Despair (7 page)

The decision, which I had formed and which was now swiftly brought into execution, met with his full approval, the more so, as I was following an old piece of advice of his.

A week later I asked him to dinner. He tucked the corner of his napkin sideways into his collar. While tackling his soup, he expressed displeasure with the trend of political events. Lydia breezily inquired whether there would be any war and with whom? He looked at her over his spectacles, taking his time (such, more or less, was the glimpse you caught of him at the beginning of this chapter) and finally answered: “It is heavy to say, but I think war excluded. When I young was, I came upon the idea of supposing only the best” (he all but turned “best” into “pest,” so gross were his lip-consonants). “I hold this idea always. The chief thing by me is optimismus.”

“Which comes in very handy, seeing your profession,” said I with a smile.

He lowered at me and replied quite seriously:

“But it is pessimismus that gives clients to us.”

The end of the dinner was unexpectedly crowned with tea served in glasses. For some unaccountable reason Lydia thought such a finish very clever and nice. Orlovius at any rate was pleased. Ponderously and lugubriously telling us of his old mother, who lived in Dorpat, he held up his glass to stir what remained of his tea in the German fashion—that is, not with a spoon, but by means of a circular motion of the wrist—so as not to waste the sugar settled at the bottom.

The agreement I signed with his firm was, on my part, a curiously hazy and insignificant action. It was about that time I became so depressed, silent, absent-minded; even my unobservant wife noticed a change in me—especially as my lovemaking had lapsed into a drab routine after all that furious dissociation. Once, in the middle of the night (we were lying awake in bed, and the room was impossibly stuffy, notwithstanding the wide-open window), she said:

“You do seem overworked, Hermann; in August we’ll go to the seaside.”

“Oh,” I said, “it’s not only that, but town life generally, that’s what is boring me to death.”

She could not see my face in the dark. After a minute she went on:

“Now, take for instance Aunt Elisa—you know that aunt of mine who lived in France, in Pignan. There
is
such a town as Pignan, isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she doesn’t live there any more, but has gone to Nice with the old Frenchman she married. They’ve got a farm down there.”

She yawned.

“My chocolate is going to the devil, old girl,” said I and yawned also.

“Everything will be all right,” Lydia muttered. “You must have a rest, that’s all.”

“A change of life, not a rest,” said I with the pretense of a sigh.

“Change of life,” said Lydia.

“Tell me,” I asked her, “wouldn’t you like us to live somewhere in a quiet sunny nook, wouldn’t it be a treat for you, if I retired from business? The respectable
rentier
sort of thing, eh?”

“I’d like living with you anywhere, Hermann. We’d have Ardalion come too, and perhaps we’d buy a great big dog.”

A silence.

“Well, unfortunately we shan’t go anywhere. I’m practically broke. That chocolate will have to be liquidated, I suppose.”

A belated pedestrian passed by. Chock! And again: chock! He was probably knocking the lamposts with his cane.

“Guess: my first is that sound, my second is an exclamation, my third will be prefixed to me when I’m no more; and my whole is my ruin.”

The smooth sizzle of a passing motorcar.

“Well—can’t you guess?”

But my fool of a wife was already asleep. I closed my eyes, turned on my side, tried to sleep too; was unsuccessful. Out of the darkness, straight towards me, with jaw protruding and eyes looking straight into mine, came Felix. As he closed up on me he dissolved, and what I saw before me was merely the long, empty road by which he had come. Then again, from afar, there appeared a form, that of a man, giving a knock with his stick to every wayside tree-trunk; nearer and nearer he stalked, and I tried to make out his face.… And lo, with jaw protruding and eyes looking straight into mine—
But he faded as before, the moment he reached me, or, better say, he seemed to enter into me, and pass through, as if I were a shadow; and then again there was only the road stretching out expectantly, and again a figure appeared, and again it was he.

I turned on my other side, and for a while all was dark and peaceful, unruffled blackness; then, gradually, a road became perceptible: the same road, but the other way round; and there appeared suddenly before my very face, as if coming out of me, the back of a man’s head and the bag strapped to his shoulders; slowly his figure diminished, he was going, going, in another instant would be gone … but all of a sudden he stopped, glanced back and retraced his steps, so that his face grew clearer and clearer; and it was my own face.

