cave was provoking ferocious gastric alarms, revolting rumblings, and pain. He spent nine years making up his mind, and on the tenth, he did. Slowly and cautiously, gathering in and extending the rings of his tail, he clambered out of his cave.

Immediately he sensed that it was spring. The black rocks, washed by a recent downpour, were ashimmer; the sunlight boiled in the overflowing mountain torrent; the air was redolent of wild game. And the dragon, broadly inflating his flaming nostrils, started his descent into the valley. His satiny belly, white as a water lily, nearly touched the ground, crimson blotches stood out on his bloated green flanks, and the sturdy scales merged, on his back, into a jagged conflagration, a ridge of double ruddy humps, diminishing in size toward the potently, flexibly twitching tail. His head was smooth and greenish, bubbles of fiery mucus hung from his soft, warty underlip, and his giant, scaly paws left deep tracks, star-shaped concavities.

The first thing he saw upon descending into the valley was a railroad train traveling along rocky slopes. The dragon's first reaction was delight, since he mistook the train for a relative he could play with. Moreover, he thought that beneath that shiny, hard-looking shell there must surely be some tender meat. So he set off in pursuit, his feet slapping with a hollow, damp noise, but, just as he was about to gobble up the last car, the train sped into a tunnel. The dragon stopped, thrust his head into the black lair into which his quarry had vanished, but there was no way he could get in there. He dispatched a couple of torrid sneezes into the depths, then retracted his head, sat on his haunches, and began waiting--who knows, it might come running out again. After waiting some time he shook his head and moved on. At that instant a train did come scurrying out of the dark lair, gave a sly flash of window glass, and disappeared behind a curve. The dragon gave a hurt look over his shoulder and, raising his tail like a plume, resumed his journey.

Dusk was falling. Fog floated above the meadows. The gigantic beast, big as a live mountain, was seen by some homeward-bound peasants, who remained petrified with awe. A little auto speeding along the highway had all four of its tires blow out from fright, bounced, and ended up in the ditch. But the dragon walked on, noticing nothing; from afar came the hot scent of concentrated crowds of humans, and that is where he was headed. And, against the blue expanse of the night sky, there loomed before him black factory smokestacks, guardians of a large industrial town.

The main personages of this town were two: the owner of the Miracle Tobacco Company and that of the Big Helmet Tobacco Company. Between them raged age-old, subtle hostilities, about which one could write an entire epic poem. They were rivals in everything--the motley colors of their advertisements, their distribution techniques, pricing, and labor relations--but no one could say which had the upper hand. That memorable night, the owner of the Miracle Company stayed very late at his office. Nearby on his desk lay a stack of new, freshly printed advertisements that workmen from the cooperative were to plaster around the city at daybreak.

Suddenly a bell pierced the silence of the night and, a few moments later, entered a pale, haggard man with a burdocklike wart on his right cheek. The factory owner knew him: he was the proprietor of a model tavern the Miracle Company had set up on the outskirts.

"It's going on two in the morning, my friend. The only justification I can find for your visit is an event of unheard-of importance."

"That's exactly the case," said the tavern keeper in a calm voice, although his wart was twitching. This is what he reported:

He was bundling off five thoroughly soused old laborers. They must have seen something highly curious outdoors, for they all broke out laughing--"Oh-ho-ho," rumbled one of the voices, "I must have had one glass too many, if I see, big as life, the hydra of counterrevo--"

He did not have time to finish, for there was a surge of terrifying, ponderous noise, and someone screamed. The tavern keeper stepped outside to have a look. A monster, glimmering in the murk like a moist mountain, was swallowing something large with its head thrown back, which made its whitish neck swell with alternating hillocks; it swallowed and licked its chops, its whole body rocked, and it gently lay down in the middle of the street.

"I think it must have dozed off," finished the tavern keeper, restraining the twitching wart with his finger.

The factory owner got up. The robust fillings of his teeth flashed with the golden fire of inspiration. The arrival of a live dragon aroused in him no other feelings than the passionate desire that guided him in every instance--the desire to inflict a defeat on the rival firm.

"Eureka," he exclaimed. "Listen, my good man, are there any other witnesses?"

"I don't think so," the other replied. "Everybody was in bed, and I decided not to wake anyone and came straight to you. So as to avoid panic."

The factory owner donned his hat.

"Splendid. Take this--no, not the whole pile, thirty or forty sheets will do--and bring along this can, and the brush too. There, now show me the way."

They went out into the dark night and were soon at the quiet street at the end of which, according to the tavern keeper, reposed a monster. First, by the light of a lone, yellow streetlamp, they saw a policeman standing on his head in the middle of the pavement. It turned out later that, while making his nightly rounds, he had come upon the dragon and had such a fright that he turned upside down and remained petrified in that attitude. The factory owner, a man with the size and strength of a gorilla, turned him right side up and leaned him against the lightpost; then he approached the dragon. The dragon was asleep, and no wonder. The individuals he had devoured, it so happened, were totally impregnated with wine, and had popped succu-lently between his jaws. The alcohol on an empty stomach had gone straight to his head and he had lowered the pellicles of his eyelids with a blissful smile. He lay on his belly with his front paws folded under, and the glow of the streetlamp highlighted the glistening arcs of the double vertebral protuberances.

"Set up the ladder," said the factory owner. Til do the pasting myself."

And, choosing flat spots on the slimy green flanks of the monster, he began unhurriedly brushing paste on the scaly skin and affixing ample advertising posters. When he had used all the sheets, he gave the brave tavern keeper a meaningful handshake and, chomping on his cigar, returned home.

Morning came, a magnificent spring morning softened by a lilac haze. And suddenly the street came alive with a merry, excited din, doors and windows slammed, people poured into the street, mingling with those who were hurrying somewhere, laughing as they went. What they saw was a perfectly lifelike dragon, all covered with colorful advertisements, slapping listlessly along the asphalt. One poster was even stuck to the bald crown of his head, "smoke only miracle brand," rollicked the blue and crimson letters of the ads. "only fools don't smoke my cigarettes," "miracle tobacco turns air into honey," "miracle, miracle, miracle!"

