Unwitting Street

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  His very first concert in the large hall of the Philharmonic was a triumph. Of the latest virtuosos, it is typically said that one morning they woke up famous. Accuracy demands a correction: Flüchten fell asleep a celebrity, though he was prevented from doing so for quite some time by the dozens of telephone calls congratulating him on his extraordinary success. Early next morning he was awoken by the gingery smell of the flowers with which his modest hotel room had been crammed and heaped.

  A subsequent cycle of cello concerts was now eliciting greater and greater acclaim. The elf, you see, loved flowers, they reminded him of his forest abodes; he also loved the brilliance of the concert hall’s electric lights, which reminded him of the radiance of fireflies and stars. Usually during performances, the elf would sit on the end of the bow’s pointed tip and sing along in a soft high-pitched voice that only Flüchten could hear, suggesting the rhythm with a fluttering of his tiny gossamer wings.

  Until the end of this latest cycle there remained two performances. Flüchten had brought off the first part of today’s program with enormous success. In his dressing room he was met with handshakes, the writing pads of music critics, and two or three perfumed notes.

  The second part was devoted to a classical cello sonata. Its opening allegro held the audience rapt. The elf was in especially high spirits: he leapt from string to string, fluttered from fret to fret, and, gliding like a skater over the bow’s rosined hairs, lent them that vibration mastered by only the greatest virtuosos on earth.

  Before the andante cantabile the orchestra accompanying Flüchten fell silent for a minute. The soloist wiped the strings of his instrument with a handkerchief, slipped two fingers of his right hand into the side pocket of his white vest, and produced a mute. As he pressed it to the strings’ lower extremities, he heard a glissading sound, like that of a fingernail grazing porcelain.

  The conductor raised his baton.

  Flüchten placed a confident bow on the strings and struck the first chord. And then? Instead of a consonant harmony, he heard a screechy combination of wooden-sounding elements. He played on, wondering through the andante’s first measures, but then confusion and fear entered his consciousness. His hand ran mechanically over the strings. His forehead bloomed with beads of cold sweat. Finally the conductor replaced his baton on the lip of his music stand. Flüchten tried to slip away on trembling legs, but was stopped by a storm of applause. “No one noticed,” thought he, as he went backstage. He received as many congratulations as he had forty minutes before, as many handshakes—and only an old balding critic, whose forehead crept back to his nape, stood aloof, glumly jotting something down in his notebook.

  Flüchten ducked out of the dinner arranged by his admirers at the city’s best restaurant. Pleading ill-health, he hurried back to the suite in the fashionable hotel where he now lived. He unplugged the telephone, locked the door, and sat for a long time, still in his coat, by the window, beyond which swarmed the many-colored lights of the nighttime city.

  The clock struck two. Flüchten threw off his coat and went into the bedroom. He undressed. Lay down. Put out the light. But he felt he would not fall asleep. The clock chimed once. And then thrice. Flüchten turned the light back on and, slipping feet into slippers, went over to his instrument, glumly muffled in its brown cloth cover.

  First Flüchten touched the strings through the material. They responded dully, as if only half-awake. Then he yanked the cover off and ran his fingers over the frets. He couldn’t understand it.

  Yet it was all easily explained. In adjusting the wooden mute during the concert, he had inadvertently squashed his guest, the divine elf who had settled in his cello. The elf died, and with him the music. The wood remained, the resonator remained, the bow, the strings, and the pegs, but the music that lived in them had gone.

  For two days Flüchten did not come out of his suite. By the morning of the third day the playbills advertising his concerts had been pasted over with diagonal banners offering refunds to ticketholders.

  That evening maestro Flüchten requested his bill and called for an automobile, which delivered him to the North Station.

  The chambermaid who came to clean the empty suite found a cello in the corner, evidently forgotten by the last guest. Both buttons on its cover had been neatly fastened. The hotel’s proprietor was promptly informed. He shrugged his shoulders in dismay: the man in that suite had left no address.

