No, that was not so—he had missed nothing. The sole joy of these unrealizable embraces was their ease of evocation. During the past ten years of lonely and restrained youth, living on a cliff where there was always a bit of snow and from where it was a long way down to the little brewery town at the foot of the mountain, he had become accustomed to the thought that between the deceit of casual love and the sweetness of its temptation there was a void, a gap in life, an absence of any real action on his part, so that on occasion, when he looked at a passing girl, he imagined simultaneously both the stupendous possibility of happiness and repugnance for its inevitable imperfection—charging this one instant with a romantic image, but diminishing its triptych by the middle section. He knew therefore that their reading of Stevenson would never be interrupted by a Dantean pause, knew that if such a break should take place he would not experience a thing, except a devastating chill because the demands of the imagination were unfulfillable, and because the vacuousness of a gaze, forgiven for the sake of beautiful, moist eyes, inevitably corresponded to a defect as yet concealed—the vacuous expression of breasts, which it was impossible to forgive. But sometimes he envied the simple love life of other men and the way they probably had of whistling while taking off their shoes.
Crossing Wittenberg Square where, as in a color film, roses were quivering in the breeze around an antique flight of stairs which led down to an underground station, he walked toward the Russian bookshop: between lessons there was a chink of spare time.
As always happened when he came to this street (beginning under the auspices of a huge department store that sold all forms of local bad taste, and ending after several crossroads in burgherish calm, with poplar shadows on the asphalt, all chalked over by hopscotchers) he met an elderly, morbidly embittered St. Petersburg writer who wore an overcoat in summer to hide the shabbiness of his suit, a dreadfully skinny man with bulging dark brown eyes, wrinkles of fastidious distaste around his apish mouth, and one long, curved hair growing out of a big black pore on his broad nose—a detail which attracted Fyodor Konstantinovich’s attention much more than the conversation of this clever schemer, who embarked immediately he met anyone upon something in the nature of a fable, a long farfetched anecdote of yore, which turned out to be merely a prelude to some amusing gossip about a mutual acquaintance. Fyodor had barely got rid of him when he caught sight of two more writers, a good-naturedly gloomy Muscovite whose carriage and aspect were somewhat reminiscent of the Napoleon of the island period, and a satirical poet from the Berlin Russian-émigré paper, a frail little man with a kindly wit and a quiet, hoarse voice.
These two, like their predecessor, invariably turned up in this region, which they used for leisurely walks, rich in encounters, so that it seemed as if on this German street there had encroached the vagabond phantom of a Russian boulevard, or as if on the contrary a street in Russia, with several natives taking the air, swarmed with the pale ghosts of innumerable foreigners flickering among those natives like a familiar and barely noticeable hallucination.
They chatted about the writer just encountered, and Fyodor sailed on. After a few steps he noticed Koncheyev reading on the stroll the feuilleton at the bottom of the Paris Russian-émigré paper, with a marvelous angelic smile on his round face. The engineer Kern came out of a Russian food shop, cautiously thrusting a small parcel into the briefcase pressed against his chest, and on a cross street (like the confluence of people in a dream or in the last chapter of Turgenev’s Smoke) he caught a glimpse of Marianna Nikolavna Shchyogolev with some other lady, mustachioed and very stout, who perhaps was Mme. Abramov. Immediately after that Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski cut across the street—no, a mistake—a stranger not even very like him.
Fyodor Konstantinovich reached the bookshop. In the window he could see, among the zigzags, cogs and numerals of Soviet cover designs (this was the time when the fashion there was to have titles like Third Love, The Sixth Sense and Point Seventeen), several new émigré publications: a corpulent new romance by General Kachurin, The Red Princess, Koncheyev’s Communication, the pure white paperbacks of two venerable novelists, an anthology of recitable poetry published in Riga, the minute, palm-sized volume of a young poetess, a handbook What a Driver Should Know, and the last work of Dr. Utin, The Foundations of a Happy Marriage. There were also several old St. Petersburg engravings—in one of which a mirror-like transposition had put the rostral column on the wrong side of the neighboring buildings.
