Despair (9 page)

I went to the window and looked out: there was a dreary courtyard down there and a round-backed Tartar in an embroidered skullcap was showing a small blue carpet to a buxom barefooted woman. Now I knew that woman and I recognized that Tartar too, and the patch of weeds in one corner of the yard, and that vortex of dust, and the Caspian wind’s soft pressure, and the pale sky sick of looking on fisheries.

At that moment there was a knock, a maid entered with the additional pillow and the cleaner chamber pot I had demanded, and when I turned to the window again it was no longer a Tartar whom I saw there but some local peddler selling braces, and the woman was gone. But while I looked there started afresh that process of fusion, of building, that making up of a definite remembrance; there reappeared, growing and clustering, those weeds in a corner of the yard, and again red-haired Christina Forsmann, whom I had known carnally in 1915, fingered the Tartar’s carpet, and sand flew, and I could not discover what the kernel was, around which all those things were formed, and where exactly the germ, the fount—suddenly I glanced at the decanter of dead water and it said “warm”—as in that game when you hide objects; and very possibly I should have finally found the trifle, which, unconsciously noticed by me, had at once set going the engine of memory (or, again, I should not have found it, the simple, nonliterary explanation being that everything in that provincial
German hotel chamber, even the view, vaguely and uglily resembled something seen in Russia ages ago) had I not thought of my appointment; and that made me draw on my gloves and hurry out.

I turned down the boulevard, past the post office. A brutal wind was blowing and chasing leaves—scurry, cripples!—athwart the street. In spite of my impatience I was as observant as usual, noting the faces and trousers of passersby, the tramcars which seemed like toys compared to the Berlin ones, the shops, a giant’s top hat painted on a peeling wall, signboards, the name of a fishmonger: Carl Spiess, reminding me of one Carl Spiess whom I used to know in that Volga village of my past and who likewise sold spitchcocks.

At last, reaching the end of the street, I saw the bronze horse rearing and using its tail for a prop, like a woodpecker, and if the duke riding it had stretched out his arm with more energy, the whole monument in the murky evening light might have passed for that of Peter the Great in the town he founded. On one of the benches an old man was eating grapes out of a paper bag; on another bench sat two elderly dames; an invalid old woman of enormous size reclined in a Bath chair and listened to their talk, her round eyes agog. Twice and thrice did I go round the statue, observing as I went the snake writhing under that hind hoof, that legend in Latin, that jackboot with the black star of a spur. Sorry, there was really no snake; it was just my fancy borrowing from Tsar Peter—whose statue, anyway, wears buskins.

Then I sat down on an empty bench (there were half a dozen in all) and looked at my watch. Three minutes past five. Sparrows hopped about the turf. On a ridiculously curved flowerbed there grew the filthiest flowers in the world; Michaelmas daisies. Ten minutes elapsed. No, my agitation
refused to keep seated. Moreover, I was out of cigarettes and craved frantically for a smoke.

I turned into a side street, passing, as I did so, a black Protestant church which affected an air of antiquity, and espied a tobacconist’s. The automatic bell continued to whirr after my entering, as I had not closed the door: “Will you please—” said the bespectacled woman behind the counter, and I stepped back and shut the door sharply. Just above it was one of Ardalion’s still-life pictures: a tobacco pipe, on green cloth, and two roses.

“How on earth did you—?” I asked with a laugh. She did not understand at first, and then answered:

“My niece painted it—my niece who died recently.”

Well, I’m damned! (thought I). For had I not seen something very similar, if not identical, among Ardalion’s pictures? Well, I’m damned!

“Oh, I see,” said I aloud: “have you got—” I named the brand I usually smoke, paid for the cigarettes and went out.

Twenty minutes past five.

Not daring to return to the assigned place (so giving fate a chance of altering its programme) and still feeling nothing, neither annoyance, nor relief, I walked for a pretty long time down the side street which led me away from the statue, and at every other step I stopped, trying to light my cigarette, but the wind kept filching my light until I took shelter under a porch, thus blasting the blast—what a pun! I stood under the porch and looked at two little girls playing marbles; rolling by turn the iridescent orb, now bending to give it a push with the back of the finger, now compressing it between the feet to release it with a hop, and all this in order that the marble should trickle into a tiny pit in the ground under a double-trunked birch tree; as I stood looking at that concentrated,
silent and minute game, I somehow found myself thinking that Felix could not come for the simple reason that he was a product of my imagination, which hankered after reflections, repetitions, masks, and that my presence in a remote little town was absurd and even monstrous.

