Finally, on the evening of the third day, they came for me. I got up and for the first time in all this while felt a strange chill inside me, perhaps the remote fear of death, perhaps a deep-seated dread of the unknown. In any case, I knew that I was now powerless to defend myself. I thought how this made everything simpler and how I had faced less danger in that dark Parisian alley with the hands of an unknown assassin at my throat. Previously I had depended on myself for survival, on some primitive mental alertness and my natural agility. Now I was defenceless.
I was led into the investigator’s office. He indicated a seat and offered me a cigarette. Then he asked:
“Have you thought about what I said to you during our last meeting?”
I nodded. The chill within me was for some reason preventing me from speaking.
“Will you sign your confession?”
I had to make an exceptional effort to reply to the investigator’s question in the negative. I knew, however, that only the word “no” could possibly save me. I felt as if I lacked the strength to utter the word, and in that moment it dawned on me why people admit to crimes they have not committed. Every muscle in my body was tensed, the blood rushed to my face, and I felt as if I were bearing up an enormous weight. At last I replied:
“No.”
Everything came crashing down before me, and I thought I was on the verge of losing consciousness. Yet I distinctly heard the investigator’s voice:
“We’ve been able to ascertain that your testimony, while on first appearance most convincing—which will aggravate your guilt—was false. Your right-hand man in the organization you headed has betrayed you and signed a full confession.”
I felt an immediate sense of relief. However, I had the impression that my voice lacked conviction.
“Neither the man, nor the organization you mention has ever existed. Your methods of prosecution are absurd.”
At that moment the door opened and some soldiers brought my cellmate in. Then they withdrew. I quickly glanced at him; he instantly seemed to grow taller.
“Do you recognize this man?” asked the investigator.
“I do.”
He obviously wanted to add something, but refrained from doing so. Silence ensued. The investigator got up from his chair and took a few steps about the room. Then he went over to the window and opened it. Next he returned, zigzagging, to his chair, but decided not to sit down, instead remaining standing in an unnatural and uncomfortable pose, half bent over. I sensed that something strange and troubling was happening to him.
“Are you feeling ill?” I asked.
He did not answer. The man in rags was staring at him intently, standing there without moving or saying a word.
The investigator again went over to the window and half leant out of it. Then, finally, he sat down at his desk again and began writing. Several times he tore up the sheets of paper and threw them into the waste-paper basket. This went on for some time. Beads of sweat formed on his face; his hands started shaking. Then he stood up and said in a strangled voice:
“Yes. I see that you’ve been the victim of some terrible mistake. In accordance with your request, I promise to undertake a thorough investigation of the matter and punish the guilty parties. On behalf of the Central Government, please accept my apologies. You are free to go.”
He rang a bell. An officer in a blue tunic entered, and the investigator issued him with a pass. We left the room and delved once again into the endless passageways and corridors, whose walls were covered in those same paintings, lending the impression that we were walking past some military line-up of semi-officers, semi-civilians, great in number and all identical. Finally we reached an enormous gate, which silently swung open before us. Then I turned my head to speak to my companion and I nearly stopped dead in my tracks with amazement. Beside me was a tall, clean-shaven man in a handsome European suit; on his face he wore a sardonic smile. While the gates closed just as silently behind us, and before I could say a word, he waved goodbye to me, turned right and disappeared.
Try as I might to look for him, I was unable to find him. It was a sultry summer evening, the street lamps were lit, passing motor cars were sounding their horns, and the traffic lights were flashing green and red at the crossings. Savouring the joys of liberty, I fell to thinking about what I might do in this foreign city where I knew no one and had no place of refuge. But I continued walking. The traffic began to quieten down. I crossed a narrow river on a bridge flanked by impressive statues of water nymphs; then I cut across some boulevard and started walking up a street leading off at a slight angle. By now it was perfectly quiet. I continued on for around two or three hundred metres. At a turning leading onto a road lined with single-and double-storey villas a dim street lamp illuminated the metallic blue of a sign fixed to the wall. I went up to it and with astonishing slowness made out, as though emerging from deep slumber, blurred at first, then gradually taking shape and becoming clearer and clearer, white letters in the Latin alphabet looming before my eyes. Instantly they became blurred again and vanished, but a second later they reappeared. I extracted a cigarette and lit it, burning my fingers on the match—and only then did I comprehend the happy pattern of these symbols. On a navy-blue plaque, in white lettering, was written the words: 16e ARR-T, RUE MOLITOR.
