Next to this, in clumsy childish letters: “I will collect fines from writers,” signed “director of the prison.”
One could make out yet another line, an ancient and enigmatic one: “Measure me while I live—after it will be too late.”
“In any case I have been measured,” said Cincinnatus, resuming his journey and rapping lightly with his knuckles on the walls. “But how I don’t want to die! My soul has burrowed under the pillow. Oh, I don’t want to! It will be cold getting out of my warm body. I don’t want to … wait a while … let me doze some more.”
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. At fifteen Cincinnatus went to work in the toy workshop, where he was assigned by reason of his small stature. In the evenings he would feast on ancient books to the lazy enchanting lap of wavelets in the Floating Library, in memoriam of Dr. Sineokov, who had drowned at just that spot in the city river. The grinding of chains, the little gallery with its orange-colored lamp shades, the plash, the water’s smooth surface oiled by the moon, and, in the distance, lights flickering past in the black web of a lofty bridge. Later, however, the valuable volumes began to suffer from the damp, so that in the end it was necessary to drain the river, channeling all the water over to the Strop by means of a specially dug canal.
In the shop he struggled for a long time with intricate trifles and worked on rag dolls for schoolgirls; here there was little hairy Pushkin in a fur carrick, and ratlike Gogol in a flamboyant waistcoat, and old little Tolstoy with his fat nose, in a peasant’s smock, and many others, as for example Dobrolyubov, in spectacles without lenses and all buttoned up. Having artificially developed a fondness for this mythical Nineteenth Century, Cincinnatus was ready to become completely engrossed in the mists of that antiquity and find therein a false shelter, but something else distracted him.
There, in that little factory, worked Marthe; her moist lips half open, aiming a thread at the eye of a needle. “Hi, Cincinnatik!” And so began those rapturous wanderings in the very, very spacious (so much so that even the hills in the distance would be hazy from the ecstasy of their remoteness) Tamara Gardens, where, for no reason, the willows weep into three brooks, and the brooks, in three cascades, each with its own small rainbow, tumble into the lake, where a swan floats arm in arm with its reflection. The level lawns, the rhododendrons, the oak groves, the merry gardeners in their green jackboots playing hide-and-seek the whole day through; some grotto, some idyllic bench, on which three jokers had left three neat little heaps (it’s a trick—they are imitations made of brown painted tin), some baby deer, bounding into the avenue and before your very eyes turning into trembling mottles of sunlight—that is what those gardens were like! There, there is Marthe’s lisping prattle, her white stockings and velvet slippers, her cool breast and her rosy kisses tasting of wild strawberries. If only one could see from here—at least the treetops, at least the distant range of hills … Cincinnatus tied the dressing gown a little tighter.
Cincinnatus moved the table and began dragging it backwards as it shrieked with rage: how unwillingly, with what shudderings it moved across the stone floor! Its shudderings were transmitted to Cincinnatus’s fingers and to Cincinnati’s palate as he retreated toward the window (that is, toward the wall where way, way up high, there was the inclined cavity of the window). A loud spoon fell, the cup began to dance, the pencil started to roll, one book began sliding upon another. Cincinnatus lifted the bucking chair onto the table. Finally he climbed up himself. But of course he could see nothing, only the hot sky with a few white hairs thinly combed back—the remnants of clouds that could not tolerate the blueness. Cincinnatus could barely stretch as far as the bars beyond which rose the window tunnel with more bars at the end, and their shadowed repetition on the peeling walls of the stone incline. There, on the side, written in the same neat, contemptuous hand as one of the half-erased sentences he had read before, was the inscription: “You cannot see anything. I tried it too.”
Cincinnatus was standing on tiptoe, holding the iron bars with his small hands, which were all white from the strain, and half of his face was covered with a sunny grating, and the gold of his left mustache shone, and there was a tiny golden cage in each of his mirrorlike pupils, while below, from behind, his heels rose out of the too-large slippers.
