Thus began his life in his new hole. His landlady could not get used to his habits of sleeping till noon, lunching none knew how or where, and dining off greasy wrapping paper. His book of poems did not get any reviews after all (somehow he had assumed it would happen automatically and had not even taken the trouble of sending out review copies), except for a brief note in Vasiliev’s Gazeta, signed by the financial correspondent, who expressed an optimistic view of his literary future and quoted one stanza with a deadly misprint. He came to know Tannenberg Street better and it yielded him all its fondest secrets: such as the fact that next door in the basement lived an old shoemaker by the name of Kanarienvogel and there actually was a bird cage, although minus its yellow captive, in his purblind window, among samples of repaired footwear; but as for Fyodor’s shoes, the cobbler looked at him over the top of the steel-rimmed spectacles of his guild and refused to repair them; so Fyodor started thinking of buying a new pair. He also learned the name of the upstairs tenants: having zoomed one day by mistake to the top landing, he read on a brass nameplate Carl Lorentz, Geschichtsmaler, and one day Romanov, whom he met at a street corner and who shared a studio in another part of the city with the Geschichtsmaler, told Fyodor a few things about him: he was a toiler, a misanthrope and a conservative, who had spent his whole life painting parades, battles, the imperial phantom with his star and ribbon, haunting the Sans-Souci park—and who now, in the uniformless republic, was impoverished and begloomed. He had enjoyed before 1914 a distinguished reputation, had visited Russia to paint the Kaiser’s meeting with the Tsar, and while wintering in St. Petersburg had met his present wife, Margarita Lvovna, who was at the time a young and enchanting dilettante who dabbled in all the arts. His alliance in Berlin with the Russian emigre painter had begun by accident, as a result of a newspaper advertisement. This Romanov was of quite a different cut. Lorentz developed a sullen attachment to him, but since the day of Romanov’s first exhibition (in which he showed his portrait of Countess d’X, stark naked with corset marks on her stomach, holding her own self diminished to one- third life-size) had considered him a madman and a swindler. Many, however, were captivated by the young artist’s bold and original gift; extraordinary successes were predicted for him and some even saw in him the originator of a neonaturalist school: after passing through all the trials of so-called modernism, he was said to have arrived at a renovated, interesting and somewhat cold narrative art. In his early works a certain trace of the cartoonist’s style was still evident—for example, in that thing of his called “Coincidence,” where, on an advertising post, among the vivid, remarkably harmonious colors of playbills, astral names of cinemas and other transparent motley, one could read a notice about a lost diamond necklace (with a reward to the finder), which necklace lay right there on the sidewalk, at the very foot of the post, its innocent fire sparkling. In his “Autumn,” though, the black tailor’s dummy with its ripped side, dumped in a ditch among magnificent maple leaves, was already expressiveness of a purer quality; connoisseurs found in it an abyss of sadness. But his best work to date remained one that had been acquired by a discerning tycoon and had already been extensively reproduced, called “Four Citizens Catching a Canary”; all four were in black, broad-shouldered, tophatted (although for some reason one of them was barefoot), and placed in odd, exultant and at the same time wary poses beneath the strikingly sunny foliage of a squarely trimmed linden tree in which hid the bird, perhaps the one that had escaped from my shoemaker’s cage. I was obscurely thrilled by Romanov’s strange, beautiful, yet venomous art; I perceived in it both a forestalling and a forewarning: having far outdistanced my own art, it simultaneously illuminated for it the dangers of the way. As for the man himself, I found him boring to the point of revulsion—I could not stand his extremely rapid, extremely lisping speech, accompanied by a totally irrelevant, automatic rolling of his shining eyes. “Listen,” he said, spitting at my chin, “why don’t you let me introduce you to Margarita Lorentz—she has told me to bring you over some night—do come, we hold little soirees at the studio—you know, with music, sandwiches, red lampshades—a lot of young people come—the Polonski girl, the Shidlovski brothers, Zina Mertz….”
These names were unknown to me; I felt no desire to spend evenings in the company of Vsevolod Romanov, nor did Lorentz’s pug-faced wife interest me in any way—so not only did I not accept the invitation, but since that time I began avoiding the artist.
