2
 

KRUG HALTED in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement (pulsation, radiation) of its features (crumpled ripples) was due to her speaking, and he realized that this movement had been going on for some time. Possibly all the way down the hospital stairs. With her faded blue eyes and long wrinkled upper lip she resembled someone he had known for years but could not recall—funny. A side line of indifferent cognition led him to place her as the head nurse. The continuation of her voice came into being as if a needle had found its groove. Its groove in the disc of his mind. Of his mind that had started to revolve as he halted in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement of its features was now audible.

She pronounced the word that meant “fighting” with a north-western accent: “fakhtung” instead of “fahtung.” The person (male?) whom she resembled peered out of the mist and was gone before he could identify her—or him.

“They are still fighting,” she said. “… dark and dangerous. The town is dark, the streets are dangerous. Really, you had better spend the night here.… In a hospital bed” (gospitalisha kruvka—again that marshland accent and he felt like a heavy crow—kruv—flapping against the sunset). “Please! Or you could wait at least for Dr. Krug who has a car.”

“No relative of mine,” he said. “Pure coincidence.”

“I know,” she said, “but still you ought not to not to not to not to”—(the world went on revolving although it had expended its sense).

“I have,” he said, “a pass.” And, opening his wallet, he went so far as to unfold the paper in question with trembling fingers. He had thick (let me see) clumsy (there) fingers which always trembled slightly. The inside of his cheeks was methodically sucked in and smacked ever so slightly when he was in the act of unfolding something. Krug—for it was he—showed her the blurred paper. He was a huge tired man with a stoop.

“But it might not help,” she whined, “a stray bullet might hit you.”

(You see the good woman thought that bullets were still flukhtung about in the night, meteoric remnants of the firing that had long ceased.)

“I am not interested in politics,” he said. “And I have only the river to cross. A friend of mine will come to fix things tomorrow morning.”

He patted her on the elbow and went on his way.

He yielded, with what pleasure there was in the act, to the soft warm pressure of tears. The sense of relief did not last, for as soon as he let them flow they became atrociously hot and abundant so as to interfere with his eyesight and respiration. He walked through a spasmodic fog down the cobbled Omigod Lane towards the embankment. Tried clearing his throat but it merely led to another gasping sob. He was sorry now he had yielded to that temptation for he could not stop yielding and the throbbing man in him was soaked. As usual he discriminated between the throbbing one and the one that looked on: looked on with concern, with sympathy, with a sigh, or with bland surprise. This was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching the torrents of local grief from an abstract bank. A familiar figure, albeit anonymous and aloof. He saw me crying when I was ten and led me to a looking glass in an unused room (with an empty parrot cage in the corner) so that I might study my dissolving face. He has listened to me with raised eyebrows when I said things which I had no business to say. In every mask I tried on, there were slits for his eyes. Even at the very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value most. My saviour. My witness. And now Krug reached for his handkerchief which was a dim white blob somewhere in the depths of his private night. Having at last crept out of a labyrinth of pockets, he mopped and wiped the dark sky and amorphous houses; then he saw he was nearing the bridge.

On other nights it used to be a line of lights with a certain lilt, a metrical incandescence with every foot rescanned and prolonged by reflections in the black snaky water. This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist. As Krug, trudging steadily, approached, two Ekwilist soldiers barred his way. More were lurking around, and when a lantern moved, knight-wise, to check him, he noticed a little man dressed as a meshchaniner [petty bourgeois] standing with folded arms and smiling a sickly smile. The two soldiers (both, oddly enough, had pockmarked faces) were asking, Krug understood, for his (Krug’s) papers. While he was fumbling for the pass they bade him hurry and mentioned a brief love affair they had had, or would have, or invited him to have with his mother.

“I doubt,” said Krug as he went through his pockets, “whether these fancies which have bred maggot-like from ancient taboos could be really transformed into acts—and this for various reasons. Here it is” (it almost wandered away while I was talking to the orphan—I mean, the nurse).

They grabbed it as if it had been a hundred krun note. While they were subjecting the pass to an intense examination, he blew his nose and slowly put back his handkerchief into the left-hand pocket of his overcoat; but on second thought transferred it to his right-hand trouser pocket.

“What’s this?” asked the fatter of the two, marking a word with the nail of the thumb he was pressing against the paper. Krug, holding his reading spectacles to his eyes, peered over the man’s hand. “University,” he said. “Place where things are taught—nothing very important.”

“No, this,” said the soldier.

“Oh, ‘philosophy.’ You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.” He gestured vaguely with his glasses and then slipped them into their lecture-hall nook (vest pocket).

“What is your business? Why are you loafing near the bridge?” asked the fat soldier while his companion tried to decipher the permit in his turn.

“Everything can be explained,” said Krug. “For the last ten days or so I have been going to the Prinzin Hospital every morning. A private matter. Yesterday my friends got me this document because they foresaw that the bridge would be guarded after dark. My home is on the south side. I am returning much later than usual.”

“Patient or doctor?” asked the thinner soldier.

“Let me read you what this little paper is meant to convey,” said Krug, stretching out a helpful hand.

“Read on while I hold it,” said the thin one, holding it upside down.

“Inversion,” said Krug, “does not trouble me, but I need my glasses.” He went through the familiar nightmare of overcoat—coat—trouser pockets, and found an empty spectacle case. He was about to resume his search.

“Hands up,” said the fatter soldier with hysterical suddenness.

Krug obeyed, holding the case heavenward.

The left part of the moon was so strongly shaded as to be almost invisible in the pool of clear but dark ether across which it seemed to be swiftly floating, an illusion due to the moonward movement of some small chinchilla clouds; its right part, however, a somewhat porous but thoroughly talcpowdered edge or cheek, was vividly illumined by the artificial-looking blaze of an invisible sun. The whole effect was remarkable.

The soldiers searched him. They found an empty flask which quite recently had contained a pint of brandy. Although a burly man, Krug was ticklish and he uttered little grunts and squirmed slightly as they rudely investigated his ribs. Something jumped and dropped with a grasshopper’s click. They had located the glasses.

“All right,” said the fat soldier. “Pick them up, you old fool.”

Krug stooped, groped, side-stepped—and there was a horrible scrunch under the toe of his heavy shoe.

“Dear, dear, this is a singular position,” he said. “For now there is not much to choose between my physical illiteracy and your mental one.”

“We are going to arrest you,” said the fat soldier. “It will put an end to your clowning, you old drunkard. And when we get fed up with guarding you, we’ll chuck you into the water and shoot at you while you drown.”

Another soldier came up idly juggling with a flashlight and again Krug had a glimpse of a pale-faced little man standing apart and smiling.

“I want some fun too,” the third soldier said.

“Well, well,” said Krug. “Fancy seeing you here. How is your cousin, the gardener?”

The newcomer, an ugly, ruddy-cheeked country lad, looked at Krug blankly and then pointed to the fat soldier.

“It is his cousin, not mine.”

“Yes, of course,” said Krug quickly. “Exactly what I meant. How is he, that gentle gardener? Has he recovered the use of his left leg?”

“We have not seen each other for some time,” answered the fat soldier moodily. “He lives in Bervok.”

“A fine fellow,” said Krug. “We were all so sorry when he fell into that gravel pit. Tell him, since he exists, that Professor Krug often recalls the talks we had over a jug of cider. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past. Grand apples in Bervok.”

“This is his permit,” said the fat moody one to the rustic ruddy one, who took the paper gingerly and at once handed it back.

“You had better call that ved’ min syn [son of a witch] there,” he said.

It was then that the little man was brought forward. He seemed to labour under the impression that Krug was some sort of superior in relation to the soldiers for he started to complain in a thin almost feminine voice, saying that he and his brother owned a grocery store on the other side and that both had venerated the Ruler since the blessed seventeenth of that month. The rebels were crushed, thank God, and he wished to join his brother so that a Victorious People might obtain the delicate foods he and his deaf brother sold.

“Cut it out,” said the fat soldier, “and read this.”

The pale grocer complied. Professor Krug had been given full liberty by the Committee of Public Welfare to circulate after dusk. To cross from the south town to the north one. And back. The reader desired to know why he could not accompany the professor across the bridge. He was briskly kicked back into the darkness. Krug proceeded to cross the black river.

This interlude had turned the torrent away: it was now running unseen behind a wall of darkness. He remembered other imbeciles he and she had studied, a study conducted with a kind of gloating enthusiastic disgust. Men who got drunk on beer in sloppy bars, the process of thought satisfactorily replaced by swine-toned radio music. Murderers. The respect a business magnate evokes in his home town. Literary critics praising the books of their friends or partisans. Flaubertian farceurs. Fraternities, mystic orders. People who are amused by trained animals. The members of reading clubs. All those who are because they do not think, thus refuting Cartesianism. The thrifty peasant. The booming politician. Her relatives—her dreadful humourless family. Suddenly, with the vividness of a praedormital image or of a bright-robed lady on stained glass, she drifted across his retina, in profile, carrying something—a book, a baby, or just letting the cherry paint on her fingernails dry—and the wall dissolved, the torrent was loosed again. Krug stopped, trying to control himself, with the palm of his ungloved hand resting on the parapet as in former days frock-coated men of parts used to be photographed in imitation of portraits by old masters—hand on book, on chair back, on globe—but as soon as the camera had clicked everything started to move, to gush, and he walked on—jerkily, because of the sobs shaking his ungloved soul. The lights of the thither side were nearing in a shudder of concentric prickly iridescent circles, dwindling again to a blurred glow when you blinked, and extravagantly expanding immediately afterwards. He was a big heavy man. He felt an intimate connection with the black lacquered water lapping and heaving under the stone arches of the bridge.

Presently he stopped again. Let us touch this and look at this. In the faint light (of the moon? of his tears? of the few lamps the dying fathers of the city had lit from a mechanical sense of duty?) his hand found a certain pattern of roughness: a furrow in the stone of the parapet and a knob and a hole with some moisture inside—all of it highly magnified as the 30,000 pits in the crust of the plastic moon are on the large glossy print which the proud selenographer shows his young wife. On this particular night, just after they had tried to turn over to me her purse, her comb, her cigarette holder, I found and touched this—a selected combination, details of the bas-relief. I had never touched this particular knob before and shall never find it again. This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late. In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments; paying perhaps terrific fines, but stopping the train. Say, why did you do it? the popeyed conductor might ask. Because I liked the view. Because I wanted to stop those speeding trees and the path twisting between them. By stepping on its receding tail. What happened to her would perhaps not have happened, had I been in the habit of stopping this or that bit of our common life, prophylactically, prophetically, letting this or that moment rest and breathe in peace. Taming time. Giving her pulse respite. Pampering life, life—our patient.

Krug—for it was still he—walked on, with the impression of the rough pattern still tingling and clinging to the ball of his thumb. This end of the bridge was brighter. The soldiers who bade him halt looked livelier, better shaven, wore neater uniforms. There was also more of them, and more nocturnal travellers had been held up: two old men with their bicycles and what might be termed a gentleman (velvet collar of overcoat set up, hands thrust into pockets) and his girl, a bedraggled bird of paradise.

Pietro—or at least the soldier resembled Pietro, the head waiter at the University Club—Pietro the soldier examined Krug’s pass and said in cultured accents:

“I fail to understand, Professor, what enabled you to effect the crossing of the bridge. You had no right whatever to do so since this pass has not been signed by my colleagues of the north side guard. I am afraid you must go back and have it done by them according to emergency regulations. Otherwise I cannot let you enter the south side of the city. Je regrette but a law is a law.”

“Quite true,” said Krug. “Unfortunately they are unable to read, let alone write.”

“This does not concern us,” said bland grave handsome Pietro—and his companions nodded in grave judicious assent. “No, I cannot let you pass, unless, I repeat, your identity and innocence are guaranteed by the signature of the opposite sentry.”

“But cannot we turn the bridge the other way round, so to speak?” said Krug patiently. “I mean—give it a full turn. You sign the permits of those who cross over from the south side to the north one, don’t you? Well, let us reverse the process. Sign this valuable paper and suffer me to go to my bed in Peregolm Lane.”

Pietro shook his head: “I do not follow you, Professor. We have exterminated the enemy—aye, we have crushed him under our heels. But one or two hydra heads are still alive, and we cannot take any chances. In a week or so, Professor, I can assure you the city will go back to normal conditions. Isn’t that a promise, lads?” Pietro added, turning to the other soldiers who assented eagerly, their honest intelligent faces lit up by that civic ardour which transfigures even the plainest man.

“I appeal to your imagination,” said Krug. “Imagine I was going the other way. In fact, I was going the other way this morning, when the bridge was not guarded. To place sentries only at nightfall is a very conventional notion—but let it pass. Let me pass too.”

“Not unless this paper is signed,” said Pietro and turned away.

“Aren’t you lowering to a considerable extent the standards by which the function, if any, of the human brain is judged?” rumbled Krug.

“Hush, hush,” said another soldier, putting his finger to his cleaved lip and then quickly pointing at Pietro’s broad back. “Hush. Pietro is perfectly right. Go.”

“Yes, go,” said Pietro who had overheard the last words. “And when you come again with your pass signed and everything in order—think of the inner satisfaction you will feel when we countersign it. And for us, too, it will be a pleasure. The night is still young, and anyway, we should not shirk a certain amount of physical exertion if we want to be worthy of our Ruler. Go, Professor.”

Pietro looked at the two bearded old men patiently gripping their bicycle handles, their knuckles white in the lamplight, their lost dog eyes watching him intently. “You may go, too,” said the generous fellow.

With an alacrity that was in odd contrast with their advanced age and spindle legs, the bearded ones jumped upon their mounts and pedalled off, wobbling in their eagerness to get away and exchanging rapid guttural remarks. What were they discussing? The pedigree of their bicycles? The price of some special make? The condition of the race track? Were their cries exclamations of encouragement? Friendly taunts? Did they banter the ball of a joke seen years before in the Simplizissimus or the Strekoza? One always desires to find out what people who ride by are saying to each other.

Krug walked as fast as he could. Clouds had masked our siliceous satellite. Somewhere near the middle of the bridge he overtook the grizzled cyclists. Both were inspecting the anal ruby of one of the bicycles. The other lay on its side like a stricken horse with half-raised sad head. He walked fast and held his pass in his fist. What would happen if I threw it into the Kur? Doomed to walk back and forth on a bridge which has ceased to be one since neither bank is really attainable. Not a bridge but an hourglass which somebody keeps reversing, with me, the fluent fine sand, inside. Or the grass stalk you pick with an ant running up it, and you turn the stalk upside down the moment he gets to the tip, which becomes the pit, and the poor little fool repeats his performance. The old men overtook him in their turn, clattering lickety-split through the mist, gallantly galloping, goading their old black horses with blood-red spurs.

“ ’Tis I again,” said Krug as his slovenly friends clustered around him. “You forgot to sign my pass. Here it is. Let us get it over with promptly. Scrawl a cross, or a telephone booth curlicue, or a gammadion, or something. I dare not hope that you have one of those stamping affairs at hand.”

While still speaking, he realized that they did not recognize him at all. They looked at his pass. They shrugged their shoulders as if ridding themselves of the burden of knowledge. They even scratched their heads, a quaint method used in that country because supposed to prompt a richer flow of blood to the cells of thought.

“Do you live on the bridge?” asked the fat soldier.

“No,” said Krug. “Do try to understand. C’est simple comme bonjour as Pietro would say. They sent me back because they had no evidence that you let me pass. From a formal point of view I am not on the bridge at all.”

“He may have climbed up from a barge,” said a dubious voice.

“No, no,” said Krug. “I not bargee-bargee. You still do not understand. I am going to put it as simply as possible. They of the solar side saw heliocentrically what you tellurians saw geocentrically, and unless these two aspects are somehow combined, I, the visualized object, must keep shuttling in the universal night.”

“It is the man who knows Gurk’s cousin,” cried one of the soldiers in a burst of recognition.

“Ah, excellent,” said Krug much relieved. “I was forgetting the gentle gardener. So one point is settled. Now, come on, do something.”

The pale grocer stepped forward and said:

“I have a suggestion to make. I sign his, he signs mine, and we both cross.”

Somebody was about to cuff him, but the fat soldier, who seemed to be the leader of the group, intervened and remarked that it was a sensible idea.

“Lend me your back,” said the grocer to Krug; and hastily unscrewing his fountain pen, he proceeded to press the paper against Krug’s left shoulder blade. “What name shall I put, brothers?” he asked of the soldiers.

They shuffled and nudged each other, none of them willing to disclose a cherished incognito.

“Put Gurk,” said the bravest at last, pointing to the fat soldier.

“Shall I?” asked the grocer, turning nimbly to Gurk.

They got his consent after a little coaxing. Having dealt with Krug’s pass, the grocer in his turn stood before Krug. Leapfrog, or the admiral in his cocked hat resting the telescope on the young sailor’s shoulder (the grey horizon going seesaw, a white gull veering, but no land in sight).

“I hope,” said Krug, “that I will be able to do it as nicely as I would if I had my glasses.”

On the dotted line it will not be. Your pen is hard. Your back is soft. Cucumber. Blot it with a branding iron.

Both papers were passed around and bashfully approved of.

Krug and the grocer started walking across the bridge; at least Krug walked: his little companion expressed his delirious joy by running in circles around Krug, he ran in widening circles and imitated a railway engine: chug-chug, his elbows pressed to his ribs, his feet moving almost together, taking small firm staccato steps with knees slightly bent. Parody of a child—my child.

“Stoy, chort [stop, curse you],” cried Krug, for the first time that night using his real voice.

The grocer ended his gyrations by a spiral that brought him back into Krug’s orbit whereupon he fell in with the latter’s stride and walked beside him, chatting airily.

“I must apologize,” he said, “for my demeanor. But I am sure you feel the same as I do. This has been quite an ordeal. I thought they would never let me go—and those allusions to strangling and drowning were a bit tactless. Nice boys, I admit, hearts of gold, but uncivilized—their only defect really. Otherwise, I agree with you, they are grand. While I was standing——”

This is the fourth lamp-post, and one tenth of the bridge. Few of them are alight.

“… My brother who is practically stone deaf has a store on Theod—sorry, Emrald Avenue. In fact we are partners, but I have a little business of my own which keeps me away most of the time. In view of the present events he needs my help, as we all do. You might think——”

Lamp-post number ten.

“… but I look at it this way. Of course our Ruler is a great man, a genius, a one-man-in-a-century-man. The kind of boss people like you and me have been always wanting. But he is bitter. He is bitter because for the last ten years our so-called liberal government has kept hounding him, torturing him, clapping him into jail for every word he said. I shall always remember—and shall pass it on to our grandsons—what he said that time they arrested him at the big meeting in the Godeon: “I,” he said, “am born to lead as naturally as a bird flies.” I think it is the greatest thought ever expressed in human language, and the most poetical one. Name me the writer who has said anything approaching it? I shall go even further and say——”

This is number fifteen. Or sixteen?

“… if we look at it from another angle. We are quiet people, we want a quiet life, we want our business to go on smoothly. We want the quiet pleasures of life. For instance, everybody knows that the best moment of the day is when one comes back from work, unbuttons one’s vest, turns on some light music, and sits in one’s favourite armchair, enjoying the jokes in the evening paper or discussing one’s neighbours with the little woman. That is what we mean by true culture, true human civilization, the things for the sake of which so much blood and ink have been shed in ancient Rome or Egypt. But nowadays you continuously hear silly people say that for the likes of you and me that kind of life has gone. Do not believe them—it has not. And not only has it not gone——”

Are there more than forty? This must be at least half of the bridge.

“… shall I tell you what has really been going on all those years? Well, firstly, we were made to pay impossible taxes; secondly, all those Parliament members and Ministers of State whom we never saw or heard, kept drinking more and more champagne and sleeping with fatter and fatter whores. That is what they call liberty! And what happened in the meantime? Somewhere deep in the woods, in a log cabin, the Ruler was writing his manifestos, like a tracked beast. The things they did to his followers! Jesus! I have heard dreadful stories from my brother-in-law who has belonged to the party since his youth. He is certainly the brainiest man I have ever met. So you see——”

No, less than half.

“… you are a professor I understand. Well, Professor, from now on a great future lies before you. We must now educate the ignorant, the moody, the wicked—but educate them in a new way. Just think of all the trash we used to be taught.… Think of the millions of unnecessary books accumulating in libraries. The books they print! You know—you will never believe me—but I have been told by a reliable person that in one bookshop there actually is a book of at least a hundred pages which is wholly devoted to the anatomy of bedbugs. Or things in foreign languages which nobody can read. And all the money spent on nonsense. All those huge museums—just one long hoax. Makes you gape at a stone that somebody picked up in his backyard. Less books and more commonsense—that’s my motto. People are made to live together, to do business with one another, to talk, to sing songs together, to meet in clubs and stores, and at street corners—and in churches and stadiums on Sundays—and not sit alone, thinking dangerous thoughts. My wife had a lodger——”

The man with the velvet collar and his girl passed by quickly with pit-a-pat of fugitive footfalls, not looking back.

