Lipotin gave an irritated shrug of the shoulders:
“If this one here is the original then Prince Yussupoff must have been given the copy. – – Anyway, it doesn’t matter, the price I received was for the original; and the Prince, his house and his collections have been swept away from the face of the earth. Any further argument is pointless; to each his own.”
“And the old mirror, obviously English?” I asked.
“Is, if you insist, genuine. It is the mirror that was originally in the frame. Yussupoff had a new Venetian glass put in the frame as he was buying the mirror for his own use. He was superstitious. He said too many people had already looked into the mirror; that kind of thing could bring bad luck.”
“And so –?”
“And so you can keep it, sir, if it has taken your fancy. It’s not worth talking about a price.”
“But if the frame is genuine after all?”
“It has been paid for. Genuine or fake – let me make you a present of this memento from my native land.”
I know Russian obstinacy. It was as he said: genuine or fake, I had to accept the present. Otherwise he would have been offended. Better to let it stick at “fake” so that he wouldn’t get annoyed at his mistake later on, if he should realise he had made a mistake.
And that’s how I came by a little masterpiece of an early baroque frame.
I silently decided to find a way of compensating him for his generosity by giving him a good price for some other piece. But nothing else that he showed me was of any interest. That, I’m afraid, is the way things usually are: the opportunity of turning a good intention into action is much rarer than that of satisfying a selfish urge. So it was somewhat shamefacedly that I left, half an hour later, with Lipotin’s gift under my arm, without leaving behind anything more than a promise to make up for it with several purchases on my next visit.
It was around eight o’clock that I arrived home and found nothing on my desk, apart from a note from my housekeeper saying that her replacement had come about six and asked if it was all right not to start until eight o’clock as there were some arrangements she still had to make. My housekeeper had then left at seven, so I had made good use of the brief interregnum with my visit to Lipotin. I could look forward to the arrival of my new chatelaine in a few minutes, always assuming Frau Fromm kept her word.
In something of a bad mood because my old friend, Gärtner, had not kept to his promise, I decided to cheer myself up by unpacking Lipotin’s present, which I still had under my arm.
The harsh electric light could not disguise its perfection. Even the deep green glass with its opalescent spots seemed to have an antique charm; it glowed in the frame, more like a beautifully polished, smoky moss-agate – in places almost like a gigantic emerald – than the murky glass of an old mirror.
Strangely fascinated by the chance beauty of an ancient mirror-glass with its oxidised silver backing, I propped the thing up before me and immersed myself in its unfathomable depths shot with mysterious, iridescent reflections.
How did the change come over me? I began to feel as if I were no longer standing in my study, but was at the station in the middle of the throng of arriving passengers and people waiting at the barrier. And wasn’t that Dr. Gärtner waving his hat at me from the crowd?! I pushed my way through the press and managed, with some difficulty, to reach my friend who was coming laughing towards me. For a moment I was struck by the fact that he had no luggage: strange, he must have sent it all on ahead, I thought, but then I forgot the matter completely.
We greeted each other warmly; we hardly even bothered to mention the fact that we had not seen each other for close on thirty years.
Outside we took a cab and soon reached my flat – the journey was strangely smooth and silent, almost as if the carriage were gliding along. We kept up a lively conversation all the way there and all the way up the stairs so that I did not really concentrate on other matters, such as how the cabby was paid, for example. Everything seemed to take care of itself and was forgotten in the instant. And it was just the same when we entered my flat: my astonishment at finding some things were not quite in their usual places was brief and, so to speak, absent-minded and peripheral. The first phenomenon of this kind that I noticed was when I glanced out of one of the windows and saw, instead of the expected row of houses and gardens, a huge meadow with the outlines of unknown trees and an unfamiliar horizon.
Strange! I thought – but that was all, for on the other hand the view also seemed familiar and expected. And my friend Gärtner kept my attention occupied with his lively questioning and appeals to my memory of this or that incident from our student days.
Then when we had settled ourselves comfortably in my study I felt like jumping up out of the chair I had sat down in: it was an old-fashioned armchair with high armrests and huge, padded wings and it was certainly not part of the furnishings of my flat: suddenly the accustomed environment seemed so alien, and yet, again, it felt reassuringly familiar. Oddly enough, I kept all these observations, reflections and feelings to myself; not a word of this unease did I mention to my friend as everything went on as normal and the conversation flowed without a break.
The changes to which