In the morning the potato-hawker’s cry “Prima Kartoffel!” rang out in the street, in a high, disciplined singsong (but how the young vegetable’s heart throbs!) or else a sepulchral bass proclaimed “Blumenerde!” The thump of rugs being beaten was sometimes joined by a hurdy-gurdy, which was painted brown and mounted on squalid cart wheels, with a circular design on its front depicting an idyllic brook; and cranking now with his right hand, now with his left, the sharp-eyed organ-grinder pumped out a thick “O sole mio.” That sun was already inviting me into the square. In its garden a young chestnut tree, still unable to walk alone and therefore supported by a stake, suddenly came out with a flower bigger than itself. The lilacs, however, did not bloom for a long time; but when they finally made up their mind, then, within one night, which left a considerable number of cigarette butts under the benches, they encircled the garden with ruffled richness. In a quiet lane behind the church the locust trees shed their petals on a gray June day, and the dark asphalt next to the sidewalk looked as if cream of wheat had been spilled on it. In the rose beds around the statue of a bronze runner the Dutch Glory disengaged the corners of its red petals and was followed by General Arnold Janssen. One happy and cloudless day in July, a very successful ant flight was staged: the females would take to the air, and the sparrows, also taking to the air, would devour them; and in places where nobody bothered them they kept crawling along the gravel and shedding their feeble prop-room wings. From Denmark the papers reported that as a result of a heat wave there, numerous cases of insanity were being observed: people were tearing off their clothes and jumping into the canals. Male gypsy moths dashed about in wild zigzags. The lindens went through all their involved, aromatic, messy metamorphoses.
Fyodor, in his shirt-sleeves and with sneakers on his sockless feet, would spend the greater part of the day on an indigo bench in the public garden, a book in his long tanned fingers; and when the sun beat down too hard, he would lean his head on the hot back of the bench and shut his eyes for long periods; the ghostly wheels of the city day revolved through the interior bottomless scarlet, and the sparks of children’s voices darted past, and the book, open in his lap, became ever heavier and more unbooklike; but now the scarlet darkened under a passing cloud, and lifting his sweaty neck, he would open his eyes and once again see the park, the lawn with its marguerites, the freshly watered gravel, the little girl playing hopscotch with herself, the pram with the baby consisting of two eyes and a pink rattle, and the journey of the blinded, breathing, radiant disk through the cloud—then everything would blaze once again and along the dappled street, lined with restless trees, a coal truck would thunder by with the grimy driver on his high, bumpy seat, clenching the stalk of an emerald-bright leaf in his teeth.
In the late afternoon he would go to give a lesson—to a businessman with sandy eyelashes, who looked at him with a dull gaze of malevolent perplexity as Fyodor unconcernedly read him Shakespeare; or to a schoolgirl in a black jumper, whom he sometimes felt like kissing on her bent yellowish nape; or to a jolly thickset fellow who had served in the imperial navy, who said est’ (aye-aye) and obmozgovat’ (to dope it out), and was preparing dat’ drapu (to blow) to Mexico, escaping secretly from his mistress, a two-hundred-pound, passionate and doleful old woman who had happened to flee to Finland in the same sleigh as he and since then, in perpetual jealous despair, had been feeding him meat pies, cream pudding, pickled mushrooms…. Besides these English lessons there were lucrative commercial translations—reports on the low sound conductivity of tile floors or treatises about ball bearings; and finally, a modest but particularly precious income came from his lyrical poems, which he composed in a kind of drunken trance, and always with that same nostalgic, patriotic fervor; some of them did not materialize in final form, dissolving instead, fertilizing the innermost depths, while others, completely polished and equipped with all their commas, were taken to the newspaper office—first via a subway train with glinting reflections rapidly ascending its vertical stangs of brass, then in the strange emptiness of an enormous elevator to the ninth floor, where at the end of a corridor the color of gray modeling clay, in a narrow little room smelling of “the decaying corpse of actuality” (as the number one office comic used to crack), sat the secretary, a moonlike, phlegmatic person, ageless and virtually sexless, who had more than once saved the day when, angered by some item in Vasiliev’s liberal paper, menacing rowdies would come, German Trotskyists hired locally, or some robust Russian Fascist, a rogue and a mystic.
The telephone jangled; ripply proofs breezed past; the theater critic kept on reading a stray Russian newspaper from Vilna. “Why, do we owe you money? Nothing of the kind,” the secretary would say. When the door to the room on the right opened, one could hear the juicily dictating voice of Getz, or Stupishin clearing his throat, and among the clatter of several typewriters one could make out the swift rat-tat-tat of Tamara.
At the left was Vasiliev’s office; his lustrine jacket grew tight across his plump shoulders as, standing before the lectern he used as a writing table and puffing like some powerful machine, he wrote the leading article in his untidy handwriting with its schoolroom blots, headed: “No Improvement in Sight,” or “The Situation in China.”
