“From the account of Penn’s expedition. And from my memory.”
“Well, then. What now?”
“That’s his business,” said Weber with a laugh. “But if I know what men are like … In any case, we sail at the week’s end.”
A shadow blocked the light streaming in through the door. It was Steel.
“I’m back, but I won’t come in,” he said quickly. “I read the name of your home port on the stern of your yacht, Conseil. Melbourne. But I’d …”
“Number Two, Flag Street,” replied Conseil. “And—”
“Thank you, that’s all.”
Steel disappeared.
“This could end badly,” Hart noted coolly, once the silence had spoken to each of them in turn. “He’ll find you.”
“What’s that?”
“People like that never forgive.”
“Bah!” retorted Conseil with a toss of the head. “Life is short: the world, large.”
IV.
Two years passed, during which Conseil turned up in a great many other places, observing the variety of life with his eternal attempts to make a mockery of its dizzying flight; but at last, of this, too, he grew weary. And so he returned home, taking a caustic delight in his solitude—without the aesthetic convulsions of des Esseintes, though with the acrimony of a chill desolation that he found impossible to comprehend.
Meanwhile, hearts had gone on being broken and patched together again, the world trundled on, and amid this trundling came the sound of even footsteps. They fell silent at Conseil’s doorstep. That was when he received a visiting card reminding him of Cordon Brun.
“I’ll see him,” said Conseil after a brief pause, experiencing in the exquisite unpleasantness of his situation a vivifying and acute curiosity. “Show Steel in.”
They met at a distance of twenty yards across a vast hall. The silvery light, in all its translucent array, seemed to halt Steel when he appeared at the threshold. Thus he stood awhile, peering at the inscrutable face of his host. In this moment, both men felt that their meeting had been inevitable; then they quickly approached each other.
“Cordon Brun,” said Conseil amiably. “You vanished, and I left without giving you that engraving by Morad, as I’d planned. It’s to your taste—by which I mean to say that the fantastic landscape of Saturn that it depicts evokes the mysteries of the universe.”
“Yes,” said Steel, smiling. “As you can see, I remembered your address. I made a note of it. I’ve come to tell you that I made it to the Heart of the Wilderness, and I saw just what Pelegrin did—more even, for I live there now.”
“I am to blame,” said Conseil drily, “but my words are my business, and I’ll answer for them. At your service, Steel.”
Laughing, Steel took Conseil’s limp hand, raised it, and gave it a smack.
“Good heavens, no!” he cried. “That’s not what I mean. I made the Heart of the Wilderness. I tell you, I did! I didn’t actually find it, because it wasn’t there, of course, and then I realized that you’d been joking. But what a splendid joke! There was a time when I, too, used to dream of such things. Yes, I’ve always loved discoveries that stir the heart like a beautiful song. They called me an eccentric—but what of it? I admit, I was deathly envious of Pelegrin, but that’s why I set off alone, to see what he had seen. Yes, a month’s journey showed me what the jungle is. Hunger … and thirst … alone. A fever that lasted ten days. I had no tent. I thought the flames of the campfire were many-colored, like a rainbow. White horses would come charging out of the forest. My late brother turned up and sat watching me; he kept whispering, beckoning me somewhere. I would take quinine and drink. All this delayed me, of course. A snake bit my hand. How the prospect of death enraged me! But I took myself in hand and listened to what my body was telling me. Then, like a dog, I felt drawn to a patch of grass and ate it; that’s how I saved myself, but I broke into a sweat and had to sleep. I suppose I was lucky. It was all like a dream: the wild animals, the fatigue, the hunger, the still. I killed the animals. But there was nothing at all in that place you’d mentioned. I scoured the whole plateau; it descends to a small tributary where the slope widens out. Of course, I saw it all so clearly. But there I’d found true beauty. There are things that words strike like hail on a windowpane—just pinging …”
“Go on,” said Conseil softly.