  Indeed the whereabouts and subsequent fate of Friedrich Flüchten remain unknown to this day.

  1938

  THE GAMBLERS

  THEY WERE two in a square unheated room in a wooden shack by the city gates.* A bookkeeper and a poet. On the abacus there was nothing to count. Except changes of regime.* Only yesterday the bookkeeper had slid a ninth white bead from right to left along its spindle. Paper had all gone to handbills, orders, and appeals stuck to the brick and wood of walls, while resolutely rejecting anything as trifling as poetry. So then, both men were out of work. Their money had long since emigrated from their pockets and turned into bread and firewood, long since eaten and long since burned. Two men, two benches, one table, two stools, and one dog-eared deck of cards. From morning till night the poet and the bookkeeper played stuss.* Now and then, most often toward evening, one of them would go out to forage a crust of bread or a board from a fence for kindling. The trouble was that between them they had only one pair of boots, which was constantly, depending on how the cards fell, changing hands. Or rather: feet.

  The poet was having bad luck. For a week now he had been going around in clothes no longer his. An unpaid advance and the dedication of his book, Dreams of a Freezing Man, had likewise passed into the possession of his partner. Yet the gamblers continued to gamble.

  In effect, the cosmos belongs to everyone; everything—from stars to dust motes—is the common property of humanity. Proceeding from that thought, the poet—this was only yesterday—put the North Star on his card and began to tally.* Alas, ten seconds had not gone by before the star was made over to the bookkeeper. In that same way the poet lost Berenice’s Hair* and, soon after, first the Little Dipper, and then the Big.

  Because of the Milky Way the gamblers did not sleep the whole night. By the light of an oil lamp they battled furiously on until that starry way wound up in the bookkeeper’s pocket.

  But after that, fortune suddenly turned one hundred and eighty degrees. For a start, an extraordinary thing happened: the poet managed to collect his lost advance. True, it was only three or four million. But even if the bread was stale, it was bread; even if the wood was green, it was wood. In the cube of four walls it became warmer, in their stomachs as well; their fingers unfroze and, naturally, reached for the deck of cards. The poet’s run of luck continued: first he won back his millions, then—planet by planet—the entire solar system, and finally whole constellations rained down from the starry heavens straight into his palms: the bookkeeper had only a few paltry starlets left; he managed to hang on to Saturn’s rings, but two or three deals later the rings too rolled away, right behind the planet, to his lucky rival.

  Never mind the stars. The poet won back the boots! The entire universe belonged to him. Excited by his good luck, he took a few turns up and down the room. By now the small stove had grown cold. The universe the poet had won was slightly frozen. Ornate white patterns were forming on the windows.

  “Who’ll go for wood?” asked the lucky man.

  “The one who won the boots,” replied the bookkeeper.

  He sat on his bench, knees pressed to chin, and rubbed his rag-wrapped feet.

  The winner did not object. He pulled his canvas cap down over his ears, wrapped himself tighter in his quilted jacket, and went off.

  At almost that same moment outside, gunshots crackled. The bookkeeper understood: the Whites were entering the city, it was their turn. The bookkeeper went up to his abacus hanging on a nail and slid a black bead from right to left along its spindle.

  The volleys intensified
, and in the distance two or three cannon shots thundered. From somewhere nearby came the typewriter-like rat-a-tat of a machine gun. The late afternoon light turned to dusk, the dusk to night.

  His partner had not returned.

  The temperature in the room was falling. All through that long winter night the bookkeeper sat on his bench—and uneasy thoughts slipped through his brain.

  Come dawn he wound strips of felt round his feet, as well as two newspapers, and shivered out into the street. Snow, saltpetrously glittering snow. Clenched shutters of long, yellow, coffin-shaped shacks. At a crossroad a gray body—like a spreading inkblot. Near the body three women and a little boy, the earflaps of his cloth hat hanging down, wagging their ribbon tails.

