“Just bought it. That was the third time this chap has been to see me, so I took it just to get rid of him.”
“What kind of painting is it?”
“Oh, it’s worthless! A daub, done in very poor taste!” said Brock. “Better take a look at mine. There are two I did just recently.”
I walked over to the spot he indicated on the wall. Yes, that’s what was in his soul! … One was a pea-green landscape. The vague outline of a road and the steppes with an unpleasant dusty hue; with a nod, I moved on to the second “article.” It, too, was a landscape, consisting of two horizontal strips of differing shades of gray (lead and slate) with green tufts dotted around it. Both paintings, talentless as they were, evoked a cold, dull tension.
Without a word I stepped away from the paintings. Brock peered at me, coughed, and lit a cigarette.
“You work quickly,” I remarked, so as not to draw out the silence. “So, what about the Gorshkov?”
“As I said. Two hundred.”
“Two hundred for a Gorshkov?” I exclaimed. “That’s a lot of money, Brock!”
“Permit me to inquire about the tone in which you just said that. Gorshkov … What exactly is your opinion of him?”
“The subject under discussion is a painting,” I said. “A painting I intend to buy.”
“No,” objected Brock, who was now irritated both by my words and by my indifference toward his paintings. “For this disrespect to a great national painter of ours, the price for you is now three hundred!”
As often happens with nervous people, in the heat of the moment I couldn’t resist a caustic question:
“And what would you take for this cabbage if I were to tell you that Gorshkov is simply a bad artist?”
Brock let the cigarette fall from his lips and gazed at me lingeringly and malevolently. It was a sharp, piercing look of quivering hatred.
“You’re a fine judge … You cynic!”
“Why this quarrelling?” I said. “What’s bad is bad.”
“Well, fine then,” he declared, frowning and looking at the floor. “Two hundred it was, so two hundred it shall be.”
“It won’t be two hundred; it’ll be one hundred.”
“Now you’re the one who’s starting …”
“Very well, one hundred and twenty-five?”
Still more offended, he gloomily walked up to the cupboard and dragged out from behind it the painting he had just brought.
“I’ll make a gift of this one,” he said, brandishing the painting. “It’s to your taste, it could be yours for twenty rubles.”
Now turning the painting the right way around, what he brought level with my eyes was something staggering.
IV.
What I saw was a long room, flooded with light, with a glass wall to the left, grown over with entwining ivy and flowers. To the right, above a row of antique chairs upholstered in green plush, hung several small etchings in a horizontal line. A door stood ajar in the distance. Closer to the foreground, on the left, atop a round walnut table with a gleaming surface, stood a tall glass vase with flowers that were shedding their petals; these were scattered across the table and on the floor, whose surface was of polished stone. Through the glass of the wall, which was made up of hexagonal panes, the flat roofs of an unknown eastern city could be glimpsed.
The words “something staggering” may thus seem like an expositional whim, for the subject was commonplace enough, and its execution here lacked not only great originality but any originality whatsoever. Yes, indeed! And yet, the painting’s simplicity was replete with the immediate suggestion of a persistent summer heat. The light was hot. The shadows were limpid and somnolent. The hush—that special hush of a sultry day, filled with the silence of a secluded, sated life—was conveyed through an intangible expressiveness; the sun burned my hand when, grasping the frame, I looked ahead, straining to make out the brushstrokes—that disenchanting mathematics of paints, which, upon bringing a work closer to ourselves, we see in place of faces and objects.
The room depicted in the painting stood empty. To varying degrees of success, hundreds of artists have used this device. However, the greatest talent has never yet attained the psychological effect that immediately asserted itself in the given instance. The effect was that of the viewer’s unexpected abduction into the depths of the perspective, so that I felt as if I were standing in that room. It was as though I had stopped by and seen that there was nobody there but me. Thus, the emptiness of the room compelled me to regard it from the vantage of my individual presence. Moreover, the distinctness, the materiality of the depiction was greater than anything of the kind I had ever seen.