I turned again, this time lying supine, and then, as if seen through a dark glass, there stretched above me a varnished blue-black sky, a band of sky between the ebon shapes of trees which on either side were slowly receding; but when I lay face downwards, I saw running below me the pebbles and mud of a country road, wisps of dropped hay, a cart rut brimming with rainwater, and in that wind-wrinkled puddle the trembling travesty of my face; which, as I noticed with a shock, was eyeless.

“I always leave the eyes to the last,” said Ardalion self-approvingly.

He held before him, at arm’s length, the charcoal picture which he had begun making of me, and bent his head this way and that. He used to come frequently, and it was on the balcony that we generally had the sitting. I had plenty of leisure now: it had occurred to me to give myself something in the way of a small holiday.

Lydia was present too, curled up in a wicker armchair
with a book; a half-squashed cigarette end (she never quite crushed them to death) with grim tenacity of life let forth a thin, straight thread of smoke out of the ashtray: now and then some tiny wind would make it dip and wobble, but it recovered again as straight and thin as ever.

“Anything but a good likeness,” said Lydia, without, however, lifting her eyes from her book.

“It may come yet,” rejoined Ardalion. “Here, I’m going to prune this nostril and we’ll get it. Kind of dull light this afternoon.”

“What’s dull?” inquired Lydia, lifting her eyes and holding one finger on the interrupted line.

Let me interrupt this passage, too, for there is still another piece of my life that summer worthy of your attention, reader. While apologizing for the muddle and mottle of my tale, let me repeat that it is not I who am writing, but my memory, which has its own whims and rules. So, watch me roaming again about the forest near Ardalion’s lake; this time I have come alone and not by car, but by train (as far as Koenigsdorf) and bus (as far as the yellow post).

On the suburban map Ardalion left on our balcony one day all the features of the locality stand out very clear. Let us suppose I am holding that map before me; then the city of Berlin, which is outside the picture, may be imagined somewhere in the vicinity of my left elbow. On the map itself, in its southwestern corner, there stretches northward, like a black and white bit of scaled tape, the railway line, which, metaphysically at least, runs along my sleeve cuffward from Berlin. My wristwatch is the small town of Koenigsdorf, beyond which the black and white ribbon turns and proceeds eastward, where there is another circle (the lower button of my waistcoat): Eichenberg.

No need, however, to travel as far as that yet; we get off at Koenigsdorf. As the railway line swerves to the east, its companion, the main road, leaves it and continues north alone, straight to the village of Waldau (the nail of my left thumb). Thrice a day there is a bus plying between Koenigsdorf and Waldau (seventeen kilometers); and it is at Waldau, by the bye, that the center of the land-selling enterprise is situated; a gaily painted pavilion, a fancy flag flapping, numerous yellow signposts: one, for instance, points “to the bathing beach,” but there is yet no beach to speak of—only a bog on the lip of the Waldau lake; another points “to the casino,” but the latter is likewise absent, though represented by something looking like a tabernacle, with an incipient coffee stall; still another sign invites you “to the sports ground,” and sure enough you find there, newly erected, a complicated affair for gymnastics, rather like gallows, but there is nobody who might use the thing, apart from some village urchin swinging head downward and showing the patch on his bottom; and all around, in every direction, lie the lots; some of them are half sold and on Sundays you see fat men in bathing suits and horn-rimmed glasses sternly engaged in building rudimentary bungalows; here and there you may even see flowers freshly planted, or else a pink privy enlaced with climbing roses.

We shall, however, not go as far as Waldau either, but leave the bus on the tenth kilometer from Koenigsdorf, at a point where a solitary yellow post stands on our right. On the east side of the highway the map shows a vast space all dotted over: it is the forest; there, in its very heart, lies the small lake we bathed in, with, on its western bank, spread fanwise like playing cards, a dozen allotments, only one of which is sold (Ardalion’s—if you can call it sold).

We are now getting to the exciting part. Mention has already been made of the station of Eichenberg which comes after Koenigsdorf when you travel east. Now comes a technical question: can a person starting from the neighborhood of Ardalion’s lake reach Eichenberg on foot? The answer is: yes. We should go round the southern side of the lake and then bear east through the wood. After a four-kilometer walk, keeping in the wood all the time, we come out to a rustic lane, one end of which leads no matter where, to hamlets we need not bother about, while the other brings us to Eichenberg.