Well do I remember that little town—and feel oddly perplexed: should I go on giving instances of such aspects of it, which in a horribly unpleasant way echoed things I had somewhere seen long ago? It even seems to me now that it was, that town, constructed of certain refuse particles of my past, for I discovered in it things most remarkably and most uncannily familiar to me: a low pale-blue house, the exact counterpart of which I had seen in a St. Petersburg surburb; an old-clothes shop, where suits hung that had belonged to dead acquaintances of mine; a street lamp bearing the same number (I always like to notice the numbers of street lamps) as one that had stood in front of the Moscow house where I lodged; and nearby the same bare birch tree with the same forked trunk in an iron corset (ah, that is what made me look at the number on the lamp). I could, if I chose, give many more examples of that kind, some of which are so subtle, so—how shall I put it? … abstractly personal, as to be unintelligible to the reader, whom I pet and pamper like a devoted nurse. Nor am I quite certain of the exceptionality of the aforesaid phenomena. Every man with a keen eye is familiar with those anonymously retold passages from his past life: false-innocent combinations of details, which smack revoltingly of plagiarism. Let us leave them to the conscience of fate and return, with a sinking heart and dull reluctance, to the monument at the end of the street.

The old man had finished his grapes and was gone; the woman, dying from dropsy, had been wheeled away; there
was nobody about, save one man, who sat on that very same bench where I had been sitting a while ago. Leaning forward a little and with knees set apart, he was dealing out crumbs to the sparrows. His stick, which was carelessly set against the seat near his left hip, came slowly into motion the moment I noticed its presence; it started sliding and plopped down on the gravel. The sparrows flew up, described a curve and settled on the surrounding shrubs. I became aware that the man had turned towards me.

You are right, my intelligent reader.

Keeping my eyes fixed on the ground, I shook his right hand with my left, simultaneously picked up the fallen stick, and sat down on the bench beside him.

“You are late,” I said, without looking at him. He laughed. Still without looking, I unbuttoned my overcoat, removed my hat, passed my palm across my head. I felt hot all over. The wind had died in the madhouse.

“I recognized you at once,” said Felix in a fawning idiotically conspirant manner.

I was looking now at the stick in my hands. It was a stout, weathered stick, with its lime wood notched in one place and the owner’s name neatly branded on it: “Felix so and so,” and under that the date, and then the name of his village. I put it back on the bench, with the fleeting thought that he had come on foot, the rascal.

At last, bracing myself, I turned toward him. Still, it was not at once that I glanced at his face; I started working from his feet upward, as one sees on the screen when the cameraman is trying to be tantalizing. First came big, dusty shoes, thick socks sloppy about the ankles, then shiny blue trousers (the corduroy ones having presumably rotted) and a hand holding a crust of dry bread. Then a blue coat over a dark-grey sweater. Still higher the soft collar that I knew (though
now comparatively clean). There I stopped. Should I leave him headless or go on building him? Taking cover behind my hand I glanced between my fingers at his face.

For a moment I had the impression that it had all been a delusion, a hallucination—that never could he have been my double, that gump, with his raised eyebrows, expectantly leering, not quite knowing yet what countenance to assume—therefore raising those eyebrows, so as to be on the safe side. For a moment, as I say, he appeared to me as like me as any man. But then, their fright over, the sparrows returned, one of them hopping quite close, and that diverted his attention; his features fell back to their proper position, and I saw, once again, the marvel that had arrested me five months before.

He flung a handful of crumbs to the sparrows. The nearest made a flurried peck, the crumb sprang up and was nabbed by another, which immediately flew away. Felix again turned to me with his former expectant and cringing servility.

“That one got nothing,” said I, pointing to a little chap standing apart and clicking his beak helplessly.

“He’s young,” observed Felix. “Look, he has hardly any tail yet. I like birdies,” he added with a mawkish grin.

“Been in the war?” I queried; and several times running, I cleared my throat, for my voice was hoarse.

“Yes,” he answered. “Two years. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Damned afraid of getting killed, eh?”