It really is a miracle, laughed the crowd, and how is it done--is it a machine or are there people inside?

The dragon was feeling rotten after his involuntary binge. The cheap wine now made him sick to his stomach, his whole body felt weak, and the thought of breakfast was out of the question. Besides, he was now overcome by an acute sense of shame, the excruciating shyness of a creature that finds itself amid a crowd for the first time. Frankly speaking, he very much wished to return as soon as possible to

his cave, but that would have been even more shameful--therefore, he continued his grim progress through the town. Several men with placards on their backs protected him from the curious and from urchins who wanted to slip under his white belly, clamber onto his lofty back-hone, or touch his snout. Music played, people gaped from every window, behind the dragon automobiles drove single file, and in one of them slouched the factory owner, the hero of the day.

The dragon walked without looking at anybody, dismayed by the incomprehensible merriment that he aroused.

Meanwhile, in a sunlit office, along a carpet soft as moss, paced to and fro with clenched fists the rival manufacturer, owner of the Big Helmet Company. At an open window, observing the procession, stood his girlfriend, a diminutive tightrope dancer.

"This is an outrage," croaked over and again the manufacturer, a middle-aged, bald man with blue-gray bags of flabby skin under his eyes. "The police ought to put a stop to this scandal. . . . When did he manage to cobble together this stuffed dummy?"

"Ralph," the dancer suddenly cried, clapping her hands. "I know what you should do. We have a number at the circus called The Joust, and--"

In a torrid whisper, goggling her doll-like, mascara-lined eyes, she told him her plan. The manufacturer beamed. An instant later he was already on the phone with the circus manager.

"So," said the manufacturer, hanging up. "The dummy is made of inflated rubber. We'll see what's left of it if we give it a good prick."

Meanwhile the dragon had crossed the bridge, passed the marketplace and the Gothic cathedral, which aroused some pretty repugnant memories, continued along the main boulevard, and was traversing a broad square when, parting the crowd, a knight unexpectedly came charging at him. The knight wore iron armor, visor lowered, a funereal plume on his helmet, and rode a ponderous black horse in silvery netting. Arms bearers--women dressed as pages--walked alongside, carrying picturesque, hastily devised banners heralding "big helmet,"

"SMOKE ONLY BIG HELMET," "BIG HELMET BEATS THEM ALL." The circus

rider impersonating the knight spurred his steed and clenched his lance. But the steed for some reason started backing, spurting foam, then suddenly reared up and sat heavily on its haunches. The knight tumbled to the asphalt, with such a clatter one might think someone had thrown all the dishes out the window. But the dragon did not see this. At the knight's first move he had stopped abruptly, then rapidly turned, knocking down a pair of curious old women standing on a balcony with his tail as he did so, and, squashing the scattering spectators, had taken flight. He was out of the town in a single bound, flew across the fields, scrambled up the rocky slopes, and dove into his bottomless cavern. There he collapsed onto his back, paws folded and showing his satiny, white, shuddering belly to the dark vaults, heaved a deep breath, closed his astonished eyes, and died.

CHRISTMAS

AFTER walking back from the village to his manor across the dimming snows, Sleptsov sat down in a corner, on a plush-covered chair which he never remembered using before. It was the kind of thing that happens after some great calamity. Not your brother but a chance acquaintance, a vague country neighbor to whom you never paid much attention, with whom in normal times you exchange scarcely a word, is the one who comforts you wisely and gently, and hands you your dropped hat after the funeral service is over, and you are reeling from grief, your teeth chattering, your eyes blinded by tears. The same can be said of inanimate objects. Any room, even the coziest and the most absurdly small, in the little-used wing of a great country house has an unlived-in corner. And it was such a corner in which Sleptsov sat.

The wing was connected by a wooden gallery, now encumbered with our huge north Russian snowdrifts, to the master house, used only in summer. There was no need to awaken it, to heat it: the master had come from Petersburg for only a couple of days and had settled in the annex, where it was a simple matter to get the stoves of white Dutch tile going.

The master sat in his corner, on that plush chair, as in a doctor's waiting room. The room floated in darkness; the dense blue of early evening filtered through the crystal feathers of frost on the window-pane. Ivan, the quiet, portly valet, who had recently shaved off his mustache and now looked like his late father, the family butler, brought in a kerosene lamp, all trimmed and brimming with light. He set it on a small table, and noiselessly caged it within its pink silk shade. For an instant a tilted mirror reflected his lit ear and cropped gray hair. Then he withdrew and the door gave a subdued creak.

Sleptsov raised his hand from his knee and slowly examined it. A drop of candle wax had stuck and hardened in the thin fold of skin between two fingers. He spread his fingers and the little white scale cracked.

2: The following morning, after a night spent in nonsensical, fragmentary dreams totally unrelated to his grief, as Sleptsov stepped out into the cold veranda, a floorboard emitted a merry pistol crack underfoot, and the reflections of the many-colored panes formed paradisal lozenges on the whitewashed cushionless window seats. The outer door resisted at -first, then opened with a luscious crunch, and the dazzling frost hit his face. The reddish sand providently sprinkled on the ice coating the porch steps resembled cinnamon, and thick icicles shot with greenish blue hung from the eaves. The snowdrifts reached all the way to the windows of the annex, tightly gripping the snug little wooden structure in their frosty clutches. The creamy white mounds of what were flower beds in summer swelled slightly above the level snow in front of the porch, and farther off loomed the radiance of the park, where every black branchlet was rimmed with silver, and the firs seemed to draw in their green paws under their bright plump load. Wearing high felt boots and a short fur-lined coat with a karakul collar, Sleptsov strode off slowly along a straight path, the only one cleared of snow, into that blinding distant landscape. He was amazed to be still alive, and able to perceive the brilliance of the snow and feel his front teeth ache from the cold. He even noticed that a snow-covered bush resembled a fountain and that a dog had left a series of saffron marks on the slope of a snowdrift, which had burned through its crust. A little farther, the supports of a footbridge stuck out of the snow, and there Sleptsov stopped. Bitterly, angrily, he pushed the thick, fluffy covering off the parapet. He vividly recalled how this bridge looked in summer. There was his son walking along the slippery planks, flecked with aments, and deftly plucking off with his net a butterfly that had settled on the railing. Now the boy sees his father. Forever-lost laughter plays on his face, under the turned-down brim of a straw hat burned dark by the sun; his hand toys with the chainlet of the leather purse attached to his belt, his dear, smooth, suntanned legs in their serge shorts and soaked sandals assume their usual cheerful widespread stance. Just recently, in Petersburg, after having babbled in his delirium about school, about his bicycle, about some great Oriental moth, he died, and yesterday Sleptsov had taken the coffin--weighed down, it seemed, with an entire lifetime--to the country, into the family vault near the village church.

