THE BEST IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN FICTION
IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

AHASUERUS

Translated by Arch Tait

(from Glas 10)

The dream had been printed on a wove paper which smelled of dust. The letters merged into words and thoughts and pictures even as the sense of imminent resolution loomed nearer, stronger but, almost reaching its peak, failed, receded, but was still to be sensed out there amidst the whispers suspended in emptiness.

This was the whisper of a truth which on waking cannot be recalled (as the inside of a pitcher thrown on its side still grieves for its fullness, a savour yet clinging tremulously to its sides). And yet it had been there... it had shown through from the other side of the page, you had only to turn over – it was that simple! Why did his anguish and a presentiment of failure have to galvanize his fingers, ensuring trouble? The book slipped down, disintegrating into badly sewn sections and crumbling sheets of paper. He rushed to gather it up, jumbling everything in his haste, but in any case he did not need it all, just a single page, a single line... here it was, he had even folded it over in order not to lose the place. His sudden clutching at the page started letters sliding down one after the other into the crevice between the pages, as if glue which had been keeping them in place had dried out. He tried to keep hold of some of them, to scrape at least a few back out... hopeless broken bits of words... just his luck to have cut his nails yesterday...

His body came back to itself, as exhausted as if he had been labouring. The book he had dozed off over was waiting for him on the floor beneath the couch. It was undamaged, its antique embossed binding sturdily hand-made. Light from the barred window expanded into the room's interior, sliced into dense, quivering segments. The high ceiling, like the vault of a narrow church nave, was lost in gloom. The walls teemed with books which spread out over every surface, which were heaped on tables and chairs, which were sucked into the alcove behind the door, and sprouted on the floor in stacks. Several piles had already established themselves at the foot of his couch, of which he himself occupied only a modest part – a small man with a grey ghostly beard you could see through, and a face the colour of a potato shoot, even tinged with green. A time-worn tartan rug barely warmed him, he could not say whether the chill he was feeling had invaded his dream or the trembling in his dream had carried over into wakefulness.

He needed something to do, something to work at to help him calm down. Book binding. What else? He had already selected several tomes which were the worse for wear. He lit the spirit stove and put the glue to boil. The sweet smell of his craft impinged upon his nostrils, which quivered responsively at the caress. Before you know it I'll be out today doing business, he thought wryly. There was a certain address he really should have looked in on long ago. He could afford to be ironical about his bibliomania and his almost imbecile inertia in much the same way a sage jester might fearlessly and earnestly deride his lord, secure in the knowledge that he was undermining his power not a jot. How could he wish it otherwise? Where would he himself be without that power, the only thing that gave direction of a sort to his life. What other power was there that could still get him out of the house into the town where one way or another the time at least passed, hauled creakily forward by pinions and grit-ridden worn out cogwheels. Here in his backwater there was no sound of passing time; the old German wall clock had stopped one night during the bombing. Its hands had grown furred and dangled down; its inner workings had fallen apart and rusted away, and left a stain on the wallpaper somewhere. Take down the shelves above the doorway and you would probably see it there even now. Or was that another of the false memories which had sprouted through into the real ones? Oh, the uncertainty of his being, where he did not even dream dreams but read them, where the pages of books and things imagined in his general drowsiness flowed imperceptibly into each other, and the sound of his own heart beating seemed to come from outside, like the gavel in an old-time theatre announcing the start of a new act.

