Pushkin, "Окно"

A very popular poem ("Window") by this writer of genius.  You can read the original here.

One darkened time not long ago,        
Beneath an empty moon's sad reign,
In foggy haze of endless flow,
A girl sat by a window pane.  
Alone I saw her brood in thought,   
Her breast a-heave in secret thrills;
As her keen gaze the circuits caught
Of one dark path beneath the hills.

"I'm here!" came forth a whisper's snatch,       
And shaking, she moved quick her hands, 
Through fear and angst to window's latch,
The moon as lightless as the lands. 
"Luck's child," I said with certain woe,
"For you but joy awaits your heart! 
"And when shall I some evening know,
"A window open as fate's chart?"

Akhmatova, "Алиса"

A work ("Alisa") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

1

She worried still about the past,          
About her dreams of distant Mays, 
As Pierrette's mind became the last  
Retreat of whole and golden days.

The shards of jug she gathered strewn,  
Not knowing how to piece them back.           
"If only you, Alisa, knew                           
How life is dull, how life is slack!

"At dinner yawns engulf the meal,    
And food and drink I soon forget.   
Be sure oblivion conceals
My brows, which I no longer fret.

"Give me the means, Alisa mine,    
To bring it back, all back to me!   
All that I have is yours with time,             
From house and clothes then set me free.         

"He came to me in dream-like crown,         
Each night I fear, each night lie scared!"   
Do you know whose dark ringlet frowns             
In the locket Alisa wears?   

2

"How late! So tired then I yawn."
"Мignon, lie there, you needn't move,
My reddish hair, coiffed and drawn,
For my coy mistress I improve."

In bows of green with pearly hasp
Amidst her hair, she read the note:
"I'll wait for you by maple's grasp;
For you I'll wait, O Count unknown!"

Beneath a mask of lace I see 
Her stifle laughs of baleful spite; 
Today she even ordered me    
To strangle her with garters tight.   

On blackest dress came morning's face  
From window's corner dark it shone:
"And me I know he will embrace
By maple's grasp, my Count unknown."

The Visit to the Museum

Upon strolling recently through this exquisite museum, one of the New World's finest, I could not but recollect the happy childhood memories of other museums and books about museums that seemed so much more enthralling the less I knew about the world.  As much as learning remains one of my great passions, museums tend not to interest me.  The simple reason is that they now house things that have no business being in museums, much less meriting our admiration; the more complicated explanation is that they have lost their pedagogical flair.  Modern art, that bastion of mediocrity, fraud and alleged democratic ideals, has polluted the walls and catalogs of museums for so long that we yearn for the day when someone actually had to have talent to get his works exhibited.  Yet we also yearn for the systematic coherence that is the hallmark of civilization.  If you were to visit this northern palace, this vessel of ancient wisdom, or this jewel amidst Florence's alleyways and fountains, your experience would be one of awe not only in the genius of homo sapiens, but also in the commonalities over which man has always obsessed – time, space, God, love, death, nostalgia, revenge, betrayal, and the unifying denominator among all these topoi, truth.  Art, great art, is the truth within our souls.  When one pair of eyes can perceive even for a moment the truth behind another's work and be edified by this revelation, the ultimate goal of art has been achieved.  But as we know not all museums feature art; some are merely collections of empires from bygone days, which should inform our reading of this famous story.

Our Russian narrator is going to a place named Montisert, when a friend of his in Paris, equally Russian and equally without a homeland (this is, after all, the 1930s), asks him for a curious favor: drop by the local museum and try to purchase "a portrait of his grandfather by Leroy."  The narrator accedes to this request if only to humor his friend as well as because he "had always had doubts about [his] friend's capacity to remain this side of fantasy."  The setup in stories of this ilk, even from a master plotter like Nabokov, is the unpleasant comeuppance of someone who assumes that the dreams of others cannot be realized through the performance of small gestures of kindness.  The narrator, an educated man by his allusions and diction, proceeds as planned to the museum where he encounters a caretaker who tries to dissuade him from being too interested in any type of acquisition.  It takes a good survey of the odds and ends contained in this "building of modest proportions" before he finds something of greater interest than "old, worn coins resting in the velvet of their compartments," a Chinese vase, or "a red-and-green map of Montisert in the seventeenth century":