It was quiet as it can only be on a bright, frosty day. Sleptsov raised his leg high, stepped off the path and, leaving blue pits behind him in the snow, made his way among the trunks of amazingly white trees to the spot where the park dropped off toward the river. Far below, ice blocks sparkled near a hole cut in the smooth expanse of white and, on the opposite bank, very straight columns of pink smoke stood above the snowy roofs of log cabins. Sleptsov took off his karakul cap and leaned against a tree trunk. Somewhere far away peasants were chopping wood--every blow bounced resonantly skyward--and beyond the light silver mist of trees, high above the squat isbas, the sun caught the equanimous radiance of the cross on the church.

3: That was where he headed after lunch, in an old sleigh with a high straight back. The cod of the black stallion clacked strongly in the frosty air, the white plumes of low branches glided overhead, and the ruts in front gave off a silvery blue sheen. When he arrived he sat for an hour or so by the grave, resting a heavy, woolen-gloved hand on the iron of the railing that burned his hand through the wool. He came home with a slight sense of disappointment, as if there, in the burial

vault, he had been even further removed from his son than here, where the countless summer tracks of his rapid sandals were preserved beneath the snow.

In the evening, overcome by a fit of intense sadness, he had the main house unlocked. When the door swung open with a weighty wail, and a whiff of special, unwintery coolness came from the sonorous non-barred vestibule, Sleptsov took the lamp with its tin reflector from the watchman's hand and entered the house alone. The parquet floors crackled eerily under his step. Room after room filled with yellow light,

and the shrouded furniture seemed unfamiliar; instead of a tinkling chandelier, a soundless bag hung from the ceiling; and Sleptsov's enormous shadow, slowly extending one arm, floated across the wall and

the gray squares of curtained paintings. He went into the room which had been his son's study in summer, set the lamp on the window ledge, and, breaking his fingernails as he did so, opened the folding shutters, even though all was darkness outside. In the blue glass the yellow flame of the slightly smoky lamp appeared, and his large, bearded face showed momentarily.

He sat down at the bare desk and sternly, from under bent brows, examined the pale wallpaper with its garlands of bluish roses; a narrow officelike cabinet, with sliding drawers from top to bottom; the couch and armchairs under slipcovers; and suddenly, dropping his head onto the desk, he started to shake, passionately, noisily, pressing first his lips, then his wet cheek, to the cold, dusty wood and clutching at its far corners.

In the desk he found a notebook, spreading boards, supplies of black pins, and an English biscuit tin that contained a large exotic cocoon which had cost three rubles. It was papery to the touch and seemed made of a brown folded leaf. His son had remembered it during his sickness, regretting that he had left it behind, but consoling himself with the thought that the chrysalid inside was probably dead. He also found a torn net: a tarlatan bag on a collapsible hoop (and the muslin still smelled of summer and sun-hot grass).

Then, bending lower and lower and sobbing with his whole body, he began pulling out one by one the glass-topped drawers of the cabinet. In the dim lamplight the even files of specimens shone silklike under the glass. Here, in this room, on that very desk, his son had spread the wings of his captures. He would first pin the carefully killed insect in the cork-bottomed groove of the setting board, between the adjustable strips of wood, and fasten down flat with pinned strips of paper the still fresh, soft wings. They had now dried long ago and been transferred to the cabinet--those spectacular Swallowtails, those dazzling Coppers and Blues, and the various Fritillaries, some mounted in a supine position to display the mother-of-pearl undersides. His son used to pronounce their Latin names with a moan of triumph or in an arch aside of disdain. And the moths, the moths, the first Aspen Hawk of five summers ago!

4: The night was smoke-blue and moonlit; thin clouds were scattered about the sky but did not touch the delicate, icy moon. The trees, masses of gray frost, cast dark shadows on the drifts, which scintillated

here and there with metallic sparks. In the plush-upholstered, well-heated room of the annex Ivan had placed a two-foot fir tree in a clay pot on the table, and was just attaching a candle to its cruciform tip when Sleptsov returned from the main house, chilled, red-eyed, with gray dust smears on his cheek, carrying a wooden case under his arm. Seeing the Christmas tree on the table, he asked absently: "What's that?"

Relieving him of the case, Ivan answered in a low, mellow voice: "There's a holiday coming up tomorrow."

"No, take it away," said Sleptsov with a frown, while thinking, Can this be Christmas Eve? How could I have forgotten?

Ivan gently insisted: "It's nice and green. Let it stand for a while."

"Please take it away," repeated Sleptsov, and bent over the case he had brought. In it he had gathered his son's belongings--the folding butterfly net, the biscuit tin with the pear-shaped cocoon, the spreading board, the pins in their lacquered box, the blue notebook. Half of the first page had been torn out, and its remaining fragment contained part of a French dictation. There followed daily entries, names of captured butterflies, and other notes:

_"Walked across the bog as far as Borovichi, _. . ."

_"Raining today. Played checkers with Father, then read Goncharov}s F_rigate, _a deadly bore."_

_"Marvelous hot day. Rode my bike in the evening. A midge got in my __rye. Deliberately rode by her dacha twice, but didn't see her . . ."_

Sleptsov raised his head, swallowed something hot and huge. Of whom was his son writing?

_"Rode my bike as usual," _he read on, _"Our eyes nearly met. My dar__ling, my love . . ."_

"This is unthinkable," whispered Sleptsov. "I'll never know. ..."

He bent over again, avidly deciphering the childish handwriting that slanted up then curved down in the margin.