  The bookkeeper approached. Yes, it was he, his lucky partner. He lay face down in the snow, arms flung out. Under his chest was a bundle of wood. One of the women, wiping away freezing tears with the ends of her black shawl, wailed:

  “Oh, my darling, unfortunate man. Who’d have known, who’d have guessed? I sent my Mitka out last evening for kerosene. But those—what do you call them, don’t know—they were around. Around and shooting. What could I do? My little Mitka . . . Then God sent a kind man. He swooped Mitka up in his arms and ran for the gate. Only he was got, poor fellow, by a bullet. Just look at him! What bad luck. Just look! Bitter sorrow . . .”

  “But is Mitka all right?”

  “He’s all right. Nothing wrong with him. But this poor . . . May he rest in peace . . .”

  The women stood sighing for a minute more, then the gate closed behind them.

  The bookkeeper looked round. The street was empty. Kneeling in the snow, he drew the boots off the corpse, pulled them on his frozen feet and, without looking round, went back to the shack. As for the Universe, which remained the property of the poet, he didn’t give it a thought.

  1937

  IN LINE

  (Feuilleton)

  THE WRITER untied the laces of his tight shoes, thrust his feet into soft commodious slippers, and went to his desk. Where he had long been awaited by his inkwell. He flipped open the lid, reached for a pile of foolscap, and dipped the tip of his pen into the black pool of musing ink.

  At that same moment, from the right-hand corner of the desk to the inkwell, an invisible line formed. A line of themes that had long been waiting to sip even a drop of ink.

  The man was absorbed in thought: where to begin? Consequently he neither heard nor saw the jostling and squabbling among his conceptions.

  •

  “Now you listen to me, citizen plot,* and don’t push, I’ve been waiting for ten years, while you . . .”

  “Ten years: that makes you subject to exclusion. I just occurred, I’m ten seconds old, but I’m topical, trenchant. Printer’s ink and a rotary press are waiting for me—and I won’t let anyone step on my words. So clear off!”

  “Not so fast, young plotkin. The ink is still wet behind your ears, yet you have the temerity to cut ahead. As for me, our master has already made five sketches. I’m a fleshed-out theme and will not be trifled with. And where do you think you’re going? Get back in line! Upstarts at the end.”

  “Honey, let me just slip in here beside you, I’m only a column long. My theme is that two times two does not make four,* but that four, if you think about it deeply, is almost two times two.”

  “Get out of here. There’re lots of your kind slouching around. Wait, where’d he come from? Shoving ahead with his big belly. Hold your horses, paunchy.”

  “I take no offense. I, you see, am a fat novel. Fifty percent paid for and twenty percent thought out. Now kindly step aside.”

  “Should we let him in?”

  “Hell no! He’ll drink up all the ink. Kick him out!”

  “But excuse me . . . My sweep is absolutely vast. Whereas you are all, forgive me, stumpy little things, not a patch even on my radiuses.”

  “And we’ll thumb our stumpy noses, but not behind your back, so quick go ahead, fat novel, before you get the sack!”

  “That’s right, we’ll put a spoke in the wheel of his hearse.”*

  “Excuse me. What is the meaning of this? Who are these ruffians?”

  “We’re feuilletons! Jokes for folks. What’s your name?”

  “My title: No Bed of Roses—in four parts and twenty-eight chapters. A saga of the Russian intelligentsia. Spanning three generations. And looking with a critical eye at what is called . . .”

  “Pardon me, I must interrupt you, the critical eye—is I. An article—a survey of the past year in literature. I am, in fact, almost half written. All I need is a bit more ink with a touch of bile. I’d like to skim you, citizen novel. You would suit me for an ending. But all in good time: go on being written, go on, I’m after you.”

  “Delighted, although . . . And just what is your point of view, your critical retrospection, so to speak, with regard to the bygone year?”

