You know, like taking a simple word, say ‘ceiling’ and seeing it as ‘sealing’ or ‘sea-ling’ until it becomes completely strange and feral, something like ‘iceling’ or ‘inglice.’ I think that some day that will happen to the whole of life. In any case wish Tanya from me everything gay, green and Leshino-summery. Tomorrow my landlord and landlady are going away and I am beside myself with joy: beside myself—a very pleasant situation, like on a rooftop at night.
I’ll stay at Agamemnonstrasse another month and then move. I don’t know how things will work out. By the way, my Chernyshevski is selling rather well. Who exactly was it told you that Bunin praised it? They already seem ancient history to me now, my exertions over the book, and all those little storms of thought, those cares of the pen—and now I am completely empty, clean, and ready to receive new lodgers. You know, I’m black as a gypsy from the Grunewald sun. Something is beginning to take shape—I think I’ll write a classical novel, with ‘types,’ love, fate, conversations …”
The door suddenly opened, Zina half entered and without letting go of the door handle threw something on his desk.
“Pay this to Mamma,” she said; she glanced at him through slitted eyes and disappeared.
He unfolded the banknote. Two hundred marks. The amount seemed colossal, but a moment’s calculation showed that it would only just suffice for the two past months—eighty plus eighty, and thirty-five for the coming one, from now on without board. But everything grew confused when he began to consider that for the past month he had not been taking lunch, but on the other hand had been receiving bigger suppers; besides that he had contributed during that time ten (or fifteen?) marks, and on the other hand he owed for telephone conversations and for one or two other trifles, such as today’s taxi. The solution to the problem was beyond him, it bored him; he thrust the money beneath a dictionary.
“… and with descriptions of nature. I am very glad that you’re reading my thing over again, but now it’s time to forget it—it was only an exercise, a tryout, an essay before the school holidays. I have missed you a great deal and perhaps (I repeat, I don’t know how it will work out …) I’ll visit you in Paris.
Generally speaking I’d abandon tomorrow this country, oppressive as a headache—where everything is alien and repulsive to me, where a novel about incest or some brash trash, some cloyingly rhetorical, pseudobrutal tale about war is considered the crown of literature; where in fact there is no literature, and hasn’t been for a long time; where sticking out of the fog of a most monotonous democratic dampness—also pseudo—you have the same old jackboot and helmet; where our native enforced ‘social intent’ in literature has been replaced by social opportunity—and so on, and so on … I could go on much longer—and it is amusing that fifty years ago every Russian thinker with a suitcase used to scribble exactly the same—an accusation so obvious as to have become even banal.
Earlier, on the other hand, in the golden middle of last century, goodness, what transports! ‘Little gemütlich Germany’—ach, brick cottages, ach, the kiddies go to school, ach, the peasant doesn’t beat his horse with a club! … Never mind-he has his own German way of torturing it, in a cozy nook, with red-hot iron. Yes, I would have left long ago, but there are certain personal circumstances (not to mention my wonderful solitude in this country, the wonderful, beneficient contrast between my inner habitus and the terribly cold world around me; you know, in cold countries houses are warmer than in the south, better insulated and heated), but even these personal circumstances are capable of taking such a turn that soon, perhaps, I’ll leave the Fetterland and bring them with me.
And when will we return to Russia? What idiotic sentimentality, what a rapacious groan must our innocent hope convey to people in Russia. But our nostalgia is not historical—only human—how can one explain this to them? It’s easier for me, of course, than for another to live outside Russia, because I know for certain that I shall return—first because I took away the keys to her, and secondly because, no matter when, in a hundred, two hundred years—I shall live there in my books—or at least in some researcher’s footnote. There; now you have a historical hope, a literary-historical one … ‘I lust for immortality—even for its earthly shadow!’ Today I am writing you non-stop nonsense (non-stop trains of thought) because I am well and happy—and besides that, all this has something to do in a roundabout way with Tanya’s baby.