“It just had to be there,” Steel continued gently. “That’s why I sailed downriver on a raft toward the fort and hired all the men and materials I needed at the trading post. I built it, just as it was in your tale and just as it pleased me. Seven houses. It took a year. After that, I scoured thousands of people, thousands of souls, traveling here and there, looking high and low. Of course I was bound to find them, given the sort of man I am—that much was obvious. Now then, shall we go and take a look? It’s clear you have the gift of artistic imagination, and I want to know whether you pictured it as it is.”
He related all this with the horrifying simplicity of a boy telling a story from world history.
Conseil blushed. Long-forgotten music resounded in his soul, and he worked out this unexpected agitation, pacing the diagonals of the hall. Then he froze, as though rooted to the spot.
“You’re a dynamo,” he said, his voice choked. “You know something, you’re a real dynamo. I mean that as a compliment.”
“When you can see something so clearly—” Steel began.
“I’ve been asleep for so long,” said Conseil severely, interrupting him. “So then … But how like a dream it all is! Perhaps I ought to live again, eh?”
“Not a bad idea,” said Steel.
“But it didn’t exist. It just didn’t.”
“It did,” said Steel, raising his head without intending to make an impression. But from this gesture the impression reeled and thundered in every corner. “It did, because I carried it in my own heart.”
From this meeting and this conversation there came a conclusion, which strongly recalled the arid delirium of a sophisticated mind back in Cordon Brun. Two men, their eyes still full of the great, wild expanse they had just left behind, were propping themselves up against a log wall hidden by the jungle. A ray of evening light met them, and from a balcony overlooking the natural orangery that constituted the garden came the gentle voice of a woman singing.
Steel smiled, and Conseil knew why.
THE RAT-CATCHER
In the water’s bosom stands Chillon
There, in a dungeon, seven columns
Decked in the gloomy moss of years …
Byron, tr. Vasily Zhukovsky
I.
In the spring of 1920, more specifically in March, more specifically on the twenty-second of the month—let us make these offerings of precision so as to buy a welcome into the bosom of the arbiters of documentary evidence, without which the inquisitive reader of our time would likely question the editorial staff—I went to market. I went to market on March 22, and, I repeat, in the year 1920. It was the one at Haymarket Square. I cannot tell you at which corner I was standing, however, and I do not recall what was in the newspapers that day. Since I was walking back and forth along the pavement near the ruins of the market building, I was not really standing at any corner. I was selling some books—the last of what I had.
The bitter cold and the sleet falling like clouds of white sparks upon the heads of the crowd in the distance added a foul look to the spectacle. Fatigue and a feeling of being chilled to the bone showed in every face. My luck was out. For more than two hours I wandered, meeting only three people who asked what I would take for my books, but even they found the price—five pounds of bread—exorbitant. Meanwhile, darkness was falling—the least propitious condition for bookselling. I stepped onto the sidewalk and leaned against a wall.
To my right stood an old woman garbed in a burnouse and an old black hat with glass beading. Tossing her head mechanically, she proffered with her gnarled fingers a pair of children’s bonnets, some ribbons, and a bundle
of yellowed shirt collars. To my left, pinching with her free hand a warm gray head scarf snugly beneath her chin, stood a young, rather independent-looking girl, carrying the same merchandise as I—books. Her smart little slippers, her skirt that draped leisurely all the way down to her ankles (quite unlike those frivolous little dresses cut at the knees, which even old women had begun to wear in those days), her cloth jacket, her warm, antiquated mittens, the bare cushions of her fingers peeping out from the holes in them, and also the manner in which she looked at passers-by—without smiling or inviting, at times thoughtfully lowering her eyelashes toward the books—how she held them, these books, and how she would groan, letting out a restrained sigh, whenever a passer-by, having cast a glance at her hands and then at her face, would walk off, as though astonished by something and popping some sunflower seeds into his mouth—all this pleased me no end, and the market even seemed to me a little warmer.
We take an interest in those who correspond to our notion of an individual in a given circumstance, and so I asked the girl whether her little trade was going well. With a slight cough, she turned her head, ran her attentive blue-gray eyes over me, and said: “Much as yours.”
