broken windows and a bloody handkerchief on the running board; a half-a-dozen people still loafed around, gaping at it. Everything was sun mottled; a puny old man with a dyed little beard and wearing cloth spats sat sunning himself on a green bench, with his back to the traffic, while opposite him across the sidewalk, an elderly, rosy-faced beggar woman with legs cut off at the pelvis was set down like a bust at the foot of a wall and was selling paradoxical shoelaces. Between the houses could be seen a vacant lot and on it something was modestly and mysteriously blooming; beyond it the continuous slaty-black backs of houses that seemed to have turned to leave, carried strange, attractive and seemingly completely autonomous whitish designs, reminding one not quite of the canals on Mars and not quite of something very distant and half-forgotten, like an accidental expression from a once-heard fairy tale or old scenery for some unknown play.
Down the helical stairs of the bus that drew up came a pair of charming silk legs: we know of course that this has been worn threadbare by the efforts of a thousand male writers, but nevertheless down they came, these legs—and deceived: the face was revolting. Fyodor climbed aboard, and the conductor, on the open top deck, smote its plated side with his palm to tell the driver he could move on. Along this side and along the toothpaste advertisement upon it swished the tips of soft maple twigs—and it would have been pleasant to look down from above on the gliding street ennobled by perspective, if it were not for the everlasting, chilly thought: there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages—when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes—a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds. What he should be really teaching was that mysterious and refined thing which he alone—out of ten thousand, a hundred thousand, perhaps even a million men—knew how to teach: for example— multilevel thinking: you look at a person and you see him as clearly as if he were fashioned of glass and you were the glass blower, while at the same time without in the least impinging upon that clarity you notice some trifle on the side—such as the similarity of the telephone receiver’s shadow to a huge, slightly crushed ant, and (all this simultaneously) the convergence is joined by a third thought—the memory of a sunny evening at a Russian small railway station; i.e., images having no rational connection with the conversation you are carrying on while your mind runs around the outside of your own words and along the inside of those of your interlocutor. Or: a piercing pity—for the tin box in a waste patch, for the cigarette card from the series
The bus rolled on—and presently he arrived at his destination—the place of a lone and lonesome young woman, very attractive in spite of her freckles, always wearing a black dress opened at the neck and with lips like sealing-wax on a letter in which there was nothing. She continually looked at Fyodor with pensive curiosity, not only taking no interest in the remarkable novel by Stevenson which he had been reading with her for the past three months (and before that they had read Kipling at the same rate), but also not understanding a single sentence, and noting down words as you would note down the address of someone you knew you would never visit. Even now—or more exactly, precisely now and with greater agitation than before, Fyodor (although in love with another who was incomparable in fascination and intelligence) wondered what would happen if he placed his palm on this slightly trembling little hand with the sharp fingernails, lying so invitingly close—and because he knew what would happen then his heart suddenly began to thump and his lips immediately went dry; at this point, however, he was involuntarily sobered by a certain intonation of hers, her little laugh, the smell of that certain scent which somehow was always used by the very women who liked him, although to him this dullish, sweetish-brown smell was unbearable. She was a worthless, cunning woman with a sluggish soul; but even now, when the lesson was over and he had gone out into the street, he was seized by a vague feeling of annoyance; he could imagine much better than he had just been able to, in her presence, how gaily and yieldingly her compact little body would probably have responded to everything, and with painful vividness he saw in an imaginary mirror his hand on her back and her smooth auburn head thrown back, and then the mirror significantly emptied and he experienced that most trivial of all feelings on earth: the stab of a missed opportunity.
No, that was not so—he had missed nothing. The sole joy of these unrealizable embraces was their ease of evocation. During the past ten years of lonely and restrained youth, living on a cliff where there was always a bit of snow and from where it was a long way down to the little brewery town at the foot of the mountain, he had become accustomed to the thought that between the deceit of casual love and the sweetness of its temptation there was a void, a gap in life, an absence of any real action on his part, so that on occasion, when he looked at a passing girl, he imagined simultaneously both the stupendous possibility of happiness and repugnance for its inevitable imperfection—charging this one instant with a romantic image, but diminishing its triptych by the middle section. He knew therefore that their reading of Stevenson would never be interrupted by a Dantean pause, knew that if such a break should take place he would not experience a thing, except a devastating chill because the demands of the imagination were unfulfillable, and because the vacuousness of a gaze, forgiven for the sake of beautiful, moist eyes, inevitably corresponded to a defect as yet concealed—the vacuous expression of breasts, which it was impossible to forgive. But sometimes he envied the simple love life of other men and the way they probably had of whistling while taking off their shoes.
Crossing Wittenberg Square where, as in a color film, roses were quivering in the breeze around an antique flight of stairs which led down to an underground station, he walked toward the Russian bookshop: between lessons there was a chink of spare time. As always happened when he came to this street (beginning under the auspices of a huge department store that sold all forms of local bad taste, and ending after several crossroads in burgherish calm, with poplar shadows on the asphalt, all chalked over by hopscotchers) he met an elderly, morbidly embittered St. Petersburg writer who wore an overcoat in summer to hide the shabbiness of his suit, a dreadfully skinny man with bulging dark brown eyes, wrinkles of fastidious distaste around his apish mouth, and one long, curved hair growing out of a big black pore on his broad nose—a detail which attracted Fyodor Konstantinovich’s attention much more than the conversation of this clever schemer, who embarked immediately he met anyone upon something in the nature of a fable, a long farfetched anecdote of yore, which turned out to be merely a prelude to some amusing gossip about a mutual acquaintance. Fyodor had barely got rid of him when he caught sight of two more writers, a good-naturedly gloomy Muscovite whose carriage and aspect were somewhat reminiscent of the Napoleon of the island period, and a satirical poet from the Berlin Russian-emigre paper, a frail little man with a kindly wit and a quiet, hoarse voice. These two, like their predecessor, invariably turned up in this region, which they used for leisurely walks, rich in encounters, so that it seemed as if on this German street there had encroached the vagabond phantom of a Russian boulevard, or as if on the contrary a street in Russia, with several natives taking the air, swarmed with the pale ghosts of innumerable foreigners flickering among those natives like a familiar and barely noticeable hallucination. They chatted about the writer just encountered, and Fyodor sailed on. After a few steps he noticed Koncheyev reading on the stroll the feuilleton at the bottom of the Paris Russian-emigre paper, with a marvelous angelic smile on his round face. The engineer Kern came out of a Russian food shop, cautiously thrusting a small parcel into the briefcase pressed against his chest, and on a cross street (like the confluence of people in a dream or in the last chapter of Turgenev’s
Fyodor Konstantinovich reached the bookshop. In the window he could see, among the zigzags, cogs and numerals of Soviet cover designs (this was the time when the fashion there was to have titles like
