The Red Thread

by Unknown

  “An escaped man,” said one, “God go with him.”

  “An escaped man,” echoed the other in reply, “The Devil take him.”

  The town began with a row of poor log houses standing in little yards enclosed by dilapidated fences. A little girl bounded out, barefoot. Her feet were black. Rodion halted, enchanted. He felt naïve joy, tinged with another feeling—bitter, almost terrible—as he gazed at those familiar houses, always the same, with thatched or planked roofs so weather-beaten that you could see daylight through them. What town was this? He didn’t dare ask. He mingled with the crowd, searching for a street-sign, a notice posted by the local Soviet. But this was a town without street-signs, without posters, perhaps without a name, an ordinary little town with ruined churches: the same empty cooperatives as everywhere, a line of people in front of the closed shop of the Tabak-Trust, a miserable market-place where everything—the horses’ long drooping heads, the people’s faces, the rare sacks of grain—had the same colour of dried mud . . . On the red gauze banner strung across the main street, Rodion, who did not wish to read them, made out two faded rain-washed words: Enthusiasm, Industrialization . . .

  His hungry wanderings led him to a vast building-site bristling with scaffolds and tall skeletal walls of red brick. Trucks were jouncing drunkenly through mud-puddles without even startling the little, resigned horses harnessed to ancient carts. Casks of cement were bursting through a rail fence, and men were bustling clumsily about among the trucks, the horses, the carts, the cement, the scaffoldings. On a door Rodion read: Now hiring: labourers, masons, carpenters, stucco-workers and others—bed and soup. He pushed open the door. Inside it smelled of cheap tobacco, fresh lime, manure, benzine; it was full of hoarse voices arguing about an incident involving a missing cart-load, a drunken driver, twenty-seven roubles, the Control Commission. Rodion asked for a job as a mason-tender.

  “Fine. If you know the work, we’ll give you a chance to prove it in the second brigade, ‘Socialist Emulation.’ Its output is nineteen percent higher than the average for the plan. Three roubles and sixty-five kopecks a day and soup from the technicians’ canteen—you’re lucky. Only you better meet the quota. We carry out the plan here, brother: we don’t want any loafers. If you don’t work out, tomorrow I’ll send you over to the fourth, the gold-brickers brigade: black-list, two roubles forty-five, and sour-cabbage soup—Diarrhoea Brand.”

  “I’ll meet the quota,” said Rodion with an imperceptible touch of self-mockery. “I’m class-conscious, citizen. What are we building here?”

  “District Headquarters for State Security, comrade proletarian. So the work must be done properly, you understand. There’s competition with the prisoners’ brigades.”

  The crew that Rodion joined included a woman who taught him to carry the maximum load of solidly-stacked bricks on his back and shoulders, to carry them to the top of the scaffolding fast enough so that the masons of the fifth prisoners’ brigade never paused for an instant in their methodical labours. There was no time to breathe, to exchange a few words, or to smoke, and anyway smoking was forbidden, and anyway you lost your taste for everything. To keep up your spirits, you chewed bad tobacco—twenty cigarettes for sixty-five kopecks. The woman must have been about thirty. She hid in order to drink. When she saw Rodion’s face drenched with sweat, pinched like the face of a dying man, she joined him on a shaky platform from which you could see a soft landscape of humble roofs and light-green prairies blending off into the horizons. The woman held her brandy-bottle out to Rodion.

  “Drink fast! If the brigade-leader catches us we’re sure to get fined. . . .”

  Rodion, racked with fatigue, avidly absorbed that liquid fire. His legs never stopped shaking under him, but he felt savagely strong and lucid: he saw reality with the intensity of a dream. The woman was flat-chested and the hard, deep-lined features of her face expressed wear and resistance. Her eyes were sunken and surrounded by dark shadows.

  “Feeling better?” she asked. The corners of the grey kerchief knotted under her chin were fluttering in the breeze. Her tall form stood out over the scaffolding, and behind her there was nothing but airy space, plains, and Russian earth, the tortured earth of the Revolution, its black waters, its clouded waters, its clear waters, its frozen waters, its deadly waters, its invigorating waters, its enchanted forests, its mud, its impoverished villages, its countless living prisoners, its countless executed ones in graves, its construction sites, its masses, its solitudes and all the seeds germinating in its womb. Rodion saw it all, ineffably. All—even the germinating seeds, since they too are real. And that the woman drinking brandy from the bottle at that instant was truly, totally, a human being. He was entranced to see it so clearly.