"It's only me," Zhlukhtin proclaimed from the doorway, raising his hat in a clownish manner. He was a poor actor, tiresomely fussy because he lacked aplomb, and hence good taste. "I didn't wake you, I hope? I did knock, but found the door open. My dear Vladimir Modestovich, with treasures such as yours you need to be more security-conscious. And perhaps you should get that doorbell seen to. Oh dearie me, you've come unstuck again. I knew it! I just knew it! Look, I popped into the shop on the way here. I've brought you a bun, your favourite processed cheese, some little bits of this and that..."
He tap danced his tattoo of ritual salutation, an unfit honest toiler, a circus performer fit only for circus.
A glaze of melted hoarfrost or drizzle was gleaming on the nap of his coat. He put down a string bag and a bulging briefcase which looked like a piglet among the piles of books, and his gaze roamed the room appraisingly, checking everything was where it should be and stumbling, as always, when it came to the bars on the window. Since his last visit the actor had grown even balder, flabbier, and more bloated with unclean fluids. Next to him the old man appeared even more withered and shrunken; one might have fancied an invisible umbilicus linking them, along which vital juices were transfused. The actor had showed up here long ago, on just such a day as this when the old man seemed not long for this world. He had been a young man then, with colour in his cheeks and maidenly eyelashes, and with that only too familiar, only too understandable wicked gleam in his attractive eyes. Since then he had returned as unfailingly as the seasons of the year, as chronic illness, sensing from afar whenever the old man took a turn for the worse.
"Oh dear, what a world we live in, dear Vladimir Modestovich," Zhlukhtin declaimed rather more loudly than he needed to, sleeking down his hair. "I recently heard such a dreadful, dreadful story. It seems a lady artist well past her youth died all alone. For the whole of her life the only thing she had done was paint her pictures. She never married, never had children. She sat over her paintings as if they were her chicks, never letting them out of her sight. It wasn't just that she wouldn't give them to people as presents, she even hated having to sell them. I don't know how much demand there was for them. As far as I know she wasn't all that famous. Anyway, there's no telling now how much they were worth, because one day she just dropped dead. No relatives made themselves known, there was no property to speak of, and she had given no thought to the disposal of what there was while there was still time. Ye-es. Anyway, the housing warden comes along, sees his accommodation all cluttered up with a load of used canvases and pieces of painted cardboard, and all he's worried about is he can't move new people in. So he has them moved out to the yard into a big pile, pours a can of paraffin over them, and whoof! How do you like that? Talk about theatre of the absurd, eh? Want me to open you a tin of something straightaway? Suit yourself. Ye-es. There you have it. Someone beavers away the whole of their lives, maybe wanting to leave something for posterity, but no! Whoof! The whole lot gone without a trace."

He had told this story before, but had either forgotten or was sure the old man would have. It made no odds. They had long been talking round in circles, and both of them knew perfectly what they were circling round, closer and closer, more and more impatiently...

"She had lived her life and had earned her rest," the old man smiled his wry smile, and his weak voice rang unexpectedly pure and clear. "It was given to her not to be present at her defeat. If you could only understand, Zhlukhtin, how much that is. Alas, you have had the sense knocked out of you by an affliction which isn't even yours. By nature you are someone made for earthly pleasures: good food, the love of women, lazing in soft armchairs, entertaining your public with ventriloquism or sleight of hand, living to a stout, fat-lipped old age, and enjoying a good story over a glass of vodka. Why ever did you go and succumb to an addiction you really have no use for? God only knows what you won't do to get your hands on books you are not even capable of reading properly. And you want there to be a meaning to it all? Do you really care in the slightest what happens afterwards to all the eggs you have laid, the secretions you have secreted, to what, it seems, you yourself would call your traces?"

The actor produced a grimace which had been intended as a wry smile. There was a French expression he held in reserve for such occasions, but he was now suddenly unsure whether it was "C'est la vie", or "Tete-a-tete".
"No, no, you really have a way with you, eh, Vladimir Modestovich," he played for time. "And there was me thinking, you know..."
"Or are you relating these soul-saving parables of yours to get me to..."
"Let me at least make you a sandwich," Zhlukhtin blurted, retreating into activity in disarray. "Whatever has got into you today, though? By the by, Vladimir Modestovich, you might like to hear about an interesting newspaper article somebody told me about. It was this professor writing about why mountain dwellers live so long. `I would particularly draw your attention,' he says, `to this common factor they all share, and that's that none of them has ever bathed in the sea. Not even, if I'm not mistaken, in a river. In fact, they don't even wash very often.' How do you like that, eh?"

