I remember waking up one night and distinctly feeling my long, greasy, rank hair against my face, the slackness of my jowls, and the curiously familiar sensation of my tongue touching the gaps in my mouth where I was missing teeth. Seconds later, however, the awareness that I was merely a spectator in all this, as well as the heavy odour I had detected from the outset, would vanish. Then slowly, like a man gradually beginning to distinguish objects in the half-light—which, incidentally, was typical at the start of almost all these visions—I would discover this next distressing incarnation, the victim to which I had now fallen. I saw myself as an old woman with a tired, haggard body, deathly pale in colour. Through a small window overlooking a dark, narrow courtyard the oppressive stench of a deprived neighbourhood blew into the room in sultry summer waves; amid the suffocating heat this decrepit body, by whose sides drooped long, fleshy breasts and whose stomach with its roll of fat concealed the origin of two equally chubby legs that ended in black ragged toenails, lay on a grey-and-white bed sheet that was damp with sweat. Sound asleep next to it, head thrown back, mouth agape and white teeth bared, like a dog, was an Arab boy with tight thick curls of black hair, whose back and shoulders were covered in pimples.
The image of this old woman did not, however, occupy my mind for long. She gradually faded into the semi-darkness, and once again I found myself on my narrow bed, in my room with its high window overlooking a quiet street in the Latin Quarter. In the morning, when I awoke and opened my eyes again, I saw—this time entirely as a spectator to the event—that the Arab boy was gone, and on the bed remained only the corpse of the old woman, the sheets stained with dried blood from a terrible wound at her neck. I never saw her again: she disappeared for ever. But this was undoubtedly the most repulsive sensation I had ever experienced in my life—this body, fat and sagging, in such a cruel state of muscular incapacity.
Since the day that I first met the Russian beggar in the Jardin du Luxembourg, so clearly and indelibly etched in my memory—the black frayed hat, the stubble on his face, the tattered boots and that amazing garment, be it an overcoat or something resembling a jacket—nearly two years had passed. For me these had been long, almost endless years, filled with swarms of silent, delirious visions that blended corridors leading God knows where, narrow chasm-like vertical shafts, exotic trees on the far-distant shores of a southern sea, black rivers that flowed into dreams, and an uninterrupted stream of various people, both men and women, the reason for whose appearance invariably eluded my comprehension, but who were inseparable from my own existence. Nearly every day I would feel this almost abstract psychological weariness, the result of some manifold, unrelenting madness that curiously affected neither my health nor my faculties—nor even did it prevent me from sitting the occasional exam or memorizing a host of university lectures. Sometimes this noiseless torrent would come to a sudden halt without any forewarning whatsoever; I was drifting through life then without a care in the world, breathing in the damp winter air of the Parisian streets and with carnivorous zeal devouring plates of meat in restaurants, tearing at the succulent morsels with my voracious teeth.
On one such day I was sitting at a table in a large café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. Behind me, an assured male voice, evidently concluding—judging by his final intonation—some period that I hadn’t heard, said:
“And believe me, I have enough experience in life to know.”
I turned around. There was something familiar about his voice. However, the man I saw was completely unknown to me. I quickly looked him over: he was wearing a fitted overcoat, a shirt with a starched collar, a deep-crimson tie, a navy-blue suit and a gold wristwatch. A pair of spectacles rested on his nose, and there was a book lying open in front of him. Next to him sat a blonde woman of around thirty, an artist whom I had met a few times at evenings hosted by some friends; she was puffing away on a cigarette and seemed to be listening to him distractedly. He then closed the book and took off his glasses—he was evidently far-sighted—and that was when I saw his eyes. To my utter disbelief, I recognized the man to whom I had given the ten francs in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I could never have identified him solely on the basis of his eyes and his voice, though, for the man sitting here in the café seemed to have nothing in common with the beggar who had approached me two years ago, asking for money. Never before had it occurred to me that clothes could so change a man. There was something unnatural and implausible about his metamorphosis. It was as if time had fantastically regressed. Two years ago this man had been a mere shadow; now he had miraculously transformed back into the man he had once been, whose disappearance ought to have been irreversible. I was unable to come to my senses for genuine astonishment.
The female artist got up to leave, waving to me both hello and goodbye simultaneously as she made her exit. Then I went up to the gentleman’s table and said:
“Forgive me, but I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you somewhere before.”
“Please, do sit down,” he replied with quiet courtesy. “It’s a credit to your memory. You’re the first of those who knew me in the old days to have recognized me. You say we’ve met? You’re quite correct. It was back when I was living in a slum, in Rue Simon le Franc.”
He made a vague hand gesture.
“I presume you would like to know what happened to me? Well then, let us begin with the fact that miracles simply do not happen.”
