Intoxicated, weak, slipping on the coarse turf, and catching his balance, he set off downward, and immediately, from behind a projection of the rampart, where a black bramble bush rustled its warning, Emmie darted out to him, her face and legs painted pink by the sunset, and, firmly grasping him by the hand, dragged him after her. All her movements betrayed excitement, rapturous haste. “Where are we going? Down?” Cincinnatus inquired haltingly, laughing from impatience. She quickly led him along the fortress wall. A small green door opened in the wall. Stairs, leading down, passed imperceptibly underfoot. Again a door creaked; beyond it was a darkish passage in which stood trunks, a wardrobe, and a ladder resting against the wall, and there was a smell of kerosene; it was now apparent that they had entered the director’s apartment by the back way for, now no longer clutching his fingers quite so tightly, already absent-mindedly releasing them, Emmie led him into a dining room where they were all sitting and drinking tea at a lighted oval table. Rodrig Ivanovich’s napkin amply covered his chest; his wife—thin, freckled, with white eyelashes—was passing the pretzels to M’sieur Pierre, who had dressed up in a Russian shirt embroidered with cocks; balls of colored wool and glassy knitting needles lay in a basket by the samovar. A sharp-nosed little old crone in a mobcap and black shawl was hunched at one end of the table.
When he saw Cincinnatus the director gaped, and something drooled from one corner of his mouth.
“Pfui, you naughty child!” said the director’s wife to Emmie with a slight German accent.
M’sieur Pierre, who was stirring his tea, demurely lowered his eyes.
“What’s the meaning of this escapade?” Rodrig Ivanovich said through the trickling melon juice. “To say nothing of the fact that this is against all regulations!”
“Let them be,” said M’sieur Pierre without raising his eyes. “After all, they are both children.”
“It’s the end of her vacation, so she wants to play a prank,” put in the director’s wife.
Emmie sat down at the table, deliberately making her chair scrape, fidgeting and wetting her lips and having dismissed Cincinnatus forever, began spreading sugar (which immediately assumed an orange hue) on her shaggy slice of melon; thereupon she bit into it busily, holding it by the ends, which reached her ears, and brushing her neighbor with her elbow. Her neighbor continued to sip his tea, holding the spoon protruding from it between second and third fingers, but inconspicuously, reached under the table with his left hand. “Eek!” cried Emmie as she gave a ticklish start, without, however, taking her mouth from the melon.
“Sit down over there for the time being,” said the director, with his fruit knife indicating to Cincinnatus a green armchair with an antimacassar that stood aloof in the damask dusk near the folds of the window draperies. “When we finish I’ll take you back. I said sit down. What’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with him? What a slow-witted fellow!”
M’sieur Pierre leaned over to Rodrig Ivanovich and, blushing slightly, imparted to him something.
The latter’s larynx emitted a regular thunderclap:
“Well, congratulations, congratulations,” he said, restraining with difficulty the gusts of his voice. “This is good news!—It’s high time you informed him—We all …” He glanced at Cincinnatus and was about to launch on a formal—
“No, not yet, my friend, don’t embarrass me,” murmured M’sieur Pierre, touching his sleeve.
“In any case, you won’t refuse another tumbler of tea,” said Rodrig Ivanovich playfully, and then, after a moment of reflection and some champing, he addressed Cincinnatus.
“Hey, you there. You can look at the album meanwhile. Child, give him the album. For her” (gesture with the knife) “return to school our dear guest has made her—has made her a—Pardon me, Pyotr Petrovich, I’ve forgotten what you called it.”
“A photohoroscope,” M’sieur Pierre replied modestly.
“Shall I leave the lemon in?” asked the director’s wife.
The hanging kerosene lamp, whose light did not reach the back of the dining room (where only the gleam of a pendulum flashed as it hacked off the solid seconds) flooded the cozily spread table with a familial light, which graded into the chinking sounds of the tea ritual.
Chapter Sixteen
Let us be calm. The spider had sucked dry a small downy moth with marbled forewings, and three houseflies, but was still hungry and kept glancing at the door. Let us be calm. Cincinnatus was a mass of scrapes and bruises. Be calm; nothing had happened. Last night, when they brought him back to the cell, two employees were just finishing plastering the place where lately the hole had gaped. That place was now marked only by swirls of paint a bit rounder and thicker than elsewhere, and he had a stifling sensation whenever he glanced at the wall, which again was blind, deaf and impenetrable.
Another vestige of the previous day was the alligator album with its massive dark silver monogram that he had taken along in a fit of meek abstraction: that singular photo-horoscope put together by the resourceful M’sieur Pierre, that is, a series of photographs depicting the natural progression of a given person’s entire life. How was this done? Thus: extensively retouched snapshots of Emmie’s present face were supplemented by shots of other people—for the sake of costume, furniture and surroundings—so as to create the entire décor and stage properties of her future life. Consecutively stuck into the polygonal little windows of the solid, gilt-edged cardboard, and supplied with finely inscribed dates, these sharp and, at first sight, genuine photographs pictured Emmie first as she was at present; then at fourteen, an attaché case in her hand; then at sixteen, in tights and tutu, with gaseous wings growing from her back, seated relaxed on a table, and lifting a goblet of wine amid rakes; then, at eighteen, in femme-fatale weeds, at a railing above a waterfall; then … oh, in many more aspects and poses, even to the very last, horizontal.
By means of retouching and other photographic tricks, what appeared to be progressive changes in Emmie’s face had been achieved (incidentally, the trickster had made use of her mother’s photographs); but one had only to look closer and it became repulsively obvious how trite was this parody of the work of time. The Emmie who was leaving by the stage door, in furs, with flowers pressed to her shoulder, had limbs that had never danced; while in the next shot, showing her already in her bridal veil, the groom at her side was tall and slender, but had the round little face of M’sieur Pierre. At thirty she already had what was supposed to look like wrinkles, drawn in without meaning, without life, without knowledge of their true significance, but conveying something very bizarre to the expert, as a chance stirring of a tree’s branches may coincide with a sign gesture comprehensible to a deaf-mute. And at forty Emmie was dying—and here allow me to congratulate you on an inverse error: her face in death could never pass for the face of death!
Rodion bore this album away, mumbling that the young lady was just leaving, and when he next appeared he deemed it necessary to announce that the young lady had left:
(Sighing) “Gone, gone …” (To the spider) “Enough, you’ve had enough …” (Showing his palm) “I don’t have anything for you.” (To Cincinnatus again) “It’ll be dull, so dull without our little daughter … how she flitted about, what music she made, our spoiled darling, our golden flower.” (Pause. Then, in a different tone) “What’s the matter, good sir, why don’t you ask those catchy questions any more? Well? So, so,” Rodion convincingly replied to himself and withdrew with dignity.
After dinner, quite formally, no longer in prison garb but in a velvet jacket, an arty bow tie and new, high-heeled, insinuatingly squeaking boots with glossy legs (making him somehow resemble an operatic woodman), M’sieur Pierre came in, and, behind him, respectfully yielding to him first place in perambulation, speech, everything, came Rodrig Ivanovich and the lawyer with his briefcase.
The three of them settled themselves at the table in wicker chairs (brought from the waiting room), while Cincinnatus walked about the cell, in single combat with shameful fear; but presently he also sat down.
Somewhat clumsily (with a clumsiness that was, however, practiced and familiar) fussing with the briefcase, yanking open its black cheek, holding it partly on his knee, partly leaning it against the table—it would slip off one point, then off the other—the lawyer produced a large writing pad and locked, or rather buttoned up the briefcase, which yielded too readily and therefore at first muffed the fastening nip; he was just placing it on