“… change it all. You will teach young people to count, to spell, to tie a parcel, to be tidy and polite, to take a bath every Saturday, to speak to prospective buyers—oh, thousands of necessary things, all the things that make sense to all people alike. I wish I was a teacher myself. Because I maintain that every man, no matter how humble, the last gaberloon, the last——”

If all were alight I should not have got so confused.

“… for which I paid a ridiculous fine. And now? Now it is the State that will help me along with my business. It will be there to control my earnings—and what does that mean? It means that my brother-in-law who belongs to the party and now sits in a big office, if you please, at a big glass-topped writing desk will help me in every possible way to get my accounts straight: I shall make much more than I ever did because from now on we all belong to one happy community. It is all in the family now—one huge family, all linked up, all snug and no questions asked. Because every man has some kind of relative in the party. My sister says how sorry she is that our old father is no more, he who was so afraid of bloodshed. Greatly exaggerated. What I say is the sooner we shoot the smart fellows who raise hell because a few dirty anti-Ekwilists at last got what was coming to them——”

This is the end of the bridge. And lo—there is no one to greet us.

Krug was perfectly right. The south side guards had deserted their post and only the shadow of Neptune’s twin brother, a compact shadow that looked like a sentinel but was not one, remained as a reminder of those that had gone. True, some paces ahead, on the embankment, three or four, possibly uniformed, men, smoking two or three glowing cigarettes, relaxed on a bench while a seven-stringed amorandola was being discreetly, romantically thumbed in the dark, but they did not challenge Krug and his delightful companion, nor indeed pay any attention to them as the two passed.

3
 

HE ENTERED THE ELEVATOR which greeted him with the small sound he knew, half stamp, half shiver, and its features lit up. He pressed the third button. The brittle, thin-walled, old-fashioned little room blinked but did not move. He pressed again. Again the blink, the uneasy stillness, the inscrutable stare of a thing that does not work and knows it will not. He walked out. And at once, with an optical snap, the lift closed its bright brown eyes. He went up the neglected but dignified stairs.

Krug, a hunchback for the nonce, inserted his latchkey and slowly reverting to normal stature stepped into the hollow, humming, rumbling, rolling, roaring silence of his flat. Alone, a mezzotint of the Da Vinci miracle—thirteen persons at such a narrow table (crockery lent by the Dominican monks) stayed aloof. The lightning struck her stubby tortoiseshell-handled umbrella as it leant away from his own gamp, which was spared. He took off the one glove he had on, disposed of his overcoat and hung up his wide-brimmed black felt hat. His wide-brimmed black hat, no longer feeling at home, fell off the peg and was left lying there.

He walked down the long passage on the walls of which black oil-paintings, the overflow from his study, showed nothing but cracks in the blindly reflected light. A rubber ball the size of a large orange was asleep on the floor.

He entered the dining-room. A plate of cold tongue garnished with cucumber slices and the painted cheek of a cheese were quietly expecting him.

The woman had a remarkable ear. She slipped out of her room next to the nursery and joined Krug. Her name was Claudina and for the last week or so she had been the sole servant in Krug’s household: the male cook had left, disapproving of what he had neatly described as its “subversive atmosphere.”

“Thank goodness,” she said, “you have come safely home. Would you like some hot tea?”

He shook his head, turning his back to her, groping in the vicinity of the sideboard as if he were looking for something.

“How is madame tonight?” she asked.

Not answering, in the same slow blundering fashion, he made for the Turkish sitting-room which nobody used and, traversing it, reached another bend of the passage. There he opened a closet, lifted the lid of an empty trunk, looked inside and then came back.

Claudina was standing quite still in the middle of the dining-room where he had left her. She had been in the family for several years and, as conventionally happens in such cases, was pleasantly plump, middle-aged, and sensitive. There she stood staring at him with dark liquid eyes, her mouth slightly opened showing a gold spotted tooth, her coral earrings staring too and one hand pressed to her formless grey-worsted bosom.

“I want you to do something for me,” said Krug. “Tomorrow I am taking the child to the country for a few days and while I am away will you please collect all her dresses and put them into the empty black trunk. Also her personal affairs, the umbrella and such things. Put it all, please, into the closet and lock it up. Anything you find. The trunk may be too small——”

He wandered out of the room without looking at her, was about to inspect another closet but thought better of it, turned on his heel and then automatically switched into tiptoe gear as he approached the nursery. There at the white door he stopped and the thumping of his heart was suddenly interrupted by his little son’s special bedroom voice, detached and courteous, employed by David with graceful precision to notify his parents (when they returned, say, from a dinner in town) that he was still awake and ready to receive anybody who would like to wish him a second goodnight.

This was bound to happen. Only a quarter past ten. I thought the night was almost over. Krug closed his eyes for a moment, then went in.

He distinguished a rapid dim tumbling movement of bedclothes; the switch of a bed lamp clicked and the boy sat up, shielding his eyes. At that age (eight) children cannot be said to smile in any settled way. The smile is not localized; it is diffused throughout the whole frame—if the child is happy of course. This child was still a happy child. Krug said the conventional thing about time and sleep. No sooner had he said it than a fierce rush of rough tears started from the bottom of his chest, made for his throat, was stopped by inferior forces, remained in wait, maneuvering in black depths, getting ready for another leap. Pourvu qu’il ne pose pas la question atroce. I pray thee, local deity.

“Have they been shooting at you?” David asked.

“What nonsense,” he said. “Nobody shoots at night.”

“But they have. I heard the pops. Look, here’s a new way of wearing pyjamas.”

He stood up nimbly, spreading his arms, balancing on small powdery-white, blue-veined feet that seemed to cling monkey-wise to the disarranged linen on the dimpled creaking mattress. Blue pants, pale-green vest (the woman must be colour-blind).

“I dropped the right ones into my bath,” he explained cheerfully.

Possibilities of buoyancy exerted a sudden attraction, and with the collaboration of popping sounds he jumped, once, twice, three times, higher, higher—then from a dizzy suspension fell down on his knees, rolled over, stood up again on the tossed bed, tottering, swaying.

“Lie down, lie down,” said Krug, “it is getting very late. I must go now. Come, lie down. Quick.”

(He may not ask.)

He fell this time on his bottom and, fumbling with incurved toes, got them under the blanket, between blanket and sheet, laughed, got them right this time, and Krug rapidly tucked him in.

“There has been no story tonight,” said David, lying quite flat, his own long upper lashes sweeping up, his elbows thrown back and resting like wings on both sides of his head on the pillow.

“I shall tell you a double one tomorrow.”

As he bent over the child, Krug was held at arm’s length for a moment, both looking into each other’s faces: the child hurriedly trying hard to think up something to ask in order to gain time, the father frantically praying that one particular question would not be asked. How tender the skin looked in its bedtime glory, with a touch of the palest violet above the eyes and with the golden bloom on the forehead, below the thick ruffled fringe of golden brown hair. The perfection of nonhuman creatures—birds, young dogs, moths asleep, colts—and these little mammals. A combination of three tiny brown spots, birthmarks on the faintly flushed cheek near the nose recalled some combination he had seen, touched, taken in recently—what was it? The parapet.

He quickly kissed them, turned off the light and went out. Thank God, it has not been asked—he thought as he closed the door. But, as he gently released the handle, there it came, high-pitched, brightly remembered.

“Soon,” he replied. “As soon as the doctor tells her she can. Sleep. I beg you.”

At least a merciful door was between him and me.

In the dining-room, on a chair near the sideboard, Claudina sat crying lustily into a paper napkin. Krug settled down to his meal, dispatched it in haste, briskly handling the unnecessary pepper and salt, clearing his throat, moving plates, dropping a fork and catching it on his instep, while she sobbed intermittently.

“Please, go to your room,” he said at last. “The child is not asleep. Call me at seven tomorrow. Mr. Ember will probably attend to the arrangements tomorrow. I shall leave with the child as early as possible.”

“But it’s so sudden,” she moaned. “You said yesterday——Oh, it ought not to have happened like this!”

“And I shall wring your neck,” added Krug, “if you breathe one blessed word to the child.”

He pushed away his plate, went to his study, locked the door.

Ember might be out. The telephone might not work. But from the feel of the receiver as he took it up he knew the faithful instrument was alive. I could never remember Ember’s number. Here is the back of the telephone book on which we used to jot down names and figures, our hands mixed, slanting and curving in opposite directions. Her concavity fitting my convexity exactly. Extraordinary—I am able to make out the shadow of eyelashes on the child’s cheek but fail to decipher my own handwriting. He found his spare glasses and then the familiar number with the six in the middle resembling Ember’s Persian nose, and Ember put down his pen, removed the long amber cigarette-holder from his thickly pursed lips and listened.

“I was in the middle of this letter when Krug rang up and told me a terrible thing. Poor Olga is no more. She died today following an operation of the kidney. I had gone to see her at the hospital last Tuesday and she was as sweet as ever and admired so much the really lovely orchids I had brought her; there was no real danger in sight—or if there was, the doctors did not tell him. I have registered the shock but cannot analyse yet the impact of the news. I shall probably not be able to sleep for several nights. My own tribulations, all those petty theatrical intrigues I have just described, will, I am afraid, seem as trivial to you as they now seem to me.

“At first I was struck by the unpardonable thought that he was delivering himself of a monstrous joke like the time he read backwards from end to beginning that lecture on space to find out whether his students would react in any manner. They did not, nor do I for the moment. You will see him probably before you receive this muddled epistle; he is going tomorrow to the Lakes with his poor little boy. It is a wise decision. The future is not too clear but I suppose the University will resume its functions before long, though of course nobody knows what sudden changes may occur. Of late there have been some appalling rumours; the only newspaper I read has not come for at least a fortnight. He asked me to take care of the cremation tomorrow, and I wonder what people will think when he does not turn up; but of course his attitude towards death prevents his going to the ceremony though it will be as brief and formal as I can possibly make it—if only Olga’s family does not intrude. Poor dear fellow—she was a brilliant helper to him in his brilliant career. In normal times, I suppose, I would be supplying her picture to American newspapermen.”

Ember put down his pen again and sat lost in thought. He too had participated in that brilliant career. An obscure scholar, a translator of Shakespeare in whose green, damp country he had spent his studious youth—he innocently shambled into the limelight when a publisher asked him to apply the reverse process to the Komparatiwn Stuhdar en Sophistat tuen Pekrekh or, as the title of the American edition had it, a little more snappily, The Philosophy of Sin (banned in four states and a best seller in the rest). What a strange trick of chance—this masterpiece of esoteric thought endearing itself at once to the middleclass reader and competing for first honours during one season with that robust satire Straight Flush, and then, next year, with Elisabeth Ducharme’s romance of Dixieland, When the Train Passes, and for twenty-nine days (leap year) with the book club selection Through Towns and Villages, and for two consecutive years with that remarkable cross between a certain kind of wafer and a lollipop, Louis Sontag’s Annunciata, which started so well in the Caves of St. Barthelemy and ended in the funnies.

In the beginning, Krug, although professing to be amused, was greatly annoyed by the whole business, while Ember felt abashed and apologetic and covertly wondered whether perhaps his particular brand of rich synthetic English had contained some outlandish ingredient, some dreadful additional spice that might account for the unexpected excitement; but with a greater perspicacity than the two puzzled scholars showed, Olga prepared herself to enjoy thoroughly, for years to come, the success of a work whose very special points she knew better than its ephemeral reviewers could know. She it was who made the horrified Ember persuade Krug to go on that American lecture tour, as if she foresaw that its plangent reverberations would win him at home the esteem which his work in its native garb had neither wrung from academic stolidity nor induced in the comatose mass of amorphous readerdom. Not that the trip itself had been displeasing. Far from it. Although Krug, being as usual chary of squandering in idle conversation such experiences as might undergo unpredictable metamorphoses later on (if left to pupate quietly in the alluvium of the mind), had spoken little of his tour, Olga had managed to recompose it in full and to relay it gleefully to Ember who had vaguely expected a flow of sarcastic disgust. “Disgust?” cried Olga. “Why, he has known enough of that here. Disgust, indeed! Elation, delight, a quickening of the imagination, a disinfection of the mind, togliwn ochnat divodiv [the daily surprise of awakening]!”

“Landscapes as yet unpolluted with conventional poetry, and life, that self-conscious stranger, being slapped on the back and told to relax.” He had written this upon his return, and Olga, with devilish relish, had pasted into a shagreen album indigenous allusions to the most original thinker of our times. Ember evoked her ample being, her thirty-seven resplendent years, the bright hair, the full lips, the heavy chin which went so well with the cooing undertones of her voice—something ventriloquial about her, a continuous soliloquy following in willowed shade the meanderings of her actual speech. He saw Krug, the ponderous dandruffed maestro, sitting there with a satisfied and sly smile on his big swarthy face (recalling that of Beethoven in the general correlation of its rugged features)—yes, lolling in that old rose armchair while Olga buoyantly took charge of the conversation—and how vividly one remembered the way she had of letting a sentence bounce and ripple over the three quick bites she took at the raisin cake she held, and the brisk triple splash of her plump hand over the sudden stretch of her lap as she brushed the crumbs away and went on with her story. Almost extravagantly healthy, a regular radabarbára [full-blown handsome woman]: those wide radiant eyes, that flaming cheek to which she would press the cool back of her hand, that shining white forehead with a whiter scar—the consequence of an automobile accident in the gloomy Lagodan mountains of legendary fame. Ember could not see how one might dispose of the recollection of such a life, the insurrection of such a widowhood. With her small feet and large hips, with her girlish speech and her matronly bosom, with her bright wits and the torrents of tears she shed that night, while dripping with blood herself, over the crippled crying doe that had rushed into the blinding lights of the car, with all this and with many other things that Ember knew he could not know, she would lie now, a pinch of blue dust in her cold columbarium.

He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death.

Ember hesitated, then dialled fluently. The line was engaged. That sequence of small bar-shaped hoots was like the long vertical row of superimposed I’s in an index by first lines to a verse anthology. I am a lake. I am a tongue. I am a spirit. I am fevered. I am not covetous. I am the Dark Cavalier. I am the torch. I arise. I ask. I blow. I bring. I cannot change. I cannot look. I climb the hill. I come. I dream. I envy. I found. I heard. I intended an Ode. I know. I love. I must not grieve, my love. I never. I pant. I remember. I saw thee once. I travelled. I wandered. I will. I will. I will. I will.

He thought of going out to mail his letter as bachelors are wont to do around eleven o’clock at night. He hoped a timely aspirin tablet had nipped his cold in the bud. The unfinished translation of his favourite lines in Shakespeare’s greatest play—

follow the perttaunt jauncing ’neath the rack with her pale skeins-mate.

crept up tentatively but it would not scan because in his native tongue ‘rack’ was anapaestic. Like pulling a grand piano through a door. Take it to pieces. Or turn the corner into the next line. But the berth there was taken, the table was reserved, the line was engaged.

It was not now.

“I thought perhaps you might like me to come. We might play chess or something. I mean, tell me frankly——”

“I would,” said Krug. “But I have had an unexpected call from—well, an unexpected call. They want me to come immediately. They call it an emergency session—I don’t know—important, they say. All rubbish, of course, but as I can neither work nor sleep, I thought I might go.”

“Had you any trouble in getting home tonight?”

“I am afraid I was drunk. I broke my glasses. They are sending——”

“Is it what you alluded to the other day?”

“No. Yes. No—I do not remember. Ce sont mes collègues et le vieux et tout le trimbala. They are sending a car for me in a few minutes.”

“I see. Do you think——”

“You will be at the hospital as early as possible, won’t you?—At nine, at eight, even earlier.…”

“Yes, of course.”

“I told the maid—and perhaps you will look into the matter too when I am gone—I told her——”

Krug heaved horribly, could not finish—crushed down the receiver. His study was unusually cold. All of them so blind and sooty, and hung up so high above the bookshelves, that he could hardly make out the cracked complexion of an upturned face under a rudimentary halo or the jigsaw indentures of a martyr’s parchmentlike robe dissolving into grimy blackness. A deal table in one corner supported loads of unbound volumes of the Revue de Psychologie bought secondhand, crabbed 1879 turning into plump 1880, their dead-leaf covers frayed or crumpled at the edges and almost cut through by the crisscross string eating its way into their dusty bulk. Results of the pact never to dust, never to unmake the room. A comfortable hideous bronze stand lamp with a thick glass shade of lumpy garnet and amethyst portions set in asymmetrical interspaces between bronze veins had grown to a great height, like some enormous weed, from the old blue carpet beside the striped sofa where Krug will lie tonight. The spontaneous generation of unanswered letters, reprints, university bulletins, disembowelled envelopes, paper clips, pencils in various stages of development littered the desk. Gregoire, a huge stag beetle wrought of pig iron which had been used by his grandfather to pull off by the heel (hungrily gripped by these burnished mandibles) first one riding boot, then the other, peered, unloved, from under the leathern fringe of a leathern armchair. The only pure thing in the room was a copy of Chardin’s “House of Cards,” which she had once placed over the mantelpiece (to ozonize your dreadful lair, she had said)—the conspicuous cards, the flushed faces, the lovely brown background.

He walked down the passage again, listened to the rhythmic silence in the nursery—and Claudina again slipped out of the adjacent room. He told her he was going out and asked her to make his bed on the divan in the study. Then he picked up his hat from the floor and went downstairs to wait for the car.

It was cold outside and he regretted not having refilled his flask with that brandy which had helped him to live through the day. It was also very quiet—quieter than usual. The oldfashioned genteel house fronts across the cobbled lane had extinguished most of their lights. A man he knew, a former Member of Parliament, a mild bore who used to take out his two polite paletoted dachshunds at nightfall, had been removed a couple of days before from number fifty in a motor truck already crammed with other prisoners. Obviously the Toad had decided to make his revolution as conventional as possible. The car was late.

He had been told by University President Azureus that a Dr. Alexander, Assistant Lecturer in Biodynamics, whom Krug had never met, would come to fetch him. The man Alexander had been collecting people all evening and the President had been trying to get in touch with Krug since the early afternoon. A peppy, dynamic, efficient gentleman, Dr. Alexander—one of those people who in times of disaster emerge from dull obscurity to blossom forth suddenly with permits, passes, coupons, cars, connections, lists of addresses. The University bigwigs had crumpled up helplessly, and of course no such gathering would have been possible had not a perfect organizer been evolved from the periphery of their species by a happy mutation which almost suggested the discreet intermediation of a transcendental force. One could distinguish in the dubious light the emblem (bearing a remarkable resemblance to a crushed dislocated but still writhing spider) of the new government upon a red flaglet affixed to the bonnet, when the officially sanctioned car obtained by the magician in our midst drew up at the curb which it grazed with a purposeful tyre.

Krug seated himself beside the driver, who was none other than Dr. Alexander himself, a pink-faced, very blond, very well-groomed man in his thirties, with a pheasant’s feather in his nice green hat and a heavy opal ring on his fourth finger. His hands were very white and soft, and lay lightly on the steering wheel. Of the two (?) persons in the back Krug recognized Edmond Beuret, the Professor of French literature.

“Bonsoir, cher collègue,” said Beuret. “On m’ai tiré du lit au grand désepoir de ma femme. Comment va la vôtre?”

“A few days ago,” said Krug, “I had the pleasure of reading your article on—” (he could not recall the name of that French general, an honest if somewhat limited historical figure who had been driven to suicide by slanderous politicians).

“Yes,” said Beuret, “it did me good to write it. ‘Les morts, les pauvres morts ont de grandes douleurs. Et quand Octobre souffle’——”

Dr. Alexander turned the wheel very gently and spoke without looking at Krug, then giving him a rapid glance, then looking again straight ahead:

“I understand, Professor, that you are going to be our saviour tonight. The fate of our Alma Mater lies in good hands.”

Krug grunted noncommittally. He had not the vaguest—or was it a veiled allusion to the fact that the Ruler, colloquially known as the Toad, had been a schoolmate of his—but that would have been too silly.

The car was stopped in the middle of Skotoma (ex Liberty, ex Imperial) Place by three soldiers, two policemen, and the raised hand of poor Theodor the Third who permanently wanted a lift or to go to a smaller place, teacher; but they were motioned by Dr. Alexander to look at the little red and black flag—whereupon they saluted and retired into the darkness.

The streets were deserted as usually happens in the gaps of history, in the terrains vagues of time. Taken all in all the only live creature encountered was a young man going home from an ill-timed and apparently badly truncated fancy ball: he was dressed up as a Russian mujik—embroidered shirt spreading freely from under a tasselled sash, culotte bouffante, soft crimson boots, and wrist watch.

“On va lui torcher le derrière, à ce gaillard-là,” remarked Professor Beuret grimly. The other—anonymous—person in the back seat, muttered something inaudible and replied to himself in an affirmative but likewise inarticulate way.

“I cannot drive much faster,” said Dr. Alexander steadily looking ahead, “because the wrestle-cap of the lower slammer is what they call muckling. If you will put your hand into my right-hand pocket, Professor, you will find some cigarettes.”

