fragrance of her soft hair, but her arm slid down, and she sleepily nudged with the sole of her sandal the bag standing next to the armchair…. A rumbling approached and receded beyond the window. Then, in the silence, the whine of a mosquito became audible, and for some reason it evoked a fleeting memory of something infinitely remote, late bedtimes in his childhood, a dissolving lamp, the hair of his sister, his coeval, who had died long, long ago. “My sweetheart,” he repeated, and, nuzzling a curl out of the way, cuddling mussily, he tasted, exerting almost no pressure, her hot silky neck near the chill of the chain; then, taking her by the temples so that her eyes lengthened and narrowed, he began kissing her parting lips, her teeth…. She slowly wiped her mouth with bent knuckles, her head collapsed onto his shoulder, and between her eyelids there showed only a narrow, sunset-hued luster, for she was virtually asleep.
There was a knock at the door. He gave a violent start (hurriedly withdrawing his hand from her belt without having figured out how to unhook it). “Wake up, get off,” he said, giving her a quick shake. She opened her vacant eyes wide and slithered down over the hummock of his knee. “Come in,” he said.
The old fellow peeked in and announced that the gentleman was wanted downstairs, that there was somebody from the police station to see him.
“The police?” he asked, grimacing with bewilderment. “The police?… All right, you can go—I’ll be right down,” he added without getting up. He lit a cigarette, blew his nose and carefully refolded his handkerchief, squinting through the smoke. “Listen,” he said before going out, “your bag is over here. I’ll open it for you and you take out whatever you need, get undressed and go to bed in the meantime. The bathroom is the first door on the left.”
“Why the police?” he thought as he descended the badly lit staircase. “What do they want?”
“What’s the matter?” he asked sharply upon reaching the entrance hall and seeing an already restive gendarme, a swarthy giant with a cretin’s eyes and chin.
“The matter,” came the willing answer, “is that apparently you’ll have to accompany me to the police station—it’s not far.”
“Near or far,” spoke the traveler after a brief pause, “it’s after midnight, and I was getting ready for bed. Moreover, please be advised that any deduction, especially such a dynamic one, is a cry in the woods to an ear unfamiliar with the previous train of thought, or, to put it more simply, what is logical gets construed as being zoological. Besides, a globetrotter freshly and for the first time arrived in your hospitable little town would be curious to know your basis—some local custom, perhaps—for selecting the middle of the night to extend an invitation, an invitation that is all the more unacceptable because I am not alone but have a weary little girl with me. No, wait, I’m not through yet…. Who ever heard of justice putting the enforcement of a law first and the grounds for its application second? Wait for some accusations, gentlemen, wait for somebody to lodge a little complaint! For the time being, my neighbor cannot see through the wall, and the chauffeur cannot scrutinize my soul. In conclusion—and perhaps most important—be so kind as to acquaint yourself with my papers.”
The now befuddled dimwit acquainted himself, came to his senses, and went to work on the unlucky old man. It turned out that the latter not only had confused two similar names, but was unable to explain when and for what destination the desired drifter had departed.
“All right, all right,” said the traveler peaceably, having vented his vexation for the delay entirely on his too hasty foe, and fully aware of his own invulnerability (thank Doom she did not sit in the back of the car; thank Doom they did not go mushroom-hunting in the June sun—and, of course, that the shutters were tight).
Reaching the landing at a run, he realized he had not noted the room number, paused in hesitation, spat out the butt of his cigarette…. Now, however, the impatience of his emotions kept him from going back down for information, and besides it was unnecessary—he recalled the arrangement of the doors in the corridor. He found the right door, licked his chops, grabbed the doorknob, was about to—
The door was locked; he felt a horrid pang in the pit of his stomach. If she had locked herself in, it was to keep him out, it meant she was suspicious…. Shouldn’t have kissed her like that… Must have frightened her off, or she may have noticed something… Or the reason was sillier and simpler: she had naively decided that he had gone to bed in another room, it had not even entered her mind that she would be sleeping in the same room with a stranger—yes, still a stranger. And he knocked, as yet scarcely aware himself of the intensity of his alarm and irritation.