“Until a few moments ago I’d have agreed with you, but now I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Oh, you’d be wrong to doubt it,” he said. “There’s nothing more deceptive than appearances. One can make assertions on the basis of these only if one acknowledges their total arbitrariness beforehand. In five minutes’ time the causes of my metamorphosis will seem entirely natural to you.”
He leant his elbows on the table.
“I don’t recall whether I told you back then…”
And so he told me exactly what had happened to him, and truly there was nothing miraculous about it. In one of the Baltic states—he neglected to mention which—lived his elder brother, who, in the wake of the Revolution, had managed to retain a sizeable fortune. According to my acquaintance, he was a cruel and miserly man, who hated everyone who had, or might have had, cause to ask him for money. He never married and he had no heirs. Some time ago he had drowned while bathing in the sea, and so the inheritance passed on to his brother, whom a solicitor tracked down in Paris, living in Rue Simon le Franc. Once the formalities had been concluded, he came into possession of a fortune valued at many hundreds of thousands of francs. Then he took an apartment on Rue Molitor, living alone and passing the time, as he put it, between reading and pleasant idleness. He invited me to drop by one day between appointed hours; there was no need to call in advance. Thereupon we parted. I stayed on in the café, and again, just as I had done two years ago, I watched him leave. It was April, but the day was cold by comparison with the previous year. He walked along the wide passage between the little café tables and slowly vanished into the soft electric light in his new fitted overcoat and new hat; now the assuredness of his gait could seem in no way out of place to anyone, even to me, who had been so struck by it at our first meeting.
Alone, I lapsed into thought—contemplative at first and without aim; then, among the formless motion of images, features gradually drew into focus and I began to recall the events that had taken place two years ago. Now it was cold, but then it had been warm, and I had remained sitting on that bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I did now in the café, following the man’s departure. Back then, of course, I had been reading Karamzin: immediately forgetting the words on the page, my thoughts kept returning to the nineteenth century and its sharp disparity with the twentieth. I even pondered the differences in political regimes—thoughts that, generally speaking, very seldom captivated my attention—and it seemed to me that the nineteenth century had known none of the barbaric and violent forms
of government that characterized the history of certain nations in the twentieth century. I recalled Durkheim’s theory of “social constraint”, contrainte sociale, and, deviating once again from the university’s course material, I proceeded to considerations of a more general and more contentious order. I mused on the idiocy of state-led violence and how it ought to have been much more apparent to contemporaries than to so-called “future historians”, who would fail to grasp the personal tragedy of this oppression, along with its palpable absurdity. I also thought how state ethics, taken to their logical paroxysm—as the culmination of some collective delirium—would inevitably lead to an almost criminal notion of authority, and that, in such periods of history, power truly belongs to ignorant crooks and fanatics, tyrants and madmen: sometimes they end their life on the gallows or at the guillotine, sometimes they die of natural causes, their coffin accompanied on its journey by the unspoken damnation of those whose misfortune and disgrace it was to be their subjects. I also thought of the Grand Inquisitor and the tragic fate of his author, and how personal, even illusory freedom can essentially prove to have a negative value, with a meaning and significance that frequently eludes us because it contains, in an extremely unstable equilibrium, the roots of opposition.
But now I was far from such thoughts; they seemed obscure and insignificant by comparison with the egotistical considerations of my own destiny, the illusory and uncertain nature of which had never ceased to captivate my attention, all the more so as today’s encounter had coincided with the demise of this happy phase of my life, the blessedness—I could find no other word for it—of which lay in the fact that during these past few weeks I had lived without dreaming and without thinking about anything.
The previous day I had been seized by a vague sense of anxiety, inexplicable as always and for that very reason particularly troubling. The next day the feeling intensified, and now it no longer left me. It began to seem to me as if some danger, intangible and unfathomable in equal measure, were lurking in the wings. Had I not been so used to the constant presence of this hallucinatory world that so doggedly pursued me, I might perhaps have been frightened that this was the onset of some persecution complex. Yet the singularity of my situation resided in the fact that, as opposed to people afflicted by genuine madness, those utterly convinced that some invisible, elusive figure truly was following them—someone with a multitude of agents at their disposal: a bus conductor, a laundress, a policeman, a strange gentleman in spectacles and a hat—I knew that my unease could be attributed wholly and exclusively to random flights of imagination. Living as I did, with almost no independent means at my disposal, unaffiliated with any political organization, partaking in no form of social activity and in no way distinguishing myself from the anonymous multimillion mass of the Parisian public, I knew there was no way I could be the object of anyone’s pursuit. There was not a single person in existence to whom my life could have presented any interest, no one who could have envied me. I understood perfectly that my vague anxiety was entirely pointless, that there were and could be no grounds for it. Yet as inconceivable as it was, still the feeling persisted, and the fact that it was clearly unfounded failed to extricate me from this situation. Meanwhile, in contrast to maniacs, whose attention is strained to breaking point, who never miss a single detail of what is happening around them as they resolutely seek out the presence of their pursuant adversary, I lived and moved as if surrounded by a thin veil of fog, one that deprived objects and people of their sharply defined contours.
