help; he guessed he could, and after a muffled confabulation with his fussy wife, just on the brim of the membrane (all I made out was “mad people are unpredictable”), she took over. They knew a very decent girl who had worked at the Russian nursery school “Passy na Rousi” to which Dolly had gone four or five years ago. The girl’s name was Anna Ivanovna Blagovo. Did I know Oksman, the owner of the Russian bookshop on rue Cuvier?
“Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you—”
“Well,” she went on, interrupting me, “Annette
sekre-tarstvovala
for him while his regular typist was hospitalized, but she is now quite well again, and you might—”
“That’s fine,” I said, “but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why did you accuse me of being an ‘unpredictable madman’? I can assure you that I am not in the habit of raping young women—”
“
Gospod’ s vami, golubchik!
(What an idea, my dear!)” exclaimed Mrs. Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding her absentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending to the telephone.
Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! too glib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. A few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most soothing
voyeuse
imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that the oxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau’s island zoo—especially from such bits as the “screaming shape,” still half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop, among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that I was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the Boyan Bookshop
sans tarder
, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.
After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of insomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according to police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how many unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced the least urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any light). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth or fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling’s death, I must havelooked pretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when a hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might have composed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own and presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:
Zvezdoobraznost’ nebesnyh zvyozd
Vidish’ tol’ko skvoz’ slyozy …
(Heavenly stars are seen as stellate
only through tears.)
I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light would delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a young emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.
4
The “Boyan” publishing firm (Morozov’s and mine was the “Bronze Horseman,” its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only
émigré
editions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library, occupied a smart three-story house of the
hôtel particulier
type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in
“Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you—”
“Well,” she went on, interrupting me, “Annette
sekre-tarstvovala
for him while his regular typist was hospitalized, but she is now quite well again, and you might—”
“That’s fine,” I said, “but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why did you accuse me of being an ‘unpredictable madman’? I can assure you that I am not in the habit of raping young women—”
“
Gospod’ s vami, golubchik!
(What an idea, my dear!)” exclaimed Mrs. Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding her absentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending to the telephone.
Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! too glib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. A few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most soothing
voyeuse
imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that the oxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau’s island zoo—especially from such bits as the “screaming shape,” still half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop, among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that I was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the Boyan Bookshop
sans tarder
, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.
After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of insomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according to police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how many unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced the least urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any light). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth or fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling’s death, I must havelooked pretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when a hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might have composed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own and presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:
Zvezdoobraznost’ nebesnyh zvyozd
Vidish’ tol’ko skvoz’ slyozy …
(Heavenly stars are seen as stellate
only through tears.)
I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light would delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a young emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.
4
The “Boyan” publishing firm (Morozov’s and mine was the “Bronze Horseman,” its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only
émigré
editions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library, occupied a smart three-story house of the
hôtel particulier
type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in
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