I had long grown used to these attacks of mental illness. Within what remained of my consciousness, in this small, troubled space that at times almost ceased to exist, but which nevertheless constituted my last hope of returning to the real world and not one darkened by chronic madness, I tried stoically to endure these departures and excursions. Yet every time I returned I found myself in the grip of despair. The inability to overcome this inexplicable ailment was akin to being conscious of my own impending doom, of some moral handicap that set me apart from other people, as if I were unworthy of the popular happiness of being the same as everyone else. That evening, as I read those letters on the blue plaque, after a few moments of joy, I experienced something like the pain of a man who has just received confirmation of a terminal diagnosis. Paris that night seemed different than usual and unlike its true self; with a tragic finality the vista of street lamps illuminating the foliage on the trees served only to emphasize the incurable sorrow I felt. I thought about the future that lay ahead of me, the growing complexity of my existence, and my real life, which was difficult to discern among this mass of morbid, fantastical distortions that haunted me. I was unable to complete a single task that required any sustained effort or whose solution demanded an unbroken application of logic. Even in my personal relations there was always, or there always risked being, that element of mental derangement, which could strike at any moment and would distort everything. I could not be held wholly accountable for my actions, could never be certain of the reality of what was happening to me; I often found it difficult to distinguish what was real and what was a hallucination. And now, as I walked about Paris, the city seemed no more real to me than the capital of the fantastical Central State. I had begun my latest journey in Paris, but where and when could I ever have witnessed anything like that imaginary labyrinth where the imperative momentum of my madness had driven me? The reality of that passageway, however, was borderline, and I remembered the turning and those strange recesses in the wall no less clearly than I did all the buildings in the street where I lived in the Latin Quarter. Of course, I knew for a fact that the street did exist, whereas the passageway had just been a product of my imagination; and yet this incontestable difference between the street and the passageway lacked the definite, concrete persuasiveness it ought to have held for me.
Now my thoughts turned elsewhere. Of all the districts in Paris, why had I wound up specifically in this one and not in another, not in Montmartre, for example, or in the Grands Boulevards? It was hardly likely to have happened by chance. I was unable to recall where I had headed as I left my apartment and what had induced me to undertake this journey. In any case, I had walked along, oblivious to bot
h the buildings and the streets, as all this time I had been imprisoned in the Central State; nevertheless, I had set off in a particular direction and had apparently not lost my way, although it was clear that the part of my consciousness leading me there had functioned beyond any control of my own. There must have been an automatic precision, as happens when a man stops thinking about what he is doing and his actions take on a speed and accuracy that would be impossible were they to be directed by his consciousness. It was no coincidence that I had ended up here. But where could I have been going? A few years before I would often travel this route, because a woman with whom I had been very close lived nearby; back then I had known every building and every tree in the area. However, we parted a long time previously, and thereafter the streets leading to her apartment had shed their once thrilling aspect; their even vistas, at whose ends stood a building with an apartment on the fourth floor where my whole world—warm and transparent—had once been centred, now appeared unrecognizably foreign to me.
I couldn’t remember, and I felt so weary that I decided to put an end to these fruitless endeavours and return home. Ultimately it did not really matter. I sat on the Métro for a long time, then I got off at Odéon and headed towards my hotel, spurred on by an irresistible urge—to lie down and sleep. By the time I finally found myself in bed, it was already night; I could hear the occasional footstep outside in the street, and from an invisible gramophone came the sound of a woman’s voice singing ‘Autrefois je riais de l’amour’.† Soon I found myself sinking into a melancholy gloom, as starless and warm as the night itself, when suddenly, just as I was on the verge of slumber, I recalled that I had planned to pay a visit to Rue Molitor that evening, to the house of my acquaintance, the one who had so miraculously and so unexpectedly come into money.
* * *
I went to see him a few days later. This time neither his apartment nor the telephone on his writing desk, neither the books on the shelves nor the unusual tidiness that was in evidence everywhere, surprised me—firstly because I could never be any more surprised than I had been when I met him that day in the café, secondly because having lived for years in squalid hovels he should naturally be attracted to things of an opposite nature: instead of apocalyptic filth, cleanliness; instead of chaos, order; instead of a spit-spattered stone floor, gleaming parquet. In his general deportment, as in his every move, one sensed the convulsive tension of newfound gentility, which, on the face of it, seemed a little affected, at least to begin with.
When I arrived at his apartment—this would have been around four o’clock in the afternoon—he was not alone. A little man of around fifty, with indefinably grey hair and small, shifty eyes, was sitting in an expectantly servile pose, giving me to think once again how the term “plastique”, so flaunted in arts and theatre reviews, was often cruelly and almost invariably inseparable from the circumstances of one’s life, milieu and state of health, and how the word was so mutely expressive. He was very shabbily dressed and held in his hands a crumpled, soiled cap that had once been light grey—this was possible to discern from the light patches of fabric showing through at the peak, which had been protected by a button. As I entered, the man with the cap, who was in the middle of saying something, fell silent and shot me a look both angry and fearful. The host, however, stood up, greeted me—he was markedly courteous—apologized and said to his guest:
“Do go on, I’m listening. You say that it happened in Lyons?”