At once my eye was caught by the portrait of a man between two abominable landscapes (with cattle and "atmosphere").  I moved closer and, to my considerable amazement, found the very object whose existence had hitherto seemed to me but the figment of an unstable mind.  The man, depicted in wretched oils, wore a frock coat, whiskers and a large pince-nez on a cord; he bore a likeness to Offenbach, but, in spite of the work's vile conventionality, I had the feeling one could make out in his features the horizon of a resemblance, as it were, to my friend.  In one corner, meticulously traced in carmine against a black background, was the signature Leroy in a hand as commonplace as the work itself.

In a more traditional narrative we would expect a bustle over negotiating the transfer of the work, and our narrator would either shun inferior art in favor of his own good taste or come to understand that the nostalgic plainness of his friend's memories is a harmless trifle in a world teeming with ogres and demons – but this is hardly a traditional narrative.  Unable to have the caretaker authorize the half-desired transaction and aware of the bureaucratic mechanisms at work, our protagonist promptly asks to see a supervisor.  He is directed to the museum's director, a certain Monsieur Godard:

[He was] a thin middle-aged gentleman in high collar and dickey, with a pearl in the knot of his tie, and a face very much resembling a Russian wolfhound; as if that were not enough, he was licking his chops in a most doglike manner, while sticking a stamp on an envelope, when I entered his small but lavishly furnished room with its malachite inkstand on the desk and a strangely familiar Chinese vase on the mantel.

There is no chitchat as a prelude to the matter at hand.  According to the director and his trusted catalog, the picture in question is The Return of the Herd, not, as our narrator claims, Portrait of a Russian Nobleman by Gustave Leroy.  He offers the director the full sum his friend extended to him to verify what is looking more and more like a delusion or artistic imposition of the sort that Nabokov exploits in many other texts.  Nevertheless, once the two reach the museum, it turns out that the narrator and his odd friend have been correct in their assumptions and observations.  And this is where the narrator wanders into another wing of the museum and comes across several other items that he did not expect to find.

Why this tale is collected in books of ghost stories is not immediately evident, although there is certainly something otherworldly to its dénouement.  Our narrator is soon abandoned by his host and sees that troupes of other visitors with unlike goals have entered the museum and, by their very presence and commotion, are in the midst of tearing it asunder.  He sees, inter alia, marble legs, grand pianos, alembics, copper helmets, a room "radiant with Oriental fabrics," the entire skeleton of a whale, large paintings, aquariums, and a "bright parlor tastefully furnished in Empire style."  But perhaps most important are those other visitors:

All was not well at the museum.  From within issued rowdy cries, lewd laughter, and even what seemed like the sound of a scuffle.  We entered the first hall; there the elderly custodian was restraining two sacrilegists who wore some kind of festive emblems in their lapels and were altogether very purple-faced and full of pep as they tried to extract the municipal councillor's merds from beneath the glass.  The rest of the youths, members of some rural athletic organization, were making noisy fun, some of the worm in alcohol, others of the skull.  One joker was in rapture over the pipes of the steam radiator, which he pretended was an exhibit; another was taking aim at an owl with his fist and forefinger.  There were about thirty of them in all, and their motion and voices created a condition of crush and thick noise.

Someone more prone to disclosure might deem this scene the perfect allegory for modern art as symbolic of Soviet kitsch.  Old Russia then becomes the object of extensive museum exhibits, an effect of endless richness and artistic grandeur that can be beheld in this spectacular film shot, amazingly enough, on one take.  Like in that film, the narrator progresses through the development of Russian art and culture: from the simple cow herds and noblemen (the basic fiefdoms of yore) to the latest developments in science, art, technology and culture.  All this, of course, is obliterated by the Soviet machine.  But, I fear, such a dearth of subtlety has no place in a museum.

The Kreutzer Sonata

He shook my hand and smiled at the same time, a smile which seemed unabashedly mocking, and then began to explain to me how he had brought the notes to prepare for Sunday and that they were in disagreement as to what to play: should they tackle something more complicated and classic, namely Beethoven's violin sonata, or resign themselves to smaller, trivial pieces?