“The literary review you ask about is called The Tower. I don’t have it but I think you’ll find it in any Russian bookshop. Nothing came from Uncle Oleg. When did he send it? I think you’ve mixed something up. Well, that’s it. Keep well, je t’embrasse. Night, rain quietly falling—it has found its nocturnal rhythm, and can now go on for infinity.”
He heard the hall fill with departing voices, heard somebody’s umbrella fall and the elevator summoned by Zina rumble and come to a halt. All was still again. Fyodor went into the dining room where Shchyogolev sat cracking the last nuts, chewing on one side, and Marianna Nikolavna was clearing the table. Her plump, dark pink face, the glossy wings of her nose, violet eyebrows, apricot hair turning to bristly blue on her fat shaven nape, her azure orb with its mascara-fouled canthus, momentarily immersing its gaze in the dreggy ooze on the bottom of the teapot, her rings, her garnet brooch, the flowery shawl on her shoulders—all this together constituted a crudely but richly daubed picture in a somewhat hackneyed genre.
She put on her spectacles and took out a sheet with figures on it when Fyodor asked how much he owed her. At this Shchyogolev raised his eyebrows in surprise: he had been sure that they would not get another penny from their lodger, and being essentially a kindly man he had advised his wife only yesterday not to press Fyodor but to write him a week or two later from Copenhagen with a threat to approach his relatives. After settling up, Fyodor retained three and a half marks out of the two hundred and went off to bed. In the hallway he met Zina returning from below. “Well?” she said, holding her finger on the switch—a half-interrogative, half-urging interjection which meant approximately: “Are you coming this way? I’m putting out the light here, so hurry up.” The dimple on her naked arm, pale-silk-clad legs in velvet slippers, lowered face. Darkness.
He went to bed and began to fall asleep to the whisper of the rain. As always on the border between consciousness and sleep all sorts of verbal rejects, sparkling and tinkling, broke in: “The crystal crunching of that Christian night beneath a chrysolitic star” … and his thought, listening for a moment, aspired to gather them and use them and began to add of its own: Extinguished, Yasnaya Polyana’s light, and Pushkin dead, and Russia far … but since this was no good, the stipple of rhymes extended further: “A falling star, a cruising chrysolite, an aviator’s avatar …” His mind sank lower and lower into a hell of alligator alliterations, into infernal cooperatives of words.
Through their nonsensical accumulation a round button on the pillowcase prodded him in the cheek; he turned on his other side and against a dark backdrop naked people ran into the Grunewald lake, and a monogram of light resembling an infusorian glided diagonally to the highest corner of his subpal-pebral field of vision. Behind a certain closed door in his brain, holding on to its handle but turning away from it, his mind commenced to discuss with somebody a complicated and important secret, but when the door opened for a minute it turned out that they were talking about chairs, tables, stables. Suddenly in the thickening mist, by reason’s last tollgate, came the silver vibration of a telephone bell, and Fyodor rolled over prone, falling … The vibration stayed in his fingers, as if a nettle had stung him. In the hall, having already put back the receiver into its black box, stood Zina—she seemed frightened. “That was for you,” she said in a low voice. “Your former landlady, Frau Stoboy. She wants you to come over immediately. There’s somebody waiting for you at her place.
Hurry.” He pulled on a pair of flannel trousers and gasping for breath went along the street. At this time of year in Berlin there is something similar to the St. Petersburg white nights: the air was transparently gray, and the houses swam past like a soapy mirage. Some night workers had wrecked the pavement at the corner, and one had to creep through narrow passages between planks, everyone being given at the entrance a small lamp which at the exit was to be left on a hook screwed into a post or else simply on the sidewalk next to some empty milk bottles. Leaving his bottle as well he ran further through the lusterless streets, and the premonition of something incredible, of some impossible superhuman surprise splashed his heart with a snowy mixture of happiness and horror.
In the gray murk,