“Indeed,” said Brock, seeing that I was silent. “A most commonplace daub. And yet you say …”
I could hear my heart pounding, but I didn’t want to argue.
“Well, then,” I said, laying the painting aside, “I’ll get those twenty rubles and, if you wish, I’ll stop by this evening. Who’s the artist?”
“I don’t know,” said Brock in vexation. “Paintings like this aren’t exactly a rarity. Anyhow, Gorshkov … Let’s discuss the matter.”
By now I was afraid of angering him, lest I lose the painting of the sunny room. I was more than a little stunned; I had become vacant and forbearing.
“Yes, I’ll buy the Gorshkov,” I said. “I’ll definitely buy it. So that’s your final price—two hundred? Very well then. What am I to do with you? As I said, I’ll bring the money this evening. Two hundred and twenty. When can I find you at home?”
“If you’re serious, I’ll expect you at seven o’clock,” said Brock, placing the painting he had shown me on top of the piano, and with a smile he rubbed his hands. “That’s what I like: one, two—and it’s in the bag. Just like the Americans do it.”
Had S. T. been at home then, I should have set off for his apartment immediately to collect the money, but at that hour he would himself be puttering about the city in search of antique porcelain. That is why, in spite of my great impatience, I headed from Brock’s apartment to the House of Scholars—or KUBU, as its Russian acronym went—to find out whether I had been granted the rations for which I had filed a request.
V.
To a warmly dressed man with a cold soul, the frost may seem an exquisite pleasure. Indeed, everything had grown numb and turned blue. Was this not truly a delight? Beneath the white sky the crowded city froze. The air was unpleasant, nakedly transparent, as in a cold hospital. The windows of the gray buildings were blinded by hoarfrost. The frost imparted a fanciful sense to everything: boarded-up shops with snowdrifts on the entrance steps and smashed plate glass windows; a deathly silence at the front doors; kiosks that had fallen in on themselves; inns that lacked windows and roofs, with floors that had been ripped up; a dearth of cab drivers—thus, so cruelly, it seemed, the frost had dealt with everything. A motorcar that had been running fairly well but had suddenly got stuck because its engine had been damaged—that, too, had apparently fallen into the jaws of the frost. The movement of people headed for warmth called the frost to mind even more. Along the road and sidewalks, carried in hands, on sledges, and on carts, with the rasping slowness of habitual despair, the firewood crept. Wagons creaked, as snow crunched into frost: piercingly and terribly. Ice-covered logs were being dragged along the sidewalk by the hands of exhausted women and adolescents of the kind who know all the unacceptable playground vocabulary and ask for “a light” in a deep bass. Incidentally, among the businesses the likes of which the city had never seen, in addition to “domestic husbandry” (hay strewn about a room, like grass for goats) and “new-old” (the glittering illusion of newness imparted to “footwear” found in a dump), about which de Régnier speaks in his curious book The Backstreets of Paris, one was now compelled to note the profession of “kindling salesmen,” too. These tattered figures sold bundles of kindling weighing no more than five pounds, which they carried under their arms for those who could permit themselves that most pru
dent of luxuries: holding them under the base of a teapot or a saucepan, burning them one after the other, until the water in it boiled. Moreover, firewood was being sold from sledges in little bundles or whole armfuls—to each according to his means. Carts, heavily laden with firewood, went by, and the driver, walking alongside, whipped the thieves as he passed—children who were pinching logs on the run. Occasionally, passions were inflamed by a log that had fallen from the cart of its own accord: passers-by would dash to it headlong, but usually the bounty would be obtained by some moustachioed villain—the sort who in the military can make soup out of an axe.
I walked quickly, almost at a run, seeing off one block after another, the snow crunching underfoot, and mopping my face. In one courtyard I spotted a crowd of good-natured people. They were breaking the wooden parts off a brick outbuilding. Involuntarily I paused—there was an expansive, businesslike tone to this spectacle, something of what in the laconic language of our psychology is termed: “That’s the spirit, lads! …” A double door flew open, and a floor beam came crashing down with one end sticking out of the snow. In one corner of the yard, two men were furiously knocking into each other as they sawed the end off a log as thick as a barrel. I entered the courtyard with a sense of human solidarity and said to a sleepy chap in a dark-blue coat who was looking on:
“Citizen, won’t you give me a couple of boards?”