In the last century and a half – since, as it were, the dawn of science's urge to explain everything – we have come to impute our irrationalities to faults of nature.  No longer are we responsible for the evil thoughts we harbor (childhood anxieties writ large) or the actions that we take against the freedoms and rights of others (we only care about ourselves, anyway), nor the crimes for which we are ultimately tried and acquitted because we are insane.  Insane has come to mean irrational, and anyone who is irrational is clearly not in control of what he may inflict upon his fellow humans and their environment.  I cannot speak for all my readers, but you may want to consider what part of your day you actually spend in unadulterated rationality.  Are the caffeine and alcohol you imbibe or grease you consume helping you live longer and in better health?  The casual encounters with persons whose sexual histories could not possibly be known to you?  The wild thoughts scattered throughout your day about promotions, raises, sports teams, past relationships, annoyances, physical tics, and other neurotic trivialities that seem to be the hallmark of modern societies of privilege?  If we were truly rational, we would be very careful with what we eat, choose one mate and stay with her forever, exercise regularly, stop worrying about whether we will make our payment on our car or home, and be nice to everyone and everything, because over time most intelligent people come to see that so-called 'rational behavior' comprises only caring about your survival to the possible detriment of everyone else's.  Yet for people of faith, faith and rationality are synonymous.  They are synonymous not because we are too foolish to think for ourselves, but because believing in something greater than yourself becomes, with the proper spiritual insight, the most rational thing you could ever do precisely because there is no reason to do it other than itself.  Belief is how we form friendships, think of country, nation, and heritage, and, perhaps most importantly, how we love.  We love without evidence, because there can be no evidence for the intangible twine that binds one soul to another.  I may believe someone loves me, but I am guided in my belief by a covenant that what that person and I have is sacred and can defeat time, space and every other obstacle to immortality.  A fine way to segue into this controversial novella.

The narrator and the reader will spend their time fascinated by one lowly man, Pozdnyshev, whom the narrator meets in a train compartment as marriage and love are being discussed.  The time is the late nineteenth century and Romanticism has been replaced by railroads, distant love by the all-too-familiar commute of the factory worker.  What love used to be – wild, enchanting, a font of salvation – has now become a series of morose gestures packaged in the understanding that we must continue evolution from amoeba to ape to human to enough humans to conquer the globe with the breadth of our immediate desires.  And Pozdnyshev has indeed been very unlucky in love.  His views stem from a long marriage to a woman he once loved and the five children she bore him.  They married when he was still young and after he had had his fill of public houses, and they quickly settled into the habits of a typically haute bourgeoisie household.  Soon all aspects of what should have been love and affection begin to shrivel and flake, and it is, surprisingly enough, family life and marriage that are to blame.  Pozdnyshev comments that, "the attraction to children, the animal need to feed, nurture, and defend them, was present in my wife as in so many women as nothing more than precisely an animal instinct and the complete lack of imagination or reason."  The reproduction of the human race is exactly what Pozdnyshev sees as its downfall: an attempt to immortalize the flesh instead of the soul, a very topical retort in the late nineteenth century.  But this is not the crux of his issue with his family.  No, his problems commence when his wife decides to return to playing the piano.  

Little by little, it is this common if somewhat privileged life (the Pozdnyshevs reside in a much more splendid house than your average city dweller) that Pozdnyshev comes to see as a "vile lie."  And with his whole existence now subject to scrutiny in every detail, it is hardly remarkable that he hears more than one layer of meaning in his wife's everyday statements:

She began thinking of another love, one pure and new, or at least that's what I thought.   And here is where she began looking about as if in expectation of something.  I noticed this and could not help but feel an onrush of panic and anxiety.  She would talk to others, people she would happen to meet or accost, and I understood that what she was saying was actually directed at me.  She expressed herself boldly with nary a thought for the fact that merely an hour ago she had endorsed a wholly opposing position; she spoke half in jest about a mother's concerns – and any mother who says she doesn't have such concerns is lying – about devoting herself to her children while she is still young and while she can still enjoy life.  She looked after the children less, but not with the despair of before, and spent more and more time tending to herself, to her appearance, although she tried to hide this, as well as to her pleasures and her self-perfection.  It was then that she returned to the piano with great interest, the piano which she had once completely abandoned.  This is where it all began.

