“I think I have something for you. You once saw here Tamara Grigorievna, the Armenian lady. She has had a room in the flat of a Russian family but now wants to turn it over to somebody.”
“Which means it’s a bad room if she wants to get rid of it,” remarked Fyodor carelessly.
“No, it’s simply that she’s going back to her husband. However, if you don’t like it in advance then I won’t do anything about it.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” said Fyodor. “I like the idea very much, really I do.”
“Naturally, there’s no guarantee the room is not already disposed of, but still I would advise you to give her a ring.”
“Oh, of course,” said Fyodor.
“Since I know you,” continued Mme. Chernyshevski, already leafing through a black notebook, “and since I know you’ll never ring yourself …”
“I’ll do it first thing tomorrow,” said Fyodor.
“… since you will never do it—Uhland forty-eight thirty-one—I’ll do it myself. I’ll get her right now and you can ask her everything.”
“Stop, wait a minute,” said Fyodor anxiously. “I have no idea what I have to ask.”
“Don’t worry, she’ll tell you herself.” And Mme. Chernyshevski, rapidly repeating the number under her breath, stretched her hand toward the little table with the telephone.
As soon as she put the receiver to her ear her body assumed its usual telephone posture on the sofa; from a sitting attitude she slipped into a reclining one, adjusted her skirt without looking, and her blue eyes wandered here and there as she waited to be connected. “It would be nice—” she began, but then the girl answered and Mme. Chernyshevski said the number with a kind of abstract exhortation in her tone and a special rhythm in her pronunciation of the figures—as if 48 was the thesis and 31 the antithesis—adding in the shape of a synthesis: ja wohl.
“It would be nice,” she re-addressed Fyodor, “if she went there with you.
I’m sure you’ve never in your life …” Suddenly, with a smile, dropping her eyes, moving a plump shoulder and slightly crossing her outstretched legs: “Tamara Grigorievna?” she asked in a new voice, suave and inviting. She laughed softly as she listened, pinching a fold in her skirt. “Yes, it’s me, you’re right. I thought that as always you wouldn’t recognize me. All right—let’s say often.” Settling her tone even more comfortably: “Well, what’s new?” She listened to what was new, blinking; as if in parenthesis she pushed a box of fruit-paste bonbons in Fyodor’s direction; then the toes of her small feet in their shabby velvet slippers began to rub gently against one another; they stopped. “Yes, so I’ve heard, but I thought he had a permanent practice.” She continued to listen. One could make out in the silence the infinitely small drumming of the voice from another world.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” said Alexandra Yakovlevna, “oh, that’s ridiculous.” … “So that’s how things are with you,” she drawled after a moment, and then, to a quick question which sounded to Fyodor like a microscopic bark, she replied with a sigh: “Yes, more or less, nothing new. Alexander Yakovlevich is well, keeps himself busy, he’s at a concert now, and I have nothing to report, nothing special. Right now I have here … Well, of course, it amuses him, but you can’t imagine how I sometimes dream of going away somewhere with him, even if only for a month. What’s that? Oh, anywhere. Generally speaking, things get a little depressing at times, but otherwise there’s nothing new.” She slowly inspected her palm and remained like that with her hand before her. “Tamara Grigorievna, I have Godunov-Cherdyntsev here. By the way, he’s looking for a room. Do those people of yours.… Oh, that’s wonderful. Wait a minute, I’m passing him the receiver.”
“How do you do?” said Fyodor, bowing to the telephone. “I’ve been told by Alexandra Yakovlevna—”
Loudly, so that it even tickled his middle ear, an extraordinarily nimble and distinct voice took over the conversation. “The room’s not yet rented,” began the almost unknown Tamara Grigorievna, “and as it happens they would very much like to have a Russian boarder. I’ll tell you right away who they are. The name is Shchyogolev, that tells you nothing, but in Russia he was a public prosecutor, a very, very cultured and pleasant gentleman.… Then there is his wife, who is also extremely nice, and a daughter from the first marriage.
Now listen: they live at 15 Agamemnonstrasse, a wonderful district, in a small flat but hoch-modern, central heating, bath—in short, everything you could wish for. The room you’ll live in is delightful, but [with a retractive intonation] it looks out onto the yard, that of course is a small minus. I’ll tell you how much I paid for it, I paid thirty-five marks a month. It is quiet and has a fine daybed. Well, there we are. What else can I tell you? I had my meals there and I must confess the food was excellent, excellent, but you must ask them the price yourself. I was on a diet. Here’s what we’ll do now. I have to be there in any case tomorrow morning, about half past eleven, I’m very punctual, so you come there too.”
“Wait a second,” said Fyodor (for whom to rise at ten was the equivalent of rising at five for anyone else). “Wait a second. I’m afraid that tomorrow … Perhaps it might be better if I …”
He wanted to say: “give you a ring,” but Mme. Chernyshevski, who was sitting nearby, made such eyes that with a gulp he instantly corrected himself: “Yes, I think on the whole I can,” he said without animation, “thank you, I’ll come.”
“Well then [in a narrative tone], it’s 15, Agamemnonstrasse, third floor, with an elevator. So that’s what we’ll do. Until tomorrow then, I shall be very glad to see you.”
“Good-by” said Fyodor Konstantinovich.
“Wait,” cried Alexandra Yakovlevna, “please don’t ring off.”
The next morning when he arrived at the stipulated address—in an irritable mood, with a woolly brain and with only half of him functioning (as if the other half of him had still not opened on account of the earliness of the hour)—it turned out that Tamara Grigorievna not only was not there but had rung to say she could not come. He was received by Shchyogolev himself (no-one else was at home), who turned out to be a bulky, chubby man whose outline reminded one of a carp, about fifty years old, with one of those open Russian faces whose openness is almost indecent. It was a fairly full face of oval cut, with a tiny black tuft just under the lower lip.
He had a remarkable hair style that was also somehow indecent: thin black hair evenly smoothed down and divided by a parting which was not quite in the middle of the head and yet not quite to one side either. Big ears, simple male eyes, a thick yellowish nose and a moist smile completed the general pleasant impression. “Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” he repeated, “of course, of course, an extremely well-known name. I once knew … let me see—isn’t your father Oleg Kirillovich? Aha, uncle. Where’s he living now? In Philadelphia? Hm, that’s quite a way. Just look where we émigrés get to! Amazing. And are you in touch with him? I see, I see. Well, never put off to tomorrow what you have already done—ha-ha! Come. I’ll show you your quarters.”
To the right of the hallway there was a short passage immediately turning right again at a right-angle to become another embryo corridor that terminated in the half-open door of the kitchen. The left wall had two doors, the first of which, with an energetic intake of breath, Shchyogolev threw back. Turning its head, there froze before us a small oblong room with ochered walls, a table by the window, a couch along one wall and a wardrobe by the other.
To Fyodor, it seemed repellent, hostile, completely “unhandy” in regard to his life, as if positioned several fateful degrees out of true (with a dusty sunbeam representing the dotted line that marks the bias of a geometric figure when it is revolved) in relation to that imaginary rectangle within whose limits he might be able to sleep, read and think; but even if by a miracle he had been able to adjust his life to fit the angle of this deviant box, nevertheless its furniture, color, view onto the asphalt yard—everything about it was unendurable, and he decided at once that he would not take it.
“Well, here it is,” said Shchyogolev jauntily, “and here’s the bathroom next door. It needs a little cleaning up in here. Now, if you don’t mind …” He bumped violently into Fyodor in turning around in the narrow corridor and uttering an apologetic “Och!” grasped him by the shoulder. They
