“… Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty,” counted M’sieur Pierre. “That’s all. Up, please. It’s a fine day, the ride will be most enjoyable, anyone else in your place would be in a hurry to start.”
“Just an instant more. I find it ludicrous and disgraceful that my hands should tremble so—but I can neither stop nor hide it, and, yes, they tremble and that’s all. My papers you will destroy, the rubbish you will sweep out, the moth will fly away at night through the broken window, so that nothing of me will remain within these four walls, which are already about to crumble. But now dust and oblivion are nothing to me; I feel only one thing—fear, fear, shameful, futile fear …” Actually Cincinnatus did not say all this; he was silently changing his shoes. The vein on his forehead was swollen, the blond locks fell on it, his shirt had a wide-open embroidered collar, which imparted a certain extraordinarily youthful quality to his neck and to his flushed face with its blond quivering mustache.
“Let’s go!” shrieked M’sieur Pierre.
Cincinnatus, trying not to brush against anyone or anything, placing his feet as if he were walking on bare, sloping ice, finally made his way out of the cell, which in fact was no longer there.
Chapter Twenty
Cincinnatus was led through stone passageways. Now ahead, now behind, a distracted echo would leap out—all its burrows were crumbling. Often there were stretches of darkness because bulbs had burned out. M’sieur Pierre demanded that they go in step.
Now they were joined by several soldiers in the regulation canine masks, and then Rodrig and Roman, with the master’s permission, went on ahead, with long, pleased strides, swinging their arms in businesslike fashion, and overtaking each other. Shouting, they disappeared around a corner.
Cincinnatus, who, alas, had suddenly lost the capacity of walking, was supported by M’sieur Pierre and a soldier with the face of a borzoi. For a very long time they clambered up and down staircases—the fortress must have suffered a mild stroke, as the descending stairs were in reality ascending and vice versa. Again there were long corridors, but of a more inhabited kind; that is, they visibly demonstrated—either by linoleum, or by wallpaper, or by a sea chest against the wall—that they adjoined living quarters. At one bend there was even a smell of cabbage soup. Further on they passed a glass door with the inscription “ffice,” and after another period of darkness they abruptly found themselves in the courtyard, vibrant with the noonday sun.
Throughout this whole journey Cincinnatus was busy trying to cope with his choking, wrenching, implacable fear. He realized that this fear was dragging him precisely into that false logic of things that had gradually developed around him, but from which he had still somehow been able to escape that morning. The very thought that this chubby, red-cheeked hunter was going to hack at him was already an inadmissible sickening weakness, drawing Cincinnatus into a system that was perilous to him. He fully understood all this, but, like a man unable to resist arguing with a hallucination, even though he knows perfectly well that the entire masquerade is staged in his own brain, Cincinnatus tried in vain to out-wrangle his fear, despite his understanding that he ought actually to rejoice at the awakening whose proximity was presaged by barely noticeable phenomena, by the peculiar effects on everyday implements, by a certain general instability, by a certain flaw in all visible matter—but the sun was still realistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outward propriety.
Outside the third gate the carriage was waiting. The soldiers did not accompany them further, but sat down on logs piled by the wall, and began taking off their cloth masks. The prison staff and the guards’ families pressed timidly and greedily around the gate—barefoot children would run out, trying to get into the picture, and immediately would dart back, and their kerchiefed mothers would shush them, and the hot light gilded the scattered straw, and there was the odor of warm nettles, while off to one side a dozen geese crowded, gobbling discreetly.
“Well, let’s get going,” M’sieur Pierre said jauntily and put on his pea-green hat with a pheasant feather.
An old, scarred carriage, which listed with a groan when springy little M’sieur Pierre mounted the step, was hitched to a bay nag with bared teeth, with lesions shiny from flies on its sharply protruding haunches, all in all so lean and so ribby that its trunk seemed to be enclosed in a set of hoops. There was a red ribbon in its mane. M’sieur Pierre squeezed over to make room for Cincinnatus and asked if the bulky case that was placed at their feet were in his way. “Please, my dear fellow, try not to step on it,” he added. Rodrig and Roman climbed on the box. Rodrig, who was playing the coachman, snapped the long whip, the horse gave a start, was unable to move the carriage immediately and sank on its haunches. A discordant cheer inopportunely rang out from the staff. Rising and leaning forward, Rodrig gave the horse’s nose a lash, and, when the carriage moved spasmodically off, he nearly fell backwards on the box from the jolt, drawing the rein tight and crying “whoa!”
“Easy, easy,” said M’sieur Pierre with a smile, touching Rodrig’s back with a plump hand in a smart glove.
The pale road coiled several times, with evil picturesqueness, around the base of the fortress. In places the grade was fairly steep, and then Rodrig would hastily wind tight the scrunching brake handle. M’sieur Pierre, his hands resting on the bulldog head of his cane, gaily looked around at the cliffs, the green inclines between them, the clover and vines, and the whirling white dust, and, while he was at it, also caressed with his gaze the profile of Cincinnatus who was still engaged in his inner struggle. The scrawny, gray, bent backs of the two men sitting on the box were perfectly identical. The hoofs clipped and clopped. Horseflies circled like satellites. At times the carriage overtook hurrying pilgrims (the prison cook, for instance, with his wife), who would stop, shielding themselves from the sun and dust, and then quicken their pace. One more turn and then the road stretched out toward the bridge, having disentangled itself from the slowly revolving fortress (which already stood quite poorly, the perspective was disorganized, something had come loose and dangled).
“I’m sorry I flared up like that,” M’sieur Pierre was saying gently. “Don’t be angry with me, duckie. You understand yourself how it hurts to see others being sloppy when you put your whole soul into your work.”
They clattered across the bridge. News of the execution had only just now begun to spread through the town. Red and blue boys ran after the carriage.
A man who feigned insanity, an old fellow of Jewish origin who had for many years been fishing for nonexistent fish in a waterless river, was collecting his chattels, hurrying to join the very first group of townspeople heading for Thriller Square.
“… but there’s no point in dwelling on that,” M’sieur Pierre was saying. “Men of my temperament are volatile but also get over it quickly. Rather let us turn our attention to the conduct of the fair sex.”
Several girls, hatless, jostling and squealing, were buying up all the flowers from a fat flower vendor with browned breasts, and the boldest among them managed to throw a bouquet into the carriage, nearly knocking the cap off Roman’s head. M’sieur Pierre shook a finger.
The horse, its bleary eye looking askance at the flat, spotted dogs, extending their bodies as they raced at its hoofs, strained up Garden Street, and the crowd was already catching up—another bouquet hit the carriage. Now they were turning right, past the huge ruins of the ancient factory, then along Telegraph Street, already ringing, moaning, tooting with the noise of instruments tuning up, then through an unpaved, whispering lane, past a public garden where two bearded men in civilian dress got up from a bench when they saw the carriage, and, gesticulating emphatically, began indicating it to each other—both dreadfully excited, square-shouldered—and now they were running,