Not having an unduly sophisticated make-up, he preferred to act as if his little game was known only to himself, since year after year neither of them had ever called things by their real name. To this day he did not know how he had been rumbled. He had once found his way to this room, whose barred window evoked such chilling associations, a fussing predator waiting with mind-numbing stubbornness for his prey to fall beneath his feet of its own accord, a prey which he lacked the guts to overpower himself. It really couldn't be much longer. Any moment now... At times the old man felt an almost familial warmth and compassion for him, as other members of a family might love a brother handicapped since birth. What imp had goaded him into teasing him just now? As if some vague purpose in his dream had been prompting him towards a risky continuation of it (somewhere at the top of a right-hand page... a buzzing in his ears, flyblown traceries).
"All right, Zhlukhtin, all right. You'd do better to take a look at this instead."The actor uncertainly took the book in his fat fingers with their strong, squat nails. It was curious to observe the way his features froze the instant the title registered with him; his face flushed crimson, and a pimple on his bald head suddenly filled with blood. He glanced at the last page, where the publication details should have been, then again at the cover, and his eyes darted around the room.
"This is... you mean...?"
"Precisely," the old man confirmed. "No point looking for it in any catalogues."
"But... I mean... where did you find it? How did you manage to...?"
"Why, don't you think I can do anything without your supervision?"
"That's not what I meant, Vladimir Modestovich," the actor hastened to head off that tack. "How could you think such a...? What a strange mood you are in today. But just look at that binding... Why, it's a real Pagnan. Well, well, well! However did you... No, I'm not prying, but I am so impressed."
Through the customary panicky breathlessness a clarion of genuine emotion sounded in his voice.

"Some people really do have a sixth sense, a truly wonderful sixth sense like diviners have for detecting, say, water underground, or mineral ores. Isn't that right, Vladimir Modestovich? The wand suddenly twitches and taps the ground of its own accord as if to say, "Dig here". My word of honour, I have sometimes felt it myself: my eyelid flutters, my fingertips go cold and I feel a sort of tickle in my left nostril saying, "This is where to look!" Needless to say, Vladimir Modestovich, I'm not in your class. You are a mystery to me, I admit... Incidentally, I've got a couple of little surprises to show off to you here, but I'm almost embarrassed to produce them now..."
He fussed noisily with the fastenings of his briefcase, squeezing its bulging sides. From underneath the flap a small foot with a white hoof popped out for a moment, sensing freedom. The actor hastily crammed it back in, forcibly suppressing a certain amount of grunting and squealing, and with his other hand extracting the books he had brought and deftly snapping the lock shut.
"That's quite a job," he said, mopping his brow with a large crumpled handkerchief. "It's all right for people who collect miniature editions. You can carry around a library worth a hundred thousand in a small case the size of this. I saw one man's books, no bigger than a box of matches, they weren't. You'd have needed a microscope to read them. It takes all kinds. Ye-es... Look, I want to show you something quite unique in its own way: the theory of card games for top class cardsharpers. A restricted publication, as you might say, strictly for the profession. Ten numbered copies. No censorship approval or indication of the printer. Part One: general strategy, tactics and psychology; Part Two: special techniques arranged by category. Whist, blackjack, preference, and God knows what subtleties. It makes you positively regret not being a cardsharper. And here is another little book, charming in its way: Description of an Hen, Having in Profile the Figure of a Man. Of course, if you were to take it seriously it's enough to make a cat laugh, yet it is priceless, because it is one of a kind. Theatre of the absurd, Vladimir Modestovich, truly, theatre of the absurd! Its whole value stems from its being in the singular. If writers were not in such a hurry to bring instant happiness to loads of people, or preferably the whole human race, their books might be worth as much as this one, eh? We know just how useful their so-called great books are, we've had thousands of years to find that out, and what is there to show? But here," he again carefully took up the volume. "Who knows? There might be something really important tucked away in here..."
The old man half closed his eyes, a shadow changing the expression on his lips almost imperceptibly.
"The author of these writings, Zhlukhtin, meditates in passing on the impossibility of communicating one's insights to another person. The meaning of words can be too different for different people. It is not a new idea, plainly, but when you feel as isolated as he did, a man without contemporaries, when there is nobody left, when you have outlived them all..."
"Well, and he still wanted to have his say. And look at the style he brought it out in!"
The old man cast a very short glance at him; the actor did not even see it (he was blowing on a page, trying to turn it without touching it with his fingers); then the eyelids came down again, rounded like the blind eyes of classical sculptures.
"You have hit the bull's eye, Zhlukhtin. It is difficult to be consistent. We know nothing at all about people who were consistent. This man, though, was himself too much of a bookworm. Life was not quite real for him until it had been translated into print... even if only in a part work like this..."
"What's that?" the actor's eyebrows knitted together like two hairy caterpillar tentatively sniffing each other. "You mean this is an incomplete edition? There are further parts to it?"
"Zhlukhtin!" the old man laughed quietly, and his laughter was without malice. "Does the name in the sub-heading mean nothing to you? Or do you not even know who Ahasuerus is?"
"The Wandering Jew? Why, I even had a couple of books..."
"The eternal Jew, the deathless wanderer. How can the writings of someone who cannot die ever be complete?"
The actor looked at him, ruminating, taking in this new turn.
"Oh, I get what you mean. You never know with you, Vladimir Modestovich, when you are joking and when you are being serious."
"'People talk seriously,' our author writes here, 'when they believe their words can change something, when there is a choice.'"
"Ah," the actor agreed. He was not planning to delve into the old man's obscure logic, and like someone nursing a cantankerous patient refrained from contradicting it. There was, however, something about the old man's animatedness today which made him wonder. Might it be indicating something he did not know about?
"Well, you know what they say, lucky the man who has all the time in the world. Do you know, I had toothache last night, I was whingeing and whining too. I am beginning to come apart at the seams and all. Ye-es... I seem to remember, this chap's immortality was a punishment, only I'm blessed if I can remember what he was being punished for."
"To cut a long story short, he failed to show proper respect for someone before that person's death."
"Well, well, how d'you like that. That's quite a punishment. Although if you think about it, I suppose it's a bit like long-term insomnia."
"Zhlukhtin, the profundity of your reflections today truly astounds me," the old man said unsmilingly. "But insomnia is too straightforward. Immortality is something else."
"And what might that be?" the actor asked absently, blowing on another page.
"Immortality is a lack of form."

