gentleman, though the liveliness of his glance and the beauty of his large hands were undimin-ished—
only I would never have recognized him from the back, for, instead of the thick, sleek hair and shaven
nape, there was now a nimbus of black fluff encircling a sun-browned bald spot akin to a tonsure. With
his silk shirt, the color of stewed rutabaga, his checked tie, his wide pearl-gray pants, and his piebald
shoes, he struck me as being dtressed up for a fancy-dress ball; but his large nose was the same as ever,
and with it he infallibly caught the light scent of the past when I came up, slapped him on his muscular
shoulder, and posed him my riddle. You were standing a little way off, your bare ankles pressed together
on their high cobalt-blue heels, examining with restrained but mischievous interest the furnishings of
the enormous hall, empty at that hour—the hippopotamus hide of the armchairs, the austere bar, the
British magazines on the glass-topped table, the frescoes, of studied simplicity, depicting scanty-
breasted bronzed girls against a golden background, one of whom, with parallel strands of stylized hair
falling along her cheek, had for some reason gone down on one knee. Could we conceive that the
master of all this splendor would ever cease to see it? My angel…. Meanwhile, taking my hands in his,
squeezing them, puckering the skin between his brows and fixing me with dark, nar rowed eyes, he was
observing that life-suspending pause observed by those who are about to sneeze but are not quite sure
if they will succeed… but he succeeded, the past burst into light, and he loudly pronounced my
nickname. He kissed your hand, without bending his head, and then, in a benevolent fuss, obviously
enjoying the fact that I, a person who had seen better days, had now found him in the full glory of the
life he had himself created by the power of his sculptitory will, he seated us on the terrace, ordered
cocktails and lunch, introduced us to his brother-in-law, Mr. L., a cultured man in a dark business suit
that contrasted oddly with Faker’s exotic foppishness. We drank, we ate, we talked about the past as
about someone gravely ill, I managed to balance a knife on the back of a fork, you petted the wonderful
nervous dog that feared its master, and after a minute of silence, in the midst of which Falter suddenly
uttered a distinct «Yes,» as if concluding a diagnostic deliberation, we parted, making each other
promises that neither he nor I had the least intention of keeping. You didn’t find anything remarkable
about him, did you? And to be sure—that type has been done to death: throughout a drab youth
supported his alcoholic father by giving lessons, and then slowly, obsti nately, buoyantly achieved
prosperity; for, in addition to the not very profitable hotel, he had flourishing interests in the wine
business. But, as I understood later, you were wrong when you said that it was all somewhat dull and
that energetic, successful fellows like him always reek of sweat. Actually, I am madly envious now of the
early Faker’s basic trait: the precision and power of his «volitional substance,» as-you remember?—poor
Adolf put it in a quite different context. Whether sitting in a trench or in an office, whether catching a
train or getting up on a dark morning in an unheated room, whether arranging business connections or
pursuing someone in friendship or enmity, Adam Falter not only was always in possession of all his
faculties, not only lived every moment cocked like a pistol, but was always certain of unfailingly
achieving today’s aim, and tomorrow’s, and the whole gradual progression of his aims, at the same time
working economically, for he did not aim high, and knew his limitations exactly. His greatest service to
himself was that he deliberately disregarded his talents, and banked on the ordinary, the commonplace;
for he was endowed with strange, mysteriously fascinating gifts, which some other, less circumspect
person might have tried to put to practical use. Perhaps only in the very beginning of life had he
sometimes been unable to control himself, intermixing the humdrum coaching of a schoolboy in a
humdrum subject with unusually elegant manifestations of mathematical thought, which left a certain
chill of poetry hanging about my schoolroom after he had hurried away to his next lesson. I think with
envy that if my nerves were as strong as his, my soul as resilient, my willpower as condensed, he would
have imparted to me nowadays the essence of the superhuman discovery he recently made—that is, he
would not have feared that the information would crush me; I, on the other hand, would have been
sufficiently persistent to make him tell me everything to the end.