He heard some abrupt female laughter, the repulsive exclamation of bedsprings, and then the slap-slap of bare feet. “Who is it?” asked an angry male voice….“Wrong room, eh? Well, next time please find the right room. There’s somebody in here hard at work, there’s somebody in here trying to train a young person, that somebody is being interrupted….” Another burst of laughter resounded in the background.
A vulgar mistake, nothing more. He continued along the corridor—and suddenly realized he was on the wrong landing. He retraced his steps, turned the corner, cast a puzzled look at a meter on the wall, at a sink beneath a dripping faucet, at somebody’s tan shoes outside a door, turned again—the staircase had vanished! The one he finally found turned out to be different: he went down only to lose his way in some faintly lit storage rooms where stood trunks and, from the corners, now a cabinet, now a vacuum cleaner, now a broken stool, now the skeleton of a bed protruded with an air of fatality. He swore under his breath, losing control, exasperated by these obstacles…. At last he reached a door and gave it a shove, banged his head on a low lintel, and ducked out into the entrance hall next to a dimly illuminated nook, where, scratching the bristles of his cheek, the old man was peering into his black book, and the gendarme snored on a bench next to him—every bit as in a guardroom. Getting the needed information was a matter of one minute, slightly prolonged by the old man’s apologies.
He went in. He went in and first of all, before he looked at anything, stooping furtively, turned the key twice in the lock. Then he saw the black stocking with its elastic under the washstand. Then he saw the opened suitcase containing an incipient disorder, and a waffle-textured towel half extracted by its ear. Then he saw the dress and underwear heaped on the armchair, the belt, the other stocking. Only then did he turn toward the island of the bed.
She was lying supine atop the undisturbed blanket, with her left arm behind her head, in her little robe, whose lower part had fallen open—she had not been able to find her nightgown—and, by the light of the reddish lampshade, through the haze and stuffiness of the room, he could see her narrow, concave belly between the innocent, projecting hipbones. With the roar of cannon fire a truck ascended from the bottom of the night, a glass tinkled on the marble top of the night table, and it was strange to see how her enchanted slumber flowed evenly past everything.
Tomorrow of course we’ll begin at the beginning with a carefully pondered progression, but for now you’re asleep, you’re extraneous, don’t interfere with grown-ups, this is how it must be, it’s my night, it’s my business. He undressed, lay down to the left of the captive, rocking her ever so slightly, and froze, cautiously catching his breath. So. The hour he had deliriously desired for a full quarter century had finally come, yet it was shackled, even cooled by the cloud of his bliss. The flow and ebb of her light-colored robe, mingling with revelations of her beauty, still quivered before his eyes, intricately rippled as if seen through cut glass. He simply could not find the focal point of happiness, did not know where to begin, what one could touch, and how, within the realm of her repose, in order to savor this hour to the fullest. So. To start with, proceeding with clinical caution, he removed from his wrist the walleye of time and, reaching over her head, placed it on the bedside table between a glistening drop of water and the empty glass.
So. A priceless original: sleeping girl, oil. Her face in its soft nest of curls, scattered here, wadded together there, with those little fissures on her parched lips, and that special crease in the eyelids over the barely joined lashes, had a russet, roseate tint where the lighted cheek—whose Florentine outline was a smile in itself—showed through. Sleep, my precious, don’t listen to me.
Already his gaze (the self-aware gaze of one who is observing an execution or a point at the bottom of an abyss) was creeping downward along her form and his left hand was in motion—but here he gave a start as if someone had moved in the room, at the edge of his field of vision, for he had not immediately recognized the reflection in the wardrobe mirror (his pajama stripes, receding into the shadow, and an indistinct glint on the lacquered wood, and something black under her pink ankle).
Finally making up his mind, he gently stroked her long, just slightly parted, faintly sticky legs, which grew cooler and a little coarser on the way down, and progressively warmer farther up. He recalled, with a furious sense of triumph, the roller skates, the sun, the chestnut trees, everything—while he kept stroking with his fingertips, trembling and casting sidelong looks at the plump promontory, with its brand-new downiness, which, independently but with a familial parallel, embodied a concentrated echo of something about her lips and cheeks. A little higher, at