_"Saw a fresh specimen of the Camberwell Beauty today. That means au__tumn is here. Rain in the evening. She has probably left, and we d__idn't even get acquainted. Farewell, my darling. I feel terribly sad. . . "_

"He never said anything to me. . . ." Sleptsov tried to remember, rubbing his forehead with his palm.

On the last page there was an ink drawing: the hind view of an elephant--two thick pillars, the corners of two ears, and a tiny tail.

Sleptsov got up. He shook his head, restraining yet another onrush of hideous sobs.

"I-can't-bear-it-any-longer," he drawled between groans, repeating even more slowly, "I--can't--bear--it--any--longer. . . ."

"It's Christmas tomorrow," came the abrupt reminder, "and I'm going to die. Of course. It's so simple. This very night . . ."

He pulled out a handkerchief and dried his eyes, his beard, his cheeks. Dark streaks remained on the handkerchief.

"... death," Sleptsov said softly, as if concluding a long sentence.

The clock ticked. Frost patterns overlapped on the blue glass of the window. The open notebook shone radiantly on the table; next to it the light went through the muslin of the butterfly net, and glistened on a corner of the open tin. Sleptsov pressed his eyes shut, and had a fleeting sensation that earthly life lay before him, totally bared and comprehensible--and ghastly in its sadness, humiliatingly pointless, sterile, devoid of miracles. . . .

At that instant there was a sudden snap--a thin sound like that of an overstretched rubber band breaking. Sleptsov opened his eyes. The cocoon in the biscuit tin had burst at its tip, and a black, wrinkled creature the size of a mouse was crawling up the wall above the table. It stopped, holding on to the surface with six black furry feet, and started palpitating strangely. It had emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome with grief had transferred a tin box to his warm room, and the warmth had penetrated its taut leaf-and-silk envelope; it had awaited this moment so long, had collected its strength so tensely, and now, having broken out, it was slowly and miraculously expanding. Gradually the wrinkled tissues, the velvety fringes, unfurled; the fan-pleated veins grew firmer as they filled with air. It became a winged thing imperceptibly, as a maturing face imperceptibly becomes beautiful. And its wings--still feeble, still moist--kept growing and unfolding, and now they were developed to the limit set for them by God, and there, on the wall, instead of a little lump of life, instead of a dark mouse, was a great _Attacus _moth like those that fly, birdlike, around lamps in the Indian dusk.

And then those thick black wings, with a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness.

A LETTER THAT NEVER REACHED RUSSIA

MY charming, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray-haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glori-fied snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Peters-burg street.

Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.

It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects--the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight--as he moves against the direction of the car's travel.

As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.

A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted--except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.

And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk--how unexpectedly!-- the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.

Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistin-guishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At

the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.

And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.

I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local cafe. Many fellow exiles of mine denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes through the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes--in London ballrooms--perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: "monotonous and mad." It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals . . . Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: "I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities."

And so I enjoy watching, in the _cafes dansants _here, how "pair after pair flick by," to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.

On that kind of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope ("brand-new one," he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. "She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all," observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.

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

THE FIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The electrician, with his hand already on the doorknob, looked hack. "I thought I was at home here."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE RETURN OF CHORB

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

"He said she was ill?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

He passed in reverse through all the spots they had visited together during their honeymoon journey. In Switzerland where they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he recognized nothing except the hotels. As to the Black Forest, through which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did not impede memory. And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving--to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing--light, laughing hands that knew

no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves. He thought that if he managed to gather all the little things they had noticed together--if he re-created thus the near past--her image would grow immortal and replace her forever. Nighttime, though, was unendurable. Night imbued with sudden terror her irrational presence. He hardly slept at all during the t hree weeks of his trek--and now he got off, quite drugged with fa-tigue, at the railway station, which had been last autumn their point of departure from the quiet town where he had met and married her.

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

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

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

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

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

On the way downstairs he realized how weary he was, and when he found himself in the alley the blurry blue of the May night made him dizzy. Upon turning into the boulevard he walked faster. A square. A stone _Herzog. _The black masses of the City Park. Chestnut trees now were in flower. _Then, _it had been autumn. He had gone for a long stroll with her on the eve of the wedding. How good was the earthy, damp, somewhat violety smell of the dead leaves strewing the sidewalk! On those enchanting overcast days the sky would be of a dull white, and the small twig-reflecting puddle in the middle of the black pavement resembled an insufficiently developed photograph. The gray-stone villas were separated by the mellow and motionless foliage of yellowing trees, and in front of the Kellers' house the leaves of a

withering poplar had acquired the tone of transparent grapes. One glimpsed, too, a few birches behind the bars of the gate; ivy solidly muffed some of their boles, and Chorb made a point of telling her that ivy never grew on birches in Russia, and she remarked that the foxy tints of their minute leaves reminded her of spots offender rust upon ironed linen. Oaks and chestnuts lined the sidewalk; their black bark was velveted with green rot; every now and then a leaf broke away to fly athwart the street like a scrap of wrapping paper. She attempted to catch it on the wing by means of a child's spade found near a heap of pink bricks at a spot where the street was under repair. A little way off the funnel of a workers' van emitted gray-blue smoke which drifted aslant and dissolved between the branches--and a resting workman, one hand on his hip, contemplated the young lady, as light as a dead leaf, dancing about with that little spade in her raised hand. She skipped, she laughed. Chorb, hunching his back a bit, walked behind her--and it seemed to him that happiness itself had that smell, the smell of dead leaves.

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

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

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

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

"The night," said Chorb, scarcely unclenching his teeth. The girl cocked her head, swung her handbag, and replied: "Twenty-five."

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

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

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

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

Upon receiving the banknotes, she carefully arranged them in her bag, uttered a light little sigh, and again rubbed herself against him. "Shall I undress?" she asked with a shake of her bob. "Yes, go to bed," muttered Chorb. "I'll give you some more in the morning."

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

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

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

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

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

And Chorb heaved a sigh of relief, for he realized that the ordeal was over. He moved onto the green couch, and sat there, clasping his hairy shins and with a meaningless smile contemplating the harlot.