"Oddly enough, Zhlukhtin, since my wife died I have not spoken so seriously with anyone as I have with you. If you were only capable of understanding. Pay no attention to the way I'm always pretending to laugh, it is rather self-irony. I recognize myself in others only too well. When I read how delighted Gogol's Petrushka is at the way the letters of the alphabet always come together to make sense, when he was himself made up of letters, I did not laugh. I understood him. I bear the same mark. I used to love watching people while they were reading, sitting somewhere on a bench or in a railway carriage. Their faces would tense or relax, their lips would move, shadows run over their faces. Where is a person at that moment? What dimension is he in? What we have in front of us is only a shell. What virtual worlds is he assimilating from those layers of white paper? It's the genetic code of the Universe. If the Universe suddenly came to an end but the things contained in books survived, they could fertilize a handful of dust and restore the seed to God. It's a crazy notion, Zhlukhtin, probably beyond the comprehension of any normal human being. I experienced it one night during terrible bombing, when I understood how people come to lose their sanity."
The actor lowered his eyelashes discreetly. When the old man himself started mentioning insanity he began to find it suspicious. Was he introducing the subject deliberately, was he up to his tricks again? His wife had died during the war, in evacuation, leaving her new-born son to be brought up by strangers. To this day the old man felt a burden of guilt at having let her go alone and failing to protect her. He was apparently supposed to have gone with her, but had stayed behind for just one more day because of work commitments and, more importantly, in order to make at least some sort of provision to safeguard his library. Some military authority or other had then suddenly refused to release him. To this day Zhlukhtin had been unable to discover who in war-time Moscow could possibly have needed the services of this gnome with his expert knowledge of God knows what crackpot languages and goings-on, who was also an expert book binder working in equally crackpot leathers. Zhlukhtin had only the vaguest conception of what his "secular occupation" might have been: the old man was forever expressing himself in impossibly fancy language, and in all probability made half of it up himself. In any case, all that was now of no importance whatsoever. In all this history the only thing that really interested the actor was that son of his who had been traced after the war and who must naturally be a grown man by now. The old man was either keeping very quiet about him, or possibly really did not know anything about him. One had to be wary of showing too much interest.

"I shall have to lie down after all. Give me the book back, I'll hide it away."
Unica were kept separately under lock and key: the writings of eccentrics, monks and graphomaniacs, incunabula, essays of free-thinkers which the censors had not managed to root out totally, manuscripts which had survived by some miracle, proof copies with no indication of a print run, elect voices of decades and epoches past. All the other books clogging the room were just so much material, convertible currency, worker bees which existed to feed the queen. The unglazed mahogany bookcase, like a great safe, pregnant with its weighty treasures, was threatening to make the floor cave in. Zhlukhtin broke out in a sweat when he thought how much it must be worth. He was presently running his fingers over the smooth body of the book, fingering its raised embossing as if it were a woman's nipple, and his flesh stiffened with a desire to possess it not little different from other variants of the same urge, if less obviously adapted to the continuation of the human race. Although then again, who can fathom the wiles of nature?