“I am a non-smoker,” said Krug. “And anyway I do not believe there are any there.”

They drove on for some time in silence.

“Why?” asked Dr. Alexander, gently treading, gently releasing.

“A passing thought,” said Krug.

Discreetly the gentle driver allowed one hand to leave the wheel and grope, then the other. Then, after a moment, the right one again.

“I must have mislaid them,” he said after another minute of silence. “And you, Professor, are not only a non-smoker—and not only a man of genius, everybody knows that, but also (quick glance) an exceedingly lucky gambler.”

“Eez eet zee verity,” said Beuret, suddenly shifting to English, which he knew Krug understood, and speaking it like a Frenchman in an English book, “eez eet zee verity zat, as I have been informed by zee reliably sources, zee disposed chef of the state has been captured together with a couple of other blokes (when the author gets bored by the process—or forgets) somewhere in the hills—and shot? But no, I ziss cannot credit—eet eez too orrible” (when the author remembers again).

“Probably a slight exaggeration,” observed Dr. Alexander in the vernacular. “Various kinds of ugly rumours are apt to spread nowadays, and although of course domusta barbarn kapusta [the ugliest wives are the truest], still I do not think that in this particular case,” he trailed off with a pleasant laugh and there was another silence.

O my strange native town! Your narrow lanes where the Roman once passed dream in the night of other things than do the evanescent creatures that tread your stones. O you strange town! Your every stone holds as many old memories as there are motes of dust. Every one of your grey quiet stones has seen a witch’s long hair catch fire, a pale astronomer mobbed, a beggar kicked in the groin by another beggar—and the King’s horses struck sparks from you, and the dandies in brown and the poets in black repaired to the coffee houses while you dripped with slops to the merry echoes of gardyloo. Town of dreams, a changing dream, O you, stone changeling. The little shops all shuttered in the clean night, the gaunt walls, the niche shared by the homeless pigeon with a sculptured churchman, the rose window, the exuded gargoyle, the jester who slapped Christ—lifeless carvings and dim life mingling their feathers.… Not for the wheels of oil-maddened engines were your narrow and rough streets designed—and as the car stopped at last and bulky Beuret crawled out in the wake of his beard, the anonymous muser who had been sitting beside him was observed to split into two, producing by sudden gemination Gleeman, the frail Professor of Medieval Poetry, and the equally diminutive Yanovsky, who taught Slavic scansion—two newborn homunculi now drying on the paleolithic pavement.

“I shall lock the car and follow you presently,” said Dr. Alexander with a little cough.

An Italianate mendicant in picturesque rags who had overdone it by having an especially dramatic hole in the one place which normally would never have had any—the bottom of his expectant hat—stood, shaking diligently with the ague in the lamplight at the front door. Three consecutive coppers fell—and are still falling. Four silent professors flocked up the rococo stairs.

But they did not have to ring or knock or anything for the door on the topmost landing was flung open to greet them by the prodigious Dr. Alexander who was there already, having zoomed perhaps, up some special backstairs, or by means of those nonstop things as when I used to rise from the twinned night of the Keeweenawatin and the horrors of the Laurentian Revolution, through the ghoul-haunted Province of Perm, through Early Recent, Slightly Recent, Not So Recent, Quite Recent, Most Recent—warm, warm!—up to my room number on my hotel floor in a remote country, up, up, in one of those express elevators manned by the delicate hands—my own in a negative picture—of dark-skinned men with sinking stomachs and rising hearts, never attaining Paradise, which is not a roof garden; and from the depths of the stag-headed hall old President Azureus came at a quick pace, his arms open, his faded blue eyes beaming in advance, his long wrinkled upper lip quivering——

“Yes, of course—how stupid of me,” thought Krug, the circle in Krug, one Krug in another one.

4
 

OLD AZUREUS’S MANNER of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release their hold, a blank expression replace the fervent light of his pale fragile face, and he would leave you as if he had made a mistake, as if after all you were not the loved one—the loved one whom, the next moment, he would espy in another corner, and again the smile would dawn, again the hands would enfold the sparrow, again it would all dissolve.

A score of prominent representatives of the University, some of them Dr. Alexander’s recent passengers, were standing or sitting in the spacious, more or less glittering drawing-room (not all the lamps were lit under the green cumuli and cherubs of its ceiling) and perhaps half a dozen more co-existed in the adjacent mussikisha [music room], for the old gentleman was a mediocre harpist à ses heures and liked to fix up trios, with himself as the hypotenuse, or have some very great musician do things to the piano, after which the very small and not overabundant sandwiches and some triangled bouchées, which he fondly believed had a special charm of their own due to their shape, were passed around by two maids and his unmarried daughter, who smelt vaguely of eau de Cologne and distinctly of sweat. Tonight, in lieu of these dainties, there were tea and hard biscuits; and a tortoiseshell cat (stroked alternately by the Professor of Chemistry, and Hedron, the Mathematician) lay on the dark-shining Bechstein. At the dry-leaf touch of Gleeman’s electric hand, the cat rose like boiling milk and proceeded to purr intensely; but the little medievalist was absent-minded and wandered away. Economics, Divinity, and Modern History stood talking near one of the heavily draped windows. A thin but virulent draught was perceptible in spite of the drapery. Dr. Alexander had sat down at a small table, had carefully removed to its north-western corner the articles upon it (a glass ashtray, a porcelain donkey with paniers for matches, a box made to mimic a book) and was going through a list of names, crossing out some of them by means of an incredibly sharp pencil. The President hovered over him in a mixed state of curiosity and concern. Now and then Dr. Alexander would stop to ponder, his unoccupied hand cautiously stroking the sleek fair hair at the back of his head.

“What about Rufel?” (Political Science) asked the President. “Could you not get him?”

“Not available,” replied Dr. Alexander. “Apparently arrested. For his own safety, I am told.”

“Let us hope so,” said old Azureus thoughtfully. “Well, no matter. I suppose we may start.”

Edmond Beuret, rolling his big brown eyes, was telling a phlegmatic fat person (Drama) of the bizarre sight he had witnessed.

“Oh, yes,” said Drama. “Art students. I know all about it.”

“Ils ont du toupet pourtant,” said Beuret.

“Or merely obstinacy. When young people cling to tradition they do so with as much passion as the riper man shows when demolishing it. They broke into the Klumba [Pigeon Hole—a well-known theatre] since all the dancing halls proved closed. Perseverance.”

“I hear that the Parlamint and the Zud [Court of Justice] are still burning,” said another Professor.

“You hear wrongly,” said Drama, “because we are not talking of that, but of the sad case of history encroaching upon an annual ball. They found a provision of candles and danced on the stage,” he went on, turning again to Beuret, who stood with his stomach protruding and both hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets. “Before an empty house. A picture which has a few nice shadows.”

“I think we may start,” said the President, coming up to them and then passing through Beuret like a moonbeam, to notify another group.

“Then it is admirable,” said Beuret, as he suddenly saw the thing in a different light. “I do hope the pauvres gosses had some fun.”

“The police,” said Drama, “dispersed them about an hour ago. But I presume it was exciting while it lasted.”

“I think we may start in a moment,” said the President confidently, as he drifted past them again. His smile gone long ago, his shoes faintly creaking, he slipped in between Yanovksy and the Latinist and nodded yes to his daughter, who was showing him surreptitiously a bowl of apples through the door.

“I have heard from two sources (one was Beuret, the other Beuret’s presumable informer),” said Yanovsky—and sank his voice so low that the Latinist had to bring down and lend him a white-fluffed ear.

“I have heard another version,” the Latinist said, slowly unbending. “They were caught while attempting to cross the frontier. One of the Cabinet Ministers whose identity is not certain was executed on the spot, but (he subdued his voice as he named the former President of the State) … was brought back and imprisoned.”

“No, no,” said Yanovsky, “not Me Nisters. He all alone. Like King Lear.”

“Yes, this will do nicely,” said Dr. Azureus with sincere satisfaction to Dr. Alexander who had shifted some of the chairs and had brought in a few more, so that by magic the room had assumed the necessary poise.

The cat slid down from the piano and slowly walked out, on the way brushing for one mad instant against the pencil-striped trouser leg of Gleeman who was busy peeling a dark-red Bervok apple.

Orlik, the Zoologist, stood with his back to the company as he intently examined at various levels and from various angles the spines of books on the shelves beyond the piano, now and then pulling out one which showed no title—and hurriedly putting it back: they were all zwiebacks, all in German—German poetry. He was bored and had a huge noisy family at home.

“I disagree with you there—with both of you,” the Professor of Modern History was saying. “My client never repeats herself. At least not when people are all agog to see the repetition coming. In fact, it is only unconsciously that Clio can repeat herself. Because her memory is too short. As with so many phenomena of time, recurrent combinations are perceptible as such only when they cannot affect us any more—when they are imprisoned so to speak in the past, which is the past just because it is disinfected. To try to map our tomorrows with the help of data supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete non-existence. The giddy rush of the present into this vacuum is mistaken by us for a rational movement.”

“Pure Krugism,” murmured the Professor of Economics.

“To take an example”—continued the Historian without noticing the remark: “no doubt we can single out occasions in the past that parallel our own period, when the snowball of an idea had been rolled and rolled by the red hands of schoolboys and got bigger and bigger until it became a snowman in a crumpled top hat set askew and with a broom perfunctorily affixed to his armpit—and then suddenly the bogey eyes blinked, the snow turned to flesh, the broom became a weapon and a full-fledged tyrant beheaded the boys. Oh, yes, a parliament or a senate has been upset before, and it is not the first time that an obscure and unlovable but marvellously obstinate man has gnawed his way into the bowels of a country. But to those who watch these events and would like to ward them, the past offers no clues, no modus vivendi—for the simple reason that it had none itself when toppling over the brink of the present into the vacuum it eventually filled.”

“If this be so,” said the Professor of Divinity, “then we go back to the fatalism of inferior nations and disown the thousands of past occasions when the capacity to reason, and act accordingly, proved more beneficial than scepticism and submission would have been. Your academic distaste for applied history rather suggests its vulgar utility, my friend.”

“Oh, I was not talking of submission or anything in that line. That is an ethical question for one’s own conscience to solve. I was merely refuting your contention that history could predict what Paduk would say or do tomorrow. There can be no submission—because the very fact of our discussing these matters implies curiosity, and curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form. Speaking of curiosity, can you explain the strange infatuation of our President for that pink-faced gentleman yonder—the kind gentleman who brought us here? What is his name, who is he?”

“One of Maler’s assistants, I think; a laboratory worker or something like that,” said Economics.

“And last term,” said the Historian, “we saw a stuttering imbecile being mysteriously steered into the Chair of Paedology because he happened to play the indispensable contrabass. Anyhow the man must be a very Satan of persuasiveness considering that he has managed to get Krug to come here.”

“Did he not use,” asked the Professor of Divinity with a mild suggestion of slyness, “did he not use somewhere that simile of the snowball and the snowman’s broom?”

“Who?” asked the Historian. “Who used it? That man?”

“No,” said the Professor of Divinity. “The other. The one whom it was so hard to get. It is curious the way ideas he expressed ten years ago——”

They were interrupted by the President who stood in the middle of the room asking for attention and lightly clapping his hands.

The person whose name had just been mentioned, Professor Adam Krug, the philosopher, was seated somewhat apart from the rest, deep in a cretonned armchair, with his hairy hands on its arms. He was a big heavy man in his early forties, with untidy, dusty, or faintly grizzled locks and a roughly hewn face suggestive of the uncouth chess master or of the morose composer, but more intelligent. The strong compact dusky forehead had that peculiar hermetic aspect (a bank safe? a prison wall?) which the brows of thinkers possess. The brain consisted of water, various chemical compounds and a group of highly specialized fats. The pale steely eyes were half closed in their squarish orbits under the shaggy eyebrows which had protected them once from the poisonous droppings of extinct birds—Schneider’s hypothesis. The ears were of goodly size with hair inside. Two deep folds of flesh diverged from the nose along the large cheeks. The morning had been shaveless. He wore a badly creased dark suit and a bow tie, always the same, hyssop violet with (pure white in the type, here Isabella) interneural macules and a crippled left hindwing. The not so recent collar was of the low open variety, i.e., with a comfortable triangular space for his namesake’s apple. Thick-soled shoes and old-fashioned black spats were the distinctive characters of his feet. What else? Oh, yes—the absent-minded beat of his forefinger against the arm of his chair.

Under this visible surface, a silk shirt enveloped his robust torso and tired hips. It was tucked deep into his long underpants which in their turn were tucked into his socks: it was rumoured, he knew, that he wore none (hence the spats) but that was not true; they were in fact nice expensive lavender silk socks.

Under this was the warm white skin. Out of the dark an ant trail, a narrow capillary caravan, went up the middle of his abdomen to end at the brink of his navel; and a blacker and denser growth was spread-eagled upon his chest.

Under this was a dead wife and a sleeping child.

The President bent his head over a rosewood bureau which had been drawn by his assistant into a conspicuous position. He put on his spectacles using one hand, shaking his silvery head to get their bows into place, and proceeded to collect, equate, tap, tap, the papers he had been counting. Dr. Alexander tiptoed into a far corner where he sat down on an introduced chair. The President put down his thick even batch of typewritten sheets, removed his spectacles and, holding them away from his right ear, began his preliminary speech. Soon Krug became aware that he was a kind of focal centre in respect to the Argus-eyed room. He knew that except for two people in the assembly, Hedron and, perhaps, Orlik, nobody really liked him. To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something … something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms—some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh. Unchallenged and unsought, a plump pale pimply adolescent entered a dim classroom and looked at Adam who looked away.

“I have called you together, gentlemen, to inform you of certain very grave circumstances, circumstances which it would be foolish to ignore. As you know, our University has been virtually closed since the end of last month. I have now been given to understand that unless our intentions, our programme and conduct are made clear to the Ruler, this organism, this old and beloved organism, will cease to function altogether, and some other institution with some other staff be established in its stead. In other words, the glorious edifice which those bricklayers, Science and Administration, have built stone by stone during centuries, will fall.… It will fall because of our lack of initiative and tact. At the eleventh hour a line of conduct has been planned which, I hope, may prevent the disaster. Tomorrow it might have been too late.

“You all know how distasteful the spirit of compromise is to me. But I do not think the gallant effort in which we shall all join can be branded by that obnoxious term. Gentlemen! When a man has lost a beloved wife, when an animal has lost his feet in the aging ocean; when a great executive sees the work of his life shattered to bits—he regrets. He regrets too late. So let us not by our own fault place ourselves in the position of the bereaved lover, of the admiral whose fleet is lost in the raging waves, of the bankrupt administrator—let us take our fate like a flaming torch into both hands.

“First of all, I shall read you a short memorandum—a kind of manifesto if you wish—which is to be submitted to the Government and duly published … and here comes the second point I wish to raise—a point which some of you have already guessed. In our midst we have a man … a great man let me add, who by a singular coincidence happened in bygone days to be the schoolmate of another great man, the man who leads our State. Whatever political opinions we hold—and during my long life I have shared most of them—it cannot be denied that a government is a government and as such cannot be expected to suffer a tactless demonstration of unprovoked dissension or indifference. What seemed to us a mere trifle, the mere snowball of a transient political creed gathering no moss, has assumed enormous proportions, has become a flaming banner while we were blissfully slumbering in the security of our vast libraries and expensive laboratories. Now we are awake. The awakening is rough, I admit, but perhaps this is not solely the fault of the bugler. I trust that the delicate task of wording this … this that has been prepared … this historical paper which we all will promptly sign, has been accomplished with a deep sense of the enormous importance this task presents. I trust too that Adam Krug will recall his happy schooldays and carry this document in person to the Ruler, who, I know, will appreciate greatly the visit of a beloved and world-famous former playmate, and thus will lend a kinder ear to our sorry plight and good resolutions than he would if this miraculous coincidence had not been granted us. Adam Krug, will you save us?”

Tears stood in the old man’s eyes and his voice had trembled while uttering this dramatic appeal. A page of foolscap skimmed off the table and gently settled on the green roses of the carpet. Dr. Alexander noiselessly walked over to it and restored it to the desk. Orlik, the old zoologist, opened a little book lying next to him and discovered that it was an empty box with a lone pink peppermint on the bottom.

“You are the victim of a sentimental delusion, my dear Azureus,” said Krug. “What I and the Toad hoard en fait de souvenirs d’enfance is the habit I had of sitting upon his face.”

There was a sudden crash of wood against wood. The zoologist had looked up and at the same time put down Buxum biblioformis with too much force. A hush followed. Dr. Azureus slowly sat down and said in a changed voice:

“I do not quite follow you, Professor. I do not know who the … whom the word or name you used refers to and—what you mean by recalling that singular game—probably some childish tussle … lawn tennis or something like that.”

“Toad was his nickname,” said Krug. “And it is doubtful whether you would call it lawn tennis—or even leapfrog for that matter. He did not. I was something of a bully, I am afraid, and I used to trip him up and sit upon his face—a kind of rest cure.”

“Please, my dear Krug, please,” said the President, wincing. “This is in questionable taste. You were boys at school, and boys will be boys, and I am sure you have many enjoyable memories in common—discussing lessons or talking of your grand plans for the future as boys will do——”

“I sat upon his face,” said Krug stolidly, “every blessed day for about five school years—which makes, I suppose, about a thousand sittings.”

Some looked at their feet, others at their hands, others again got busy with cigarettes. The zoologist, after showing a momentary interest in the proceedings, turned to a newfound bookcase. Dr. Alexander negligently avoided the shifting eye of old Azureus, who apparently was seeking help in that unexpected quarter.

“The details of the ritual,” continued Krug—but was interrupted by the ching-ching of a little cowbell, a Swiss trinket that the old man’s desperate hand had found on the bureau.

“All this is quite irrelevant,” cried the President. “I really must call you to order, my dear colleague. We have wandered away from the main——”

“But look here,” said Krug. “Really, I have not said anything dreadful, have I? I do not suggest for instance that the present face of the Toad retains after twenty-five years the immortal imprint of my weight. In those days, although thinner than I am now——”

The President had slipped out of his chair and fairly ran towards Krug.

“I have remembered,” he said with a catch in his voice, “something I wanted to tell you—most important—sub rosa—will you please come with me into the next room for a minute?”

“All right,” said Krug, heaving out of his armchair.

The next room was the President’s study. Its tall clock had stopped at a quarter past six. Krug calculated rapidly, and the blackness inside him sucked at his heart. Why am I here? Shall I go home? Shall I stay?

“… My dear friend, you know well my esteem for you. But you are a dreamer, a thinker. You do not realize the circumstances. You say impossible, unmentionable things. Whatever we think of—of that person, we must keep it to ourselves. We are in deathly danger. You are jeopardizing the—everything.…”

Dr. Alexander, whose courtesy, assistance and savoir vivre were really supreme, slipped in with an ash tray which he placed at Krug’s elbow.

“In that case,” said Krug, ignoring the redundant article, “I have to note with regret that the tact you mentioned was but its helpless shadow—namely an afterthought. You ought to have warned me, you know, that for reasons I still cannot fathom you intended to ask me to visit the——”

“Yes, to visit the Ruler,” interpolated Azureus hurriedly. “I am sure that when you take cognizance of the manifesto, the reading of which has been so unexpectedly postponed——”

The clock began striking. For Dr. Alexander, who was an expert in such matters and a methodical man, had not been able to curb the tinkerer’s instinct and was now standing on a chair and pawing the danglers and the naked face. His ear and dynamic profile were reflected in pink pastel by the opened glass door of the clock.

“I think I prefer going home,” said Krug.

“Stay, I implore you. We shall now quickly read and sign that really historical document. And you must agree, you must be the messenger, you must be the dove——”

“Confound that clock,” said Krug. “Can’t you stop its striking, man? You seem to confuse the olive branch with the fig leaf,” he went on, turning again to the President. “But this is neither here nor there, since for the life of me——”

“I only beg you to think it over, to avoid any rash decision. Those school recollections are delightful per se—little quarrels—a harmless nickname—but we must be serious now. Come, let us go back to our colleagues and do our duty.”

Dr. Azureus, whose oratorical zest seemed to have waned, briefly informed his audience that the declaration which all had to read and sign, had been typed in the same number of copies as there would be signatures. He had been given to understand, he said, that this would lend a dash of individuality to every copy. What was the real object of this arrangement he did not explain, and, let us hope, did not know, but Krug thought he recognized in the apparent imbecility of the procedure the eerie ways of the Toad. The good doctors, Azureus and Alexander, distributed the sheets with the celerity that a conjuror and his assistant display when passing around for inspection articles which should not be examined too closely.

“You take one, too,” said the older doctor to the younger one.

“No, really,” exclaimed Dr. Alexander, and everybody could see his handsome face express a rosy confusion. “Indeed, no. I would not dare. My humble signature must not hobnob with those of this august assembly. I am nothing.”

