Marthe’s top-floor window was dark but open. The children must be sleeping on the hook-nosed balcony—there was a glimpse of something white there. Cincinnatus ran up the front steps, pushed open the door, and entered his lighted cell. He turned around, but already he was locked in. O horrible! The pencil glistened on the table. The spider sat on the yellow wall.
“Turn off the light!” shouted Cincinnatus.
His observer through the peephole turned it off. Darkness and silence began to merge but the clock interfered; it struck eleven times, thought for a moment, and struck once more, and Cincinnatus lay supine gazing into the dark, where bright dots were scattering and gradually disappearing. Darkness and silence merged completely. It was then and only then (that is, lying supine on a prison cot, after midnight, after a horrible, horrible, I simply cannot tell you what a horrible day) that Cincinnatus C. clearly evaluated his situation.
At first, against the background of that black velvet which lines at night the underside of the eyelids, Marthe’s face appeared as in a locket; her doll-like rosiness; her shiny forehead with its childlike convexity; her thin eyebrows, slanting upward, high above her round hazel eyes. She began to blink, turning her head, and there was a black velvet ribbon on her soft, creamy-white neck, and the velvety quiet of her dress flared at the bottom, blending with the darkness. That is how he saw her among the audience, when they led him up to the freshly painted defendants’ bench on which he did not dare sit, but stood beside it (and still he got emerald paint all over his hands, and the newspaper men greedily photographed the fingerprints he had left on the back of the bench). He could see their tense foreheads, he could see the gaudy pantaloons of the fops, and the hand-mirrors and iridescent scarves of the women of fashion; but the faces were indistinct—of all the spectators he remembered only round-eyed Marthe. The defense counsel and the prosecutor, both wearing makeup and looking very much alike (the law required that they be uterine brothers but such were not always available, and then makeup was used), spoke with virtuoso rapidity the five thousand words allotted to each.
They spoke alternately and the judge, following the rapid exchanges, would move his head, right and left and all the other heads followed suit; only Marthe, half-turned, sat motionless like an astonished child, her gaze fixed on Cincinnatus, standing next to the bright green park bench. The defense counsel, an advocate of classic decapitation, won easily over the inventive prosecutor, and the judge summed up the case.
Fragments of these speeches, in which the words “translucence” and “opacity” rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnati’s ears, and the rush of blood became applause, and Marthe’s locket-like face remained in his field of vision and faded only when the judge—who had moved so close that on his large swarthy nose he could see the enlarged pores, one of which, on the very extremity, had sprouted a lone but long hair—pronounced in a moist undertone, “with the gracious consent of the audience, you will be made to don the red tophat”—a token phrase that the courts had evolved, whose true meaning was known to every schoolboy.
“And yet I have been fashioned so painstakingly,” thought Cincinnatus as he wept in the darkness. “The curvature of my spine has been calculated so well, so mysteriously. I feel, tightly rolled up in my calves, so many miles that I could yet run in my lifetime. My head is so comfortable …”
The clock struck a half, pertaining to some unknown hour.
Chapter Two
The morning papers, brought to him with a cup of tepid chocolate by Rodion, the local sheet Good Morning Folks, and the more serious daily Voice of the Public, teemed as always with color photographs. In the first one he found the façade of his house: the children looking out from the balcony, his father-in-law looking out of the kitchen window, a photographer looking out of Marthe’s window; in the second one there was the familiar view from this window, looking out on the garden, showing the apple tree, the open gate and the figure of the photographer shooting the façade. In addition he found two snapshots of himself, depicting him in his meek youth. Cincinnatus was the son of an unknown transient and spent his childhood in a large institution beyond the Strop River (only in his twenties did he casually meet twittering, tiny, still so young-looking Cecilia C., who had conceived him one night at the Ponds when she was still in her teens). From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were—but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of a sudden silence, the teacher, in chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while, and finally say: “What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?” Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.
In the course of time the safe places became ever fewer: the solicitous sunshine of public concern penetrated everywhere, and the peephole in the door was placed in such a way that in the whole cell there was not a single point that the observer on the other side of the door could not pierce with his gaze. Therefore Cincinnatus did not crumple the motley newspapers, did not hurl them, as his double did (the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us—you, and me, and him over there—doing what we would like to do at that very moment, but cannot…). Cincinnatus very calmly laid the papers aside and finished his chocolate. The brown skim that had mantled the chocolate became shriveled scum on his lips. Then Cincinnatus put on the black dressing gown (which was too long for him), the black slippers with pompons, and the black skullcap, and began walking about the cell, as he had done every morning since the first day of his confinement.
Childhood on suburban lawns. They played ball, pig, daddy-longlegs, leapfrog, rumpberry, poke. He was light and nimble, but they did not like to play with him. In winter the city slopes were covered with a smooth sheet of snow, and what fun it was to hurtle down on the so-called “glassy” Saburov sleds. How quickly night would fall, when one was going home after sledding … What stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below. In the frosty metallic dark the edible windows glowed with amber and crimson light; women in fox furs over silk dresses ran across the street from house to house; the electric “wagonet” stirred up a momentary luminescent blizzard as it sped by over the snow-powdered track.
A small voice: “Arkady Ilyich, take a look at Cincinnatus …”
He was not angry at the informers, but the latter multiplied and, as they matured, became frightening. Cincinnatus, who seemed pitch-black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in such a way as to seem translucent. Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences. In the dusty little museum on Second Boulevard, where they used to take him as a child, and where he himself would later take his charges, there was a collection of rare, marvelous objects, but all the townsmen except Cincinnatus found them just as limited and transparent as they did each other. That which does not have a name does not exist. Unfortunately everything had a name.
“Nameless existence, intangible substance,” Cincinnatus read on the wall where the door covered it when open.
“Perpetual name-day celebrants, you can just …” was written in another place.
Further to the left, in a strong and neat hand, without a single superfluous line: “Note that when they address you …” The continuation