A slightly husky voice hailed me discreetly from the promenade, but, as more than a year had
passed since our luncheon with Falter, I did not immediately recognize his humble brother-in-law in the
person who now cast a shadow on my stones. Out of mechanical politeness I went up to join him on the
sidewalk, and he expressed his deepest et cetera: he had happened to stop by at my pension, he said,
and the good people there had not only informed him of your death, but also indicated to him from afar
my figure upon the deserted beach, a figure that had become a kind of local curiosity (for a moment I
felt ashamed that the round back of my grief should be visible from every terrace), «We met at Adam
Ilyich’s,» he said, showing the stumps of his in-. cisors and taking his place in my limp consciousness. I
must have proceeded to ask him something about Falter.
«Oh, so you haven’t heard?» the prattler said in surprise, and it was then that I learned the
whole story.
It happened that the previous spring Falter had gone on business to a particularly viny Riviera
town, and, as usual, stopped at a quiet little hotel, whose proprietor was a debtor of his of long
standing. One must picture this hotel, tucked up in the feathered armpit of a hill overgrown with
mimosa, and the little lane, not fully built up yet, with its half-dozen tiny villas, where radio sets sang in
the small human space between the Stardust and the sleeping oleanders, while crickets zinked the night
with their stridulation in the vacant lot under Faker’s open third-story window. After having passed a
hygienic evening in a small bordello on the Boulevard de la Mutualite, he returned at about eleven to
the hotel, in an excellent mood, clear of head and light of loin, and immediately went up to his room.
The star-ashed brow of night; her expression of gentle insanity; the swarming of lights in the old town;
an amusing mathematical problem about which he had corresponded the year before with a Swedish
scholar; the dry, sweet smell that seemed to loll, without thought or task, here and there in the hollows
of the darkness; the metaphysical taste of a wine, well bought and well sold; the news, recently received
from a remote, unattractive country, of the death of a half-sister, whose image had long since wilted in
his memory—all of this, I imagine, was floating through Fal-ter’s mind as he walked up the street and
then mounted to his room; and while taken separately none of these reflections and impressions was in
the least new or unusual for this hard-nosed, not quite ordinary, but superficial man (for, on the basis of
our human core, we are divided into professionals and amateurs; Falter, like me, was an amateur), in
their totality they formed perhaps the most favorable medium for the flash, the unearthly lightning, as
catastrophic as a sweepstakes win, monstrously fortuitous, in no way foretold by the normal function of
his reason, that struck him that night in that hotel.
About half an hour had passed since his return when the collective slumber of the small white
building, with its barely rippling crapelike mosquito netting and wall flowers, was abruptly—no, not
interrupted, but rent, split, blasted by sounds that remained unforgettable to the hearers, my darling—
those sounds, those dreadful sounds. They were not the porcine squeals of a mollycoddle being
dispatched by hasty villains in a ditch, not the roar of a wounded soldier whom a savage surgeon
relieves of a monstrous leg—no, they were worse, far worse…. And if, said later the innkeeper,
Monsieur Paon, one were going to make comparisons, those sounds resembled most of all the
paroxysmal, almost exultant screams of a woman in the throes of infinitely painful childbirth—a woman,
however, with a man’s voice and a giant in her womb. It was hard to identify the dominant note amid
the storm rending that human throat—whether it was pain, fear, or the clarion of madness, or again,
and most likely of all, the expression of an unfathomable sensation, whose very unknowability imparted
to the exultation bursting from Faker’s room something that aroused in the hearers a panical desire to
put an immediate stop to it. The newlyweds who were toiling in the nearest bed paused, diverting their
eyes in parallel and holding their breath; the Dutchman living downstairs scuttled out into the garden,
which already contained the housekeeper and the white shimmer of eighteen maids (only two, really,
multiplied by their darting to and fro). The hotel keeper, who, according to his own account, had
retained full presence of mind, rushed upstairs and ascertained that the door behind which continued
the hurricane of howling, so mighty that it seemed to thrust one back, was locked from within and
would yield neither to thump nor entreaty. Roaring Falter, insofar as one could assume it was indeed he
that roared (his open window was dark, and the intolerable sounds issuing from within did not bear the
imprint of anyone’s personality), spread out far beyond the limits of the hotel, and neighbors gathered
in the surrounding darkness, and one rascal had five cards in his hand, all trumps. By