My life is all mangled and messed, but here I am clowning away, juggling with bright little descriptions, playing on the cosy pronoun “we,” winking at the tourist, the cottage owner, the lover of Nature, that picturesque hash of greens and blues. But be patient with me, my reader. The walk we shall presently take will be your rich reward. These conversations with readers are quite silly too. Stage asides. The eloquent hiss: “Soft now! Someone is coming.…”

That walk. I was dropped by the bus at the yellow post. The bus resumed its course taking away from me three old women in polka-dotted black; a fellow wearing a velvet waistcoat, with a scythe wrapped in sackcloth; a small girl with a large parcel; and a man in an overcoat despite the heat, with a heavy-looking traveling bag on his knees: probably a veterinary surgeon.

Among the spurge and scutch-grass I found traces of tires—the tires of my car which had bumped and bounced here several times, during the trips we had made. I wore plus fours, or as Germans call them: “knickerbockers” (the “k” is sounded). I entered the wood. I stopped at the exact spot where I and my wife had once waited for Ardalion. I smoked
a cigarette there. I looked at the little puff of smoke that slowly stretched out in midair, was folded by ghostly fingers, and melted away. I felt a spasm in my throat. I went on to the lake and noticed, on the sand, a crumpled black and orange scrap of film wrap (Lydia had been snapping us). I went round the lake on its south side and then straight east through the thick pine wood.

After an hour’s stroll I came out on the country road. I took it and in another hour was in Eichenberg. I boarded a slow train. I returned to Berlin.

Several times I repeated this monotonous walk without ever meeting a soul in the forest. Gloom and a deep hush. The land near the lake was not selling at all; indeed, the whole enterprise was in a bad way. When we three used to go out there for a swim, our solitude all day long remained so perfect that one could, if a body desired, bathe stark naked; which reminds me that once, at my order, frightened Lydia peeled off her bathing suit and, with many a pretty blush and nervous giggle, posed in the buff and the brown (fat thighs so tightly pressed together she could hardly stand) for her portrait before Ardalion, who all of a sudden got huffed about something, probably about his own lack of talent and, abruptly ceasing to draw, stalked away to look for edible toadstools.

As to my portrait, he worked at it stubbornly, continuing well into August, when, having failed to cope with the honest slog of charcoal, he changed to the petty knavishness of pastel. I set myself a certain time limit: the date of his finishing the thing. At last there came the pear-juice aroma of lacquer, the portrait was framed, and Lydia gave Ardalion twenty German marks, slipping them, for the sake of elegancy, into an envelope. We had guests that evening, Orlovius
among others, and we all stood and gaped; at what? At the ruddy horror of my face. I do not know why he had lent my cheeks that fruity hue; they are really as pale as death. Look as one might, none could see the ghost of a likeness! How utterly ridiculous, for instance, that crimson point in the canthus, or that glimpse of eyetooth from under a curled, snarly lip. All this—against an ambitious background hinting at things that might have been either geometrical figures or gallow trees.…

Orlovius, with whom shortsightedness was a form of stupidity, went up to the portrait as close as he could and after having pushed his spectacles up on his forehead (why ever did he wear them? They were only a hindrance) stood quite still with half-opened mouth, gently panting at the picture as if he were about to make a meal of it. “The modern style,” he said at length with disgust and passed to its neighbor, which he began to examine with the same conscientious attention, although it was but an ordinary print found in every Berlin home: “The Isle of the Dead.”

And now, dear reader, let us imagine a smallish office room on the sixth story of an impersonal house. The typist had gone; I was alone. In the window a cloudy sky loomed. On the wall a calendar showed a huge black nine, rather like the tongue of a bull: the ninth of September. Upon the table lay the worries of the day (in the guise of letters from creditors) and among them stood a symbolically empty chocolate box with the lilac lady who had been untrue to me. Nobody about. I uncovered the typewriter. All was quiet. On a certain page of my pocket diary (destroyed since) there was a certain address, written in a half-illiterate hand. Looking through that trembling prism I could see a waxen brow bending, a
dirty ear; head downwards, a violet dangled from a buttonhole; a black-nailed finger pressed upon my silver pencil.