“Number nine,” a man’s voice called from below.
Above the bed a large rectangular mirror was fixed to the wall, opposite the bed stood a mirrored screen and farther on there was a mirrored wardrobe; a few moments later, all these glaring surfaces began reflecting our bodies. There was something apocalyptic and blasphemous in this fantastical multiplicity of reflections, and I started to think about the Book of Revelation.
“On dirait de la partouze,”|| said Lida.
She had a hot, dry body, and the burning sensation never left me. I knew I would never forget these hours. I began to lose myself in the unexpected richness of physical sensations, and there was something almost merciless about the perpetual allure of her body. The words she uttered through those firmly clenched teeth seemed remarkably strange—as if there were no space for them amid the torrid heat of the room, they sounded like a futile reminder of something that no longer existed. I now found myself in another world, which, naturally, I had never known before, in all its feminine irresistibility. This was what she had sung of that evening as I had listened to her! How faintly now the accompaniment of the piano sounded in my memory—a scarcely audible musical prattling. Fragments of thought flashed through my mind. No, I had never imagined that I could find myself wholly consumed by physical passion, so utterly that it left almost no room for anything else. I stared fixedly beneath me, at Lida’s ecstatic face, at her wide, half-open lips that somehow reminded me of the cruel lines at the mouth of some stone goddess I had once seen—but had forgotten where and when. As before, a great many hands, shoulders, hips and legs were writhing about in the mirrors, and I began to suffocate from this impression of multiplicity.
“My darling,” Lida began in a monotone voice. It seemed as if these sounds were having difficulty forcing their way through the thick sensual mist. “I’ve never loved anyone as I love you.”
She was now lying next to me, exhausted and spent from the sustained exertion. But gradually her voice became deeper and clearer.
“Je n’ai pas eu de chance dans ma vie,”** she went on. “I lost my innocence at fourteen.”
She continually switched from French to Russian and from Russian back to French.
“Haven’t you seen my mother’s lover? He was old even then. He’s limp, like a rag; he’s no man. It hurt me and it was so dull, I wanted to cry because of how disgusting it all was. Est-ce que tu me comprends? Dis-moi que tu me comprends.”††
I nodded. She lay there naked—beside me, above me, beneath me—reflected in the still lustre of the mirrors. Again I had the impression—as so often happened—that a pair of eyes was staring at me fixedly from those terrible glass depths, and with cold despair I recognized the gaze as my own.
It required an extraordinary effort to overcome the sense of revulsion I now felt towards Lida and myself. I was, however, less inclined to blame her than I was to blame myself. In my conduct there had been an element of such flagrant baseness, of which I had until now not believed myself capable. Henceforth, who could tell what I might do and what other degradation awaited me? Everything inside me that I considered vaguely positive had been swept away by one chance encounter, but at what cost? I was consumed by other, more immediate considerations. I thought that if the matter had concerned only me, no one—least of all Pavel Alexandrovich—would have found out about this evening with Lida. But I couldn’t be sure of her. She might tell the story to her next lover; she might ultimately confess to Pavel Alexandrovich, and that would place me in a hopeless position. How could I make this disappear, and what wouldn’t I give for the chance to regain what there had been at the beginning of the evening? I thought about this as I lay next to her. I closed my eyes so as not to see her, and in front of me appeared that gentle mist, the same one that I had emerged from and returned to so often before, crossing from one world into another and finding myself once again in this noiseless abyss, after every psychological catastrophe. I sank into the familiar silence, so empty and dead that even the echo of this current misfortune was muted, because nothing mattered any more. Still, however, growing ever more dim, a light flickered before me; somewhere in the distance the last muffled sounds to reach me were dying away. And next to me, in this silent arena, lay Lida’s naked body, as still as a corpse.
“Monsieur, la séance est terminée,”‡‡ said a far-off woman’s voice.
Then it drew closer and repeated:
“La séance est terminée, monsieur.”
I opened my eyes. I was sitting in an empty cinema theatre; the curtain had already been drawn across the canvas of the lifeless screen. The usherette who had pronounced these words was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and sympathy.
“Excusez-moi,” I said. “Merci de m’avoir réveillé, mademoiselle.”§§
I left the cinema. There were stars in the sky, and the night was warm and peaceful. I could see stone buildings with their bolted iron shutters, tranquil street corners, the brightly illuminated windows of the cafés. And for the first time ever, my return to reality appeared to lack the sad numbness that usually accompanied it; instead there was something almost buoyant about it. I imagined that willpower would triumph one day over my illness and everything that had haunted me so relentlessly would disappear not for a period of time, but for ever. Then, of course, my real life would begin. Later, whenever those visions returned to me—those to do with the imaginary meeting with Lida, the hotel and the mirrors—I would try to think about something else at once, although I knew I could never deceive myself: what I found disgusting had, in effect, really happened, and if it were not vested in the concrete form of accomplished fact, then this was merely an arbitrary, meaningless detail. It was precisely this absence of fact, however, that offered me an unassailable argument, an indisputable justification—and on that evening this deceptive piece of evidence seemed like a happy solution to the problem.