We exchanged a few comments on trading in general. At first she kept her remarks to the bare minimum, but then, after a man in blue spectacles and riding breeches bought her copy of Don Quixote, she seemed to perk up.
“Nobody knows I’m selling these,” she said, credulously showing me a counterfeited note that the canny citizen had placed among the rest and brandishing it absentmindedly. “I’m not saying that I steal them, exactly; I just take them from the shelf while my father’s asleep. My mother’s dead, you see … We had to sell everything back then, or almost everything. We had no bread, no firewood, no kerosene. You know how it is. But my father would be furious if he found out that I come here. But I do, and bring a few books on the sly. It’s a pity about the books, but what can you do? Thank God we have so many of them. Do you have many?”
“N-no,” I said, my teeth chattering (I had already caught a chill and was a little hoarse). “Not many, as far as I remember. At least, these are all I have left now.”
She looked at me with naive attention—thus, crowding into a woodland cabin, do young village boys gawp at a passing civil servant taking tea—and, reaching out her hand, touched my shirt collar with the naked tip of her finger. My shirt, just like the collar of my summer coat, had no buttons; I had lost them and not yet bothered to sew on replacements, for I had long since stopped taking care over my appearance, having waved goodbye to both my past and my future.
“You’ll catch your death,” she said, pinching her kerchief that little bit more tightly out of habit. It was then that I realized the girl’s father loved her, that she was cosseted and mischievous, but a good sort. “You’ll catch your death, going about with an open collar. Come here a second, citizen.”
She gathered up the books under her arm and walked over to an archway. Lifting my head with an inane smile, I gave her access to my throat. The girl was well proportioned but rather shorter than me, and so, as she reached for what she needed with that enigmatic, vacant expression that women have when they fiddle around with a safety pin, the girl set the books on top of a bollard, made the briefest of efforts under her jacket, and, standing on tiptoe, breathing with concentration and purpose, tightly fastened the edge of my shirt to my coat with a white safety pin.
“Lovey-doveys,” said a thickset woman who was passing by.
“There now.” Critically appraising her handiwork, the girl chuckled. “All done. Now be off with you.”
I laughed in astonishment. Seldom had I encountered such guilelessness. We either do not see it or do not believe it; we see it, alas, only when we are ill.
Taking her hand, I shook it, thanked her, and asked her name.
“I could tell you in a jiffy,” she replied, regarding me with pity, “only why do you want to know? It’s neither here nor there. But come to think of it, why don’t you write down our telephone number; perhaps I’ll ask you to sell some books.”
I jotted it down, watching with a smile as she led her index finger through the air, the others having been clenched into a fist, and pronounced one number after another in a pedagogical tone. We were subsequently surrounded and separated from one another by a crowd fleeing a mounted police raid. I dropped my books, and by the time I had picked them up, the girl had vanished. The panic proved insufficient for people to leave the market entirely, and several minutes later an old-timer with a goatee and round spectacles, straight out of a work by Andreyev, bought the books from me. He offered me very little, but I was glad to have even that. Only as I was going home did I realize that I had sold the book in which I had written down the telephone number, and that I had forgotten it irrevocably.
II.