That smile increased her terror; she turned away, did up one last hook, laced her boots, busied herself with the putting on of her hat.

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

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

The footsteps stopped at the door. A knock followed.

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

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

A GUIDE TO BERLIN

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

1 THE PIPES

In front of the house where I live a gigantic black pipe lies along the outer edge of the sidewalk. A couple of feet away, in the same file, lies another, then a third and a fourth--the street's iron entrails, still idle, not yet lowered into the ground, deep under the asphalt. For the first few days after they were unloaded, with a hollow clanging, from trucks, little boys would run on them up and down and crawl on all fours through those round tunnels, but a week later nobody was playing any more and thick snow was falling instead; and now, when, cautiously probing the treacherous glaze of the sidewalk with my thick rubberheeled stick, I go out in the flat gray light of early morning, an even stripe of fresh snow stretches along the upper side of each black pipe while up the interior slope at the very mouth of the pipe which is nearest to the turn of the tracks, the reflection of a still illumined tram sweeps up like bright-orange heat lightning. Today someone wrote "Otto" with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o's flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel.

2 THE STREETCAR

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

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

crackling flame, rolls up and couples on. And (minus the biological metaphor) I am reminded of how, some eighteen years ago in Petersburg, the horses used to be unhitched and led around the pot-bellied blue tram.

The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and

some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological his-tory and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old -fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor's uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor's purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine--everything will be ennobled and justified by its age.

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

3 WORK

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

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

A young white-capped baker flashes by on his tricycle; there is something angelic about a lad dusted with flour. A van jingles past with cases on its roof containing rows of emerald-glittering empty bottles, collected from taverns. A long, black larch tree mysteriously trav els by in a cart. The tree lies flat; its tip quivers gently, while the earth covered roots, enveloped in sturdy burlap, form an enormous beige bomblike sphere at its base. A postman, who has placed the mouth of a sack under a cobalt-colored mailbox, fastens it on from below, and secretly, invisibly, with a hurried rustling, the box empties and the postman claps shut the square jaws of the bag, now grown full and heavy. But perhaps fairest of all are the carcasses, chrome yellow, with pink blotches, and arabesques, piled on a truck, and the man in apron and leather hood with a long neck flap who heaves each carcass onto his back and, hunched over, carries it across the sidewalk into the butcher's red shop.

4 EDEN

Every large city has its own, man-made Eden on earth.

If churches speak to us of the Gospel, zoos remind us of the solemn, and tender, beginning of the Old Testament. The only sad part is that this artificial Eden is all behind bars, although it is also true that if there were no enclosures the very first dingo would savage me. It is Eden nonetheless, insofar as man is able to reproduce it, and it is with good reason that the large hotel across from the Berlin Zoo is named after that garden.

In the wintertime, when the tropical animals have been hidden away, I recommend visiting the amphibian, insect, and fish houses. Rows of illuminated displays behind glass in the dimly lit hall resemble the portholes through which Captain Nemo gazed out of his submarine at the sea creatures undulating among the ruins of Atlantis. Behind the glass, in bright recesses, transparent fishes glide with flashing fins, marine flowers breathe, and, on a patch of sand, lies a live, crimson five-pointed star. This, then, is where the notorious emblem originated--at the very bottom of the ocean, in the murk of sunken Atlantica, which long ago lived through various upheavals while pot tering about topical Utopias and other inanities that cripple us today.

Oh, do not omit to watch the giant tortoises being fed. These ponderous, ancient corneous cupolas were brought from the Galapagos Islands. With a decrepit kind of circumspection, a wrinkly flat head and two totally useless paws emerge in slow motion from under the two-hundred-pound dome. And with its thick, spongy tongue, suggesting

somehow that of a cacological idiot slackly vomiting his monstrous speech, the turtle sticks its head into a heap of wet vegetables and messily munches their leaves.

But that dome above it--ah, that dome, that ageless, well-rubbed, dull bronze, that splendid burden of time ...

5 THE PUB

"That's a very poor guide," my usual pot companion says glumly. "Who cares about how you took a streetcar and went to the Berlin Aquarium?"

The pub in which he and I are sitting is divided into two parts, one large, the other somewhat smaller. A billiard table occupies the center of the former; there are a few tables in the corners; a bar faces the en-trance, and bottles stand on shelves behind the bar. On the wall, be-teen the windows, newspapers and magazines mounted on shot staffs lung like paper banners. At the far end there is a wide passageway, through which one sees a cramped little room with a green couch under a mirror, out of which an oval table with a checked oilcloth topples and takes up its solid position in front of the couch. That room is part of the publican's humble little apartment. There his wife, with laded looks and big breasts, is feeding soup to a blond child.

"It's of no interest," my friend affirms with a mournful yawn. "What do trams and tortoises matter? And anyway the whole thing is limply a bore. A boring, foreign city, and expensive to live in, too ..."

From our place near the bar one can make out very distinctly the couch, the mirror, and the table in the background beyond the passage. The woman is clearing the table. Propped on his elbows, the child attentively examines an illustrated magazine on its useless handle.

"What do you see down there?" asks my companion and turns slowly, with a sigh, and the chair creaks heavily under him.

There, under the mirror, the child still sits alone. But he is now looking our way. From there he can see the inside of the tavern--the green island of the billiard table, the ivory ball he is forbidden to touch, the metallic gloss of the bar, a pair of fat truckers at one table and the two of us at another. He has long since grown used to this scene and is not dismayed by its proximity. Yet there is one thing I know. Whatever happens to him in life, he will always remember the picture he saw every day of his childhood from the little room where he was fed his soup. He will remember the billiard table and the coat-less evening visitor who used to draw back his sharp white elbow and hit the ball with his cue, and the blue-gray cigar smoke, and the din of voices, and my empty right sleeve and scarred face, and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap.

"I can't understand what you see down there," says my friend, turning back toward me.

What indeed! How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection?

A NURSERY TALE

FANTASY, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy! Erwin knew these things well. In a tram, he would always sit on the right-hand side, so as to be nearer the sidewalk. Twice daily, from the tram he took to the office and back, Erwin looked out of the window and collccted his harem. Happy, happy Erwin, to dwell in such a convement, such a fairy-tale German town!

