I was sitting with my feet up on the low window sill and looking down as my schoolmates, dressed in the same kind of long pink smocks as I, held hands and circled around a beribboned pole. Why was I left out? In punishment? No. Rather, the reluctance of the other children to have me in their game and the mortal embarrassment, shame and dejection I myself felt when I joined them made me prefer that white nook of the sill, sharply marked off by the shadow of the half-open casement. I could hear the exclamations required by the game and the strident commands of the red-haired ‘pedagoguette’; I could see her curls and her spectacles, and with the squeamish horror that never left me I watched her give the smallest children shoves to make them whirl faster. And that teacher, and the striped pole, and the white clouds, now and then letting through the gliding sun, which would suddenly spill out passionate light, searching for something, were all repeated in the flaming glass of the open window … In short, I felt such fear and sadness that I tried to submerge within myself, to slow down and slip out of the senseless life that was carrying me onward. Just then, at the end of the stone gallery where I was sitting, appeared the senior educator—I do not recall his name—a fat, sweaty, shaggy-chested man, who was on his way to the bathing place. While still at a distance he shouted to me, his voice amplified by the acoustics, to go into the garden; he approached quickly and flourished his towel. In my sadness, in my abstraction, unconsciously and innocently, instead of descending into the garden by the stairs (the gallery was on the third floor), not thinking what I was doing, but really acting obediently, even submissively, I stepped straight from the window sill onto the elastic air and—feeling nothing more than a half-sensation of bare-footedness (even though I had shoes on)—slowly and quite naturally strode forward, still absently sucking and examining the finger in which I had caught a splinter that morning … Suddenly, however, an extraordinary, deafening silence brought me out of my reverie, and I saw below me, like pale daisies, the upturned faces of the stupefied children, and the pedagoguette, who seemed to be falling backward; I saw also the globes of the trimmed shrubs, and the falling towel that had not yet reached the lawn; I saw myself, a pink-smocked boy, standing transfixed in mid-air; turning around, I saw, but three aerial paces from me, the window I had just left, and, his hairy arm extended in malevolent amazement, the—”
(Here, unfortunately, the light in the cell went out—Rodion always turned it off exactly at ten.)
Chapter Nine
And again the day began with a din of voices. Rodion was gloomily giving instructions, and three other attendants were assisting him. The entire family of Marthe had arrived for the interview, bringing with them all their furniture. Not thus, not thus had he imagined this long-awaited meeting … How they lumbered in! Marthels aged father, with his huge bald head, and bags under his eyes, and the rubbery tap of his black cane; Marthe’s brothers, identical twins except that one had a golden mustache and the other a pitch-black one; Marthe’s maternal grandparents, so old that one could already see through them; three vivacious female cousins, who, however, were not admitted for some reason at the last minute; Marthe’s children—lame Diomedon and obese little Pauline; at last Marthe herself, wearing her best black dress, with a velvet ribbon around her cold white neck, and holding a hand mirror; a very proper young man with a flawless profile was constantly at her side.
The father-in-law, leaning on his stick, seated himself in a leather armchair that had arrived with him, with an effort put a fat suede foot up on a stool and, angrily shaking his head, fixed his gaze, from beneath heavy eyelids, on Cincinnatus, who felt the familiar dull sensation at the sight of the frogs ornamenting the father-in-law’s warm jacket, the folds around his mouth that seemed to express eternal disgust, and the purple blotch of a birthmark on his corded temple, with a swelling resembling a big raisin right on the vein.
The grandfather and grandmother (the one all shaky and shriveled, in patched trousers, the other with her white hair bobbed, and so slim that she might have encased herself in a silk umbrella sheath) settled side by side in two identical high-backed chairs; the grandfather tightly clutched in his small hirsute hands a bulky portrait, in a gilt frame, of his mother, a misty young woman, in turn holding a portrait.
Meanwhile, furniture, household utensils, even individual sections of walls continued to arrive.
There came a mirrored wardrobe, bringing with it its own private reflection (namely, a corner of the connubial bedroom with a stripe of sunlight across the floor, a dropped glove, and an open door in the distance.) A cheerless little tricycle with orthopedic attachments was rolled in. It was followed by the inlaid table which had supported a flat garnet flacon and a hairpin for the last ten years. Marthe sat down on her black couch, embroidered with roses.
“Woe, woe!” proclaimed the father-in-law, striking the floor with his cane. Frightened little smiles appeared on the faces of the oldsters. “Don’t, daddy, we’ve been through it a thousand times,” Marthe said quietly, and shrugged a chilly shoulder. Her young man offered her a fringed shawl but she, forming the rudiment of a tender smile with one corner of her thin lips, waved away his sensitive hand. (“The first thing I look at in a man is his hands.”) He was dressed in the smart black uniform of a telegraph employee and perfumed with violet scent.
“Woe!” repeated the father-in-law forcefully and began to curse Cincinnatus in detail and with relish. Cincinnatus’s gaze was drawn to Pauline’s green polka-dotted dress: red-haired, cross-eyed, bespectacled, arousing not laughter but sadness with those polka dots and that plumpness, dully moving her fat legs in brown wool stockings and button shoes, she would approach those present and study each, gazing gravely and silently with her small dark eyes, which seemed to meet behind the bridge of her nose. The poor thing had a napkin tied around her neck—evidently they had forgotten to take it off after breakfast.
The father-in-law paused to regain breath, then struck another blow with his cane, whereupon Cincinnatus said, “Yes, I am listening.”
“Silence, insolent fellow,” shouted the former, “I am entitled to expect from you—if only today, when you stand at death’s door—a little respect. How you managed to get yourself on the block … I want an explanation from you—how you could … how you dared …”
Marthe asked her young man something in a low voice; he was carefully rummaging around, probing all around himself and under himself on the couch; “no, no, it’s all right,” he answered just as softly, “I must have dropped it on the way … Don’t worry, it’ll turn up … But tell me, are you sure you’re not cold?” Shaking her head negatively, Marthe lowered her soft palm onto his wrist; and, taking her hand away immediately, she straightened her dress across the knees and in a harsh whisper called her son, who was bothering his uncles, who in turn kept pushing him away—he was preventing them from listening. Diomedon, in a gray blouse with an elastic at the hips, twisting his whole body in a rhythmic distortion, nevertheless quite rapidly covered the distance between them and his mother. His left leg was healthy and rosy; the right one resembled a rifle in its complicated harness: barrel, straps, sling. His round hazel eyes and sparse eyebrows were his mother’s, but the lower half of his face, with its bulldog jowls—this, of course, was someone else’s. “Sit here,” whispered Marthe and, with a quick slap arrested the hand mirror which was trickling off the couch.
“You tell me,” the father-in-law