“Here—this is yours,” said Dr. Azureus with an odd burst of impatience.

The zoologist did not bother to read his, signed it with a borrowed pen, returned the pen over his shoulder and became engrossed again in the only inspectable stuff he had found so far—an old Baedeker with views of Egypt and ships of the desert in silhouette. Poor collecting ground on the whole—except perhaps for the orthopterist.

Dr. Alexander sat down at the rosewood desk, unbuttoned his jacket, shot out his cuffs, tuned the chair proximally, checked its position as a pianist does; then produced from his vest pocket a beautiful glittering instrument made of crystal and gold; looked at its nib; tested it on a bit of paper; and, holding his breath, slowly unfolded the convolutions of his name. Having completed the ornamentation of its complex tail, he raised his pen and surveyed the glamour he had wrought. Unfortunately at this precise moment, his golden wand (perhaps resentful of the concussions that its master’s various exertions had been transmitting to it throughout the evening) shed a big black tear on the valuable typescript.

Really flushing this time, the V vein swelling on his forehead, Dr. Alexander applied the leech. When the corner of the blotting paper had drunk its fill without touching the bottom, the unfortunate doctor gingerly dabbed the remains. Adam Krug from a vantage point near by saw these pale blue remains: a fancy footprint or the spatulate outline of a puddle.

Gleeman re-read the document twice, frowned twice, remembered the grant and the stained-glass window frontispiece and the special type he had chosen, and the footnote on page 306 that would explode a rival theory concerning the exact age of a ruined wall, and affixed his dainty but strangely illegible signature.

Beuret who had been brusquely roused from a pleasant nap in a screened armchair, read, blew his nose, cursed the day he had changed his citizenship—then told himself that after all it was not his business to combat exotic politics, folded his handkerchief and seeing that others signed, signed.

Economics and History held a brief consultation during which a sceptic but slightly strained smile appeared on the latter’s face. They appended their signatures in unison and then noticed with dismay that while comparing notes they had somehow swapped copies, for each copy had the name and address of the potential undersigner typed out in the left-hand corner.

The rest sighed and signed, or did not sigh and signed, or signed—and sighed afterwards, or did neither the one nor the other, but then thought better of it and signed. Adam Krug too, he too, he too, unclipped his rusty wobbly fountain pen. The telephone rang in the adjacent study.

Dr. Azureus had personally handed the document to him and had hung around while Krug had leisurely put on his spectacles and had started to read, throwing his head back so as to rest it on the antimacassar and holding the sheets rather high in his slightly trembling thick fingers. They trembled more than usually because it was after midnight and he was unspeakably tired. Dr. Azureus stopped hovering and felt his old heart stumble as it went upstairs (metaphorically) with its guttering candle when Krug nearing the end of the manifesto (three pages and a half, sewn) pulled at the pen in his breast pocket. A sweet aura of intense relief made the candle rear its flame as old Azureus saw Krug spread the last page on the flat wooden arm of his cretonned armchair and unscrew the muzzle part of his pen, turning it into a cap.

With a quick flip-like delicately precise stroke quite out of keeping with his burly constitution, Krug inserted a comma in the fourth line. Then (chmok) he remuzzled, reclipped his pen (chmok) and handed the document to the distracted President.

“Sign it,” said the President in a funny automatic voice.

“Legal documents excepted,” answered Krug, “and not all of them at that, I never have signed, nor ever shall sign, anything not written by myself.”

Old Azureus glanced around, his arms slowly rising. Somehow nobody was looking his way save Hedron, the mathematician, a gaunt man with a so-called “British” moustache and a pipe in his hand. Dr. Alexander was in the next room attending to the telephone. The cat was asleep in the stuffy room of the President’s daughter who was dreaming of not being able to find a certain pot of apple jelly which she knew was a ship she had once seen in Bervok and a sailor was leaning and spitting overboard, watching his spit fall, fall, fall into the apple jelly of the heart-rending sea for her dream was shot with golden-yellow, as she had not put out the lamp, wishing to keep awake until her old father’s guests had gone.

“Moreover,” said Krug, “the metaphors are all mongrels whereas the sentence about being ready to add to the curriculum such matters as would prove necessary to promote political understanding and to do our utmost is miserable grammar which even my comma cannot save. I want to go home now.”

“Prakhtata meta!” poor Dr. Azureus cried to the very quiet assembly. “Prakhta tuen vadust, mohen kern! Profsar Krug malarma ne donje … Prakhtata!”

Dr. Alexander, faintly resembling the fading sailor, reappeared and signalled, then called the President, who, still clutching the unsigned paper, sped wailing towards his faithful assistant.

“Come on, old boy, don’t be a fool. Sign that darned thing,” said Hedron, leaning over Krug and resting the fist with the pipe on Krug’s shoulder. “What on earth does it matter? Affix your commercially valuable scrawl. Come on! Nobody can touch our circles—but we must have some place to draw them.”

“Not in the mud, sir, not in the mud,” said Krug, smiling his first smile of the evening.

“Oh, don’t be a pompous pedant,” said Hedron. “Why do you want to make me feel so uncomfortable? I signed it—and my gods did not stir.”

Without looking, Krug put up his hand to touch lightly Hedron’s tweed sleeve.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t care a damn for your morals so long as you draw your circles and show conjuring tricks to my boy.”

For one dangerous moment he felt again the hot black surge of grief and the room was almost melted … but Dr. Azureus was speeding back.

“My poor friend,” said the President with great gusto. “You are a hero to have come. Why did not you tell me? I understand everything now! Of course, you could not have given the necessary attention—your decision and signature may be postponed—and I am sure we all are heartily ashamed of ourselves for having bothered you at such a moment.”

“Go on speaking,” said Krug. “Go on. Your words are conundrums to me but don’t let that stop you.”

With an awful feeling that a piece of utter misinformation had bedeviled him, Azureus stared, then stammered:

“I hope, I am not … I mean, I hope I am … I mean, haven’t you … isn’t there sorrow in your family?”

“If there is, it is no concern of yours,” said Krug. “I want to go home,” he added, blasting out suddenly in the terrible voice that would come like a thunderclap when he arrived at the climax of a lecture. “Will that man—what’s his name—drive me back?”

From afar Dr. Alexander nodded to Dr. Azureus.

The mendicant had been relieved. Two soldiers sat huddled on the treadboard of the car, presumably guarding it. Krug, being eager to avoid a chat with Dr. Alexander, promptly got into the back. To his great annoyance, however, Dr. Alexander, instead of taking the wheel, joined him there. With one of the soldiers driving while the other protruded a comfortable elbow, the car screeched, cleared its throat and hummed through the dark streets.

“Perhaps you would like——” said Dr. Alexander, and, groping on the floor, attempted to draw up a rug so as to unite under it his and his bedfellow’s legs. Krug grunted and kicked the thing off. Dr. Alexander tugged, fidgeted, tucked himself in all alone, and then relaxed, one hand languidly resting in the strap on his side of the car. An incidental street lamp found and mislaid his opal.

“I must confess I admired you, Professor. Of course you were the only real man among those poor dear fossils. I understand, you do not see much of your colleagues, do you? Oh, you must have felt rather out of place——”

“Wrong again,” said Krug, breaking his vow to keep silent. “I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.”

Dr. Alexander mistook this for one of the obscure quips which, he had been told, Adam Krug liked to indulge in and laughed cautiously.

Krug glanced at him through the running darkness and turned away for good.

“And you know,” continued the young biodynamicist, “I have a curious feeling, Professor, that somehow or other the numerous sheep are prized less than the one lone wolf. I wonder what is going to happen next. I wonder, for instance, what would be your attitude if our whimsical government with apparent inconsistency ignored the sheep but offered the wolf the most munificent position imaginable. It is a passing thought of course and you may laugh at the paradox (the speaker briefly demonstrated the way it might be done) but this and other possibilities, perhaps of a quite opposite nature, somehow or other come to the mind. You know, when I was a student and lived in a garret, my landlady, the wife of the grocer below, used to insist that I should end by setting the house on fire, so many candles did I burn every night while poring over the pages of your admirable in every respect——”

“Shut up, will you?” said Krug, all of a sudden revealing a queer streak of vulgarity and even cruelty, for nothing in the innocent and well-meaning, if not very intelligent prattle of the young scientist (who quite obviously had been turned into a chatterbox by the shyness characteristic of overstrung and perhaps undernourished young folks, victims of capitalism, communism and masturbation, when they find themselves in the company of really big men, such as for instance someone whom they know to be a personal friend of the boss, or the head of the firm himself, or even the head’s brother-in-law Gogolevitch, and so on) warranted the rudeness of the interjection; which interjection however had the effect of ensuring complete silence for the rest of the trip.

Only when the somewhat roughly driven car swerved into Peregolm Lane, did the unrestful young man, who realized no doubt the bewildered state of mind of the widower, open his mouth again.

“Here we are,” he said genially, “I hope you have your sesamka [latchkey]. We must be dashing back, I’m afraid. Good night! Happy dreams! Proshchevantze!” [jocose “adieu”].

The car vanished while the square echo of its slammed door was still suspended in mid-air like an empty picture frame of ebony. But Krug was not alone: a thing that resembled a helmet had rolled down the steps of the porch and lay at his feet.

Close up, close up! In the farewell shadows of the porch, his moon-white monstrously padded shoulder in pathetic disharmony with his slender neck, a youth, dressed up as an American Football Player, stood in one last deadlock with a sketchy little Carmen—and even the sum of their years was at least ten less than the spectator’s age. Her short black skirt with its suggestion of jet and petal half veiled the quaint garb of her lover’s limbs. A spangled wrap drooped from her left hand and the inner side of her limp arm shone through black gauze. Her other arm circled up and around the boy’s neck and the tense fingers were thrust from behind into his dark hair; yes, one distinguished everything—even the short clumsily lacquered fingernails, the rough schoolgirl knuckles. He, the tackier, held Laocoön, and a brittle shoulder-blade, and a small rhythmical hip, in his throbbing coils through which glowing globules were travelling in secret, and her eyes were closed.

“I am really sorry,” said Krug, “but I have to pass. Donje te zankoriv [do please excuse me].”

They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellation—Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies—those mirrors of infinite space qui m’effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop—hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat’s amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom—heaving more than her smile suggests—and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands.

5
 

IT BRISTLED with farcical anachronisms; it was suffused with a sense of gross maturity (as in Hamlet the churchyard scene); its somewhat meager setting was patched up with odds and ends from other (later) plays; but still the recurrent dream we all know (finding ourselves in the old classroom, with our homework not done because of our having unwittingly missed ten thousand days of school) was in Krug’s case a fair rendering of the atmosphere of the original version. Naturally, the script of daytime memory is far more subtle in regard to factual details, since a good deal of cutting and trimming and conventional recombination has to be done by the dream producers (of whom there are usually several, mostly illiterate and middle-class and pressed by time); but a show is always a show, and the embarrassing return to one’s former existence (with the off-stage passing of years translated in terms of forgetfulness, truancy, inefficiency) is somehow better enacted by a popular dream than by the scholarly precision of memory.

But is it really as crude as all that? Who is behind the timid producers? No doubt, this desk at which Krug finds himself sitting has been hastily borrowed from a different set and is more like the general equipment of the university auditorium than like the individual affair of Krug’s boyhood, with its smelly (prunes, rust) inkhole and the penknife scars on its lid (which could bang) and that special inkstain in the shape of Lake Malheur. No doubt, too, there is something wrong about the position of the door, and some of Krug’s students, vague supes (Danes today, Romans tomorrow), have been hurriedly rounded up to fill gaps left by those of his schoolmates who proved less mnemogenic than others. But among the producers or stagehands responsible for the setting there has been one … it is hard to express it … a nameless, mysterious genius who took advantage of the dream to convey his own peculiar code message which has nothing to do with school days or indeed with any aspect of Krug’s physical existence, but which links him up somehow with an unfathomable mode of being, perhaps terrible, perhaps blissful, perhaps neither, a kind of transcendental madness which lurks behind the corner of consciousness and which cannot be defined more accurately than this, no matter how Krug strains his brain. O yes—the lighting is poor and one’s field of vision is oddly narrowed as if the memory of closed eyelids persisted intrinsically within the sepia shading of the dream, and the orchestra of the senses is limited to a few native instruments, and Krug reasons in his dream worse than a drunken fool; but a closer inspection (made when the dream-self is dead for the ten thousandth time and the day-self inherits for the ten thousandth time those dusty trifles, those debts, those bundles of illegible letters) reveals the presence of someone in the know. Some intruder has been there, has tiptoed upstairs, has opened closets and very slightly disarranged the order of things. Then the shrunken, chalk-dusty, incredibly light and dry sponge imbibes water until it is as plump as a fruit; it makes glossy black arches all over the livid blackboard as it sweeps away the dead white symbols; and we start afresh now combining dim dreams with the scholarly precision of memory.

You entered a tunnel of sorts; it ran through the body of an irrelevant house and brought you into an inner court coated with old grey sand which turned to mud at the first spatter of rain. Here soccer was played in the windy pale interval between two series of lessons. The yawn of the tunnel and the door of the school, at the opposite ends of the yard, became football goals much in the same fashion as the commonplace organ of one species of animal is dramatically modified by a new function in another.

At times, a regular association football with its red liver tightly tucked in under its leather corset and the name of an English maker running across the almost palatable sections of its hard ringing rotundity, would be surreptitiously brought and cautiously dribbled about in a corner, but this was a forbidden object in the yard, bounded as it was by brittle windows.

Here is the ball, the ball, the smooth indiarubber ball, approved by the authorities, suddenly disclosed in a glass case like some museum exhibit: three balls, in fact, in three cases, for we are shown all its instars: first the new one, so clean as to be almost white—the white of a shark’s belly; then the dirty grey adult with grains of gravel adhering to its weather-beaten cheek; then a flabby and formless corpse. A bell tinkles. The museum gets dark and empty again.

Pass the ball, Adamka! A shot wide of the mark or a deliberate punt seldom resulted in a crash of broken glass; but, conversely, a puncture would usually follow the collision with a certain vicious projection formed by an angle of the roofed porch. The stricken ball’s collapse would not be noticeable at once. Then, at the next hard kick, its life-air would start to ooze, and presently it would be flopping about like an old galosh, before coming to rest, a miserable jellyfish of soiled indiarubber, on the muddy ground where fiendishly disappointed boots would at last kick it to pieces. The end of the ballona [festive gathering with dances]. She doffs her diamond tiara before her mirror.

Krug played football [vooter], Paduk did not [nekht]. Krug, a burly, fat-faced, curly-headed boy, sporting tweed knickerbockers with buttons below the knee (soccer shorts were taboo), pounded through the mud with more zest than skill. Now he found himself running (by night, ugly? Yah, by night, folks) down something that looked like a railway track through a long damp tunnel (the dream stage management having used the first set available for rendering “tunnel,” without bothering to remove either the rails or the ruby lamps that glowed at intervals along the rocky black sweating walls). There was a heavy ball at his toes; he kept treading upon it whenever he tried to kick it; finally it got stuck somehow or other on a ledge of the rock wall, which, here and there, had small inset show windows, neatly illumined and enlivened by a quaint aquarian touch (corals, sea urchins, champagne bubbles). Within one of them she sat, taking off her dew-bright rings and unclasping the diamond collier de chien that encircled her full white throat; yes, divesting herself of all earthly jewels. He groped for the ball on the ledge and fished out a slipper, a little red pail with the picture of a sailing boat upon it and an eraser, all of which somehow summed up to the ball. It was difficult to go on dribbling through the tangle of rickety scaffolding where he felt he was getting in the way of the workmen who were fixing wires or something, and when he reached the diner the ball had rolled under one of the tables, and there, half hidden by a fallen napkin, was the threshold of the goal, because the goal was a door.

If you opened that door you found a few [zaftpupen] “softies” mooning on the broad window seats behind the clothes racks, and Paduk would be there, too, eating something sweet and sticky given him by the janitor, a be-medaled veteran with a venerable beard and lewd eyes. When the bell rang, Paduk would wait for the bustle of flushed begrimed classbound boys to subside, whereupon he would quietly make his way up the stairs, his agglutinate palm caressing the banisters. Krug, whom the putting away of the ball had detained (there was a big box for playthings and fake jewellery under the stairs), overtook him and pinched his plump buttocks in passing.

Krug’s father was a biologist of considerable repute. Paduk’s father was a minor inventor, a vegetarian, a theosophist, a great expert in cheap Hindu lore; at one time he seems to have been in the printing business—printing mainly the works of cranks and frustrated politicians. Paduk’s mother, a flaccid lymphatic woman from the Marshland, had died in childbirth, and soon after this the widower had married a young cripple for whom he had been devising a new type of braces (she survived him, braces and all, and is still limping about somewhere). The boy Paduk had a pasty face and a grey-blue cranium with bumps: his father shaved his head for him personally once a week—some kind of mystic ritual, no doubt.

It is not known how the nickname “toad” originated, for there was nothing in his face suggestive of that animal. It was an odd face with all its features in their proper position but somehow diffuse and abnormal as if the little fellow had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body. The impression was due perhaps to the motionless cast of his features: he never laughed and when he happened to sneeze he had a way of doing it with a minimum of contraction and no sound at all. His small dead-white nose and neat blue galatea made him resemble en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors, but his hips were much plumper than those of mannikins, and he walked with a slight waddle and wore sandals which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment. Once, when he was being badly mauled it was discovered that he had right against the skin a green undershirt, green as a billiard cloth and apparently made of the same texture. His hands were permanently clammy. He spoke in a curiously smooth nasal voice with a strong north-western accent and had an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names—Adam Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk; this he did not from any sense of humour, which he totally lacked, but because, as he carefully explained to new boys, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed.

Such traits would have been readily excused had he been a likable fellow, a good pal, a co-operative vulgarian or a pleasantly queer boy with most matter-of-fact muscles (Krug’s case). Paduk, in spite of his oddities, was dull, commonplace and insufferably mean. Thinking of it later, one comes to the unexpected conclusion that he was a veritable hero in the domain of meanness, since every time he indulged in it he must have known that he was heading again towards that hell of physical pain which his revengeful classmates put him through every time. Curiously enough, we cannot recall any single definite example of his meanness, albeit vividly remembering what Paduk had to suffer in retaliation of his recondite crimes. There was for instance the case of the padograph.

He must have been fourteen or fifteen when his father invented this only contraption of his which was destined to have some commercial success. It was a portable affair looking like a typewriter made to reproduce with repellent perfection the hand of its owner. You supplied the inventor with numerous specimens of your penmanship, he would study the strokes and the linkage, and then turn out your individual padograph. The resulting script copied exactly the average “tone” of your handwriting while the minor variations of each character were taken care of by the several keys serving each letter. Punctuation marks were carefully diversified within the limits of this or that individual manner, and such details as spacing and what experts call “clines” were so rendered as to mask mechanical regularity. Although, of course, a close examination of the script never failed to reveal the presence of a mechanical medium, a good deal of more or less foolish deceit could be practised. You could, for instance, have your padograph based on the handwriting of a correspondent and then play all kinds of pranks on him and his friends. Despite this inane undertow of clumsy forgery, the thing caught the fancy of the honest consumer: devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds. A really good padograph, reproducing a multitude of shades, was a very expensive article. Orders, however, poured in, and one purchaser after another enjoyed the luxury of seeing the essence of his incomplex personality distilled by the magic of an elaborate instrument. In the course of a year, three thousand padographs were sold, and of this number, more than one tenth were optimistically used for fraudulent purposes (both cheaters and cheated displaying remarkable stupidity in the process). Paduk senior had been just about to build a special factory for production on a grand scale when a Parliamentary decree put a ban on the manufacture and sale of padographs throughout the country. Philosophically speaking, the padograph subsisted as an Ekwilist symbol, as a proof of the fact that a mechanical device can reproduce personality, and that Quality is merely the distribution aspect of Quantity.

One of the first samples issued by the inventor was a birthday present for his son. Young Paduk applied it to the needs of homework. His handwriting was a thin arachnoid scrawl of the reverse type with strongly barred t’s standing out conspicuously among the other limp letters, and all this was perfectly mimicked. He had never got rid of infantile inkstains, so his father had thrown in additional keys for an hourglass-shaped blot and two round ones. These adornments, however, Paduk ignored, and quite rightly. His teachers only noticed that his work had become somewhat tidier and that such question marks as he happened to use were in darker and purpler ink than the rest of the characters: by one of those mishaps which are typical of a certain kind of inventor, his father had forgotten that sign.