He covered one sidewalk in the morning, on his way to work, and the other in the late afternoon, on his way home. First one, then the other was bathed in voluptuous sunlight, for the sun also went and re-turned. We should bear in mind that Erwin was so morbidly shy that only once in his life, taunted by rascally comrades, he had accosted a woman, and she had said quietly: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Leave me alone." Thereafter, he had avoided conversation with st range young ladies. In compensation, separated from the street by a windowpane, clutching to his ribs a black briefcase, wearing scuffed trousers with a pinstripe, and stretching one leg under the opposite seat (if unoccupied), Erwin looked boldly and freely at passing girls,

and then would suddenly bite his nether lip: this signified the capture of a new concubine; whereupon he would set her aside, as it were, and his swift gaze, jumping like a compass needle, was already seeking out

the next one. Those beauties were far from him, and therefore the sweetness of free choice could not be affected by sullen timidity. If, however, a girl happened to sit down across from him, and a certain

Mvinge told him that she was pretty, he would retract his leg from under her seat with all the signs of a gruffness quite uncharacteristic of has young age--and could not bring himself to take stock of her: the

ones of his forehead--right here, over the eyebrows--ached from shyness, as if an iron helmet were restricting his temples and presenting him from raising his eyes; and what a relief it was when she got up and went toward the exit. Then, feigning casual abstraction, he looked--shameless Erwin did look--following her receding back, swal lowing whole her adorable nape and silk-hosed calves, and thus, after all, would he add her to his fabulous harem! The leg would again be stretched, again the bright sidewalk would flow past the window, and again, his thin pale nose with a noticeable depression at the tip directed streetward, Erwin would accumulate his slave girls. And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!

2: One Saturday, on a frivolous evening in May, Erwin was sitting at a sidewalk table. He watched the tripping throng of the avenue, now and then biting his lip with a quick incisor. The entire sky was tinged with pink and the streetlamps and shop-sign bulbs glowed with a kind of unearthly light in the gathering dusk. The first lilacs were being hawked by an anemic but pretty young girl. Rather fittingly the cafe phonograph was singing the Flower Aria from _Faust._

A tall middle-aged lady in a charcoal tailor-made suit, heavily, yet not ungracefully, swinging her hips, made her way among the sidewalk tables. There was no vacant one. Finally, she put one hand in a glossy black glove upon the back of the empty chair opposite Erwin.

"May I?" queried her unsmiling eyes from under the short veil of her velvet hat.

"Yes, certainly," answered Erwin, slightly rising and ducking. He was not awed by such solid-built women with thickly powdered, somewhat masculine jowls.

Down onto the table with a resolute thud went her oversize handbag. She ordered a cup of coffee and a wedge of apple tart. Her deep voice was somewhat hoarse but pleasant.

The vast sky, suffused with dull rose, grew darker. A tram screeched by, inundating the asphalt with the radiant tears of its lights. And short-skirted beauties walked by. Erwin's glance followed them.

I want this one, he thought, noticing his nether lip. And that one, too.

"I think it could be arranged," said his vis-a-vis in the same calm husky tones in which she had addressed the waiter.

Erwin almost fell off his chair. The lady looked intently at him, as she pulled off one glove to tackle her coffee. Her made-up eyes shone cold and hard, like showy false jewels. Dark pouches swelled under them, and--what seldom occurs in the case of women, even elderly women--hairs grew out of her feline-shaped nostrils. The shed glove revealed a big wrinkled hand with long, convex, beautiful fingernails. "Don't be surprised," she said with a wry smile. She muffled a yawn and added: "In point of fact, I am the Devil."

Shy, naive Erwin took this to be a figure of speech, but the lady, lowering her voice, continued as follows:

"Those who imagine me with horns and a thick tail are greatly mis taken. Only once did I appear in that shape, to some Byzantine imbecile, and I really don't know why it was such a damned success. I am born three or four times every two centuries. In the 1870s, some fifty years ago, I was buried, with picturesque honors and a great shedding of blood, on a hill above a cluster of African villages of which I had been ruler. My term there was a rest after more stringent incarnations. Now I am a German-born woman whose last husband--I had, I think, three in all--was of French extraction, a Professor Monde. In recent years I have driven several young men to suicide, caused a well-known artist to copy and multiply the picture of the Westminster Abbey on the pound note, incited a virtuous family man-- But there is really nothing to brag about. This has been a pretty banal avatar, and I am fed up with it."

She gobbled up her slice of tart and Erwin, mumbling something, reached for his hat, which had fallen under the table.

"No, don't go yet," said Frau Monde, simultaneously beckoning the waiter. "I am offering you something. I am offering you a harem. And if you are still skeptical of my power-- See that old gentleman in tortoiseshell glasses crossing the street? Let's have him hit by a tram." Erwin, blinking, turned streetward. As the old man reached the tracks he took out his handkerchief and was about to sneeze into it. At the same instant, a tram flashed, screeched, and rolled past. From both sides of the avenue people rushed toward the tracks. The old gentle -man, his glasses and handkerchief gone, was sitting on the asphalt, Someone helped him up. He stood, sheepishly shaking his head, brushing his coat sleeves with the palms of his hands, and wiggling one leg, to test its condition.

"I said 'hit by a tram,' not 'run over,' which I might also have said," remarked Frau Monde coolly, as she worked a thick cigarette into an enameled holder. "In any case, this is an example."

She blew two streams of gray smoke through her nostrils and again fixed Erwin with her hard bright eyes.

"I liked you immediately. That shyness, that bold imagination. You reminded me of an innocent, though hugely endowed, young monk whom I knew in Tuscany. This is my penultimate night. Being a woman has its points, but being an aging woman is hell, if you will pardon me the expression. Moreover, I made such mischief the other day--you will soon read about it in all the papers--that I had better get out of this life. Next Monday I plan to be born elsewhere. The Si berian slut I have chosen shall be the mother of a marvelous, mon strous man."

"I see/' said Erwin.