“What’s that?” he said after a long, affected silence. “Can’t. We’re collecting the wood for an artel;* it’s an institutional matter.”
Though I had no idea what he meant, I understood nevertheless that I would get no boards from them, and so, without pressing the matter, I withdrew.
“How can it be? We’ve hardly met, and already we part,” I thought, recalling the words of a certain interesting man: “We meet without joy and part without sorrow …”
Meanwhile, that picture of the sunny room, which had been banished temporarily by the frost, once again excited me so much that I directed all my thoughts toward it and S. T. The bounty was alluring. I had made a discovery. At the same time, my cheeks had begun to burn, and shooting pains had appeared in my nose and ears. I looked at my fingers: their tips had turned white and become almost numb. The same thing had happened to my cheeks and nose, and so I began to rub the frostbitten parts until sensation returned to them. I was not chilled to the marrow, as I would have been in the damp, but my whole body ached and felt unbearably contorted. Growing numb, I ran off in the direction of Millionnaya Street. Here, at the gates of KUBU, an odd sense of space flitted before my eyes for a second time, yet in my agonies I was not so surprised by this as I had been at Brock’s—and so I only rubbed my forehead.
Standing by those very gates, among the cab drivers and automobiles, was a group that I would have paid greater attention to, had it been a little warmer. The central figure of the group was a tall man in a black beret with a white ostrich feather; he wore a gold chain about his neck, over a black velvet cloak lined with ermine. He had an angular face, a ginger moustache parted in an ironic arrow, a golden beard worn in a narrow spiral, and a smooth and authoritative way of gesturing …
At this point my attention faltered. It seemed that a covered sedan chair with feathers and a fringe had drawn to a slightly rocking halt behind this angular, glittering figure. Three swarthy, strapping young men with cloaks thrown back over their shoulders, covering half their mouths, silently watched on as out of the gates walked the professors, dragging behind them sacks of bread. These three men seemed to constitute a retinue. But in a frost such as this there was no time for any more curiosity. Lest I delay myself further, I crossed through to the courtyard, while behind me a conversation as quiet as the strumming of strings took place:
“This is the very building, Señor Professor! We’ve arrived!”
“Excellent, Señor Caballero! I’ll go to the main clerical office, while you, Señor Euterp, and you, Señor Arumito, prepare the gifts.”
“Right away, Señor.”
VI.
Idlers in the street, heralds of the “indisputable” and the “reliable,” as well as the merely curious, would have flayed me upon learning that I didn’t linger around the mysterious foreigners, didn’t so much as sniff the air they breathed in the narrow passageway of the entrance, beneath the red signboard of the House of Scholars. Yet I have long since taught myself to be surprised at nothing.
The above conversation was held in the pure Castilian dialect, and since I know the Romance languages rather well, I had no difficulty understanding what these people were talking about. From time to time the House of Scholars received goods and provisions from various countries. Hence, a delegation from Spain had arrived. No sooner had I entered the courtyard than this deduction was confirmed.
“Have you seen the Spaniards?” said a paunchy professor to his emaciated colleague, who was thoughtfully chewing on a cigarette while standing at the tail end of a queue for salted bream, which was being distributed from a wooden hut in the courtyard. “They say they’ve brought a lot of everything and it’ll be given out next week.”
“What will we get?”
“Chocolate, canned foods, sugar, and macaroni.”
