that if it hadn’t happened, she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.
‘Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, an hour later, when, without having noticed the city, we found ourselves by the Kremlin wall on the embankment.
‘We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years. We arranged to meet the next day at the same place on the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun shone down on us. And soon, very soon, this woman became my secret wife.
‘She used to come to me every afternoon, but I would begin waiting for her in the morning. This waiting expressed itself in the moving around of objects on the table. Ten minutes before, I would sit down by the little window and begin to listen for the banging of the decrepit gate. And how curious: before my meeting with her, few people came to our yard — more simply, no one came — but now it seemed to me that the whole city came flocking there.
‘Bang goes the gate, bang goes my heart, and, imagine, it’s inevitably somebody’s dirty boots level with my face behind the window. A knife-grinder. Now, who needs a knife-grinder in our house? To sharpen what? What knives?
‘She would come through the gate once, but my heart would pound no less than ten times before that, I’m not lying. And then, when her hour came and the hands showed noon, it even wouldn’t stop pounding until, almost without tapping, almost noiselessly, her shoes would come even with my window, their black suede bows held tightly by steel buckles.
‘Sometimes she would get mischievous, pausing at the second window and tapping the glass with her toe. That same instant I would be at the window, but the shoe would be gone, the black silk blocking the light would be gone — I’d go and open the door for her.
‘No one knew of our liaison, I assure you of that, though it never happens. Her husband didn’t know, her acquaintances didn’t know. In the old house where I had that basement, people knew, of course, they saw that some woman visited me, but they didn’t know her name.’
‘But who is she?’ asked Ivan, intrigued in the highest degree by this love story.
The guest made a gesture signifying that he would never tell that to anyone, and went on with his story.
Ivan learned that the master and the unknown woman loved each other so deeply that they became completely inseparable. Ivan could clearly picture to himself the two rooms in the basement of the house, where it was always twilight because of the lilacs and the fence. The worn red furniture, the bureau, the clock on it which struck every half hour, and books, books, from the painted floor to the sooty ceiling, and the stove.
Ivan learned that his guest and his secret wife, from the very first days of their liaison, had come to the conclusion that fate itself had thrown them together at the corner of Tverskaya and that lane, and that they had been created for each other for all time.
Ivan learned from the guest’s story how the lovers would spend the day. She would come, and put on an apron first thing, and in the narrow front hall where stood that same sink of which the poor patient was for some reason so proud, would light the kerosene stove on the wooden table, prepare lunch, and set it out on the oval table in the first room. When the May storms came and water rushed noisily through the gateway past the near-sighted windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes in it. Steam rose from the potatoes, the black potato skins dirtied their fingers. Laughter came from the basement, the trees in the garden after rain shed broken twigs, white clusters.
When the storms ended and sultry summer came, there appeared in the vase the long-awaited roses they both loved. The man who called himself a master worked feverishly on his novel, and this novel also absorbed the unknown woman.
‘Really, there were times when I’d begin to be jealous of it on account of her,’ the night visitor come from the moonlit balcony whispered to Ivan.
Her slender fingers with sharply filed nails buried in her hair, she endlessly reread what he had written, and after rereading it would sit sewing that very same cap. Sometimes she crouched down by the lower shelves or stood by the upper ones and wiped the hundreds of dusty spines with a cloth. She foretold fame, she urged him on, and it was then that she began to call him a master. She waited impatiently for the already promised last words about the fifth procurator of Judea, repeated aloud in a sing-song voice certain phrases she liked, and said that her life was in this novel.
It was finished in the month of August, was given to some unknown typist, and she typed it in five copies. And finally the hour came when he had to leave his secret refuge and go out into life.
‘And I went out into life holding it in my hands, and then my life ended,’ the master whispered and drooped his head, and for a long time nodded the woeful black cap with the yellow letter ‘M’ on it. He continued his story, but it became somewhat incoherent, one could only understand that some catastrophe had then befallen Ivan’s guest.
‘For the first time I found myself in the world of literature, but now, when it’s all over and my ruin is clear, I recall it with horror!’ the master whispered solemnly and raised his hand. ‘Yes, he astounded me greatly, ah, how he astounded me!’
‘Who?’ Ivan whispered barely audibly, fearing to interrupt the agitated narrator.
‘Why, the editor, I tell you, the editor! Yes, he read it all right. He looked at me as if I had a swollen cheek, looked sidelong into the corner, and even tittered in embarrassment. He crumpled the manuscript needlessly and grunted. The questions he asked seemed crazy to me. Saying nothing about the essence of the novel, he asked me who I was, where I came from, and how long I had been writing, and why no one had heard of me before, and even asked what in my opinion was a totally idiotic question: who had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a strange theme? Finally I got sick of him and asked directly whether he would publish the novel or not. Here he started squirming, mumbled something, and declared that he could not decide the question on his own, that other members of the editorial board had to acquaint themselves with my work — namely, the critics Latunsky and Ariman, and the writer Mstislav Lavrovich.2 He asked me to come in two weeks. I came in two weeks and was received by some girl whose eyes were crossed towards her nose from constant lying.’
‘That’s Lapshennikova, the editorial secretary,’ Ivan said with a smirk. He knew very well the world described so wrathfully by his guest.
‘Maybe,’ the other snapped, ‘and so from her I got my novel back, already quite greasy and dishevelled. Trying to avoid looking me in the eye, Lapshennikova told me that the publisher was provided with material for two years ahead, and therefore the question of printing my novel, as she put it, “did not arise”.