My initial reaction to this was the negligible shock of any minor loss. However, as yet unsated hunger forestalled this impression. Lost in thought, I boiled a potato in a room with a window that had begun to rot from damp. I had a little iron stove. For firewood … In those days many people would go up to the attic—and I, too, would go there, stepping through the oblique half-light of the roofs, feeling like a thief, listening to the wind playing the pipes, and examining through the smashed dormer window a pale patch of sky that scattered down snowflakes onto the rubbish. There I would find wood shavings left over from cutting the rafters to size, as well as old window frames and dilapidated curtain rails, which I would bring back to my cellar by night, pricking up my ears on the landing for the creak of a door letting out some late visitor. A laundress lived in the neighboring room; for days on end I would listen to the powerful motions of her hands in the washtub, which produced a sound like a horse chewing rhythmically. The ticking of a sewing machine also emanated from there, often in the dead of night—like a clock gone mad. A bare table, a bare bed, a stool, a cup with no saucer, a frying pan, and the teapot in which I boiled my potato … But enough of these reminders! The spirit of everyday life often turns away from the mirror that is assiduously held up to it by immaculately literate people, those who curse in the new orthography with just the same degree of success as they had with the old.*
As night fell, I remembered the market and vividly replayed everything in my head as I examined my pin. Carmen did very little—all she did was throw a flower at an idle soldier. Nothing more had been done here. For a long time I reflected on chance meetings, initial glances, first words. They become so deeply etched in one’s memory so long as there is nothing extraneous about them. There is an irreproachable purity that belongs to these characteristic moments, which wholly lends itself to poetry or drawing—this is an aspect of life that lays down the foundation of art. An authentic experience, bound up in the serene simplicity of an unaffected tone, the sort for which we thirst with our heart at every step, is always full of charm. So faintly, but so fully does its melody convey the impression.
That is why I returned repeatedly to the pin, hammering into my memory what the girl and I had said to each other. Then I grew tired and lay down to sleep; upon waking, I stood up but immediately lost consciousness and fell to the ground. This was the onset of typhus, and in the morning I was borne to a hospital. I managed to retain sufficient memory and reason, however, to stash away my pin in a tin that had been serving as a snuffbox, and I held onto it right to the very end.
III.
With a temperature of almost one hundred and six degrees, my delirium took on the form of visitations. I was visited by people from whom I had not heard in many years. I talked with them at length and asked all of them to bring me soured milk. But, as though in cahoots with one another, they all insisted that soured milk had been forbidden me by the doctor. Meanwhile, I was secretly waiting to see whether a new nurse would appear among the gallery of faces I glimpsed as if through the steam in a sauna—she would surely be none other than the girl with the safety pin. From time to time she would pass by outside, among the tall f
lowers, wearing a green garland, against a backdrop of golden sky. So meekly, so gaily did her eyes shine! Even when she failed to appear, the ward’s flickering, dim light was imbued with her invisible presence, and every now and then I would finger the pin in the box. By morning five people had died; ruddy orderlies bore them away on stretchers, while my thermometer showed a fraction over ninety-six. Now a languid, sober state of recovery set in. I was discharged from the hospital once I was able to walk around, albeit with a pain in my legs, three months after I fell ill; when I left I had no fixed abode. My former room had been requisitioned for an invalid, and I lacked the moral fortitude to go about the various institutions, petitioning for another one.
Now, perhaps it would be appropriate to introduce a few details about my appearance, availing myself for this purpose of an extract from a letter written by my friend Repin to the journalist Fingal. I do this not because I have a vested interest in seeing my features imprinted in the lines of a book, but merely to impart some visual impression. “He is of swarthy complexion,” writes Repin, “and the regular features of his face express a reluctance for everything. His hair is cropped short, and he speaks slowly and with difficulty.” This is true, although my manner of speaking is not a consequence of my illness but, rather, results from the melancholy feeling—of which we are rarely even aware—that our inner world is of interest to few others. I, myself, however, was fascinated by every other soul, which is why I say little, preferring instead to listen. Hence, when several people congregate, vigorously rushing to cut each other off as often as possible, so as to draw the maximum attention to themselves, I usually sit on the sidelines.
For three weeks I spent the night with friends and friends of friends—on the basis of compassionate referral. I slept on floors and sofas, on stoves and empty crates, on chairs pushed together, and once even on an ironing board. During this time I saw my fill of a great many interesting things, to the glory of life, which fights so staunchly for warmth, family, and food. I saw a stove fueled by a sideboard, a kettle boiled on a lamp, horsemeat fried in coconut oil, and wooden beams stolen from dilapidated buildings. But all this—and much, much more—has already been described by quills that have torn these new topics to shreds, and so we will not touch the scrap that has been thrown our way. Something else is leading me—what happened to me next.
Fandango and Other Stories Page 20