A multitude of streets diverging in all directions, jumping out from behind corners and skirting the above-mentioned places of prayer and refreshment, turned it all into one of those schematic little pictures on which are depicted for the edification of beginning motorists all the elements of the city, all the possibilities for them to collide. To the right one saw the gates of a tram depot with three beautiful birches standing out against its cement background, and if, say, some absentminded tramdriver forgot to pause by the kiosk three yards before the lawful tram stop (a woman with parcels invariably making fussily to get off and being held back by everybody) in order to throw the switch with the point of his iron rod (alas, such absentmindedness almost never occurred), the tram would have solemnly turned in under the glass dome where it spent the night and was serviced.
The church which loomed to the left was encircled with a low belt of ivy; in the parterre surrounding it grew several dark bushes of rhododendron with purple flowers, and at night one used to see a mysterious man here with a mysterious lantern looking for earthworms on the turf—for his birds? for fishing? Opposite the church across the street, beneath the radiance of a lawn-sprinkler that waltzed on one spot with the ghost of a rainbow in its dewy arms, was the green oblong lawn of the public garden, with young trees along either side (a silver fir among them) and a pi-shaped walk, in whose shadiest corner there was a sandpit for children; but we touch this kind of rich sand only when we are burying someone we know. Behind the garden there was an abandoned soccer field, along which Fyodor walked toward the Kurfürstendamm.
The green of the lindens, the black of the asphalt, the truck tires leaning against the railings by the shop for motorcar accessories, the beaming young bride on a poster displaying a packet of margarine, the blue of a tavern sign, the gray of house fronts getting older as they got closer to the avenue—all this flickered by him for the hundredth time. As always, when a few steps from the Kurfürstendamm, he saw his bus sweep across the vista in front of him: the stop was immediately around the corner, but Fyodor did not get there in time and was forced to wait for the next one.
Over the entrance to a cinema a black giant cut out of cardboard had been erected, with turned-out feet, the blotch of a mustache on his white face beneath a bowler hat, and a bent cane in his hand. In wicker armchairs on the terrace of a neighboring café businessmen sprawled in identical poses with their hands identically gabled in front of them, all very similar to one another as regards snouts and ties but probably varied in the extent of their solvency; and by the curb stood a small car with a heavily damaged wing, broken windows and a bloody handkerchief on the running board; a half-a-dozen people still loafed around, gaping at it.
Everything was sun mottled; a puny old man with a dyed little beard and wearing cloth spats sat sunning himself on a green bench, with his back to the traffic, while opposite him across the sidewalk, an elderly, rosy-faced beggar woman with legs cut off at the pelvis was set down like a bust at the foot of a wall and was selling paradoxical shoelaces. Between the houses could be seen a vacant lot and on it something was modestly and mysteriously blooming; beyond it the continuous slaty-black backs of houses that seemed to have turned to leave, carried strange, attractive and seemingly completely autonomous whitish designs, reminding one not quite of the canals on Mars and not quite of something very distant and half-forgotten, like an accidental expression from a once-heard fairy tale or old scenery for some unknown play.
Down the helical stairs of the bus that drew up came a pair of charming silk legs: we know of course that this has been worn threadbare by the efforts of a thousand male writers, but nevertheless down they came, these legs—and deceived: the face was revolting. Fyodor climbed aboard, and the conductor, on the open top deck, smote its plated side with his palm to tell the driver he could move on.
Along this side and along the toothpaste advertisement upon it swished the tips of soft maple twigs—and it would have been pleasant to look down from above on the gliding street ennobled by perspective, if it were not for the everlasting, chilly thought: there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages—when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes—a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds.
What he should be really teaching was that mysterious and refined thing which he alone—out of ten thousand, a hundred thousand, perhaps even a million men—knew how to teach: for example—multilevel thinking: you look at a person and you see him as clearly as if he were fashioned of glass and you were the glass blower, while at the same time without in the least impinging upon that clarity you notice some trifle on the side—such as the similarity of the telephone receiver’s shadow to a huge, slightly crushed ant, and (all this simultaneously) the convergence is joined by a third thought—the memory of a sunny evening at a Russian small railway station; i.e., images having no rational connection with the conversation you are carrying on while your mind runs around the outside of your own words and along the inside of those of your interlocutor.
Or: a piercing pity—for the tin box in a waste patch, for the cigarette card from the series National Costumes trampled in the mud, for the poor, stray word repeated by the kindhearted, weak, loving creature who has just been scolded for nothing—for all the trash of life which by means of a momentary alchemic distillation—the “royal experiment”—is turned into something valuable and eternal. Or else: the constant feeling that our days here are only pocket money, farthings clinking in the dark, and that somewhere is stocked the real wealth, from which life should know how to get dividends in the shape of dreams, tears of happiness, distant mountains.
All this and much more (beginning with the very rare and painful so-called “sense of the starry sky,” mentioned it seems in only one treatise [Parker’s Travels of the Spirit], and ending with professional subtleties in the sphere of serious literature), he would have been able to teach, and teach well, to anyone who wanted it, but no one wanted it—and no one could, but it was a pity, he would have charged a hundred marks an hour, the same as certain professors of music. And at the same time he found it amusing to refute himself: all this was nonsense, the shadows of nonsense, presumptuous dreams. I am simply a poor young Russian selling the surplus from a gentleman’s upbringing, while scribbling verses in my spare time, that’s the total of my little immortality. But even this shade of multifaceted thought, this play of the mind with its own self, had no prospective pupils.
The bus rolled on—and presently he arrived at his destination—the place of a lone and lonesome young woman, very attractive in spite of her freckles, always wearing a black dress opened at the neck and with lips like sealing-wax on a letter in which there was nothing. She continually looked at Fyodor with pensive curiosity, not only taking no interest in the remarkable novel by Stevenson which he had been reading with her for the past three months (and before that they had read Kipling at the same rate), but also not understanding a single sentence, and noting down words as you would note down the address of someone you knew you would never visit.
Even now—or more exactly, precisely now and with greater agitation than before, Fyodor (although in love with another who was incomparable in fascination and intelligence) wondered what would happen if he placed his palm on this slightly trembling little hand with the sharp fingernails, lying so invitingly close—and because he knew what would happen then his heart suddenly began to thump and his lips immediately went dry; at this point, however, he was involuntarily sobered by a certain intonation of hers, her little laugh, the smell of that certain scent which somehow was always used by the very women who liked him, although to him this dullish, sweetish-brown smell was unbearable.
She was a worthless, cunning woman with a sluggish soul; but even now, when the lesson was over and he had gone out into the street, he was seized by a vague feeling of annoyance; he could imagine much better than he had just been able to, in her presence, how gaily and yieldingly her compact little body would probably have responded to everything, and with painful vividness he saw in an