“A little more and you’ll have a fall,” said Rodion, who had been standing nearby for a full half minute and now firmly clenched the leg of the trembling chair. “It’s all right, it’s all right. You can climb down now.”
Rodion had cornflower-blue eyes and, as always, his splendid red beard. This attractive Russian countenance was turned upwards toward Cincinnatus, who stepped on it with his naked sole—that is, his double stepped on it, while Cincinnatus himself had already descended from the chair to the table. Rodion, embracing him like a baby, carefully took him down, after which he moved the table with a violinlike sound to its previous place and sat on the edge, dangling the foot that was in the air, and bracing the other against the floor, having assumed the imitation-jaunty pose of operatic rakes in the tavern scene, while Cincinnatus picked at the sash of his dressing gown, and did his best not to cry.
Rodion was singing in his bass-baritone, rolling his eyes, brandishing the empty mug. Marthe used to sing that same dashing song once. Tears gushed from the eyes of Cincinnatus. On a climactic note Rodion sent the mug crashing against the floor and slid off the table. His song went on in chorus, even though he was alone. Suddenly he raised both arms and went out.
Sitting on the floor, Cincinnatus looked upward through his tears; the shadow of the bars had already moved. He tried—for the hundredth time—to move the table, but, alas, the legs had been bolted down for ages. He ate a pressed fig and began again to walk about the cell.
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. At twenty-two he was transferred to a kindergarten as a teacher in division F, and at that time he married Marthe. Almost immediately after he had assumed his new duties (consisting of keeping busy little children who were lame, hunchbacked or crosseyed) an important personage made a second-degree complaint against him. Cautiously, in the form of a conjecture, there was expressed the suggestion of Cincinnatus’s basic illegality. Together with this memorandum the city fathers also examined the old complaints that had been made from time to time by the more perceptive of his colleagues at the workshop. The chairman of the education committee and certain other official figures took turns locking themselves up with him and making on him the tests prescribed by law. For several days in a row he was not allowed to sleep, and was compelled to keep up rapid senseless small talk until it bordered on delirium, to write letters to various objects and natural phenomena, enact everyday scenes, and to imitate various animals, trades and maladies.
All of this he performed, all of this he passed, because he was young, resourceful, fresh, yearning to live, to live for a while with Marthe. Reluctantly they released him, allowing him to continue working with children of the lowest category, who were expendable, in order to see what would come of it. He took them for walks, in pairs, while he turned the handle of a small portable music box that looked like a coffee grinder; on holidays he would swing with them at the play-ground—the whole cluster would be still and breathless as it soared and would squeal as it plummeted down. Some of them he taught to read.
Meanwhile Marthe began deceiving him during the very first year of their marriage; anywhere and with anybody. Generally when Cincinnatus came home she would have a certain sated half-smile on her face as she pressed her plump chin against her neck, as if reproaching herself, and, gazing up with her honest hazel eyes, would say in a soft cooing voice, “Little Marthe did it again today.” He would look at her for a few seconds, pressing his palm to his cheek like a woman, and then, whining soundlessly, would go off through all the rooms full of her relatives and lock himself in the bathroom, where he would stamp his feet, let the water run and cough so as to cover up the sound of his weeping. Sometimes, to justify herself, she would explain to him, “You know what a kind creature I am: it’s such a small thing, and it’s such a relief to a man.”
Soon she became pregnant, and not by him. She bore a boy, immediately got pregnant again—again not by him—and bore a girl.
The boy was lame and evil-tempered, the girl dull, obese and nearly blind. Because of their defects both children ended up in his kindergarten, and it was odd to see nimble, sleek, rosy Marthe leading home this cripple and this stocky tot. Gradually Cincinnatus stopped watching himself altogether, and one day, at some open meeting in the city park there was a sudden wave of alarm and someone said in a loud voice, “Citizens, there is among us a—” Here