Soon, however, the pleasures of secrecy waned and one morning Paduk brought his machine to school. The teacher of mathematics, a tall, blue-eyed Jew with a tawny beard, had to attend a funeral, and the resulting free hour was devoted to a demonstration of the padograph. It was a beautiful object and a shaft of spring sunlight promptly located it; snow was melting and dripping outside, jewels glittered in the mud, iridescent pigeons cooed on the wet window ledge, the roofs of the houses beyond the yard shone with a diamond shimmer; and Paduk’s stumpy fingers (the edible part of each fingernail gone except for a dark linear limit embedded in a roll of yellowish flesh) drummed upon the bright keys. One must admit that the whole procedure showed considerable pluck on his part: he was surrounded by rough boys who disliked him intensely and there was nothing to prevent their pulling his magic instrument to pieces. But there he sat coolly transcribing some text and explaining in his high-pitched drawl the niceties of the demonstration. Schimpffer, a red-haired boy of Alsatian descent, with extremely efficient fingers, said: “Now let me try!” and Paduk made room for him and directed his—at first somewhat suspensive—taps. Krug tried next, and Paduk helped him, too, until he realized that his mechanized double under Krug’s strong thumb was submissively setting down: I am an imbecile imbecile am I and I promise to pay ten fifteen twenty-five kruns—“Please, oh, please,” said Paduk quickly, “somebody is coming, let us put it away.” He clapped it into his desk, pocketed the key and hurried to the lavatory, as he always did when he got excited.

Krug conferred with Schimpffer and a simple plan of action was devised. After lessons they coaxed Paduk into giving them another look at the instrument. As soon as its case was unlocked, Krug removed Paduk and sat upon him, while Schimpffer laboriously typed out a short letter. This he slipped into the mailbox and Paduk was released.

On the following day the young wife of the rheumy and dithering teacher of history received a note (on lined paper with two holes punched out in the margin) pleading for a rendezvous. Instead of complaining to her husband, as was expected, this amiable woman, wearing a heavy blue veil, waylaid Paduk, told him he was a big naughty boy and with an eager jiggle of her rump (which in those days of tight waists looked like an inverted heart) suggested taking a kuppe [closed carriage] and driving to a certain unoccupied flat, where she might scold him in peace. Although since the preceding day Paduk had been on the lookout for something nasty to happen, he was not prepared for anything of this particular sort and actually followed her into the dowdy cab before recovering his wits. A few minutes later, in the traffic jam of Parliament Square, he slithered out and ignominiously fled. How all these trivesta [details of amorous doings] reached his comrades, is difficult to conjecture; anyway, the incident became a school legend. For a few days Paduk kept away; nor did Schimpffer appear for some time: by an amusing coincidence the latter’s mother had been badly burned by a mysterious explosive that some practical joker had put into her bag while she was out shopping. When Paduk turned up again, he was his usual quiet self but he did not refer to his padograph or bring it to school any more.

That same year, or perhaps the next, a new headmaster with ideas resolved to develop what he termed “the politico-social consciousness” of the older boys. He had quite a programme—meetings, discussions, the formation of party groups—oh, lots of things. The healthier boys avoided these gatherings for the simple reason that, being held after class or during recess, they encroached upon one’s freedom. Krug made violent fun of the fools or trucklers who fell for this civic nonsense. The headmaster, while stressing the purely voluntary nature of attendance, warned Krug (who was at the top of his class) that his individualistic behavior constituted a dreadful example. There was an etching representing the Sand Bread Riot, 1849, above the headmaster’s horsehair couch. Krug did not dream of yielding and stoically ignored the mediocre marks which from that moment fell to his lot despite his work’s remaining on the same level. Again the headmaster spoke to him. There was also a coloured print depicting a lady in cherry red, sitting before her mirror. The position was interesting: here was this headmaster, a liberal with robust leanings towards the left, an eloquent advocate of Uprightness and Impartiality, ingeniously blackmailing the brightest boy in this school and acting thus not because he wished him to join a certain definite group (say a Leftist one), but because the boy would not join any group whatsoever. For it should be remarked in all fairness to the headmaster that, far from enforcing his own political predilections, he allowed his pupils to adhere to any party they chose, even if this proved to be a new combination unrelated to any of the factions represented in the then flourishing Parliament. Indeed, so broadminded was he that he positively wanted the richer boys to form strongly capitalistic clusters, or the sons of reactionary nobles to keep in tune with their caste and unite in “Rutterheds.” All he asked for was that they follow their social and economic instincts, while the only thing he condemned was the complete absence of such instincts in an individual. He saw the world as a lurid interplay of class passions amid a landscape of conventional gauntness, with Wealth and Work emitting Wagnerian thunder in their predetermined parts; a refusal to act in the show appeared to him as a vicious insult to his dynamic myth as well as to the Trade Union to which the actors belonged. Under these circumstances he felt justified in pointing out to the teachers that if Adam Krug passed the final examinations with honours, his success would be dialectically unfair in regard to those of Krug’s schoolmates who had less brains but were better citizens. The teachers entered so heartily into the spirit of the thing that it is a wonder how our young friend managed to pass at all.

That last term was also marked by the sudden rise of Paduk. Although he had seemed to be disliked by all, a kind of small court and bodyguard was there to greet him when he gently rose to the surface and gently founded the party of the Average Man. Every one of his followers had some little defect or “background of insecurity” as an educationist after a fruit cocktail might put it: one boy suffered from permanent boils, another was morbidly shy, a third had by accident beheaded his baby sister, a fourth stuttered so badly that you could go out and buy yourself a chocolate bar while he was wrestling with an initial p or b: he would never try to by-pass the obstacle by switching to a synonym, and when finally the explosion did occur, it convulsed his whole frame and sprayed his interlocutor with triumphant saliva. A fifth disciple was a more sophisticated stutterer, since the flaw in his speech took the form of an additional syllable coming after the critical word like a kind of halfhearted echo. Protection was provided by a truculent simian youth who at seventeen could not memorize the multiplication tables but was able to hold up a chair majestically occupied by yet another disciple, the fattest boy in the school. Nobody had noticed how this rather incongruous, little crowd had gathered around Paduk and nobody could understand what exactly had given Paduk the leadership.

A couple of years before these events his father had become acquainted with Fradrik Skotoma of pathetic fame. The old iconoclast as he liked to be called, was at the time steadily slipping into misty senility. With his moist bright red mouth and fluffy white whiskers he had begun to look, if not respectable, at least harmless, and his shrunken body assumed such a gossamery aspect that the matrons of his dingy neighbourhood, as they watched him shuffle along in the fluorescent halo of his dotage, felt almost like crooning over him and would buy him cherries and hot raisin cakes and the loud socks he affected. People who had been stirred in their youth by his writings had long forgotten that passionate flow of insidious pamphlets and mistook the shortness of their own memory for the curtailment of his objective existence, so that they would frown a quick frown of incredulity if told that Skotoma, the enfant terrible of the sixties, was still alive. Skotoma himself, at eighty-five, was inclined to consider his tumultuous past as a preliminary stage far inferior to his present philosophical period, for, not unnaturally, he saw his decline as a ripening and an apotheosis, and was quite sure that the rambling treatise he had Paduk senior print would be recognized as an immortal achievement.

He expressed his new-found conception of mankind with the solemnity befitting a tremendous discovery. At every given level of world-time there was, he said, a certain computable amount of human consciousness distributed throughout the population of the world. This distribution was uneven and herein lay the root of all our woes. Human beings, he said, were so many vessels containing unequal portions of this essentially uniform consciousness. It was, however, quite possible, he maintained, to regulate the capacity of the human vessels. If, for instance, a given amount of water were contained in a given number of heterogeneous bottles—wine bottles, flagons and vials of varying shape and size, and all the crystal and gold scent bottles that were reflected in her mirror, the distribution of the liquid would be uneven and unjust, but could be made even and just either by grading the contents or by eliminating the fancy vessels and adopting a standard size. He introduced the idea of balance as a basis for universal bliss and called his theory “Ekwilism.” This he claimed was quite new. True, socialism had advocated uniformity on an economic plane, and religion had grimly promised the same in spiritual terms as an inevitable status beyond the grave. But the economist had not seen that no levelling of wealth could be successfully accomplished, nor indeed was of any real moment, so long as there existed some individuals with more brains or guts than others; and similarly the priest had failed to perceive the futility of his metaphysical promise in relation to those favoured ones (men of bizarre genius, big game hunters, chess players, prodigiously robust and versatile lovers, the radiant woman taking her necklace off after the ball) for whom this world was a paradise in itself and who would be always one point up no matter what happened to everyone in the melting pot of eternity. And even, said Skotoma, if the last became the first and vice versa, imagine the patronizing smile of the ci-devant William Shakespeare on seeing a former scribbler of hopelessly bad plays blossom anew as the Poet Laureate of heaven.

It is important to note that while suggesting a remoulding of human individuals in conformity with a well-balanced pattern, the author prudently omitted to define both the practical method to be pursued and the kind of person or persons responsible for planning and directing the process. He contented himself with repeating throughout his book that the difference between the proudest intellect and the humblest stupidity depended entirely upon the degree of “world consciousness” condensed in this or that individual. He seemed to think that its redistribution and regulation would automatically follow as soon as his readers perceived the truth of his main assertion. It is also to be observed that the good Utopian had the whole misty blue world in view, not only his own morbidly self-conscious country. He died soon after his treatise appeared and so was spared the discomfort of seeing his vague and benevolent Ekwilism transformed (while retaining its name) into a violent and virulent political doctrine, a doctrine that proposed to enforce spiritual uniformity upon his native land through the medium of the most standardized section of the inhabitants, namely the Army, under the supervision of a bloated and dangerously divine State.

When young Paduk instituted the Party of the Average Man as based on Skotoma’s book, the metamorphosis of Ekwilism had only just started and the frustrated boys who conducted those dismal meetings in a malodorous classroom were still groping for the means to make the contents of the human vessel conform to an average scale. That year a corrupt politician had been assassinated by a college student called Emrald (not Amrald, as his name is usually misspelled abroad), who at the trial came out quite irrelevantly with a poem of his own composition, a piece of jagged neurotic rhetorism extolling Skotoma because he

 … taught us to worship the Common Man,

and showed us that no tree

can exist without a forest,

no musician without an orchestra,

no wave without an ocean,

and no life without death.

Poor Skotoma, of course, had done nothing of the kind, but this poem was now sung to the tune of “Ustra mara, donjet domra” (a popular ditty lauding the intoxicating properties of gooseberry wine) by Paduk and his friends and later became an Ekwilist classic. In those days a blatantly bourgeois paper happened to be publishing a cartoon sequence depicting the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Etermon (Everyman). With conventional humour and sympathy bordering upon the obscene, Mr. Etermon and the little woman were followed from parlour to kitchen and from garden to garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence, which, despite the presence of cosy armchairs and all sorts of electric thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car), did not differ essentially from the life of a Neanderthal couple. Mr. Etermon taking a z-nap on the divan or stealing into the kitchen to sniff with erotic avidity the sizzling stew, represented quite unconsciously a living refutation of individual immortality, since his whole habitus was a dead-end with nothing in it capable or worthy of transcending the mortal condition. Neither, however, could one imagine Etermon actually dying, not only because the rules of gentle humour forbade his being shown on his deathbed, but also because not a single detail of the setting (not even his playing poker with life-insurance salesmen) suggested the fact of absolutely inevitable death; so that in one sense Etermon, while personifying a refutation of immortality, was immortal himself, and in another sense he could not hope to enjoy any kind of afterlife simply because he was denied the elementary comfort of a death chamber in his otherwise well planned home. Within the limits of this airtight existence, the young couple were as happy as any young couple ought to be: a visit to the movies, a raise in one’s salary, a yum-yum something for dinner—life was positively crammed with these and similar delights, whereas the worst that might befall one was hitting a traditional thumb with a traditional hammer or mistaking the date of the boss’s birthday. Poster pictures of Etermon showed him smoking the brand that millions smoke, and millions could not be wrong, and every Etermon was supposed to imagine every other Etermon, up to the President of the State, who had just replaced dull, stolid Theodore the Last, returning at the close of the office day to the (rich) culinary and (meagre) connubial felicities of the Etermon home. Skotoma, quite apart from the senile divagations of his Ekwilism (and even they implied some kind of drastic change, some kind of dissatisfaction with given conditions), had viewed what he called “the petty bourgeois” with the wrath of orthodox anarchism and would have been appalled, just as Emrald the terrorist would have been, to know that a group of youths was worshiping Ekwilism in the guise of a cartoon-engendered Mr. Etermon. Skotoma, however, had been the victim of a common delusion: his “petty bourgeois” existed only as a printed label on an empty filing box (the iconoclast, like most of his kind, relied entirely upon generalizations and was quite incapable of noting, say, the wallpaper in a chance room or talking intelligently to a child). Actually, with a little perspicacity, one might learn many curious things about Etermons, things that made them so different from one another that Etermon, except as a cartoonist’s transient character, could not be said to exist. All of a sudden transfigured, his eyes narrowly glowing, Mr. Etermon (whom we have just seen mildly pottering about the house) locks himself up in the bathroom with his prize—a prize we prefer not to name; another Etermon, straight from his shabby office, slips into the silence of a great library to gloat over certain old maps of which he will not speak at home; a third Etermon with a fourth Etermon’s wife anxiously discusses the future of a child she has managed to bear him in secret during the time her husband (now back in his armchair at home) was fighting in a remote jungle land where, in his turn, he has seen moths the size of a spread fan, and trees at night pulsating rhythmically with countless fireflies. No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjuror’s set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold.

Skotoma had dwelt in his day upon the economic aspect of Etermon; Paduk deliberately copied the Etermon cartoon in its sartorial sense. He wore the tall collar of celluloid, the famous shirt-sleeve bands and the expensive footgear—for the only brilliance Mr. Etermon permitted himself was related to parts as far as possible removed from the anatomic centre of his being: glossy shoes, glossy hair. With his father’s reluctant consent, the top of Paduk’s pale-blue cranium was allowed to grow just enough hair to resemble Etermon’s beautifully groomed pate and Etermon’s washable cuffs with starlike links were affixed to Paduk’s weak wrists. Although in later years this mimetic adaptation was no longer consciously pursued (while on the other hand the Etermon strip was eventually discontinued, and afterwards seemed quite atypical when looked up at a different period of fashion) Paduk never got over this stiff superficial neatness; he was known to endorse the views of a doctor, belonging to the Ekwilist party, who affirmed that if a man kept his clothes scrupulously clean, he might, and should, limit his weekday ablutions to washing nothing but his face, ears, and hands. Throughout all his later adventures, in all places, under all circumstances, in the blurry back rooms of suburban cafés, in the miserable offices where this or that obstinate newspaper of his was concocted, in barracks, in public halls, in the forests and hills where he hid with a bunch of barefooted red-eyed soldiers, and in the palace where, through an incredible whim of local history, he found himself vested with more power than any national ruler had ever enjoyed, Paduk still retained something of the late Mr. Etermon, a sort of cartoon angularity, a cracked and soiled cellophane wrapper effect, through which, nevertheless, one could discern a brand-new thumbscrew, a bit of rope, a rusty knife and a specimen of the most sensitive of human organs wrenched out together with its blood-clotted roots.

In the classroom where the final examination was being held, young Paduk, his sleek hair resembling a wig too small for his shaven head, sat between Brun the Ape and a lacquered dummy representing an absentee. Adam Krug, wearing a brown dressing gown, sat directly behind. Somebody on his left asked him to pass a book to the family of his right-hand neighbour, and this he did. The book, he noticed, was in reality a rosewood box shaped and painted to look like a volume of verse and Krug understood that it contained some secret commentaries that would assist an unprepared student’s panic-stricken mind. Krug regretted that he had not opened the box or book while it passed through his hands. The theme to be tackled was an afternoon with Mallarmé, an uncle of his mother, but the only part he could remember seemed to be “le sanglot dont j’étais encore ivre.”

Everybody around was scribbling with zest and a very black fly which Schimpffer had especially prepared for the occasion by dipping it into India ink was walking on the shaven part of Paduk’s studiously bent head. It left a blot near his pink ear and a black colon on his shiny white collar. A couple of teachers—her brother-in-law and the teacher of mathematics—were busily arranging a curtained something which would be a demonstration of the next theme to be discussed. They reminded one of stagehands or morticians but Krug could not see well because of the Toad’s head. Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug’s failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtainable passages which they, mere boys, had memorized. Smugly, noiselessly, Paduk left his seat to take his paper to the examiner, tripped over the foot that Schimpffer shot out and through the gap which he left Krug clearly perceived the outlines of the next theme. It was now quite ready for demonstration but the curtains were still drawn. Krug found a scrap of clean paper and got ready to write his impressions. The two teachers pulled the curtains apart. Olga was revealed sitting before her mirror and taking off her jewels after the ball. Still clad in cherry-red velvet, her strong gleaming elbows thrown back and lifted like wings, she had begun to unclasp at the back of her neck her dazzling dog collar. He knew it would come off together with her vertebrae—that in fact it was the crystal of her vertebrae—and he experienced an agonizing sense of impropriety at the thought that everybody in the room would observe and take down in writing her inevitable, pitiful, innocent disintegration. There was a flash, a click: with both hands she removed her beautiful head and, not looking at it, carefully, carefully, dear, smiling a dim smile of amused recollection (who could have guessed at the dance that the real jewels were pawned?), she placed the beautiful imitation upon the marble ledge of toilet table. Then he knew that all the rest would come off too, the rings together with the fingers, the bronze slippers with the toes, the breasts with the lace that cupped them … his pity and shame reached their climax, and at the ultimate gesture of the tall cold stripteaser, prowling pumalike up and down the stage, with a horrible qualm Krug awoke.

6
 

“WE MET YESTERDAY,” said the room. “I am the spare bedroom in the Maximovs’ dacha [country house, cottage]. These are windmills on the wallpaper.” “That’s right,” replied Krug. Somewhere in the thin-walled, pine-fragrant house a stove was comfortably crackling and David was speaking in his tinkling voice—probably answering Anna Petrovna, probably having breakfast with her in the next room.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one’s awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one’s personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth. One day Ember and he had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare, spending millions and millions on the hoax, smothering with hush money countless publishers, librarians, the Stratford-on-Avon people, since in order to be responsible for all references to the poet during three centuries of civilization, these references had to be assumed to be spurious interpolations injected by the inventors into actual works which they had re-edited; there still was a snag here, a bothersome flaw, but perhaps it might be eliminated, too, just as a cooked chess problem can be cured by the addition of a passive pawn.

The same might be true of one’s personal existence as perceived in retrospect upon waking up: the retrospective effect itself is a fairly simple illusion, not unlike the pictorial values of depth and remoteness produced by a paintbrush on a flat surface; but it takes something better than a paintbrush to create the sense of compact reality backed by a plausible past, of logical continuity, of picking up the thread of life at the exact point where it was dropped. The subtlety of the trick is nothing short of marvellous, considering the immense number of details to be taken into account, arranged in such a way as to suggest the action of memory. Krug at once knew that his wife had died; that he had beaten a hasty retreat to the country with his little son, and that the view framed in the casement (wet leafless trees, brown earth, white sky, a hill with a farmhouse in the distance) was not only a sample picture of that particular region but was also there to tell him that David had pulled the shade up and had left the room without awakening him; whereupon, with almost obsequious apropos, a couch at the other end of the room displayed by means of mute gestures—see this and this—all that was necessary to convince one that a child had slept there.

On the morning after her death her relatives had arrived. The night before Ember had informed them of her death. Note how smoothly the retrospective machinery works: everything fits into everything else. They (to switch into a lower past-gear) arrived, they invaded Krug’s flat. David was finishing his velvetina. They came in full force: her sister Viola, Viola’s revolting husband, a half brother of sorts and his wife, two remote female cousins scarcely visible in the mist and a vague old man whom Krug had never met before. Augment the vanity of the illusive depth. Viola had always disliked her sister; they had seldom seen each other during the last twelve years. She wore a heavily blotched little veil: it came down to the bridge of her freckled nose, no further than that, and behind its black violets one could distinguish a brightness which was both voluptuous and hard. Her blond-bearded husband gently supported her, although actually the solicitude with which the pompous rogue surrounded her sharp elbow only hampered her swift masterful movements. She soon shook him away. When last seen, he was staring in dignified silence through the window at two black limousines waiting at the kerb. A gentleman in black with powdered blue jowls, the representative of the incinerating firm, came to say that it was high time to start. Meanwhile Krug had escaped with David by the back door.

Carrying a suitcase, still wet from Claudina’s tears, he led the child to the nearest trolley stop, and, in company with a band of sleepy soldiers who were going on to their barracks, arrived at the railway station. Before he was allowed to board the train for the Lakes, governmental agents examined his papers and the balls of David’s eyes. The Lakes hotel turned out to be closed, and after they had wandered around for a while, a jovial postman in his yellow automobile took them (and Ember’s letter) to the Maximovs. This completes the reconstruction.