The large courtyard of KUBU was taken up, almost as far as the main entrance, by a long series of outbuildings that had been built by the grand duchess to whom this palace had formerly belonged. To the left and right of the outbuildings were narrow, poorly cobbled passageways with staircases and storerooms, where, from time to time, they distributed rations of fish, potato, meat, candied fruit, sugar, cabbage, salt, and other such kitchen supplies. In the yard’s storerooms they tended to distribute things that would have impeded the distribution of other foodstuffs from the central storehouse, which was located on the ground floor of the former palace. There, at the appointed hour on the appointed day of the week (both had been appointed once and for all), each member of KUBU received his basic weekly ration: portions of cereal, bread, tea, butter, and sugar. This curious, powerful, and active organization still awaits its historian, and so we shall not sketch out in meager strokes what shall one day be unrolled as a finished painting.
The point of these observations of mine is that there were many people in the courtyard who came primarily from the ranks of the intelligentsia. These people, if not passing through the courtyard, stood queuing by the doors of several storehouses, where shop assistants were cleaving meat bones with axes or dumping piles of sopping herring off scales into buckets. In one shop they were dishing out bream, about ten pounds per person, and I noticed the rusty tin-colored tail of a fish poking out of a torn sack that had been placed onto a little sledge. The load’s owner, an old man with abundantly bushy gray whiskers and matching long hair, held the sledge’s rope crooked in his elbow; he was intending to hand over a slip of paper to a downcast woman no longer in the first flush of youth, but was searching for it vainly among the bundle of documents he had extracted from the side pocket of his overcoat.
“Wait, Lucy,” he was saying with incipient annoyance, “let’s look again. Hmm … hmm … The pink one is the card for the bathhouse, the white, the one for the co-op, the yellow’s the one for the basic ration, the brown, the one for the family, this is a coupon for sugar, this one’s for the bread I haven’t yet received, and—what do we have here?—certificates from the housing committee, a questionnaire from the institute, an old, out-of-date coupon for herring, a receipt for the repair of my watch, a coupon for the laundry, and a coupon … Good Heavens!” he cried, “I’ve lost my other white card, and today’s the last day I can get the sugar ration!”
With that exclamation—a bitter one, for this was the fifth time he had leafed through his papers—he was forced to admit defeat and hurriedly shoved the whole volume back into his pocket, adding:
“Perhaps I left it the kitchen, when I was cleaning my boots! … I still have time! I can run home! I’ll be back in an hour, wait for me!”
They agreed where to meet, and the o
ld man, wrapping the rope around his mitten, began mincing toward the gate, hauling the sledge behind him. A sharp jolt dislodged the bream from the hole, and the fish dropped onto the snow. Picking it up, I shouted:
“A fish! A fish! You’ve lost a fish!”
But the old man had already vanished through the gate, and the woman was nowhere to be seen. Then, owing to the pained feeling of finding something edible, without any particular practical idea or burning joy, I picked up the bream, simply because it was lying at my feet, and thrust it into my pocket. I then began to cut across various queues, stumbling now and again over creeping sledges. I made my way through the thronging crowd in the first corridor toward the clerical office, intending to inquire about my application.
A secretary with a gloomy face, whose desk was surrounded by women, children, old men, artists, actors, writers, and scholars, each on his or her own dreary business (that peculiar breed—ration adventurists—was also present), finally rifled through a heap of papers, in which he found a note against my name.
“Your case has yet to be decided,” he said. “The next committee session will take place on Tuesday—that is to say, in four days’ time.”
The hopes with which I had fought my way over to the desk having somewhat chilled, I removed upstairs, to the canteen, where for my last thousand I could have a glass of tea and a slice of bread. The commotion around me was so great that it recalled a ball or a banquet, the sole difference being that everyone was in hats and overcoats and dragging sacks behind them. Doors slammed throughout the entire building, above and below. The rumor about the foreign delegation bringing gifts was sweeping through; people were talking about it at every turn, in the canteen, and in the lobby.
“Have you heard about the delegation from Argentina?”
“Not from Argentina, but Spain.”
“From Spain, yes.”
“Oh, it’s all the same—but tell me, what have they brought? Oil, butter, lard? And are there any fabrics?”
Fandango and Other Stories Page 26