He winked and spoke with evasive obscurity:

“Every mouse has a house, but it’s not every mouse that comes out.”

In German the end rhymed too; I had already noticed his fondness for insipid sayings; and it was quite useless racking one’s brains trying to see the idea he really desired to express.

“That’s all. There is no more for you,” said he in an aside
to the sparrows. “I like squirrels too” (again that wink). “It’s good when a wood is full of squirrels. I like ’em because they are against the landowners. And moles.”

“What about sparrows?” I asked with great gentleness. “Are they ‘against’ as you put it?”

“A sparrow is a beggar among birds—a real street-beggar. A beggar,” he repeated again and again, now leaning with both hands on his stick and swaying a little. It was obvious he considered himself to be an extraordinarily astute arguer. No, he was not merely a fool, he was a fool of the melancholic type. Even his smile was glum—made one sick to look at it. And nevertheless I looked greedily. It interested me hugely to observe how our remarkable likeness got broken by the working of his face. If he were to attain old age, I reflected, his grins and grimaces would end by eroding completely our resemblance which is now so perfect when his face freezes.

Hermann (playfully): “Ah, you are a philosopher, I see.”

That seemed to offend him a little. “Philosophy is the invention of the rich,” he objected with deep conviction. “And all the rest of it has been invented too: religion, poetry … oh, maiden, how I suffer, oh, my poor heart! I don’t believe in love. Now, friendship—that’s another matter. Friendship and music.

“I’ll tell you something,” he went on, laying his stick aside and addressing me with some heat. “I’d like to have a friend who’d always be ready to share his slice of bread with me and who’d bequeath to me a piece of land, a cottage. Yes, I’d like to have a real friend. I’d work for him as a gardener, and then afterwards his garden would become mine, and I’d always remember my dead comrade with grateful tears. We’d fiddle together, or, say, he’d play the flute and I the mandolin.
But women … now, really, could you name a single one who did not deceive her husband?”

“All very true! Very true indeed. It’s a pleasure to hear you talk. Did you ever go to school?”

“Just for a short time. What can one learn at school? Nothing. If a fellow is clever, what good are lessons to him? The chief thing is Nature. Politics, for instance, don’t attract me. And generally speaking … the world, you know, is
dirt.”

“A perfectly logical conclusion,” said I. “Yes—your logic is faultless. Quite surprisingly so. Now, look here, clever, just hand me back that pencil of mine and be quick about it.”

That made him sit up and put him into the frame of mind I required.

“You forgot it on the grass,” he mumbled in a bewildered manner. “I didn’t know if I’d see you again.”

“Stole it and sold it!” I cried—even stamped my foot.

His reply was remarkable: first he shook his head denying the theft and then immediately nodded admitting the transaction. There was gathered in him, I believe, the whole bouquet of human stupidity.

“Confound you,” I said, “be more circumspect next time. Well, anyway, let’s let bygones—Have a cigarette.”

He relaxed and beamed, as he saw my wrath had passed; started to display gratitude: “Thank you, oh, thank you. Now, really, how marvelously alike we are! Mightn’t one suppose my father had sinned with your mother?” And he laughed wheedlingly, very pleased with his joke.

“To business,” said I, affecting a sudden bluff gravity. “I have invited you here not merely for the ethereal delights of small talk. I spoke in my letter of the help I was going to give you, of the work I had found for you. First of all, however,
let me put you one question. Your answer must be candid and exact. Tell me, what do you think I am?”

Felix examined me, then turned away and shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s not a riddle I’m setting you,” I went on patiently. “I perfectly realize that you cannot know my identity. Let us, in any case, waive aside the possibility you so wittily mentioned. Our blood, Felix, is not the same. No, my good chap, not the same. I was born a thousand miles from your cradle and the honor of my parents—as of yours, I hope—is unstained. You are an only son: So am I. Consequently neither to me nor to you can there come that mysterious creature: a long-lost brother once stolen by the gypsies. No ties unite us; I have no obligations toward you, mark that well, no obligations whatever; if I intend helping you, I do so of my own free will. Bear that in mind, please. Now, let me ask you again: what do you suppose I am? What is the opinion you have formed of me? For you must have formed
some
kind of opinion, mustn’t you?”