The common bathroom in a friendly house is its only inhospitable section, especially when the water runs at first tepid, then stone cold. A long silvery hair was imbedded in a cake of cheap almond soap. Toilet paper had been difficult to get lately and was replaced by bits of newspaper impaled on a hook. At the bottom of the bowl a safety razor blade envelope with Dr. S. Freud’s face and signature floated. If I stay for a week, he thought, this alien wood will be gradually tamed and purified by repeated contacts with my wary flesh. He rinsed the bath gingerly. The rubber tube of the spraying affair came off the tap with a plop. Two clean towels hung on a rope together with some black stockings that had been, or would be, washed. A bottle of mineral oil, half full, and a grey cardboard cylinder which had been the kernel of a toilet paper roll, stood side by side on a shelf. The shelf also held two popular novels (Flung Roses and All Quiet on the Don). David’s toothbrush gave him a smile of recognition. He dropped his shaving soap on the floor and there was silvery hair sticking to it when he picked it up.

In the dining room Maximov was alone. The portly old gentleman slipped a marker into his book, stood up with a genial jerk and vigorously shook hands with Krug, as if a night’s sleep had been a long and hazardous journey. “How did you rest [Kak pochivali]?” he asked, and then, with a worried frown, tested the temperature of the coffee pot under its coxcomb cozy. His shiny pink face was clean-shaven like that of an actor (old-fashioned simile); a tasselled skullcap protected his perfectly bald head; he wore a warm jacket with toggles. “I recommend this,” he said, pointing with his fifth finger. “I find it is the only cheese of its kind that does not clog the bowels.”

He was one of those persons whom one loves not because of some lustrous streak of talent (this retired businessman possessed none), but because every moment spent with them fits exactly the gauge of one’s life. There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov’s mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes undistinguished: but somehow or other these dull components formed a wonderfully comfortable and harmonious whole. No subtlety of thought tainted his honesty, he was as reliable as iron and oak, and when Krug mentioned once that the word “loyalty” phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary denotation. Common sense with him was saved from smug vulgarity by a delicate emotional undercurrent, and the somewhat bare and birdless symmetry of his branching principles was ever so slightly disturbed by a moist wind blowing from regions which he naïvely thought did not exist. The misfortunes of others worried him more than did his own troubles, and had he been an old sea captain, he would have dutifully gone down with his ship rather than plump apologetically into the last lifeboat. At the present moment he was bracing himself to give a piece of his mind to Krug, and was playing for time by talking politics.

“The milkman,” he said, “told me this morning that posters have been put up all over the village inviting the population to celebrate spontaneously the restoration of complete order. A plan of conduct is suggested. We are supposed to collect in our usual holiday haunts, in cafés, in clubs and in the halls of our corporations and sing communal songs in praise of the Government. Directors of civic ballonas have been elected for every district. One wonders of course what people who cannot sing and who do not belong to any corporation are expected to do.”

“I dreamed of him,” said Krug. “Apparently this is the only way that my old schoolmate can hope to associate with me nowadays.”

“I understand you were not particularly fond of each other at school?”

“Well, that needs analysing. I certainly loathed him, but the question is—was it mutual? I remember one queer incident. The lights went out suddenly—short circuit or something.”

“Does happen sometimes. Try that jam. Your son thought highly of it.”

“I was in the classroom reading,” continued Krug. “Goodness knows why it was in the evening. The Toad had slipped in and was fumbling in his desk—he kept candy there. It was then that the lights went out. I leaned back, waiting in perfect darkness. Suddenly I felt something wet and soft on the back of my hand. The Kiss of the Toad. He managed to bolt before I could catch him.”

“Pretty sentimental, I should say,” remarked Maximov.

“And loathsome,” added Krug.

He buttered a bun and proceeded to recount the details of the meeting at the President’s house. Maximov sat down too, pondered for a moment, then pounced across the table at a basket with knakerbrod, bumped it down near Krug’s plate and said:

“I want to tell you something. When you hear it, you may be cross and call me a meddler, but I shall risk incurring your displeasure because the matter is really much too serious and I do not mind whether you growl or not. la, sobstvenno, uzhe vchera khotel [I should have broached the subject yesterday] but Anna thought you were too tired. It would be rash to postpone this talk any longer.”

“Go ahead,” said Krug, taking a bite and bending forward as the jam was about to drip.

“I perfectly understand your refusal to deal with those people. I should have acted likewise, I guess. They will make another attempt at getting you to sign things and you will refuse again. This point is settled.”

“Most definitely,” said Krug.

“Good. Now, since this point is settled, it follows that something else is settled too. Namely, your position under the new regime. It takes on a peculiar aspect, and what I wish to point out is that you do not seem to realize the danger of this aspect. In other words, as soon as the Ekwilists lose hope of obtaining your co-operation they will arrest you.”

“Nonsense,” said Krug.

“Precisely. Let us call this hypothetical occurrence an utterly nonsensical thing. But the utterly nonsensical is a natural and logical part of Paduk’s rule. You have to take this into consideration, my friend, you have to prepare some kind of defence, no matter how unlikely the danger may seem.”

“Yer un dah [stuff and nonsense],” said Krug. “He will go on licking my hand in the dark. I am invulnerable. Invulnerable—the rumbling sea wave [volna] rolling the rabble of pebbles as it recedes. Nothing can happen to Krug the Rock. The two or three fat nations (the one that is blue on the map and the one that is fallow) from which my Toad craves recognition, loans, and whatever else a bullet-riddled country may want to obtain from a sleek neighbour—these nations will simply ignore him and his government, if he … molests me. Is that the right kind of growl?”

“It is not. Your conception of practical politics is romantic and childish, and altogether false. We can imagine him forgiving you the ideas you expressed in your former works. We can also imagine him suffering an outstanding mind to exist in the midst of a nation which by his own law must be as plain as its plainest citizen. But in order to imagine these things we are forced to postulate an attempt on his part to put you to some special use. If nothing comes of it—then he will not bother about public opinion abroad, and on the other hand no state will bother about you if it finds some profit in dealing with this country.”

“Foreign academies will protest. They will offer fabulous sums, my weight in Ra, to buy my liberty.”

“You may jest as much as you please, but still I want to know—look here, Adam, what do you expect to do? I mean, you surely cannot believe you will be permitted to lecture or publish your works, or keep in touch with foreign scholars and publishers, or do you?”

“I do not. Je resterai coi.”

“My French is limited,” said Maximov dryly.

“I shall,” said Krug (beginning to feel very bored), “lie doggo. In due time what intelligence I have left will be dovetailed into some leisurely book. Frankly I do not give a damn for this or any other university. Is David out of doors?”

“But, my dear fellow, they will not let you sit still! This is the crux of the matter. I or any other plain citizen can and must sit still, but you cannot. You are one of the very few celebrities our country has produced in modern times, and——”

“Who are the other stars of this mysterious constellation?” queried Krug, crossing his legs and inserting a comfortable hand between thigh and knee.

“All right: the only one. And for this reason they will want you to be as active as possible. They will do all they can to make you boost their way of thinking. The style, the begonia [brilliancy], will be yours, of course. Paduk will be satisfied with merely arranging the programme.”

“And I shall remain deaf and dumb. Really, my dear fellow, this is all journalism on your part. I want to be left alone.”

“Alone is the wrong word!” cried Maximov, flushing. “You are not alone! You have a child.”

“Come, come,” said Krug, “let us please——”

“We shall not. I warned you that I would ignore your irritation.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” asked Krug with a sigh and helped himself to another cup of lukewarm coffee.

“Leave the country at once.”

The stove crackled gently, and a square clock with two cornflowers painted on its white wooden face and no glass rapped out the seconds in pica type. The window attempted a smile. A faint infusion of sunshine spread over the distant hill and brought out with a kind of pointless distinction the little farm and its three pine trees on the opposite slope which seemed to move forward and then to retreat again as the wan sun swooned.

“I do not see the necessity of leaving right now,” said Krug. “If they pester me too persistently I probably shall—but for the present the only move I care to make is to rook my king the long side.”

Maximov got up and then sat down in another chair.

“I see it is going to be quite difficult to make you realize your position. Please, Adam, use your wits: neither today, nor tomorrow, nor at any time will Paduk allow you to go abroad. But today you can escape, as Berenz and Marbel and others have escaped; tomorrow it will be impossible, the frontiers are being stitched up more and more closely, there will not be a single interstice left by the time you make up your mind.”

“Well, why then don’t you escape yourself?” grunted Krug.

“My position is somewhat different,” answered Maximov quietly. “And what is more, you know it. Anna and I are too old—and besides I am the perfect type of the average man and present no danger whatever to the Government. You are as healthy as a bull, and everything about you is criminal.”

“Even if I thought it wise to leave the country I should not have the faintest idea how to manage the business.”

“Go to Turok—he knows, he will put you in touch with the necessary people. It will cost you a good deal of money but you can afford it. I too do not know how it is done, but I know it can and has been done. Think of the peace in a civilized country, of the possibilities to work, of the schooling available for your child. Under your present circumstances——”

He checked himself. After an exceedingly awkward supper the night before he had told himself he would not refer again to the subject which this strange widower seemed so stoically to avoid.

“No,” said Krug. “No. I am not up to it [ne do tovo] for the moment. It is kind of you to worry about me [obo mne] the way you do, but really [pravo] you exaggerate the danger. I shall keep your suggestion in mind, of course [koneshno]. Let us not talk of it any more [bol’she]. What is David doing?”

“Well, you know what I think at least [po kraïneïmere],” said Maximov, picking up the historical novel he had been reading when Krug came in. “But we are not through with you yet. I shall have Anna talk to you, too, whether you like it or not. She may fare better. I believe David is with her in the kitchen garden. We lunch at one.”

The night had been stormy, heaving and gasping with brutal torrents of rain; and in the starkness of the cold quiet morning the sodden brown asters were in disorder and drops of quicksilver blotched the pungent-smelling purple cabbage leaves, between the coarse veins of which grubs had made ugly holes. David was dreamily sitting in a wheelbarrow and the little old lady was trying to push it along on the muddy clay of the path. “Ne mogoo! [I cannot],” she exclaimed with a laugh and brushed a strand of thin silvery hair away from her temple. David tumbled out of the wheelbarrow. Krug, not looking at her, said he wondered whether it was not too chilly for the boy to go about without his coat, and Anna Petrovna replied that the white sweater he had on was sufficiently thick and comfy. Olga somehow had never much liked Anna Petrovna and her sweet saintliness.

“I want to take him for a good long walk,” said Krug. “You must have had quite enough of him. Lunch at one, is that right?”

What he said, what words he used, did not matter; he kept avoiding her brave kind eyes to which he felt he could not live up, and listened to his own voice stringing trivial sounds in the silence of a shrivelled world.

She stood watching them as father and son went hand in hand towards the road. Very still, fumbling keys and a thimble in the strained pockets of her black jumper.

Broken clusters of mountain ash corals lay here and there on the chocolate-brown road. The berries were puckered and soiled, but even if they had been juicy and clean you certainly could not eat them. Jam is a different matter. No, I said: No. To taste is the same as to eat. Some of the maples in the silent damp wood through which the road wandered retained their painted leaves but the birches were quite naked. David slipped and with great presence of mind prolonged the slide so as to have the pleasure of sitting down on the sticky earth. Get up, get up. But he kept sitting there for another moment looking up with sham stupefaction and laughing eyes. His hair was moist and hot. Get up. Surely, this is a dream, thought Krug, this silence, the deep ridicule of late autumn, miles away from home. Why are we here of all places? A sickly sun again attempted to enliven the white sky: for a second or two a couple of wavering shadows, K ghost and D ghost, marching on shadowy stilts, copied the human gait and then faded out. An empty bottle. If you like, he said, you can pick up that Skotomic bottle and throw it hard at the trunk of a tree. It will explode with a beautiful bang. But it fell intact into the rusty waves of the bracken, and he had to wade in after it himself, because the place was much too damp for the wrong pair of shoes David was wearing. Try again. It refused to break. All right, I shall do it myself. There was a post with a sign: Hunting Prohibited. Against this he hurled the green vodka bottle violently. He was a big heavy man. David backed. The bottle burst like a star.

Presently they emerged into open country. Who was that idly sitting on a fence? He wore long boots and a peaked cap but did not look like a peasant. He smiled and said: “Good morning, Professor.” “Good morning to you,” answered Krug without stopping. Possibly one of the people who supplied the Maximovs with game and berries.

The dachas on the right-hand side of the road were mostly deserted. Here and there, however, some remnants of vacational life still persisted. In front of one of the porches a black trunk with brass knobs, a couple of bundles, and a helpless looking bicycle with swathed pedals stood, sat, and lay, awaiting some means of transportation, and a child in town clothes was rocking for the last time in a doleful swing between the boles of two pine trees that had seen better days. A little further, two elderly women with tear-stained faces were engaged in burying a mercifully killed dog together with the old croquet ball that bore the signs of its gay young teeth. In yet another garden a white-bearded waltwhitmanesque man wearing a jaeger suit was seated before an easel, and although the time was a quarter to eleven of a nondescript morning, a cindery red-barred sunset sprawled on his canvas, and he was painting in the trees and various other details which, on the day before, advancing dusk had prevented him from completing. On a bench in a pine grove on the left a straight-backed girl was rapidly speaking (retaliation … bombs … cowards … oh, Phokus, if I were a man …) with nervous gestures of perplexity and dismay to a blue-capped student who sat with bent head and poked at scraps of paper, bus tickets, pine needles, the eye of a doll or a fish, the soft soil, with the point of the slim, tightly buttoned umbrella belonging to his pale companion. But otherwise the once cheerful resort was forlorn, the shutters were closed, a battered perambulator lay upside down in a ditch and the telegraph poles, those armless laggards, hummed in mournful unison with the blood that throbbed in one’s head.

The road dipped slightly and then the village appeared, with a misty wilderness on one side and Lake Malheur on the other. The posters the milkman had mentioned gave a delightful touch of civilization and civic maturity to the humble hamlet squatting under its low mossy roofs. Several scrawny peasant women and their drum-bellied children had collected in front of the village hall, which was being prettily decorated for the coming festivities; and from the windows of the post office on the left and from the windows of the police station on the right uniformed clerks followed the progress of the good work with eager intelligent eyes full of pleasant anticipation. All of a sudden, with a sound akin to the cry of a newborn infant, a radio loud-speaker which had just been installed burst into life, then abruptly collapsed.

“There are some toys there,” remarked David, pointing across the road towards a small but eclectic store which carried everything from groceries to Russian felt boots.

“All right,” said Krug; “let us see what there is.”

But as the impatient child started to cross alone, a big black automobile emerged at full speed from the direction of the district highway, and Krug, plunging forward, jerked David back as the car thundered by, leaving the mangled body of a hen in its tingling wake.

“You hurt me,” said David.

Krug felt weak in the knees and bade David make haste so that he would not notice the dead bird.

“How many times——” said Krug.

A small replica of the murderous vehicle (the vibration of which still haunted Krug’s solar plexus, although by that time it had probably reached or even passed the spot where the neighbourly loafer had been perched on his fence) was immediately detected by David among the cheap dolls and the tins of preserves. Though somewhat dusty and scratched, it had the kind of detachable tyres he approved of and was especially acceptable because it had been found in an out-of-the-way place. Krug asked the red-cheeked young grocer for a pocket flask of brandy (the Maximovs were teetotallers). As he was paying for it and for the little car which David was delicately rolling backwards and forwards upon the counter, the Toad’s nasal tones, prodigiously magnified, burst forth from outside. The grocer stood to attention, fixing in civic fervour the flags decorating the village hall, which, together with a strip of white sky, could be seen through the doorway.

“… and to those who trust me as they trust themselves,” roared the loud-speaker, as it ended a sentence.

The clatter of applause that followed was presumably interrupted by the gesture of the orator’s hand.

“From now on,” continued the tremendously swollen Tyrannosaurus, “the way to total joy lies open. You will attain it, brothers, by dint of ardent intercourse with one another, by being like happy boys in a whispering dormitory, by adjusting ideas and emotions to those of a harmonious majority; you will attain it, citizens, by weeding out all such arrogant notions as the community does not and should not share; you will attain it, adolescents, by letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State; then, and only then, will the goal be reached. Your groping individualities will become interchangeable and, instead of crouching in the prison cell of an illegal ego, the naked soul will be in contact with that of every other man in this land; nay, more: each of you will be able to make his abode in the elastic inner self of any other citizen, and to flutter from one to another, until you know not whether you are Peter or John, so closely locked will you be in the embrace of the State, so gladly will you be krum karum——”

The speech disintegrated in a succession of cackles. There was a kind of stunned silence: evidently the village radio was not yet in perfect working order.

“One could almost butter one’s bread with the modulations of that admirable voice,” remarked Krug.

What followed was most unexpected: the grocer gave him a wink.

“Good gracious,” said Krug, “a gleam in the gloom!”

But the wink contained a specific injunction. Krug turned. An Ekwilist soldier was standing right behind him.

All he wanted however was a pound of sunflower seeds. Krug and David inspected a cardboard house which stood on the floor in a corner. David sank down on his little haunches to peep inside through the windows. But these were simply painted upon the wall. He slowly drew himself up, still looking at the house and automatically slipping his hand into Krug’s.

They left the shop, and in order to overcome the monotony of the return journey, decided to skirt the lake and then to follow a path that meandered through meadows and would bring them back to the Maximovs’ cottage after going round the wood.

Was the fool trying to save me? From what? From whom? Excuse me, I am invulnerable. Not much more foolish in fact than suggesting I grow a beard and cross the frontier.

There were a number of things to be settled before giving thought to political matters—if indeed that drivel could be called a political matter. If, moreover, in a fortnight or so some impatient admirer did not murder Paduk. Misunderstanding, so to speak, the drift of the spiritual cannibalism advocated by the poor fellow. One wondered also (at least somebody might wonder—the question was of little interest) what the peasants made of that eloquence. Maybe it vaguely reminded them of church. First of all I shall have to get him a good nurse—a picture-book nurse, kind and wise and scrupulously clean. Then I must do something about you, my love. We have imagined that a white hospital train with a white Diesel engine has taken you through many a tunnel to a mountainous country by the sea. You are getting well there. But you cannot write because your fingers are so very weak. Moonbeams cannot hold even a white pencil. The picture is pretty, but how long can it stay on the screen? We expect the next slide, but the magic-lantern man has none left. Shall we let the theme of a long separation expand till it breaks into tears? Shall we say (daintily handling the disinfected white symbols) that the train is Death and the nursing home Paradise? Or shall we leave the picture to fade by itself, to mingle with other fading impressions? But we want to write letters to you even if you cannot answer. Shall we suffer the slow wobbly scrawl (we can manage our name and two or three words of greeting) to work its conscientious and unnecessary way across a post card which will never be mailed? Are not these problems so hard to solve because my own mind is not made up yet in regard to your death? My intelligence does not accept the transformation of physical discontinuity into the permanent continuity of a nonphysical element escaping the obvious law, nor can it accept the inanity of accumulating incalculable treasures of thought and sensation, and thought-behind-thought and sensation-behind-sensation, to lose them all at once and forever in a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness. Unquote.

“See if you can climb on top of that stone. I don’t think you can.”

David trotted across a dead meadow towards a boulder shaped like a sheep (left behind by some careless glacier). The brandy was bad but would serve. He suddenly recalled a summer day when he had walked through these very fields in the company of a tall black-haired girl with thick lips and downy arms whom he had courted just before he met Olga.

“Yes, I am looking. Splendid. Now try to get down.”

But David could not. Krug walked up to the boulder and tenderly removed him. This little body. They sat for a while on a lamb-boulder near by and contemplated an endless freight train puffing beyond the fields towards the station near the lake. A crow ponderously flapped by, the slow swish-swish of its wings making the rotting grassland and the colourless sky seem even sadder than they actually were.

“You will lose it that way. Better let me put it into my pocket.”

Presently they started moving again, and David was curious to know how far they had to walk yet. Only a little way. They followed the edge of the forest and then turned into a very muddy road which led them to what was for the moment home.

A cart was standing in front of the cottage. The old white horse looked at them across its shoulder. On the threshold of the porch two people were sitting side by side: the farmer who lived on the hill and his wife who did the housework for the Maximovs.

“They are gone,” said the farmer.

“I hope they did not go out to meet us on the road because we came by another way. Go in, David, and wash your hands.”

“No,” said the farmer. “They are quite gone. They have been taken away in a police car.”

At this point his wife became very voluble. She had just come down from the hill when she saw the soldiers leading the aged couple away. She had been afraid to come near. Her wages had not been paid since October. She would take, she said, all the jars of jam in the house.

Krug went in. The table was laid for four. David wanted to have his toy which, he hoped, his father had not lost. A piece of raw meat was lying on the kitchen table.

Krug sat down. The farmer had also come in and was stroking his grizzled chin.

“Could you drive us to the station?” asked Krug after a while.

“I might get into trouble,” said the farmer.

“Oh, come, I offer you more than the police will ever pay you for whatever you do for them.”

“You are not the police and so cannot bribe me,” replied the honest and meticulous old farmer.

“You mean you refuse?”

The farmer was silent.

“Well,” said Krug, getting to his feet, “I am afraid I shall have to insist. The child is tired, I do not intend to carry him and the bag.”

“How much was it again?” asked the farmer.

Krug put on his glasses and opened his wallet.

“You will stop at the police station on the way,” he added.