The owner of the shop was not there: he had gone to the dentist’s and his place was being taken by a rather accidental young lady reading a Russian translation of Kellerman’s The Tunnel in a fairly uncomfortable pose in the corner. Fyodor Konstantinovich approached the table where the émigré periodicals were displayed. He unfolded the literary number of the Paris Russian News and with a chill of sudden excitement he saw that the feuilleton by Christopher Mortus was devoted to Communication. “What if he demolishes it?” Fyodor managed to think with a mad hope, already, however, hearing in his ears not the melody of detraction but the sweeping roar of deafening praise. He greedily began to read.
“I do not remember who said—perhaps Rozanov said it somewhere,” began Mortus stealthily; and citing first this unauthentic quotation and then some thought expressed by somebody in a Paris café after someone’s lecture, he began to narrow these artificial circles around Koncheyev’s Communication; but even so, to the very end he never touched the center, but only directed now and then a mesmeric gesture toward it from the circumference—and again revolved. The result was something in the nature of those black spirals on cardboard circles which are everlastingly spinning in the windows of Berlin ice-cream parlors in a crazy effort to turn into bull’s-eyes.
It was a venomously disdainful “dressing down” without a single remark to the point, without a single example—and not so much the critic’s words as his whole manner made a pitiful and dubious phantom out of a book which Mortus could not fail to have read with delight and from which he avoided quoting in order not to damage himself with the disparity between what he wrote and what he was writing about; the whole review seemed to be a séance for the summoning of a spirit which is announced in advance to be, if not a fraud, at least a delusion of the senses.
“These poems,” ended Mortus, “induce in the reader an indefinite but insuperable repulsion. People friendly to Koncheyev’s talent will probably think them enchanting. We shall not quarrel—perhaps this is really so. But in our difficult times with their new responsibilities, when the very air is imbued with a subtle moral angoisse (an awareness of which is the infallible mark of ‘genuineness’ in a contemporary poet), abstract and melodious little pieces about dreamy visions are incapable of seducing anyone. And in truth it is with a kind of joyous relief that one passes from them to any kind of ‘human document,’ to what one can read ‘between the words’ in certain Soviet writers (granted even without talent), to an artless and sorrowful confession, to a private letter dictated by emotion and despair.”
At first Fyodor Konstantinovich felt an acute almost physical pleasure from this article, but it immediately dispersed and was replaced by a queer sensation, as if he had been taking part in a sly, evil business. He recalled Koncheyev’s smile of a moment ago—over these very lines, of course—and it occurred to him that a similar smile might apply to him, Godunov-Cherdyntsev, whom envy had leagued with the critic. Here he recalled that Koncheyev himself in his critical reviews had more than once—from the heights and in fact just as unscrupulously—stung Mortus (who was, by the way, in private life, a woman of middle age, the mother of a family, who in her youth had published excellent poems in the St. Petersburg review Apollo and who now lived modestly two steps from the grave of Marie Bashkirtsev, suffering from an incurable eye illness which endowed Mortus’ every line with a kind of tragic value). And when Fyodor realized the infinitely flattering hostility of this article he felt disappointed that no one wrote about him like that.
He also looked through a little illustrated weekly published by Russian émigrés in Warsaw and found a review on the same subject, but of a completely different cut. It was a critique-bouffe. The local Valentin Linyov, who from issue to issue used to pour out his formless, reckless, and not altogether grammatical literary impressions, was famous not only for not being able to make sense of the book he reviewed but also for not having, apparently, read it to the end. Jauntily using the author as a springboard, carried away by his own paraphrase, extracting isolated phrases in support of his incorrect conclusions, misunderstanding the initial pages and thereafter energetically pursuing a false trail, he would make his way to the penultimate chapter in the