"Well, my dear boy," continued Frau Monde, demolishing her second piece of pastry, "I intend, before going, to have a bit of inno cent fun. Here is what I suggest. Tomorrow, from noon to midnight you can select by your usual method" (with heavy humor Frau Monde sucked in her lower lip with a succulent hiss) "all the girls you fancy. Before my departure, I shall have them gathered and placed at your complete disposal. You will keep them until you have enjoyed them all. How does that strike you, _amico?"_

Erwin dropped his eyes and said softly: "If it is all true, it would be a great happiness."

"All right then," she said, and licked the remains of whipped cream off her spoon: "All right. One condition, nevertheless, must be set. No, it is not what you are thinking. As I told you, I have arranged my next incarnation. _Tour _soul I do not require. Now this is the condi tion: the total of your choices between noon and midnight must be an odd number. This is essential and final. Otherwise I can do nothing for you."

Erwin cleared his throat and asked, almost in a whisper: "But-- how shall I know? Let's say I've chosen one--what then?"

"Nothing," said Frau Monde. "Your feeling, your desire, are a command in themselves. However, in order that you may be sure that the deal stands, I shall have a sign given you every time--a smile, not necessarily addressed to you, a chance word in the crowd, a sudden patch of color--that sort of thing. Don't worry, you'll know."

"And--and--" mumbled Erwin, shuffling his feet under the table: "--and where is it all going to--uh--happen? I have only a very small room."

"Don't worry about that either," said Frau Monde, and her corset creaked as she rose. "Now it's time you went home. No harm in get ting a good night's rest. I'll give you a lift."

In the open taxi, with the dark wind streaming between starry sky and glistening asphalt, poor Erwin felt tremendously elated. Frau Monde sat erect, her crossed legs forming a sharp angle, and the city lights flashed in her gemlike eyes.

"Here's your house," she said, touching Erwin's shoulder. "_Au __revoir."_

Many are the dreams that can be brought on by a mug of dark beer laced with brandy. Thus reflected Erwin when he awoke the next morning--he must have been drunk, and the talk with that funny female was all fancy. This rhetorical turn often occurs in fairy tales and, as in fairy tales, our young man soon realized he was wrong.

He went out just as the church clock had begun the laborious task of striking noon. Sunday bells joined in excitedly, and a bright breeze ruffled the Persian lilacs around the public lavatory in the small park near his house. Pigeons settled on an old stone _Herzqg _or waddled .ilong the sandbox where little children, their flannel behinds sticking up, were digging with toy scoops and playing with wooden trains. The lustrous leaves of the lindens moved in the wind; their ace-of-spades shadows quivered on the graveled path and climbed in an airy flock the trouser legs and skirts of the strollers, racing up and scattering over shoulders and faces, and once again the whole flock slipped back onto the ground, where, barely stirring, they lay in wait for the next foot passenger. In this variegated setting, Erwin noticed a girl in a white dress who had squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup with warts on its belly. The inclination of her head bared the back of her neck, revealing the ripple of her vertebrae, the fair bloom, the tender hollow between her shoulder blades, and the sun through the leaves found fiery strands in her chestnut hair. Still playing with the puppy, she half-rose from her haunches and clapped her hands above it. The fat little animal rolled over on the gravel, ran off a few feet, and loppled on its side. Erwin sat down on a bench and cast a timid and avid glance at her face.

He saw her so clearly, with such piercing and perfect force of perception, that, it seemed, nothing new about her features might have been disclosed by years of previous intimacy. Her palish lips twitched as if repeating every small soft movement of the puppy; her eyelashes beat so brightly as to look like the raylets of her beaming eyes; but most enchanting, perhaps, was the curve of her cheek, now slightly in profile; that dipping line no words, of course, could describe. She started running, showing nice legs, and the puppy tumbled in her wake like a woolly ball. In sudden awareness of his miraculous might, Erwin caught his breath and awaited the promised signal. At that moment the girl turned her head as she ran and flashed a smile at the plump little creature that could barely keep up with her.

"Number one," Erwin said to himself with unwonted complacency, and got up from his bench.

He followed the graveled path with scraping footsteps, in gaudy, reddish-yellow shoes worn only on Sundays. He left the oasis of the diminutive park and crossed over to Amadeus Boulevard. Did his eyes rove? Oh, they did. But, maybe, because the girl in white had somehow left a sunnier mark than any remembered impression, some dancing blind spot prevented him from finding another sweetheart. Soon, however, the blot dissolved, and near a glazed pillar with the tramway timetable our friend observed two young ladies--sisters, or even twins, to judge by their striking resemblance--who were discussing a streetcar route in vibrant, echoing voices. Both were small and slim, dressed in black silk, with saucy eyes and painted lips.

"That's exactly the tram you want," one of them kept saying. "Both, please," Erwin requested quickly.

"Yes, of course," said the other in response to her sister's words. Erwin continued along the boulevard. He knew all the smart streets where the best possibilities existed.

"Three," he said to himself. "Odd number. So far so good. And if it were midnight right now--"

Swinging her handbag she was coming down the steps of the Leilla, one of the best local hotels. Her big blue-chinned companion slowed down behind her to light his cigar. The lady was lovely, hatless, bobhaired, with a fringe on her forehead that made her look like a boy actor in the part of a damsel. As she went by, now closely escorted by our ridiculous rival, Erwin remarked simultaneously the crimson artificial rose in the lapel of her jacket and the advertisement on a billboard: a blond-mustachioed Turk and, in large letters, the word "yes!," under which it said in smaller characters: "I smoke only the rose of the

ORIENT."

That made four, divisible by two, and Erwin felt eager to restore the odd-number rigmarole without delay. In a lane off the boulevard there was a cheap restaurant which he sometimes frequented on Sundays when sick of his landlady's fare. Among the girls he had happened

to note at one time or another there had been a wench who worked in that place. He entered and ordered his favorite dish: blood sausage and sauerkraut. His table was next to the telephone. A man in a bowler called a number and started to jabber as ardently as a hound that has picked up the scent of a hare. Erwin's glance wandered toward the bar--and there was the girl he had seen three or four times before. She was beautiful in a drab, freckled way, if beauty can be drably russet. As she raised her bare arms to place her washed beer steins he saw the red tufts of her armpits.

