hundred years’ time an ambitious failure will vent his frustration on the simpletons dreaming of a good life (that is if there does not come
The Potsdam square, always disfigured by city work (oh, those old postcards of it where everything is so spacious, with the droshki drivers looking so happy, and the trains of tight-belted ladies brushing the dust—but with the same fat flower-girls). The pseudo-Parisian character of Unter-den-Linden. The narrowness of the commercial streets beyond it. Bridge, barge, sea gulls. The dead eyes of old hotels of the second, third, hundredth class. A few more minutes of riding, and there was the station.
He caught sight of Zina in a beige georgette dress and a white little hat running up the steps. She was running with her pink elbows pressed to her sides, holding her handbag under her arm—and when he caught up with her and half embraced her, she turned round with that tender, blurry smile, with that happy sadness in her eyes with which she always greeted him when they met alone. “Listen,” she said, in a flurried voice, “I’m late, let’s run.” But he replied that he had already said good-by to them and would wait for her outside.
The low sun settling behind the rooftops seemed to have fallen out of the clouds that covered the rest of the sky (but they were by now quite soft and aloof, as if painted in melting undulations upon a greenish ceiling); there, in that narrow slit, the sky was on fire, and opposite, a window and some metallic letters shone like copper. A porter’s long shadow, pushing the shadow of a barrow, sucked in that shadow, but at the turning it protruded again at a sharp angle.
“We’ll miss you, Zina,” said Marianna Nikolavna, from the window of the carriage. “But in any case take your vacation in August and come over—we’ll see if you can’t perhaps stay for good.”
“I don’t think so,” said Zina. “Ah yes, I gave you my keys today. Don’t take them with you, please.”
“I left them in the hall… And Boris’s are in the desk… Never mind: Godunov will let you in,” added Marianna Nikolavna appeasingly.
“Well, well. Good luck to it,” said Boris Ivanovich from behind his wife’s plump shoulder and rolled his eyes. “Ah, Zinka, Zinka, just you come over and you shall ride a bicycle and swill milk—that’s the life!”
The train gave a shudder and started to move. Marianna Nikolavna kept waving for a long time. Shchyogolev drew in his head like a tortoise (and having sat down, probably emitted a Russian grunt).
She skipped down the steps—her bag now hung from her fingers, and the last rays of the sun caused a bronze gleam to dance in her eyes as she flew up to Fyodor. They kissed as ardently as if she had just arrived from far off, after a long separation.
“And now let’s go and have some supper,” she said, taking his arm. “You must be starved.”
He nodded. Now how to explain it? Why this strange embarrasment—instead of the exultant, voluble freedom I had been so eagerly looking forward to? It was as if I had grown disused from her, or else was unable to adjust myself and her, the former her, to this freedom.
“What’s the matter with you—you seem out of sorts?” she asked observantly after a silence (they were walking toward the bus stop).
“It’s sad to part with Boris the Brisk,” he replied, trying to see if a joke would resolve his emotional constraint.
“And I think it’s yesterday’s escapade,” said Zina, smiling, and he detected in her tone of voice a high-strung ring, which in its own way corresponded to his own confusion and thus both stressed and augmented it.
“Nonsense. The rain was warm. I feel wonderful.”
The bus rolled up, they boarded it. Fyodor paid for two tickets from his palm. Zina said: “I get my wages only tomorrow, so that all I have now is two marks. How much do you have?”
“Very little. Out of your two hundred I was left only three-fifty and more than a half of that I have blowed.”
“We have enough for supper, though,” said Zina.
“Are you quite sure you like the idea of a restaurant? Because I don’t too much.”
“Never mind, resign yourself. In general now it’s all over with healthy home cooking. I can’t even make an omelette. We must think about how to manage things. But for now I know an excellent place.”
Several minutes of silence. The streetlamps and shop windows were beginning to light up; the streets had grown pinched and gray from that immature light, but the sky was radiant and wide, and the sunset cloudlets were trimmed with flamingo down.
“Look, the photos are ready.”
He took them from her cold fingers. Zina standing in the street before her office, with legs placed tightly together and the shadow of a lime trunk crossing the sidewalk, like a boom lowered in front of her; Zina sitting sideways on a windowsill with a crown of sunshine around her head; Zina at work, badly taken, dark-faced—but to compensate this, her regal typewriter enthroned in the foreground, with a gleam on its carriage lever.
She thrust them back in her bag, took out and put back her monthly tram ticket in its cellophane holder, took out a small mirror, looked into it, baring the filling in her front tooth, replaced the mirror inside, clicked the bag shut, lowered it onto her knees, looked at her shoulder, brushed off a bit of fluff, put on her gloves, turned her head to the window—doing all this in rapid succession, with her features in motion, her eyes blinking and a kind of inner biting and sucking in of her cheeks. But now she sat motionless, looking away, the sinews in her pale neck stretched tight and her white-gloved hands lying on the glossy leather of her handbag.
The
Beyond the Potsdam square, just as they were approaching the canal, an elderly lady with prominent cheekbones (where had I seen her?) and with a goggle-eyed, trembling little dog under her arm made a dive for the exit, swaying and struggling with phantoms, and Zina looked up at her with a fleeting, heavenly glance.
“Did you recognize her?” she asked. “That was Lorentz. I think she’s mad at me because I never ring her up. Quite a superfluous woman, really.”
“There’s a smut on your cheek,” said Fyodor. “Careful, don’t smear it.”
Again the handbag, handkerchief, mirror.
“We soon have to get out,” she said presently. “What?”
“Nothing. I agree. Let’s get out where you like.”
“Here,” she said two stops later, taking his elbow, sitting again from a jolt, rising finally and fishing out her bag as if from water.
The lights had already taken shape; the sky was quite faint. A truck went by with a load of young people returning from some civic orgy, waving something or other and shouting something or other. In the middle of a treeless public garden consisting of a large oblong flower-bed rimmed by a footpath, an army of roses was in bloom. The small, open enclosure of a restaurant (six little tables) opposite this garden was separated from the sidewalk by a whitewashed barrier topped with petunias.
Beside them a boar and his sow were feeding, the waiter’s black fingernail dipped into the sauce, and yesterday a lip with a sore on it had been pressed to the gold border of my beer glass…. The mist of some sorrow had enveloped Zina—her cheeks, her narrowed eyes, her throat pit, her fragile clavicle—and this was somehow enhanced by the pale smoke from her cigarette. The scuffing of passersby seemed to stir up the thickening darkness.
Suddenly, in the frank evening sky, very high …
“Look,” he said. “What a beauty!”
A brooch with three rubies was gliding over the dark velvet—so high that not even the hum of the engine was audible.
She smiled, parting her lips and looking upwards.
“Tonight?” he asked, also looking upwards.
Only now had he entered into the order of feelings he used to promise himself, when formerly he imagined how they would slip together out of a thralldom that had gradually asserted itself in the course of their meetings, and grown habitual, even though it was based on something artificial, something unworthy, in fact, of the significance it had acquired: now it seemed incomprehensible why on any of those four hundred and fifty-five days she and he had not simply moved out of the Shchyogolev’s apartment to dwell together; but at the same time he knew subrationally that this external obstacle was merely a pretext, merely an ostentatious device on the part of fate, which had hastily put up the first barrier to come to hand in order to engage meantime in the important, complicated business that secretly required the very delay in development which had seemed to depend on a