The toothbrushes and the pyjamas were quickly packed. David accepted the sudden departure with perfect equanimity but suggested eating something first. The kind woman got him some biscuits and an apple. A fine rain had set in. David’s hat could not be found and Krug gave him his own broad-brimmed black one, but David kept taking it off because it covered his ears and he wanted to hear the sloshing hoofs, the creaking wheels.

As they were passing the spot where two hours before a man with a heavy moustache and twinkling eyes had been sitting on a rustic fence, Krug noticed that now, instead of the man, there were but a couple of rudobrustki or ruddocks [a small bird allied to the robin] and that a square of cardboard had been nailed to the fence. It bore a rough inscription in ink (already somewhat affected by the drizzle):

Bon Voyage!

To this Krug drew the attention of the driver; who, without turning his head, remarked that there were many inexplicable things happening nowadays (a euphemism for “new regime”) and that it was better not to study current phenomena too closely. David tugged at his father’s sleeve and wanted to know what it was all about. Krug explained that they were discussing the strange ways of people who arranged picnics in dreary November.

“I had better drive you straight on, folks, or you might miss the one-forty,” said the farmer tentatively, but Krug made him pull up at the brick house where the local police had their headquarters. Krug got out and entered an office room where a bewhiskered old man, his uniform unbuttoned at the neck, was sipping tea from a blue saucer and blowing upon it between sips. He said he knew nothing about the business. It was, he said, the City Guard, and not his department, which had made the arrest. He could only presume that they had been taken to some prison in town as political offenders. He suggested that Krug stop playing the busybody and thank his stars for not having been in the house when the arrest took place. Krug said that, on the contrary, he intended doing everything in his power to find out why two aged and respectable persons who had lived quietly in the country for a number of years and had no connection whatever with——The police officer, interrupting him, said that the best a professor could do (if Krug was a professor) would be to keep his mouth shut and leave the village. Again the saucer was lifted to the bearded lips. Two young members of the force hovered around and stared at Krug.

He stood there for a moment looking at the wall, at a poster calling attention to the plight of aged policemen, at a calendar (monstrously in copula with a barometer); pondered a bribe: decided that they really knew nothing here; and with a shrug of his heavy shoulders walked out.

David was not in the cart.

The farmer turned his head, looked at the empty seat and said the child had probably followed Krug into the police station. Krug went back. The chief eyed him with irritation and suspicion and said that he had seen the cart from the window and that there had been no child in it from the very start. Krug tried to open another door in the corridor but it was locked. “Stop that,” growled the man, losing his temper, “or else we’ll arrest you for making a nuisance of yourself.”

“I want my little boy,” said Krug (another Krug, horribly handicapped by a spasm in the throat and a pounding heart).

“Hold your horses,” said one of the younger policemen. “This is not a kindergarten, there are no children here.”

Krug (now a man in black with an ivory face) pushed him aside and went out again. He cleared his throat and bellowed for David. Two villagers in medieval kappen who stood near the cart gazed at him and then at each other, and then one of them turned and glanced in a given direction. “Have you——?” asked Krug. But they did not reply and looked once more at each other.

I must not lose my head, thought Adam the Ninth—for by now there were quite a number of these serial Krugs: turning this way and that like the baffled buffeted seeker in a game of blindman’s buff: battering with imaginary fists a cardboard police station to pulp; running through nightmare tunnels; half-hiding together with Olga behind a tree to watch David warily tiptoe around another, his whole body ready for a little shiver of glee; searching an intricate dungeon where, somewhere, a shrieking child was being tortured by experienced hands; hugging the boots of a uniformed brute; strangling the brute amid a chaos of overturned furniture; finding a small skeleton in a dark cellar.

At this point it may be mentioned that David wore on the fourth finger of his left hand a child’s enamelled ring.

He was about to attack the police once more, but then noticed that a narrow lane fringed with shrivelled nettles ran along the side of the brick police house (the two peasants had been glancing in that direction for quite a while) and turned into it, stumbling painfully over a log as he did so.

“Take care, don’t break your pins, you’ll need ’em,” said the farmer with an amiable laugh.

In the lane, a barefooted scrofulous boy in a pink red-patched shirt was whipping a top and David stood looking on with his hands behind his back.

“This is intolerable,” cried Krug. “You ought never, never to wander away like that. Shut up! Yes. I will hold you. Get in. Get in.”

One of the peasants tapped his temple slightly with a judicious air, and his crony nodded. In an open window a young policeman aimed a half-eaten apple at Krug’s back but was restrained by a staider comrade.

The cart moved on. Krug groped for his handkerchief, did not find it, wiped his face with the palm of his still shaking hand.

The well-named lake was a featureless expanse of grey water, and as the cart turned on to the highway that ran along the shore to the station, a cold breeze lifted with invisible finger and thumb the thin silvery mane of the old mare.

“Will my mummy be back when we come?” asked David.

7
 

A FLUTED GLASS with a blue-veined violet and a jug of hot punch stand on Ember’s bedtable. The buff wall directly above his bed (he has a bad cold) bears a sequence of three engravings.

Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail (Why? Ah, “that is the question,” as Monsieur Homais once remarked, quoting le journal d’hier; a question which is answered in a wooden voice by the Portrait on the title page of the First Folio). Note also the legend: “Ink, a Drug.” Somebody’s idle pencil (Ember highly treasures this scholium) has numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means “bacon” in several Slavic languages.

Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman) removing from the head of the gentleman (now writing at a desk) a kind of shapska. Scribbled underneath in the same hand: “Ham-let, or Homelette au Lard.”

Finally, number three has a road, a traveller on foot (wearing the stolen shapska) and a road sign “To High Wycombe.”

His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner. His penmanship is unconsciously faked by lawyers who happen to write a similar hand. On the wet morning of November 27, 1582, he is Shaxpere and she is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagspere and she is a Hathway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it. However, the fact that the Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose.

There are two themes here: the Shakespearian one rendered in the present tense, with Ember presiding in his ruelle; and another theme altogether, a complex mixture of past, present, and future, with Olga’s monstrous absence causing dreadful embarrassment. This was, this is, their first meeting since she died. Krug will not speak of her, will not even inquire about her ashes; and Ember, who feels the shame of death too, does not know what to say. Had he been able to move about freely, he might have embraced his fat friend in silence (a miserable defeat in the case of philosophers and poets accustomed to believe that words are superior to deeds), but this is not feasible when one of the two lies in bed. Krug, semi-intentionally, keeps out of reach. He is a difficult person. Describe the bedroom. Allude to Ember’s bright brown eyes. Hot punch and a touch of fever. His strong shining blue-veined nose and the bracelet on his hairy wrist. Say something. Ask about David. Relate the horror of those rehearsals.

“David is also laid up with a cold [ist auk beterkeltet] but that is not why we had to come back [zueruk]. What [shto bish] were you saying about those rehearsals [repetitia]?”

Ember gratefully adopts the subject selected. He might have asked: “Why then?” He will learn the reason a little later. Vaguely he perceives emotional dangers in that dim region. So he prefers to talk shop. Last chance of describing the bedroom.

Too late. Ember gushes. He exaggerates his own gushing manner. In a dehydrated and condensed form Ember’s new impressions as Literary Adviser to the State Theatre may be rendered thus:

“The two best Hamlets we had, indeed the only respectable ones, have both left the country in disguise and are now said to be fiercely intriguing in Paris after having almost murdered each other en route. None of the youngsters we have interviewed are any good, though one or two have at least the full habit of body required for the part. For reasons I shall presently make clear Osric and Fortinbras have acquired a tremendous ascendancy over the rest of the cast. The Queen is with child. Laertes is constitutionally unable to learn the elements of fencing. I have lost all interest in the staging of the thing as I am helpless to change the grotesque course it has taken. My sole poor object now is to have the players adopt my own translation instead of the abominable one to which they are used. On the other hand this work of love commenced long ago is not yet quite finished and the fact of having to speed it up for what is a rather incidental purpose (to say the least) causes me intense irritation, which, however, is nothing to the horror of hearing the actors lapse with a kind of atavistic relief into the gibberish of the traditional version (Kronberg’s) whenever Wern, who is weak and prefers ideas to words, allows them to behind my back.”

Ember goes on to explain why the new Government found it worth while to suffer the production of a muddled Elizabethan play. He explains the idea on which the production is based. Wern, who humbly submitted the project, took his conception of the play from the late Professor Hamm’s extraordinary work “The Real Plot of Hamlet.”

“ ‘Iron and ice’ (wrote the Professor) ‘—this is the physical amalgamation suggested by the personality of the strangely rigid and ponderous Ghost. Of this union Fortinbras (Ironside) will be presently born. According to the immemorial rules of the stage what is boded must be embodied: the eruption must come at all cost. In Hamlet the exposition grimly promises the audience a play founded upon young Fortinbras’ attempt to recover the lands lost by his father to King Hamlet. This is the conflict, this is the plot. To surreptitiously shift the stress from this healthy, vigorous and clearcut Nordic theme to the chameleonic moods of an impotent Dane would be, on the modern stage, an insult to determinism and common sense.

“ ‘Whatever Shakespeare’s or Kyd’s intentions were, there can be no doubt that the keynote, the impelling power of the action, is the corruption of civil and military life in Denmark. Imagine the morale of an army where a soldier, who must fear neither thunder nor silence, says that he is sick at heart! Consciously or unconsciously, the author of Hamlet has created the tragedy of the masses and thus has founded the sovereignty of society over the individual. This, however, does not mean that there is no tangible hero in the play. But he is not Hamlet. The real hero is of course Fortinbras, a blooming young knight, beautiful and sound to the core. With God’s sanction, this fine Nordic youth assumes the control of miserable Denmark which had been so criminally misruled by degenerate King Hamlet and Judeo-Latin Claudius.

“ ‘As with all decadent democracies, everybody in the Denmark of the play suffers from a plethora of words. If the state is to be saved, if the nation desires to be worthy of a new robust government, then everything must be changed; popular commonsense must spit out the caviar of moonshine and poetry, and the simple words, verbum sine ornatu, intelligible to man and beast alike, and accompanied by fit action, must be restored to power. Young Fortinbras possesses an ancient claim and hereditary rights to the throne of Denmark. Some dark deed of violence or injustice, some base trick on the part of degenerate feudalism, some masonic manoeuvre engendered by the Shylocks of high finance, has dispossessed his family of their just claims, and the shadow of this crime keeps hanging in the dark background until, with the closing scene, the idea of mass justice impresses upon the whole play its seal of historical significance.

“ ‘Three thousand crowns and a week or so of available time would not have been sufficient to conquer Poland (at least in those days); but they proved amply sufficient for another purpose. Wine-besotted Claudius is completely deceived by young Fortinbras’ suggestion, that he, Fortinbras, pass through the dominion of Claudius on his (singularly roundabout) way to Poland with an army levied for quite a different purpose. No, the bestial Polacks need not tremble: that conquest will not take place; it is not their bogs and forests that our hero covets. Instead of proceeding to the port, Fortinbras, that soldier of genius, will be lying in waiting and the “go softly on” (which he whispers to his troops after sending a captain to greet Claudius) can only mean one thing: go softly into hiding while the enemy (the Danish King) thinks you have embarked for Poland.

“ ‘The real plot of the play will be readily grasped if the following is realized: the Ghost on the battlements of Elsinore is not the ghost of King Hamlet. It is that of Fortinbras the Elder whom King Hamlet has slain. The ghost of the victim posing as the ghost of the murderer—what a wonderful bit of farseeing strategy, how deeply it excites our intense admiration! The glib and probably quite untrue account of old Hamlet’s death which this admirable imposter gives is intended solely to create innerliche Unruhe in the state and to soften the morale of the Danes. The poison poured into the sleeper’s ear is a symbol of the subtle injection of lethal rumours, a symbol which the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day could hardly have missed. Thus, old Fortinbras, disguised as his enemy’s ghost, prepares the peril of his enemy’s son and the triumph of his own offspring. No, the “judgments” were not so accidental, the “slaughters” not so casual as they seemed to Horatio the Recorder, and there is a note of deep satisfaction (which the audience cannot help sharing) in the young hero’s guttural exclamation—Ha-ha, this quarry cries on havoc (meaning: the foxes have devoured one another)—as he surveys the rich heap of dead bodies, all that is left of the rotten state of Denmark. We can easily imagine him adding in an outburst of rough filial gratitude: Yah, the old mole has done a good job!

“ ‘But to return to Osric. Garrulous Hamlet has just been speaking to the skull of a jester; now it is the skull of jesting death that speaks to Hamlet. Note the remarkable juxtaposition: the skull—the shell; “Runs away with a shell on his head.” Osric and Yorick almost rhyme, except that the yolk of one has become the bone (os) of the other. Mixing as he does the language of the shop and the ship, this middleman, wearing the garb of a fantastic courtier, is in the act of selling death, the very death that Hamlet has just escaped at sea. The winged doublet and the aureate innuendoes mask a deep purpose, a bold and cunning mind. Who is this master of ceremonies? He is young Fortinbras’ most brilliant spy.’ Well, this gives you a fair sample of what I have to endure.”

Krug cannot help smiling at little Ember’s complaints. He remarks that somehow or other the whole business reminds him of Paduk’s mannerisms. I mean these intricate convolutions of sheer stupidity. To stress the artist’s detachment from life, Ember says he does not know and does not care to know (a telltale dismissal) who this Paduk or Padock—bref, la personne en question—is. By way of explanation Krug tells Ember about his visit to the Lakes and how it all ended. Naturally Ember is aghast. He vividly visualizes Krug and the child wandering through the rooms of the deserted cottage whose two clocks (one in the dining-room, the other in the kitchen) are probably still going, alone, intact, pathetically sticking to man’s notion of time after man has gone. He wonders whether Maximov had time to receive the well-written letter he sent him about Olga’s death and Krug’s helpless condition. What shall I say? The priest mistook a blear-eyed old man belonging to Viola’s party for the widower and while making his oration, and while the beautiful big body was burning behind a thick wall, kept addressing himself to that person (who nodded back). Not even an uncle, not even her mother’s lover.

Ember turns his face to the wall and bursts into tears. In order to bring things back to a less emotional level Krug tells him about a curious character with whom he once travelled in the States, a man who was fanatically eager to make a film out of Hamlet.

“We’d begin, he had said, with
    Ghostly apes swathed in sheets
    haunting the shuddering Roman streets.
    And the mobled moon …

Then: the ramparts and towers of Elsinore, its dragons and florid ironwork, the moon making fish scales of its shingle tiles, the integument of a mermaid multiplied by the gable roof, which shimmers in an abstract sky, and the green star of a glowworm on the platform before the dark castle. Hamlet’s first soliloquy is delivered in an unweeded garden that has gone to seed. Burdock and thistle are the main invaders. A toad breathes and blinks on the late king’s favourite garden seat. Somewhere the cannon booms as the new king drinks. By dream law and screen law the cannon is gently transformed into the obliquity of a rotten tree trunk in the garden. The trunk points cannonwise at the sky where for one instant the deliberate loops of canescent smoke form the floating word “self-slaughter.”

“Hamlet at Wittenberg, always late, missing G. Bruno’s lectures, never using a watch, relying on Horatio’s timepiece which is slow, saying he will be on the battlements between eleven and twelve and turning up after midnight.

“The moonlight following on tiptoe the Ghost in complete steel, a gleam now settling on a rounded pauldron, now stealing along the taces.

“We shall also see Hamlet dragging the dead Ratman from under the arras and along the floor and up the winding stairs, to stow him away in an obscure passage, with some weird light effects anon, when the torch-bearing Switzers are sent to find the body. Another thrill will be provided by Hamlet’s sea-gowned figure, unhampered by the heavy seas, heedless of the spray, clambering over bales and barrels of Danish butter and creeping into the cabin where Rosenstern and Guildenkranz, those gentle interchangeable twins ‘who came to heal and went away to die,’ are snoring in their common bunk. As the sagebrush country and leopard-spotted hills sped past the window of the men’s lounge, more and more pictorial possibilities were evolved. We might be shown, he said (he was a hawkfaced shabby man whose academic career had been suddenly brought to a close by an awkwardly timed love affair), R. following young L. through the Quartier Latin, Polonius in his youth acting Caesar at the University Playhouse, the skull in Hamlet’s gloved hands developing the features of a live jester (with the censor’s permission); perhaps even lusty old King Hamlet smiting with a poleaxe the Polacks skidding and sprawling on the ice. Then he produced a flask from his hip pocket and said: ‘take a shot.’ He added he had thought she was eighteen at least, judging by her bust, but, in fact, she was hardly fifteen, the little bitch. And then there was Ophelia’s death. To the sounds of Liszt’s Les Funérailles she would be shown wrestling—or, as another rivermaid’s father would have said, ‘wrustling’—with the willow. A lass, a salix. He recommended here a side shot of the glassy water. To feature a phloating leaph. Then back again to her little white hand, holding a wreath trying to reach, trying to wreathe a phallacious sliver. Now comes the difficulty of dealing in a dramatic way with what had been in prevocal days the pièce de résistance of comic shorts—the getting-unexpectedly-wet stunt. The hawk-man in the toilet lounge pointed out (between cigar and cuspidor) that the difficulty might be neatly countered by showing only her shadow, her falling shadow, falling and glancing across the edge of the turfy bank amid a shower of shadowy flowers. See? Then: a garland afloat. That puritanical leather (on which they sat) was the very last remnant of a phylogenetic link between the modern highly differentiated Pullman idea and a bench in the primitive stagecoach: from oats to oil. Then—and only then—we see her, he said, on her back in the brook (which table-forks further on to form eventually the Rhine, the Dnepr and the Cottonwood Canyon or Nova Avon) in a dim ectoplastic cloud of soaked, bulging bombast-quilted garments and dreamily droning hey non nonny nonny or any other old laud. This is transformed into a tinkling of bells, and now we are shown a liberal shepherd on marshy ground where Orchis mascula grows: period rags, sun-margined beard, five sheep and one cute lamb. An important point this lamb, despite the brevity—one heartthrob—of the bucolic theme. Song moves to Queen’s shepherd, lamb moves to brook.”

Krug’s anecdote has the desired effect. Ember stops sniffling. He listens. Presently he smiles. Finally, he enters into the spirit of the game. Yes, she was found by a shepherd. In fact her name can be derived from that of an amorous shepherd in Arcadia. Or quite possibly it is an anagram of Alpheios, with the “S” lost in the damp grass—Alpheus the rivergod, who pursued a long-legged nymph until Artemis changed her into a stream, which of course suited his liquidity to a tee (cp. Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition). Or again we can base it on the Greek rendering of an old Danske serpent name. Lithe, lithping, thin-lipped Ophelia, Amleth’s wet dream, a mermaid of Lethe, a rare water serpent, Russalka letheana of science (to match your long purples). While he was busy with German servant maids, she at home, in an embayed window, with the icy spring wind rattling the pane, innocently flirted with Osric. Her skin was so tender that if you merely looked at it a rosy spot would appear. The uncommon cold of a Botticellian angel tinged her nostrils with pink and suffused her upperlip—you know, when the rims of the lips merge with the skin. She proved to be a kitchen wench too—but in the kitchen of a vegetarian. Ophelia, serviceableness. Died in passive service. The fair Ophelia. A first Folio with some neat corrections and a few bad mistakes. “My dear fellow” (we might have Hamlet say to Horatio), “she was as hard as nails in spite of her physical softness. And slippery: a posy made of eels. She was one of those thin-blooded pale-eyed lovely slim slimy ophidian maidens that are both hotly hysterical and hopelessly frigid. Quietly, with a kind of devilish daintiness she minced her dangerous course the way her father’s ambition pointed. Even mad, she went on teasing her secret with the dead man’s finger. Which kept pointing at me. Oh, of course I loved her like forty thousand brothers, as thick as thieves (terracotta jars, a cypress, a fingernail moon) but we all were Lamord’s pupils, if you know what I mean.” He might add that he had caught a cold in the head during the dumb show. Undine’s pink gill, iced watermelon, l’aurore grelottant en robe rose et verte. Her sleazy lap.

Speaking of the word-droppings on a German scholar’s decrepit hat, Krug suggests tampering with Hamlet’s name too. Take “Telemachos,” he says, which means “fighting from afar”—which again was Hamlet’s idea of warfare. Prune it, remove the unnecessary letters, all of them secondary additions, and you get the ancient “Telmah.” Now read it backwards. Thus does a fanciful pen elope with a lewd idea and Hamlet in reverse gear becomes the son of Ulysses slaying his mother’s lovers. Worte, worte, worte. Warts, warts, warts. My favourite commentator is Tschischwitz, a madhouse of consonants—or a soupir de petit chien.