"All right, all right!" barked the man into the mouthpiece.

With a sigh of relief enriched by a belch, Erwin left the restaurant. He felt heavy and in need of a nap. To tell the truth, the new shoes pinched like crabs. The weather had changed. The air was sultry. Great domed clouds grew and crowded one another in the hot sky. The streets were becoming deserted. One could feel the houses fill to the brim with Sunday-afternoon snores. Erwin boarded a streetcar.

The tram started to roll. Erwin turned his pale face, shining with sweat, to the window, but no girls walked. While paying his fare he noticed, on the other side of the aisle, a woman sitting with her back to him. She wore a black velvet hat, and a light frock patterned with Intertwined chrysanthemums against a semitransparent mauve background through which showed the shoulder straps of her slip. The lady's statuesque bulk made Erwin curious to glimpse her face. When her hat moved and, like a black ship, started to turn, he first looked away as usual, glanced in feigned abstraction at a youth sitting opposite him, at his own fingernails, at a red-cheeked little old man dozing in the rear of the car, and, having thus established a point of departure justifying further castings-around, Erwin shifted his casual gaze to the lady now looking his way. It was Frau Monde. Her full, no-longer-young face was blotchily flushed from the heat, her mannish eyebrows bristled above her piercing prismatic eyes, a slightly sardonic smile curled up the corners of her compressed lips.

"Good afternoon," she said in her soft husky voice: "Come sit over here. Now we can have a chat. How are things going?"

"Only five," replied Erwin with embarrassment.

"Excellent. An odd number. I would advise you to stop there. And at midnight--ah, yes, I don't think I told you--at midnight you are to come to Hoffmann Street. Know where that is? Look between Number Twelve and Fourteen. The vacant lot there will be replaced by a villa with a walled garden. The girls of your choice will be waiting for you on cushions and rugs. I shall meet you at the garden gate--but it is understood," she added with a subtle smile, "I shan't intrude. You'll remember the address? There will be a brand-new streetlight in front of the gate."

"Oh, one thing," said Erwin, collecting his courage. "Let them be dressed at first--I mean let them look just as they were when I chose them--and let them be very merry and loving."

"Why, naturally," she replied, "everything will be just as you wish whether you tell me or not. Otherwise there was no point in starting the whole business, _n'est-ce pas? _Confess, though, my dear boy--you were on the brink of enrolling me in your harem. No, no, have no fear, I am kidding you. Well, that's your stop. Very wise to call it a day. Five is fine. See you a few sees after midnight, ha-ha."

Upon reaching his room, Erwin took off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. He woke up toward evening. A mellifluous tenor at full blast streamed from a neighbor's phonograph: "I_ vant to be happee_--_"_

Erwin started thinking back: Number one, the Maiden in White, she's the most artless of the lot. I may have been a little hasty. Oh, well, no harm done. Then the Twins near the pillar of glass. Gay, painted young things. With them I'm sure to have fun. Then number four, Leilla the Rose, resembling a boy. That's, perhaps, the best one. And finally, the Fox in the ale-house. Not bad either. But only five. That's not very many!

He lay prone for a while with his hands behind his head, listening to the tenor, who kept wanting to be happy: Five. No, that's absurd. Pity it's not Monday morning: those three shopgirls the other day--oh, there are so many more beauties waiting to be found! And I can always throw in a streetwalker at the last moment.

Erwin put on his regular pair of shoes, brushed his hair, and hurried out.

By nine o'clock he had collected two more. One of them he no ticed in a cafe where he had a sandwich and two drams of Dutch gin. She was talking with great animation to her companion, a beard-fingering foreigner, in an impenetrable language--Polish or Russian-- and her gray eyes had a slight slant, her thin aquiline nose wrinkled when she laughed, and her elegant legs were exposed to the knee. While Erwin watched her quick gestures, the reckless way in which she lap-tapped cigarette ash all over the table, a German word, like a window, flashed open in her Slavic speech, and this chance word _("offenbar") _was the "evident" sign. The other girl, number seven on the list, turned up at the Chinese-style entrance of a small amusement park. She wore a scarlet blouse with a bright-green skirt, and her bare neck swelled as she shrieked in glee, fighting off a couple of slap-happy young boors who were grabbing her by the hips and trying to make her accompany them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They passed, Erwin caught a whiff of perfume. He looked back, then went on.

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

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

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

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

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

as it entered a streetlamp's aura, glide across a wall, twist around its edge, and vanish.

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

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

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

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

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

He stood staring at her with a wretched smile.

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

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

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

"Hoffmann Street," said the dummy dryly.

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

"Hello. It's me."

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

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

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

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

"A pity," said Erwin.

"A pity," she echoed, and yawned.

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

TERROR

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

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

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

I led a happy life. I had a girl. I remember well the torture of our first separation. I had gone on a business trip abroad, and upon my return she met me at the station. I saw her standing on the platform, caged as it were in tawny sunlight, a dusty cone of which had just penetrated through the station's glazed vault. Her face kept rhythmically turning to and fro as the train windows slowly glided by to a stop. With her I always felt easy and at rest. Once only--and here again I feel what a clumsy instrument human speech is. Still, I would like to explain. It is really such nonsense, so ephemeral: we are alone in her room, I write while she darns a silk stocking stretched taut over the back of a wooden spoon, her head bent low; one ear, translucently pink, is half concealed by a strand of fair hair, and the small pearls around her neck gleam touchingly, and her tender cheek appears sunken because of the assiduous pout of her lips. All at once, for no reason at all, I become terrified of her presence. This is far more terrifying than the fact that somehow, for a split second, my mind did not register her identity in the dusty sun of the station. I am terrified by there being another person in the room with me; I am terrified by the very notion of _another person. _No wonder lunatics don't recognize rel-

atives. But she raises her head, all her features participate in the quick smile she gives me--and no trace is left now of the odd terror I felt a moment ago. Let me repeat: this happened only one single time, and I took it to be a silly trick of my nerves, forgetting that on lonely nights before a lonely mirror I had experienced something quite similar.

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

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

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