"Are you afraid I might make off with it?" the actor joked uncomfortably.
"This one? Hardly. You haven't got the guts." ("Why am I saying this," he wondered as he heard what he was saying). He knew Zhlukhtin did thieve books from his shelves, and indeed did not make any great secret of the fact, evidently considering he was within his rights in reimbursing the expenses he had incurred these many years. He kept it within bounds, however, not wishing to endanger the main chance. "Although I suppose, even if you did make off with something, or whatever... Nobody would notice I was missing for a week."
"Do you think there is any shortage of candidates?" The actor bared his teeth, the effort involved in composing his unconvincing smile only too evident. "They are all over the place, sniffing stuff out. If it weren't for me..."
"Ah, so I ought to be grateful to you?"
"I'm not asking for gratitude. That's my fidelity, like a dog. That's probably what's done my heart in."
The old man's eyes were clear and unfaded; he still had no need of spectacles. In the same way as his voice they could seem suddenly to light up his whole face with its finely chiselled nose and sculptural brow. Perhaps, though, it was a reddening in the very corners of his eyes which suggested something smouldering, held back, immoderate, like a profoundly unsettling anguish. It was best not to meet his gaze.
"Oh, come on, come on."
He pulled the book from the fat fingers with their nails that resembled rounded mussel shells. The poor idiot seemed not to have noticed himself quite how tightly he was clutching it. Underneath the embossed binding the bones of someone's futile life rolled and rattled. The old man locked the bookcase, hung the key back round his neck, and tucked the lace under his shirt, every inch the miser out of some classic tale, tight as a duck's bottom. The actor licked his fleshy lips, gazing mesmerized at the closed doors of the bookcase behind which he seemed to see the anti-world of his own missed opportunities, the deficient half of his own identity with which he had only to be reunited to attain completeness. In fact, of course, it promised nothing of the sort, but he did not know that yet, and what was the point in disabusing him? It was what he lived for; he was capable of experiencing pain at the thought of these vulnerable bodies traded in the bazaar by this penurious nitwit, only to be torn up and used for home rolled cigarettes, and spat on into the bargain before their death. He was not greatly exercised by what was written in them, but was initiated in other passions, those which hovered about the surface of spines and bindings which had experienced so much: the breath of family dramas, wars, ruination, the smell of bodies burning at the stake, conflagrations, avarice and crime, revolutions and arrests, deadly fears and dangers, traces of the sweating fingers and tears of people long since mouldered into dust.
"I'm a fine one!" the actor said ruefully and smiled a sad smile. "I really do deserve to be laughed at. I don't even help myself where other people pull it in by the armful. One of ours was telling me that when their company was on tour in Tashkent after the earthquake you could pick up entire libraries for a few kopeks. People with no roof over their heads were practically giving them away. And there was I, like an idiot, God knows where instead."
"Yes," the old man responded softly. "You know about that side of it. Everything that burns drips down here like a candle, and the more merciless the times are towards people, the more generously it drips. It is difficult for you to imagine, Zhlukhtin, what destruction, what abandoned homes all this has come from. Earthquakes are the least of it! Somebody had to save the books, and take my word for it, at times that too was not without danger. I told you how I found my wife one day destroying something she thought it too risky to keep."
"Typical woman!" the actor nodded. "I always say, a woman can never really appreciate books. It doesn't matter who she is, she can't really appreciate them, can she?" Again he came up short against the unbearably keen gaze of those clear, still youthful eyes.

"That shelving behind your back used to be hers, with the red marocain lining, the Synodal publications and everything on the top. A few things in the bookcase, too. Left to her by her father. For all her poverty then, with no wages and no charities to help her, it didn't even occur to her that she could have sold them. If I had not shown up... She decided I was worthy. Why? She had perfect taste, the way some people have perfect pitch..."