  “Very simple. In reviewing the output of the year now deceased, I take as my guide the prescription of that Chekhov character who posed as a doctor: ‘Recipé: a few grams of sic transit,1 i.e., hurl stones at the past, at that non-bed of roses, to make it disappear faster; after that, a generous dose of gloria mundi,2 and, finally, unlimited quantities of aquae destillatae.’*3 There you have the three-part division, the three elements* that make up, alas, nearly all of our story lines, nearly all of our literary facts. I even took Chekhov’s title: ‘The Night before the Trial.’* All of you, both fat and thin, are subject to trial and conviction.”

  “Is that so? And have you considered the fact, my dear article, that Chekhov’s doctor was an impostor?”

  “Why should I wait around until all you novelmakers and storyficators ask for criticism? I know, you dislike the jabs of critical pens, you’d rather not swallow the stickleback tail first, you can’t sleep on a mattress strewn with needles.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that! Give me your minuses and pluses, but . . . You know, there’s a saying: don’t inflate my claims, and don’t call me names. Everything in moderation.”

  “Concerning your talents, I must agree: they are in moderation. Not more.”

  “We’d best put a stop to this conversation. But I am perplexed, there’s some misunderstanding here: you and I come from the same inkwell, so to speak; we were nursed by the same pen. Why should we quarrel?”

  “That’s just it, you want to do things the old way: the writer writes a bit, the reader reads a bit, and the critic castigates. You need to know how to be your own reader and your own castigator.”

  “Um, but you know, that is the old-fashioned way. Those rich pigheaded landowners used to keep so-called regalers and nudgers. The regaler recounted all sorts of tales, while the nudger nudged the regaler lest he nod off inadvertently. Believe me, every one of us is supervised by seven nudgers,* we can do without any self-nudging.”

  Suddenly from somewhere at the back came a rather soft but clear voice. Novel and article turned automatically round. At the tail end of the line stood a spindly short story. His mouth was muffled in a black scarf, his hunched and shivering body wrapped in a thin ragged cloak of lines crossing each other out. When he raised his sunken but shining eyes, the squabblers fell automatically silent and listened to the words of this new interlocutor:

  “It’s hard for me to speak. I’m afraid that today too there won’t be enough ink to go round and I’ll remain among the conceptions. Well then, I wish you Bon Voyage!—from penned longhand to typographical symbols, for millions of eyes. I’ll wait. I was thought up one sleepless night. My name is ‘Last Meeting.’ My outline is simple: a writer wakes up in the middle of the night sensing the presence of a stranger; and indeed, in the armchair by his desk, bent over an unfinished manuscript, a dim shape hovers in the darkness. The wakened man reaches for his spectacles, but his fingers do not find the familiar case. ‘Who’s there?’ he asks. ‘It is I, your Conscience,’ comes the faint, barely audible reply. ‘I am here to say goodbye; we are seein
g each other for the last time.’ The man raises his head from the pillow and peers in bewilderment at his guest; in the feminine cast of her face, in the bitter crease by her mouth, there is something infinitely dear, familiar, and yet ever so distant. ‘But how can that be?’ says the man. ‘To live without you would be like living without myself. Stay . . .’

  “His Conscience is leafing through the pages of his latest manuscript.

  “‘Don’t, please don’t.’

  “‘Do you remember,’ says the nighttime guest, turning her lovely face to the man, ‘do you remember that tale we worked on together about a man, a great eccentric, who pained the truth itself by accusing it of lying? What happened to that story?’

  “‘It was stamped: DO NOT PRINT. But I must say, you were worse than any censor, you crossed out almost everything I wrote in those days, in my youth.’

  “‘But I left you—remember?—that story about a man who allowed his life to be deluged not with ink, but with blood, so that tomorrow might come more quickly to the help of today.’

  “‘I remember.’

  “‘I must say it was a bit hysterical, your bias overshadowed the form somewhat, so I . . . I won’t argue. I’m not a professor of aesthetics, I’m only your Conscience. Well then, goodbye . . .’

  “But I see, comrade plots, that you’re not listening to me.”