The black pile of books on the table consisted of the following: first, a contemporary novel that Cincinnatus had not bothered to read during his period of existence at liberty; second, one of those anthologies, published in countless editions with condensed rehashes of and excerpts from ancient literature; third, bound issues of an old magazine; fourth, several bedraggled little volumes of a work in an unknown tongue, brought him by mistake—he had not ordered them.
The novel was the famous Quercus, and Cincinnatus had already read a good third of it, or about a thousand pages. Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak. At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least.
The idea of the novel was considered to be the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree (growing lone and mighty at the edge of a canyon at whose bottom the waters never ceased to din), the author unfolded all the historic events—or shadows of events—of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dismounted from their steeds—one dappled, the other dun—so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm’s blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now, upon a spread cloak a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now a brief drama in the life of some villagers. There was a paragraph a page and a half long in which all the words began with “p.”
It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light. The normal periods of inaction were filled with scientific descriptions of the oak itself, from the viewpoints of dendrology, ornithology, coleopterology, mythology—or popular descriptions, with touches of folk humor. Among other things there was a detailed list of all the initials carved in the bark with their interpretations. And, finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behavior of the weather.
Cincinnatus read for a while and laid it aside. This work was unquestionably the best that his age had produced; yet he overcame the pages with a melancholy feeling, plodded through the pages with dull distress, and kept drowning out the tale in the stream of his own meditation: what matters to me all this, distant, deceitful and dead—I, who am preparing to die? Or else he would begin imagining how the author, still a young man, living, so they said, on an island in the North Sea—would be dying himself; and it was somehow funny that eventually the author must needs die—and it was funny because the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author’s physical death.
The light would move along the wall. Rodion would appear with what he called frühstück. Again a butterfly wing would slide between his fingers, leaving colored powder on them.
“Can it be that he has not arrived yet?” asked Cincinnatus; it was already not the first time he had asked this question, which greatly angered Rodion, and again he did not reply.
“And another interview—will they grant me that?” asked Cincinnatus.
In anticipation of the usual heartburn he lay down on the cot and, turning toward the wall, for a long, long time helped patterns form on it, from tiny blobs of the glossy paint and their round little shadows; he would discover, for example, a diminutive profile with a large mouselike ear; then he would lose it and was unable to reconstruct it. This cold ochre smelled of the grave, it was pimply and horrible, yet his gaze still persisted in selecting and correlating the necessary little protuberances—so starved he was for even a vague semblance of a human face. Finally he turned over, lay on his back and, with the same attention began to examine the shadows and cracks on the ceiling.
“Anyway, they have succeeded in softening me,” mused Cincinnatus. “I have grown so limp and soggy that they will be able to do it with a fruit knife.”
For some time he sat on the edge of the cot, his hands compressed between his knees, all hunched over. Letting out a shuddering sigh he began again to roam. It is interesting, though, in what language this is written. The small, crowded, ornate type, with dots and squiggles within the sickle-shaped letters, seemed to be oriental—it was somehow reminiscent of the inscriptions on museum daggers. Such old little volumes, with their faded pages … some tinged with tawny blotches.
The clock struck seven, and shortly Rodion appeared with dinner.
“You are sure he still has not come?” asked Cincinnatus.
Rodion was about to leave, but turned on the threshold.
“Shame on you,” he said with a sob in his voice, “day and night you do nothing … a body feeds you here, tends you lovingly, wears himself out for your sake, and all you do is ask stupid questions. For shame, you thankless man …”
Time, humming evenly, continued to pass. The air in the cell grew dark, and when it had become quite dense and dull, the light came on in business-like fashion in the center of the ceiling—no, not quite in the center, that was just it—an agonizing reminder. Cincinnatus undressed and got in bed with Quercus. The author was already getting to the civilized ages, to judge by the conversation of three merry wayfarers, Tit, Pud, and the Wandering Jew who were taking swigs of wine from their flasks on the cool moss beneath the black vespertine oak.
“Will no one save me?” Cincinnatus suddenly asked aloud and sat up on the bed (opening his pauper’s hands, showing that he had nothing).
“Can it be that no one will?” repeated Cincinnatus, gazing at the implacable yellowness of the walls and still holding up his empty palms.
The draft became a leafy breeze. From the dense shadows above there fell and bounced on the blanket a large dummy acorn, twice as large as life, splendidly painted a glossy buff, and fitting its cork cup as snugly as an egg.
Chapter Twelve
He was awakened by a muted tapping, scratching, and the sound of something crumbling somewhere. Just as when, having fallen asleep healthy last night, you wake up past midnight in a fever. He listened to these sounds for quite a long while—trup, trup, tock-tock-tock—without any thought about their meaning, simply listening, because they had awakened him and because his hearing had nothing else to do. Trup, tap, scratch, crumble-crumble. Where? To the right? To the left? Cincinnatus raised himself up a little.
He listened—his whole head became an organ of hearing, his whole body a tense heart; he listened and already began to make sense out of certain indications: the weak distillation of darkness within the cell … the dark had settled to the bottom … Beyond the bars of the window, a gray twilight—that meant it was three or half past three … The guards asleep in the cold … The sounds were coming from somewhere below … no, it was, rather, from above, no, it was still below, just on the other side of the wall, at floor level, like a large mouse scratching with iron claws.
Cincinnatus was especially excited by the concentrated self-confidence of the sounds, the insistent seriousness with which they pursued, in the quiet of the fortress night, perhaps a distant, but none the less attainable goal. With bated breath, with a phantomlike lightness, like a sheet of tissue paper, he slipped off—and tiptoed along the sticky, clinging—to the corner from which it seemed—it seemed to be—but coming closer, he realized that he was mistaken—the tapping was more to the right and higher up; he moved, and again got confused, fooled by the aural deception that occurs when a sound, traversing diagonally one’s head, is hurriedly served by the wrong ear.
Stepping awkwardly, Cincinnatus brushed against the tray, which was standing on the floor near the wall. “Cincinnatus!” said the tray reproachfully; and then the tapping ceased with abrupt suddenness, which conveyed to the listener a heartening rationality;