...the fine oval of her face, her Roman nose, her smooth hair, the deportment of a titled personage (he saw her image developing on the inner side of his eyelids)... and who was that, in the dark, with the black little goatee beard and the high forehead, wearing a white side-fastening Russian shirt under his jacket, a fancy-dress costume, signifying nothing? The mirror hung at an angle, high up opposite the doors, round as the pupil of an eye it threw anyone who entered on his back. He never had got quite used to that biased eye, brought here as he had been by no chance destiny, a man who had not chosen but been chosen by her, not as yet troubling himself too greatly as to what he could mean for this woman. How had he captured her heart? By the intellectual distinction of his conversation? By his single-minded, saintly plundering untainted by self-interest? It was only that evening that he had understood, perhaps for the first time. The door, opening soundlessly, had allowed him like a jealous lover to see her in that mirror, tearing up books. She was ripping them into sections, then into single pages, and finally tearing up the pages in order to flush them down the toilet as there was no stove in the house. He might really have believed she was doing it because she feared for him, if he had not glimpsed the expression on her face, and realized for a moment what life with him meant for her... Only for an instant. He allowed himself no more than that. He tried to suppress his awareness even as she was standing beside him on the railway platform, barely able to do up her wretched little coat, even with its buttons let out, over her belly. Her way of standing with her body thrown back seemed devised by nature herself to balance her burden. She had, for all that, taken from him something she had been close to losing hope of; an unfamiliar smile, questioning and vulnerable, trembled on her lips, and melted away never to return, carried off with the smell of the steam engine, the sorrow, the shouts, and the drumming of the wheels. She was borne away by the tide, and he had lacked the will to stir himself, as if he were dreaming...

Zhlukhtin was standing by the bookshelves examining the familiar spines, possibly not actually seeing them but preoccupied with uneasy thoughts of his own. His feet shifted restively, like two separate corpulent animals. From where he was standing you could see the house opposite, its seams smeared with black pitch, washing hung out on the precarious little balconies. From the couch you could see only the stained glass of his window filled with emptiness. Sounds intruded through the quarter light in snatches: the needle had stuck on a gramophone record, and there was no one to jog it. The space outside the window was an abstraction, and an effort was needed to locate the street in it where, evidently, rain was on the way, or possibly snow, this old house itself with its peeling facade, its rusty roof, so untrustworthy when he was up there on firewatch during the air raids... had that really been him? The "I" perceiving the world did not have an age, a height, an outward appearance, it had long since inhabited a space without mirrors...

somewhere in a drawer, forgotten objects lay in a heap: his employment record with entries listing a fantastically long career, his diploma from the Antiquarian Society of Alexandria, a photograph of a young man in a peaked leather cap and with a holster on his belt (where had that come from?), a collection of souvenirs to remind him he had really been there at some points in his life, the original of a verdict of the Spanish Inquisition, the sentence on a black magic practitioner who had declined to recant, and a medal green with verdigris "For the Defence of Moscow"...

he had amazed everybody with the unsleeping fervour and courage with which he guarded a house to which his family would no longer return: the fatal telegram had arrived the day before. The air raid siren wailed, the town's buildings jutted up black amid the glow and the flashes, as if the world were yet to be created or had already ended, but he felt no fear at these theatrical explosions, as if confident that he and the house were in some way charmed. The too heavy tongs for picking up incendiaries lay on the roof. The crisscross searchlight beams seemed glued over the cupola of the sky like precautionary strips of paper over window glass, and this seemed incongruous since the sky could never have shattered: rather there was a cast iron heaviness about the dense, smoky pall glowing red hot here and there. You had only to spit up into it, as if into a frying pan, to be persuaded of this. He tried it, throwing his head back, and shuddered when he heard an answering hissing and spitting. He had scored a direct hit!

Throwing back his beard, he spat heavenwards like a jester in an access of glee. A hissing and a thunderous roar distorted the vault above his head, which cracked, punctures showing through it like newly discovered stars, from which the tears in his eyes drew cruciform rays – and then something opened up, something gave; he was whipped up into the air, tossed head over heels in emptiness... The droning of the plane's engines died away, a string was stilled in wadding, window panes melted, glass fragments turning into spray... The wall of the next door house had fallen away as if from a doll's house to reveal shelves full of books, the egg chamber of a fantastic anthill gleaming in the light of the fires; black shells glowed from within with a clear light, little charred corpses were scattered around him. Even as he lay on the ground among the sandbags, deafened by a roaring, incapable of thought, he was drawn with the weary obedience, the instinctive self-sacrifice of an insect, to save them, and already beginning to suspect that his defeat ran deeper than he had realized, that there was no longer continuation for him, no longer beginning, nothing, only recurrence, suffocation, heat, the chiming of a clock gone mad, boom, boom, boom...