  “Listen,” he said softly, “do you know what we are? Have you ever thought about it?” She considered him with astonishment. And her direct iron-blue gaze was tinged with fear.

  1936–1938

  Translated from the French by Richard Greeman

  I’M WAITING FOR THE FERRY

  Kabir

  I’m waiting for the ferry,

  But where are we going,

  And is there a paradise anyway?

  Besides,

  What will I,

  Who see you everywhere,

  Do there?

  I’m okay where I am, says Kabir.

  Spare me the trip.

  Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

  CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF NYRB CLASSICS

  Asterisk (*) indicates an NYRB Classics Original. Dagger (†) indicates no longer in print.

  1999

  Peasants and Other Stories

  anton chekhov

  Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

  Selected and with an introduction by Edmund Wilson

  A High Wind in Jamaica

  richard hughes

  Introduction by Francine Prose

  My Dog Tulip

  j. r. ackerley

  Introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  My Father and Myself

  j. r. ackerley

  Introduction by W. H. Auden

  Lolly Willowes, or, The Loving Huntsman

  sylvia townsend warner

  Introduction by Alison Lurie

  The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard

  sØren kierkegaard

  Edited and with an introduction by W. H. Auden

  Contempt

  alberto moravia

  Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson

  Introduction by Tim Parks

  Boredom

  alberto moravia

  Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson

  Introduction by William Weaver

  Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

  alexander berkman

  Introduction by John William Ward

  Jakob von Gunten

  robert walser

  Translated from the German and with an introduction by Christopher Middleton

  The Winners†

  julio cortázar

  Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Kerrigan

  Introduction by Alastair Reid

  The Other House

  henry james

  Introduction by Louis Begley

  Herself Surprised†

  joyce cary

  Introduction by Brad Leithauser

  To Be a Pilgrim†

  joyce cary

  Introduction by Brad Leithauser

  The Horse’s Mouth†

  joyce cary

  Introduction by Brad Leithauser

  A Handbook on Hanging

  charles duff

  Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

  2000

  Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

  daniel paul schreber

  Translated from the German and edited by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter

  Introduction by Rosemary Dinnage

  Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journey

  j.
r. ackerley

  Introduction by Eliot Weinberger

  We Think the World of You

  j. r. ackerley

  Introduction by P. N. Furbank

  The Wooden Shepherdess

  richard hughes

  Introduction by Hilary Mantel

  The Stories of J. F. Powers

  j. f. powers

  Introduction by Denis Donoghue

  Morte D’Urban

  j. f. powers

  Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Wheat That Springeth Green

  j. f. powers

  Introduction by Katherine A. Powers

  The Fierce and Beautiful World†

  andrey platonov

  Translated from the Russian by Joseph Barnes

  Introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Memoirs

  lorenzo da ponte

  Translated from the Italian by Elisabeth Abbott

  Preface by Charles Rosen

  Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Arthur Livingston

  Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

  edward john trelawny

  Introduction by Anne Barton

  Virgin Soil

  ivan turgenev

  Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

  Introduction by Charlotte Hobson

  Classic Crimes

  william roughead

  Introduction by Luc Sante

  The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren

  IONA and PETER OPIE

  Introduction by Marina Warner

  The Unknown Masterpiece and Gambara*

  honoré de balzac

  Translated from the French by Richard Howard

  Introduction by Arthur C. Danto

  The Pure and the Impure

  colette

  Translated from the French by Herma Briffault

  Introduction by Judith Thurman

  The Waste Books

  georg christoph lichtenberg

  Translated from the German and with an introduction and notes by R. J. Hollingdale

  The Glass Bees

  ernst jünger

  Translated from the German by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer

  Introduction by Bruce Sterling

  A Month in the Country

  j. l. carr

  Introduction by Michael Holroyd

  To Each His Own

  leonardo sciascia

  Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke

  Introduction by W. S. Di Piero

  The Wine-Dark Sea

  leonardo sciascia

  Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni

  Introduction by Albert Mobilio

  Seven Men

  max beerbohm

  Introduction by John Updike

  Alfred and Guinevere

  james schuyler

  Introduction by John Ashbery

  2001

  The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story

  glenway wescott

  Introduction by Michael Cunningham

  The Fox in the Attic

  richard hughes

  Introduction by Hilary Mantel

  Manservant and Maidservant

  ivy compton-burnett

  Introduction by Diane Johnson

  A House and Its Head

  ivy compton-burnett

  Afterword by Francine Prose

  The Haunted Looking Glass

  Ghost Stories chosen and illustrated by Edward Gorey

  The Root and the Flower

  l. h. myers

  Introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography

  a. j. a. symons

  Introduction by A. S. Byatt

  Hadrian the Seventh

  fr. rolfe (baron corvo)