* * *
Some time after this episode I turned once again to my informant, who was not difficult to track down: by day he could be found in a café near Place Maubert, where the fag-end men congregated; by night one would have to journey to Montparnasse. In his endless pilgrimages across Paris there were places where this man would always go, much as others would go to their clubs. After a second glass of wine, he was ready to tell me everything I required—what he knew, what he had heard, and even what he did not know but was the object of his speculation. Of course, whatever we spoke of, he would always begin with one and the same thing—his princess, whose betrayal he could never forgive.
“While we’re sitting here talking,” he said, wiping his lips with the little finger of his right hand, not without a certain degree of coquettishness, “that bitch is lounging about in satin sheets in her apartment. But she doesn’t realize that I’ve got her right where I want her.”
“How so?”
“My good man, all I need to do is to go to the right place and say to the relevant person: ‘Monsieur, vous savez l’origine d’sa richesse?’”¶¶
His French was fluent, although he overemphasized all his nasals and pronounced the French “o” like a Russian “a”.
His faded, drunken eyes stared right at me.
“Only she suspects, of course, that Kostya Voronov has always been a gentleman”—this word he pronounced entirely after his own fashion—“and that he would be entirely incapable of doing such a thing. Do you know what my nickname is?”
I replied that I hadn’t the faintest idea.
“‘The Gentleman’,” he said. “That’s what they call me. Here he is, standing before you—Kostya Voronov, gentleman, lieutenant of the Imperial Army. As I recall, the dispatch read: ‘Distinguished himself through unflinching bravery, setting an example to his commanding officers and subordinates alike…’ That’s the sort of man she’s betrayed. And why? Because, my dear fellow, Kostya Voronov had no intention of compromising himself, that’s why.”
I failed to understand exactly what he meant by this and h
ow he might have compromised himself with the princess, but I did not press the matter, fearing too involved an explanation. He looked at me, clearly searching for some sympathy, as he always did when the conversation touched upon his personal life. I again uttered some words about the vicissitudes of fate.
“Fate, you know, is nothing but what meets the eye,” he said. “Take, for instance, a man who lives life in the belief that everything is just splendid, whereas in actual fact, you see, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.”
I asked the Gentleman whether this assertion was to be taken as a purely philosophical conceit, or whether it might contain any specific allusion.
“Both,” he replied. “On the one hand, it holds true in general terms; on the other, take Pashka Shcherbakov, for example. I’ve nothing against him. Good God, I’ve known him for such a long time. He’s not a bad sort; he’s a clever chap, one of ours.”
I shot a glance at him. He was standing in front of me, grim and unshaven, wearing a soiled, tattered jacket and an alarmingly narrow pair of trousers full of holes; a yellow cigarette was drooping from his lip, smoking.
“He lives like a lord now—good nosh, of course, an apartment and a girl, just as you’d expect.”
He shook his head and drank up the remainder of his wine. I called the waiter and ordered another glass for him.
“I like it when people take a hint,” said the Gentleman. “We are Russians, after all. But to get back to Pashka. That girl of his can barely stand him, because she’s in love with Amar.”
“Who’s Amar?”
“Her lover. Haven’t you heard?”
“No.”
“Ask her about him sometime. She got involved with him back in Tunis.”
“What, is he an Arab?”
“Worse,” said the Gentleman. “Much worse. His father was an Arab, his mother was a Pole. Got mixed up in some rather shady business in Tunis. Naturally, he wound up in prison. ‘He had some unpleasantness,’ as Mishka would have said. It was she who bailed him out.”
“Who?”
“Lida, of course. Are you surprised?”
“No, it all seems perfectly plausible.”
“Only this is all strictly between you and me.”
“You may rest assured.”
There was, of course, nothing surprising about anything the Gentleman had told me; on the contrary, it would have been astonishing if there had been. Although I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Pavel Alexandrovich. How was it that he knew so little about Lida? How could it be that, despite having such a clear recollection of the mousey marksman and Zina, he had left out the most important part—Lida’s story? I learnt from the Gentleman that Pavel Alexandrovich had until quite recently only known of Lida from hearsay, but when he met her for the first time in the street he was moved by her unmistakeable poverty and misery—this was where everything had started. She would doubtless have told him about herself, but only what she deemed necessary to tell, concealing the rest from him. Moreover, he was thirty years her senior, and yet his persistent mistrust of people and his own experience in life were powerless in the face of this age gap. Still, was he really capable of deceiving himself so much on her account? Never had I imagined that Zina’s daughter would turn out to be a wistful girl with distant eyes, but the moment I laid eyes on her and heard her singing, I had no doubt as to her moral character. That Pavel Alexandrovich did not recognize—or at least made out not to recognize—something so obvious could only be put down to his catastrophic, involuntary blindness.