"Stop, stop! I have lost count! Start again, please, from the beginning!"

The face with the bulging forehead lurched nearer and, gasping for breath, he tried to recognize those lean, boyish features which he had lost but which would one day return only in a guise he did not know... he was so afraid of not recognizing his son. The face grew larger, became lighter, swelled up, the cheeks puffing out like the reflection in a samovar. Drops of sweat welled up on the brow. The window was reflected back to front in the eyes.
"It's only me!" he said without moving his lips (a circus performer only fit for circus). "Oh dearie me, Vladimir Modestovich, what a fright you gave me, though!"
"A-aah. Was that you knocking? The door is open, you know."
The face moved back, assuming its customary appearance. A hand, puffy as an inflated rubber glove, wiped its forehead. The fear subsided, leaving a painful emptiness in his heart. Outside the window the season had changed once more. The light had weakened and no longer thrust its way into the room, but hung by the window bars as if it had been passed through a meat mincer, and objects cast no shadows. Shreds of sound still pushed their way in through the window, evidently confident that the owner would not be back for a long time. But something had happened since the last time, there was a tension in the air.
"You did give me a fright, Vladimir Modestovich," the actor said, trying to rid his face of the expression he had been caught with.
"Forgive me."
"I'm sorry?"
You must forgive me, Zhlukhtin."
"Not a bit of it. Can I give you a hand? Look, have one of these pills I have with me. Perhaps I should call a doctor?"
"Zhlukhtin," the old man suddenly muttered heatedly, "if you had the least conception of compassion... There is so little of me left... Look, barely enough for a few stacks... but I can't do it myself... I can't, don't you understand? Do I really have to tell you myself what I want you to do? I can't do it myself, and I never shall be able to. I have tried. For heaven's sake, Zhlukhtin, your teeth are falling apart, your heart is playing up. Oh, Zhlukhtin! Do you want me to tell you who I keep that door open for? You already know perfectly well yourself. I have a son, Zhlukhtin, remember that. He will come back yet. It seemed to me just now... in my sleep I took you for him. Does that seem funny? I am afraid of not recognizing him. He hardly lived with me at all. He was terribly ill all the time he was here. One of my wife's relatives took him to live with her, said a boy needed a woman to look after him. Even the doctor could not understand why he was coughing and choking, rash on his skin. The book dust. He must have been allergic to it from birth. But perhaps one day? Zhlukhtin, are you listening to me? He would know how to deal with all this, destroy it all and scatter it. He has it in his blood. Zhlukhtin?"
The actor was flexing his fingers mechanically. His knuckles had gone white. He hadn't heard a word of it. He could not be bothered with the inaudible muttering, but was he at least close to guessing, this poor fool stalking he knew not whom in order to challenge the rights of an inherited, blood relationship to a duel fought by transfusion of blood for compatibility. Who would be the survivor? The tragic ape, the grotesque double to whom he had by now became only too painfully related... Oh, Lord!

No, it was not he who was reading this, but someone else was reading him, tracing the letters, running a disgustingly clammy hand over his chest, round his neck. The lace cut painfully into his throat preventing him from breathing. For heaven's sake, there were scissors lying on the table, he thought, irritated by the incorrigible mindlessness, why make him suffer needlessly? But he feared to groan aloud in order not to frighten away this long-awaited sense of readiness, compliance, of openness to his very depths: at last, at last!

at last... only a few pages left now: it was these he had been summoning unawares, teasing them, conjuring the resolution of his dream, the peace he had not earned, the longed-for shores where the almond blossom was nearly over, dropping its withered petals, while the grasshopper grew heavy, sating itself. The music got stuck right at his throat. Unable to hold out any longer, he jerked. In convulsive fear a hard nail sank painfully into his jugular cavity, there was no parting them now: they hurtled together into the familiar black depths where fireflies glowed, outlining the trace of a life in their impatient dance, where the primal fears of childhood stirred – but he could not breathe, they were thrown on their backs and everything ran backwards, tearing up the darkness, the flashes, and the fireflies...

his eyes bulged, his eyelids bursting open like a crushed snapdragon. Zhlukhtin in his corner, standing upside down on an extended arm amidst objects now suspended in emptiness amidst vitrified sounds in the chill of eternity – and he had just time to realize that there was to be no end.