  Introduction by Alexander Theroux

  Madame de Pompadour

  nancy mitford

  Introduction by Amanda Foreman

  The Anatomy of Melancholy

  robert burton

  Edited and with an introduction by Holbrook Jackson

  With a new introduction by William H. Gass

  Letty Fox: Her Luck†

  christina stead

  Introduction by Tim Parks

  Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard

  arthur conan doyle

  Introduction by George MacDonald Fraser

  The Golovlyov Family

  shchedrin

  Translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington

  Introduction by James Wood

  The Radiance of the King

  camara laye

  Translated from the French by James Kirkup

  Introduction by Toni Morrison

  Eustace and Hilda: A Trilogy

  l. p. hartley

  Introduction by Anita Brookner

  Sleepless Nights

  elizabeth hardwick

  Introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien

  Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

  elizabeth hardwick

  Introduction by Joan Didion

  A Way of Life, Like Any Other

  darcy o’brien

  Introduction by Seamus Heaney

  Renoir, My Father

  jean renoir

  Translated from the French by Randolph and Dorothy Weaver

  Introduction by Robert L. Herbert

  The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

  nirad c. chaudhuri

  Introduction by Ian Jack

  As a Man Grows Older

  italo svevo

  Translated from the Italian by Beryl de Zoete

  Introduction by James Lasdun

  Letters: Summer 1926

  BORIS PASTERNAK, MARINA TSVETAEVA, and RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky

  Translated by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt, and Jamey Gambrell

  Preface by Susan Sontag

  Mr. Fortune

  sylvia townsend warner

  Introduction by Adam Mars-Jones

  The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese

  cesare pavese

  Translated from the Italian and with an introduction by R. W. Flint

  An African in Greenland

  tété-michel kpomassie

  Translated from the French by James Kirkup

  Introduction by A. Alvarez

  The Life of Henry Brulard

  stendhal

  Translated from the French and with an introduction by John Sturrock

  Preface by Lydia Davis

  2002

  On the Yard

  malcolm braly

  Introduction by Jonathan Lethem

  Selected Stories†

  robert walser

  Translated from the German by Christopher Middleton and others

  Foreword by Susan Sontag

  The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

  álvaro mutis

  Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

  Introduction by Francisco Goldman

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz

  james mccourt

  Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum

  The Go-Between

  l. p. hartley

  Introduction by Colm Tóibín

  The Outcry

  henry james

  Introduction by Jean Strouse

  Letters from Russia*

  astolphe de custine

  The 1843 translation from the French, edited, revised, and with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein

  Miserable Miracle: Mescaline

  henri michaux

  Translated from the French by Louise Varèse and Anna Moschovakis

  Introduction by Octavio Paz

  Riders in the Chariot

  patrick white

  Introduction by David Malouf

  A Book of Mediterranean Food

  elizabeth david

  Foreword by Clarissa Dickson Wright

&
nbsp; Summer Cooking

  elizabeth david

  Foreword by Molly O’Neill

  Mary Olivier: A Life

  may sinclair

  Introduction by Katha Pollitt

  Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories

  randall jarrell

  Selected and with an introduction by Randall Jarrell

  Corrigan

  caroline blackwood

  Afterword by Andrew Solomon

  Great Granny Webster

  caroline blackwood

  Introduction by Honor Moore

  The New Life†

  dante alighieri

  Translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Preface by Michael Palmer

  The Ten Thousand Things

  maria dermoût

  Translated from the Dutch and with an introduction by Hans Koning

  The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties

  tess slesinger

  Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick

  The Middle of the Journey

  lionel trilling

  Preface by Monroe Engel

  The World of Odysseus

  m. i. finley

  Introduction by Bernard Knox

  Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror*

  h. p. lovecraft and others

  Edited by D. Thin

  The Book of My Life

  girolamo cardano

  Translated from the Latin by Jean Stoner

  Introduction by Anthony Grafton

  Troubles

  j. g. farrell

  Introduction by John Banville

  The Moon and the Bonfires*

  cesare pavese

  Translated from the Italian by R. W. Flint

  Introduction by Mark Rudman

  Paris Stories*

  mavis gallant

  Selected and with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje

  A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story†

  peter handke

  Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim

  Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides

  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

  james hogg

  Introduction by Margot Livesey

  In the Freud Archives

  janet malcolm

  With an afterword by the author

  The Fountain Overflows

  rebecca west