Several weeks passed. Then one evening, completely by chance, I found myself on Place de la Bastille, just as I had done when I came across Zina, the mousey marksman and Lida on Boulevard Garibaldi. It had been a long time since I was last in this quarter of Paris. I was there because a famous Spanish revolutionary was due to give a speech at one of the larger cafés in the area; his views had long been a subject of interest to me because they lacked the naive stupidity one invariably encounters in political orators. His lecture was to be on socialism and the proletariat; he was a brilliant man, and in his analysis these things took on a human dimension. Listening to him, I was struck by the degree to which the true essence of these questions had been corrupted and distorted by ignorant, stupid politicians, who for whatever reason considered themselves representatives of the working class, while presiding over syndicates, parties and governments. The lecture finished just after eleven o’clock in the evening. As I crossed the square, passing the notorious Rue de Lappe with its ubiquitously advertised dens, a red taxi pulled up at the corner; out of it stepped Lida, followed by a man of average height, wearing a grey suit, with a dark, thin face and a grey hat pulled down almost to his ears. From a distance he reminded me of the owner of Mishka’s hotel, although not because they bore any physical similarity to one another, but because—in as far as I was able to discern in those few seconds—there was something currish and criminal about his face. What served to underscore such an impression was his look of severe stupidity; it was obvious that this man was unaccustomed to and even incapable of thinking. Next to him, Lida’s delicate face seemed almost abstract. My eyes met her gaze, but I pretended not to see or recognize her; she too made as if she hadn’t recognized me. I quickly walked past them, but then stopped to watch where they were headed—towards the illuminated entrance of a dance hall. To my surprise I noticed that Amar—I had no doubt that this was he—walked very slowly, slightly dragging his left leg.
This happened on a Wednesday. The following Saturday evening I was due to dine at Pavel Alexandrovich’s. On Thursday, when he and I arranged everything over the telephone and he asked me how I was getting on, I replied that I had hardly been out, as I had been so busy with work. Indeed this was the case: I had recently been writing a lengthy piece on the Thirty Years War, which a friend of mine had been commissioned to write, but which he in turn had passed on to me. The article was to be published under the name of a very famous columnist and writer, a man of means, who had earned a considerable fortune from writing books about the dictators and government ministers of various countries. I was not entirely convinced that he himself could have written such an article; however, I was personally unacquainted with him and can only defer to my friend’s categorical assertion that the famous author “was unburdened with knowledge in any quarter, save for the noble sport of horse racing”. However, this was not the crux of the matter; rather it lay in the fact that the famous journalist was having a tempestuous affair with a no less famous actress of the silver screen. He would go with her to all the fashionable late-night cabarets, whisk her off to Italy and the Riviera—in brief, he had no time at all for any articles. Besides, this was not the first time in his life that such a thing had happened. One way or another, the chance for me to earn some money was much too tempting to pass up. I spent several days in the Bibliothèque Nationale, copying out long passages from a variety of books, then I set to work at home. I still had a long way to go before I would reach the closing pages, however, and I was pondering the Peace of Westphalia with no less trepidation than did Richelieu, albeit with one marked difference: I knew its consequences, which the French cardinal along with his contemporaries could not have foreseen and in light of which the whole of early seventeenth-century French politics had acquired a rather different significance than was ascribed to it by either the cardinal or even Père Joseph, who had been at least on the face of it so terribly unselfish. But the more I thought about the old barefooted Capuchin, the more unquestionable it seemed that only boundless, hidden ambition could have ordained both his politics and his life. The argument of one historian of this period seemed awfully convincing to me; he wrote that the most dangerous people in politics are those who scorn the direct advantages resulting from their positions, who strive towards neither personal wealth nor the satisfaction of traditional passions, whose sense of individuality finds its expression in the defence of some idea or historical concept. Unfortunately I was deprived of the oppor
tunity to express my personal views on the Thirty Years War, and the need to adopt a certain writing style impeded me and hindered my work. The fate of Gustavus Adolphus in particular had to be abandoned without any detailed commentary, as did the part played by Wallenstein, whose grandiose, chaotic plans, however, were in my opinion more deserving of attention than Richelieu’s policies. I was further hindered by the fact that in contrast to the journalist whose name was to appear alongside the article and who was completely indifferent to the fate of any historical figure, just as he was to any historical concept, I was intrigued by the fates of all the political actors and military leaders who had taken part in the war. Despite the three hundred years separating me from them, I came to feel for each of them what any of their contemporaries might have done—although I was acutely aware that in the various historians’ accounts these figures were no less distorted and stylized than had they been transformed by Schiller’s muse. It seemed impossible to treat Richelieu with anything but scorn, in the same way that it was impossible to write of Père Joseph with anything but respect. I tried to search for some hidden meaning in the fate of Tilly, the suicide of Wallenstein and particularly in the death of Gustavus Adolphus—but of course these notions were entirely misplaced in such a work. When I later had occasion to meet with the dummy author of the article—he turned out to be fat, bald and middle-aged, forever short of breath and with dull eyes—he was truly astonished by what I had come up with. I think that his disagreement with me over my appraisal of certain historical aspects would have been more pointed if he had held the slightest relevant idea about the content of his article. He made a few alterations, but as time was of the essence he was forced to limit himself to the purely superficial: he inserted colons and exclamation marks everywhere he could, imparting a pretentious and didactic aspect to my account and introducing an element of bad taste which, I fancied, had not been there to begin with, but was unerringly characteristic of this ignorant and vulgar man.
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