I would fall asleep and awake with this feeling of vague unease and foreboding. Days went by like this, and the feeling persisted until the moment when, in the twilight of a Parisian evening, while wandering aimlessly through the streets in an unfamiliar part of the city, I cut down a narrow passageway between two buildings. By now it was almost completely dark. The alley turned out to be surprisingly long, and when I reached the end I found myself standing in front of a blind wall, with a left turn leading off at right angles. I carried on, presuming a way out to be round the corner, but it grew even darker. As I walked between the two walls, I could just make out that one of them had been built with niches at regular intervals. Their purpose was a mystery to me. I continued another few dozen metres in the gloomy darkness, above which was a starless sky; there was total silence, broken only by the sound of my own footsteps along the uneven paving. Suddenly, as I drew abreast of one of the niches I had spotted earlier, without a sound a man’s black shadow leapt out in front of me with extraordinary speed, and for a brief fraction of a second I experienced that mortal terror for which this unrelenting state of disquiet had prepared me over the course of many days. I then felt at my neck the vicelike fingers of the man who had so suddenly and unaccountably lunged at me. As strange as it may seem, from that moment on I ceased to feel any abstract unease or immediate terror. Then again, I had no time for it. Now amid the action there was something concrete and tangible; there was reality, not irresistible abstraction. Instinctively I tensed the muscles in my neck. Judging by the frantic clutch of fingers at my throat, it was obvious that they belonged to a strong adult male, who moreover had the element of surprise on his side. However, it was also clear to me that despite the apparent superiority of his position and the desperation of my own, the advantage ultimately lay with me. I comprehended this in the very first seconds; I was well trained in various types of sport, particularly combat, and I had no difficulty in determining that my assailant knew nothing of this and only hoped to rely on brute strength. He was probably expecting me to grab him by the hands and attempt to prise them from my neck—the natural and most often useless defence of the unprepared man. By now already choking, however, I groped in the dark for his two little fingers, and then simultaneously, using both my hands, I bent them back sharply, breaking their lower joints. He gasped and started to groan, and my breathing strangely eased after he let go of my throat. He was now silently writhing about in front of me in the darkness, and at any other time this would no doubt have roused some compassion in me. But I was in a state of sudden, furious rage—as if this unidentified man had been the cause of that lengthy unease that had tormented me all this time, as if he himself were the culprit. I pressed into one of his shoulders while at the same time pulling the other one towards me, and when, without his having the time to realize what was happening, he turned away from me, I seized his neck from behind using my right arm bent at almost ninety degrees. With the fingers of my left hand I grasped my right wrist and began to tighten my deadly grip on him, not letting up for an instant. In short, I did what he ought to have done when trying to strangle me—precisely what he had failed to do, thus signing his own death warrant. He twitched a few times, although I knew that his situation was hopeless. Then, once all trace of resistance had vanished, I let go and his corpse slumped heavily to my feet. It was so dark that I was unable to examine his face properly. I noted only that he had a little moustache and black curly hair.
I listened intently. Around me, as before, there was total silence, and as I took my first step the sound of it seemed alarmingly loud. Without looking back, I continued along the passageway. At last the indistinct light of what was probably a street lamp glinted in the distance, and I heaved a sigh of relief. However, just as I was about to leave this trap something struck me on the head with tremendous force, and I lost consciousness.
Through this blackout, I had the vague notion that I was being driven somewhere. Clearly I had been administered with some powerful narcotic, as my unconscious or semi-conscious state was unnaturally prolonged. When I finally opened my eyes, I found myself lying on a narrow stone bench in a small room with a high ceiling and three grey walls. There was no fourth wall: in its place shone a bright gaping hole. I had completely lost all concept of time. On the other side of a blind wooden door I could hear footsteps and voices shouting things that I was unable to make out. These voices soon receded into the distance. I looked around the cell and only then did I notic
e that I was not alone: to my right, on a second stone bench, was a figure clothed in rags, sitting with his legs crossed and leaning against the wall. His eyes were closed, but his lips moved silently. He then turned his head to me and slowly lifted his eyelids; I met his gaze—penetrating, empty and cold, so much so that I immediately felt out of sorts. I remembered everything after this exactly as it happened with the exception of one detail, which no effort of memory could ever return to me: I couldn’t remember in which language I had spoken, at first with him, and then with all the others. Some phrases seemed to have been uttered in Russian, others in French, others in English or German.
The Buddha's Return Page 2