Ember, however, has not quite finished with the girl. After hurriedly noting that Elsinore is an anagram of Roseline, which has possibilities, he returns to Ophelia. He likes her, he says. Quite apart from Hamlet’s notions about her, the girl had charm, a kind of heartbreaking charm: those quick grey-blue eyes, the sudden laugh, the small even teeth, the pause to see whether you were not making fun of her. Her knees and calves, though quite shapely, were a little too sturdy in comparison with her thin arms and light bosom. The palms of her hands were like a damp Sunday and she wore a cross round her neck where a tiny raisin of flesh, a coagulated but still transparent bubble of dove’s blood, seemed always in danger of being sliced off by that thin golden chain. Then too, there was her morning breath, it smelled of narcissi before breakfast and of curdled milk after. She had something the matter with her liver. The lobes of her ears were naked, though they had been minutely pierced for small corals—not pearls. The combination of these details, her sharp elbows, very fair hair, tight glossy cheekbones and the ghost of a blond fluff (most delicately bristly to the eye) at the corners of her mouth, remind him (says Ember remembering his childhood) of a certain anaemic Esthonian housemaid, whose pathetically parted poor little breasts palely dangled in her blouse when she went low, very low, to pull on for him his striped socks.

Here Ember suddenly raises his voice to a petulant scream of distress. He says that instead of this authentic Ophelia the impossible Gloria Bellhouse, hopelessly plump, with a mouth like the ace of hearts, has been selected for the part. He is especially incensed at the greenhouse carnations and lilies that the management gives her to play with in the “mad” scene. She and the producer, like Goethe, imagine Ophelia in the guise of a canned peach: “her whole being floats in sweet ripe passion,” says Johann Wolfgang, Ger. poet, nov., dram. & phil. Oh, horrible.

“Or her father.… We all know him and love him, don’t we? and it would be so simple to have him right: Polonius-Pantolonius, a pottering dotard in a padded robe, shuffling about in carpet slippers and following the sagging spectacles at the end of his nose, as he waddles from room to room, vaguely androgynous, combining the pa and the ma, a hermaphrodite with the comfortable pelvis of a eunuch—instead of which they have a stiff tall man who played Metternich in The World Waltzes and insists on remaining a wise and wily statesman for the rest of his days. Oh, most horrible.”

But there is worse to come. Ember asks his friend to hand him a certain book—no, the red one. Sorry, the other red one.

“As you have noticed, perhaps, the Messenger mentions a certain Claudio as having given him letters which Claudio ‘received … of him that brought them [from the ship]’; there is no reference to this person anywhere else in the play. Now let us open the great Hamm’s second book. What does he do? Here we are. He takes this Claudio and—well, just listen.

“That he was the King’s fool is evident from the fact that in the German original (Bestrafter Brudermord) it is the clown Phantasmo who brings the news. It is amazing that nobody as yet has troubled to follow up this prototypical clue. No less obvious is the fact that in his quibbling mood Hamlet would of course make a special point of having the sailors deliver his message to the King’s fool, since he, Hamlet, has fooled the King. Finally, when we recall that in those days a court jester would often assume the name of his master, with only a slight change in the ending, the picture becomes complete. We have thus the interesting figure of this Italian or Italianate jester haunting the gloomy halls of a Northern castle, a man in his forties, but as alert as he was in his youth, twenty years ago, when he replaced Yorick. Whereas Polonius had been the ‘father’ of good news, Claudio is the ‘uncle’ of bad news. His character is more subtle than that of the wise and good old man. He is afraid to confront the King directly with a message with which his nimble fingers and prying eye have already acquainted themselves. He knows that he cannot very well come to the King and tell him ‘your beer is sour’ with a quibble on ‘beer,’ meaning ‘your beard is soar’d’ (to soar—to pull, to twitch off). So, with superb cunning he invents a stratagem which speaks more for his intelligence than for his moral courage. What is this stratagem? It is far deeper than anything ‘poor Yorick’ could ever have devised. While the sailors hurry away to such abodes of pleasure as a long-yearned-for port can provide, Claudio, the dark-eyed schemer, neatly refolds the dangerous letter and casually hands it to another messenger, the ‘Messenger’ of the play, who innocently takes it to the King.”

But enough of this, let us hear Ember’s rendering of some famous lines:

Ubit’ il’ ne ubit’? Vot est’ oprosen.

Vto bude edler: v rasume tzerpieren

Ogneprashchi i strely zlovo roka——

(or as a Frenchman might have it:)

L’égorgerai-je ou non? Voici le vrai problème.

Est-il plus noble en soi de supporter quand même

Et les dards et le feu d’un accablant destin——

Yes, I am still jesting. We now come to the real thing.

Tam nad ruch’om rostiot naklonno iva,

V vode iavliaia list’ev sedinu;

Guirliandy fantasticheskie sviv

Iz etikh list’ev—s primes’u romashek,

Krapivy, lutikov——

(over yon brook there grows aslant a willow

Showing in the water the hoariness of its leaves;

Having tressed fantastic garlands

of these leaves, with a sprinkling of daisies,

Nettles, crowflowers——)

You see I have to choose my commentators.

Or this difficult passage:

Ne dumaete-li vy, sudar’, shto vot eto (the song about the wounded deer), da les per’ev na shliape, a dve kamchatye rozy na proreznykh bashmakakh, mogli by, kol’ fortuna zadala by mne turku, zasluzhit’ mne uchast’e v teatralnoí arteli; a, sudar’?

Or the beginning of my favourite scene:

As he sits listening to Ember’s translation, Krug cannot help marvelling at the strangeness of the day. He imagines himself at some point in the future recalling this particular moment. He, Krug, was sitting beside Ember’s bed. Ember, with knees raised under the counterpane, was reading bits of blank verse from scraps of paper. Krug had recently lost his wife. A new political order had stunned the city. Two people he was fond of had been spirited away and perhaps executed. But the room was warm and quiet and Ember was deep in Hamlet. And Krug marvelled at the strangeness of the day. He listened to the rich-toned voice (Ember’s father had been a Persian merchant) and tried to simplify the terms of his reaction. Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator’s inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T—the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of suns rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man’s genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactics, by the thousand devices of shadography, by the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every wile in the warp, or was it, taken all in all, but an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk’s writing machine?

“Do you like it, do you accept it?” asked Ember anxiously.

“I think it is wonderful,” said Krug, frowning. He got up and paced the room. “Some lines need oiling,” he continued, “and I do not like the colour of dawn’s coat—I see ‘russet’ in a less leathery, less proletarian way, but you may be right. The whole thing is really quite wonderful.”

He went to the window as he spoke, unconsciously peering into the yard, a deep well of light and shade (for, curiously enough, it was some time in the afternoon, and not in the middle of the night).

“I am so pleased,” said Ember. “Of course, there are lots of little things to be changed. I think I shall stick to ‘laderod kappe.’ ”

“Some of his puns——” said Krug. “Hullo, that’s queer.”

He had become aware of the yard. Two organ-grinders were standing there, a few paces from each other, neither of them playing—in fact, both looked depressed and self-conscious. Several heavy-chinned urchins with zigzag profiles (one little chap holding a toy cart by a string) gaped at them quietly.

“Never in my life,” said Krug, “have I seen two organ-grinders in the same back yard at the same time.”

“Nor have I,” admitted Ember. “I shall now proceed to show you——”

“I wonder what has happened?” said Krug. “They look most uncomfortable, and they do not, or cannot play.”

“Perhaps one of them butted into the other’s beat,” suggested Ember, sorting out a fresh set of papers.

“Perhaps,” said Krug.

“And perhaps each is afraid that the other will plunge into some competitive music as soon as one of them starts to play.”

“Perhaps,” said Krug. “All the same—it is a very singular picture. An organ-grinder is the very emblem of oneness. But here we have an absurd duality. They do not play but they do glance upwards.”

“I shall now proceed,” said Ember, “to read you——”

“I know of only one other profession,” said Krug, “that has that upward movement of the eyeballs. And that is our clergy.”

“Well, Adam, sit down and listen. Or am I boring you?”

“Oh nonsense,” said Krug, going back to his chair. “I was only trying to think what exactly was wrong. The children seem also perplexed by their silence. There is something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot quite disentangle—a certain line of thought.…”

“The chief difficulty that assails the translator of the following passage,” said Ember, licking his fat lips after a draught of punch and readjusting his back to his large pillow, “the chief difficulty——”

The remote sound of the doorbell interrupted him.

“Are you expecting someone?” asked Krug.

“Nobody in particular. Maybe some of those actor fellows have come to see whether I am dead. They will be disappointed.”

The footfalls of the valet passed down the corridor. Then returned.

“Gentleman and lady to see you, sir,” he said.

“Curse them,” said Ember. “Could you, Adam,…?”

“Yes of course,” said Krug. “Shall I tell them you are asleep?”

“And unshaven,” said Ember. “And anxious to go on with my reading.”

A handsome lady in a dove-grey tailor-made suit and a gentleman with a glossy red tulip in the buttonhole of his cutaway coat stood side by side in the hall.

“We——” began the gentleman, fumbling in his left trouser pocket and accompanying this gesture with a kind of wriggle as if he had a touch of cramp or were uncomfortably clothed.

“Mr. Ember is in bed with a cold,” said Krug. “And he asked me——”

The gentleman bowed: “I understand perfectly, but this (his free hand proffered a card) will tell you my name and standing. I have my orders as you can see. Prompt submission to them tore me away from my very private duties as host. I too was giving a party. And no doubt Mr. Ember, if that is his name, will act as promptly as I did. This is my secretary—in fact, something more than a secretary.”

“Oh, come, Hustav,” said the lady, nudging him. “Surely, Professor Krug is not interested in our relations.”

“Our relations?” said Hustav, looking at her with an expression of fond facetiousness on his aristocratic face. “Say that again. It sounded lovely.”

She lowered her thick eyelashes and pouted.

“I did not mean what you mean, you bad boy. The Professor will think Gott weiss was.”

“It sounded,” pursued Hustav tenderly, “like the rhythmic springs of a certain blue couch in a certain guest room.”

“All right. It is sure not to happen again if you go on being so nasty.”

“Now she is cross with us,” sighed Hustav, turning to Krug. “Beware of women, as Shakespeare says! Well, I have to perform my sad duty. Lead me to the patient, Professor.”

“One moment,” said Krug. “If you are not actors, if this is not some fatuous hoax——”

“Oh, I know what you are going to say”—purred Hustav; “this element of gracious living strikes you as queer, does it not? One is accustomed to consider such things in terms of sordid brutality and gloom, rifle butts, rough soldiers, muddy boots—und so weiter. But headquarters knew that Mr. Ember was an artist, a poet, a sensitive soul, and it was thought that something a little dainty and uncommon in the way of arrests, an atmosphere of high life, flowers, the perfume of feminine beauty, might sweeten the ordeal. Please, notice that I am wearing civilian clothes. Whimsical perhaps, I grant you, but then—imagine his feelings if my uncouth assistants (the thumb of his free hand pointed in the direction of the stairs) crashed in and started to rip up the furniture.

“Show the Professor that big ugly thing you carry about in your pocket, Hustav.”

“Say that again?”

“I mean your pistol of course,” said the lady stiffly.

“I see,” said Hustav. “I misunderstood you. But we shall go into that later. You need not mind her, Professor, she is apt to exaggerate. There is really nothing special about this weapon. A humdrum official article, No. 184682, of which you can see dozens any time.”

“I think I have had enough of this,” said Krug. “I do not believe in pistols and—well, no matter. You can put it back. All I want to know is: do you intend to take him away right now?”

“Yep,” said Hustav.

“I shall find some way to complain about these monstrous intrusions,” rumbled Krug. “It cannot go on like this. They were a perfectly harmless old couple, both in rather indifferent health. You shall certainly regret it.”

“It has just occurred to me,” remarked Hustav to his fair companion, as they moved through the flat in Krug’s wake, “that the Colonel had one schnapps too many when we left him, so that I doubt whether your little sister will be quite the same by the time we get back.”

“I thought that story he told about the two sailors and the barbok [a kind of pie with a hole in the middle for melted butter] most entertaining,” said the lady. “You must tell it to Mr. Ember; he is a writer and might put it into his next book.”

“Well, for that matter, your own pretty mouth——” began Hustav—but they had reached the bedroom door and the lady modestly remained behind while Hustav, again thrusting a fumbling hand into his trouser pocket, jerkily went in after Krug.

The valet was in the act of removing a mida [small table with incrustations] from the bedside. Ember was inspecting his uvula in a hand mirror.

“This idiot here has come to arrest you,” said Krug in English.

Hustav, who had been quietly beaming at Ember from the threshold, suddenly frowned and glanced at Krug suspiciously.

“But surely this is a mistake,” said Ember. “Why should anyone want to arrest me?”

“Heraus, Mensch, marsch,” said Hustav to the valet and, when the latter had left the room:

“We are not in a classroom, Professor,” he said, turning to Krug, “so please use language that everybody can understand. Some other time I may ask you to teach me Danish or Dutch; at this moment, however, I am engaged in the performance of duties which are perhaps as repellent to me and to Miss Bachofen as they are to you. Therefore I must call your attention to the fact that, although I am not averse to a little mild bantering——”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” cried Ember. “I know what it is. It is because I did not open my windows when those very loud speakers were on yesterday. But I can explain.… My doctor will certify I was ill. Adam, it is all right, there is no need to worry.”

The sound of an idle finger touching the keys of a cold piano came from the drawing room, as Ember’s valet returned with some clothes over his arm. The man’s face was the colour of veal and he avoided looking at Hustav. To his master’s exclamation of surprise he replied that the lady in the drawing room had told him to get Ember dressed or be shot.

“But this is ridiculous!” cried Ember, “I cannot just jump into my clothes. I must have a bath first, I must shave.”

“There is a barber at the nice quiet place you are going to,” remarked the kindly Hustav. “Come, get up, you really must not be so disobedient.”

(How if I answer “no”?)

“I refuse to dress while you are all staring at me,” said Ember.

“We are not looking,” said Hustav.

Krug left the room and walked past the piano towards the study. Miss Bachofen rose up from the piano stool and nimbly overtook him.

“Ich will etwas sagen [I want to say something],” she said, and dropped her light hand upon his sleeve. “Just now, when we were talking, I had the impression you thought Hustav and I were rather absurd young people. But that is only a way he has, you know, always making witze [jokes] and teasing me, and really I am not the sort of girl you may think I am.”

“These odds and ends,” said Krug, touching a shelf near which he was passing, “have no special value, but he treasures them, and if you have slipped a little porcelain owl—which I do not see—into your bag——”

“Professor, we are not thieves,” she said very quietly, and he must have had a heart of stone who would not have felt ashamed of his evil thought as she stood there, a narrow-hipped blonde with a pair of symmetrical breasts moistly heaving among the frills of her white silk blouse.

He reached the telephone and dialled Hedron’s number. Hedron was not at home. He talked to Hedron’s sister. Then he discovered that he had been sitting on Hustav’s hat. The girl came towards him again and opened her white bag to show him she had not purloined anything of real or sentimental value.

“And you may search me, too,” she said defiantly, unbuttoning her jacket. “Provided you do not tickle me,” added the doubly innocent, perspiring German girl.

He went back to the bedroom. Near the window Hustav was turning the pages of an encyclopaedia in search of exciting words beginning with M and V. Ember stood half-dressed, a yellow tie in his hand.

“Et voilà … et me voici …” he said with an infantile little whine in his voice. “Un pauvre bonhomme qu’on traine en prison. Oh, I don’t want to go at all! Adam, isn’t there anything that can be done? Think up something, please! Je suis souffrant, je suis en détresse. I shall confess I had been preparing a coup d’état if they start torturing me.”

The valet whose name was or had been Ivan, his teeth chattering, his eyes half-closed, helped his poor master into his coat.

“May I come in now?” queried Miss Bachofen with a kind of musical coyness. And slowly she sauntered in, rolling her hips.

“Open your eyes wide, Mr. Ember,” exclaimed Hustav. “I want you to admire the lady who has consented to grace your home.”

“You are incorrigible,” murmured Miss Bachofen with a slanting smile.

“Sit down, dear. On the bed. Sit down, Mr. Ember. Sit down, Professor. A moment of silence. Poetry and philosophy must brood, while beauty and strength—your apartment is nicely heated, Mr. Ember. Now, if I were quite, quite sure that you two would not try to get shot by the men outside, I might ask you to leave the room, while Miss Bachofen and I remain here for a brisk business conference. I need it badly.”

“No, Liebling, no,” said Miss Bachofen. “Let us get moving. I am sick of this place. We’ll do it at home, honey.”

“I think it is a beautiful place,” muttered Hustav reproachfully.

“Il est saoul,” said Ember.

“In fact, these mirrors and rugs suggest certain tremendous Oriental sensations which I cannot resist.”

“Il est complètement saoul,” said Ember and began to weep.

Pretty Miss Bachofen took her boy friend firmly by the arm and after some coaxing he was made to convey Ember to the black police car waiting for them. When they had gone, Ivan became hysterical, produced an old bicycle from the attic, carried it downstairs and rode away. Krug locked the apartment and slowly went home.

8
 

THE TOWN was curiously bright in the late sunlight: this was one of the Painted Days peculiar to the region. They came in a row after the first frost, and happy the foreign tourist who visited Padukgrad at such a time. The mud left by the recent rains made one’s mouth water, so rich did it look. The house fronts on one side of the street were bathed in an amber light which brought out every, oh, every, detail; some displayed mosaic designs; the principal city bank, for instance, had seraphs amid a yuccalike flora. On the fresh blue paint of the boulevard benches children had made with their fingers the words: Glory to Paduk—a sure way of enjoying the properties of the sticky substance without getting one’s ears twisted by the policeman, whose strained smile indicated the quandary in which he found himself. A ruby-red toy balloon hung in the cloudless sky. Grimy chimney sweeps and flour-powdered baker boys were fraternizing in open cafés, where they drowned their ancient feud in cider and grenadine. A man’s rubber overshoe and a bloodstained cuff lay in the middle of the sidewalk and passers-by gave them a wide berth without, however, slowing down or looking at those two articles or indeed revealing their awareness of them in any way beyond stepping off the curb into the mud and then stepping back on to the sidewalk. The window of a cheap toyshop had been starred by a bullet, and, as Krug approached, a soldier came out carrying a clean paper bag into which he proceeded to cram the overshoe and the cuff. You remove the obstacle and the ants resume a straight course. Ember never wore detachable cuffs, nor would he have dared jump out of a moving vehicle and run, and gasp, and run and duck as that unfortunate person had done. This is becoming a nuisance. I must awake. The victims of my nightmares are increasing in numbers too fast, thought Krug as he walked, ponderous, black-overcoated, black-hatted, the overcoat flappily unbuttoned, the wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand.

Weakness of habit. A former official, a very ancien régime old party, had avoided arrest, or worse, by slipping out from his genteel plush-and-dust apartment, Peregolm Lane 4, and transferring his quarters to the dead elevator in the house where Krug dwelt. In spite of the “Not Working” sign on the door, that strange automaton Adam Krug would invariably try to get in and would be met by the frightened face and white goatee of the harassed refugee. Fright, however, would at once be replaced by a worldly display of hospitality. The old fellow had managed to transform his narrow abode into quite a comfortable little den. He was neatly dressed and carefully shaven and with pardonable pride would show you such fixtures as, for example, an alcohol lamp and a trousers press. He was a Baron.

Krug boorishly refused the cup of coffee he was offered and tramped up to his own flat. Hedron was waiting for him in David’s room. He had been told of Krug’s telephone call; had come over at once. David did not want them to leave the nursery and threatened to get out of bed if they did. Claudina brought the boy his supper but he refused to eat. From the study to which Krug and Hedron retired, they could indistinctly hear him arguing with the woman.

They discussed what could be done: planning a certain course of action; well knowing that neither this course nor any other would avail. Both wanted to know why people of no political importance had been seized: though, to be sure, they might have guessed the answer, the simple answer that was to be given them half an hour later.

“Incidentally, we are having another meeting on the twelfth,” remarked Hedron. “I am afraid you are going to be the guest of honour again.”

“Not I,” said Krug. “I shall not be there.”

Hedron carefully scooped out the black contents of his pipe into the bronze ash tray at his elbow.

“I must be getting back,” he said with a sigh. “Those Chinese delegates are coming to dinner.”

He was referring to a group of foreign physicists and mathematicians who had been invited to take part in a congress that had been called off at the last moment. Some of the least important members had not been notified of this cancellation and had come all the way for nothing.

At the door, just before leaving, he looked at the hat in his hand and said:

“I hope she did not suffer … I——”

Krug shook his head and hurriedly opened the door.

The staircase presented a remarkable spectacle. Hustav, now in full uniform, with a look of utter dejection on his swollen face, was sitting on the steps. Four soldiers in various postures formed a martial bas-relief along the wall. Hedron was immediately surrounded and shown the order for his arrest. One of the men pushed Krug out of the way. There was a vague sort of scuffle, in the course of which Hustav lost his footing and bumpily fell down the steps, dragging Hedron after him. Krug tried to follow the soldiers downstairs but was made to desist. The clatter subsided. One imagined the Baron cowering in the darkness of his unconventional hiding place and still not daring to believe that he remained uncaptured.