“Yes, yes, in Lyons. So, you see, after I was arrested…”
He told a rather convincing tale about how he had accidentally knocked down a pedestrian while riding a motorcycle, and how a long series of misfortunes had begun shortly thereafter. Judging from the way he spoke, fluently and with an astonishing lack of expression, as if the story did not concern him but some third party, to whose fate, incidentally, he was entirely ambivalent, it was clear that he had told this tale many times over and that even for him it had lost any degree of persuasiveness. I do not know whether he himself realized this. The crux of the matter was that following his release from prison his papers had been confiscated, and so now he was unable to take up any form of work, and thus found himself in a hopeless, as he phrased it, situation. The moment he uttered these words, I suddenly remembered having seen him once before and hearing those very words, whose intonation evidently never varied. I could even recall the whereabouts and the circumstances in which it had come about: it was near Gare Montparnasse, and his audience then had been a stout man with a beard—half merchant’s, half pirate’s—and the face to go with it: broad, boorish and pompous all at once. Following these words concerning the hopelessness of his situation, he paused and then said, turning away slightly and giving two half-hearted sobs, that if the gentleman did not help him, then the only thing left for him would be suicide. He added, waving his hand with casual desperation, that he had personally lost all his joie de vivre—he expressed it differently, but that was the sum of it—however, he pitied his wife, and it was possible that she would not survive the blow, for she was chronically ill and was not to blame. The mention of blame seemed rather peculiar to me, but he immediately explained that her second husband—he himself was her third—had given her syphilis, and now, he claimed, it was taking a toll on her health.
“Yes,” mused the host, “indeed…”
Then he asked in an entirely different tone of voice:
“Who gave you my address?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I asked, who gave you my address?”
“I… I’m sorry, I was just passing and thought that, perhaps, some Russians might live here…”
“In other words, you don’t want to say. As you wish. Only I know that your surname is Kalinichenko, that you were arrested not in Lyons but in Paris, and not for knocking down a pedestrian but for theft.”
The man in the cap became uncommonly agitated and, stuttering with rage, said that if the gentleman held such an unjust opinion of him then he had better take his leave. His humility having vanished, his little eyes took on a furious expression. He stood up and made a swift exit, without saying goodbye.
“Do you know him?” I enquired.
“Of course,” he replied. “We all know one another more or less. That is, I mean to say, everyone who belongs, or belonged, to that milieu. Only he failed to suspect that the Pavel Alexandrovich Shcherbakov who lives in this apartment and whose address was given to him by Kostya Voronov, despite his assurances not to pass it on to another living soul, is none other than the same who formerly lived in Rue Simon le Franc. Otherwise, of course, he wouldn’t have bothered with the story about Lyons and the motorcycle, which for thirty francs Chernov, the former writer, concocted and wrote down for him since he lacked the imagination with which to do it himself.”
“So he made up the sick wife?”
“Not entirely,” said Shcherbakov. “As far as I’m aware, my visitor has never been married. In such circles many legal formalities are deemed unnecessary. However, the woman he lives with is indeed syphilitic. But of course I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether or not she’s ever been married. I have my doubts. Let us agree that it’s of little consequence either way. And now, after all that, permit me to say how happy I am to see you here.”
The conversation immediately acquired a different, far more cultivated tone; as with everything else, there was a sense that Pavel Alexandrovich wished to forget the period preceding his current circumstances. Nevertheless, he started—he could not help but do so—with a comparison.
“For so long I was deprived,” he began, “of entry to a world that had once been my own… perhaps because I’m no philosopher, and I’m certainly no stoic. I mean to say that for a philosopher, the external conditions of life—remember Aesop’s example—should play no part whatsoever in the development of human thought. I must admit, however, that there are certain materialistic details at whose mercy a man can find himself—insects, filth, cold, foul odours…”<
br />
He was sitting in a deep armchair, smoking a cigarette, with a cup of coffee resting in front of him.
“…all this has a most unpleasant effect on a man. Perhaps it’s some law of psychological mimicry gone too far. After all, it’s quite understandable: we often know which conditions govern the inception of some biological law or other, but we cannot predict when that action will terminate, nor can we be sure that its effects will always be the same. Why is it that King Lear and Don Quixote should lose all meaning for me simply because I live in inadequately fine surroundings? And yet it is so.”
I was only half listening to him. Before my eyes, doggedly returning to me, was that day in April two years ago when I first set eyes on him, standing there in his ornamental rags, with that dark, unshaven face. Now there were books in heavy leather bindings lined above his head, and the recherché elegance of his speech could in no way seem out of place.
I spent the whole evening with him and left, taking with me the memory of this unlikely metamorphosis, which was utterly baffling and seemed to contradict everything I had until now, consciously or unconsciously, considered plausible. This man had started off in the realm of fantasy and stepped into reality, and for me his existence contained all the luxurious absurdity of a Persian fairy tale, which troubled me.
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