Whatever one may think of The Kreutzer Sonata, this passage contains its essence, but not in the form assumed by the cursory reader who might believe that Tolstoy is valuing family over individualism.  Once upon a time, a rakish and rather immoral young Lev regaled himself on the sweetness of life, on Wein, Weiber und Gesang, as Pozdnyshev himself comments, and forgot his greater purposes.  After a long, troubled, and fecund marriage to a woman who simply could not compare to his interest in writing, Tolstoy abandoned everything and condemned both facets of his previous existence: that of a Lothario and of a family man.  Neither one is praised because both in tandem represent the two easy options for modern human beings, be it the comfort of home and its concomitant security, love and plain living, or the lascivious freedoms and lightness of a life without any responsibility to anyone except yourself.  What Tolstoy comes to advocate is a life of abstinence and self-discovery in unison with one's spiritual beliefs – a noble cause if one taken to an unnecessary extreme by a mind that was always prone to extremes.  Pozdnyshev has lived both parts of Tolstoy's life and, while it is unproductive to weld fiction to fact, has decided on the basis of one important event to join his creator in hermitage.  That event is the arrival of the music teacher Trukhachevsky.

His father was a petty merchant; he was the youngest of three boys and the only one sent to his godmother in Paris to study at the conservatory.  And yet Trukhachevsky wasn't even a professional musician, but a "semi-professional."  He was not particularly handsome, but he did not need looks to attract a woman, he needed music.  And to Pozdnyshev there was something positively demonic about music:

They say that music has an elevating and sublimating effect on the soul.  Untrue!  Utter nonsense!  It most certainly has an effect, a terrible effect, not of sublimation nor of denigration, but one of disturbance.  How should I put it ... music forces me to forget myself, my true position in life, and under music's spell I seem to feel what I actually do not feel and understand what I don't really understand, and be able to do what I in fact cannot.  I would explain this phenomenon by saying that music acts like a yawn or like laughter; I am not sleepy but I yawn looking at someone yawning; and there is nothing to laugh about and yet I laugh when I hear someone laughing.

In other words, music, because of the rigidity of its form and the ineluctability that is its nature, must be understood by the common man as something to be understood, something that is done, something that everyone does.  It is, for Pozdnyshev, the bellwether of common values, easy morals, and plain decisions that shape the vast majority of human lives, and his wife is about to be cheapened by all these banalities and perhaps slip into that most banal and horrific crime of all, betrayal.  This is why Pozdnyshev finds the most insufferable circumstances that plague men of jealousy to be "those well-known bourgeois conditions in which the great and dangerous proximity of man to woman is permitted."  These circumstances are numerous: doctor's visits, balls, art lessons, and that most pernicious of all situations, music.  His wife's return to her piano, her neglect of her children (in her husband's estimation), and most of all, her interest in something greater than herself and her family all damn her to a crime that she may or may not have committed, although on more than one occasion we are presented with some ocular proof and left to ponder the ending without either possibility being confirmed.

Yet this story is not really about jealousy, it is about the decisions of man.  While his monumental novels are widely praised, Tolstoy is the type of writer who thrives on two great facets for short story writers: directness of characterization and a certain momentum that gets derailed in longer narratives.  In that vein, many have quibbled that The Kreutzer Sonata is one of his weaker works, owing in no small part to the moral framework that seems superimposed.  But the work must be commended on its clarity: the concatenation of small details of jealousy, one of the easiest emotions to write about because it is, with hatred, one of the most consuming, is made more remarkable by how similarly most tales of jealousy progress.  Jealousy allows one to find everything wrong and nothing right; to depict the world in conspiracy against you; and to portray the greatest crime of all, the one for which Judas and Pilate were sentenced to the last circle of hell.  There are many stories that start with ridiculous, almost insane premises, but very few follow them to their illogical ends.  More often than not, the reader is emotionally manipulated into seeing a world that appears far removed from contemporary reality and then provided with a last minute explanation for this odd state.  But bold is the tale that shirks the need for a comprehensive ending and sticks to its guns.  Or, in this case, its daggers.

You and I (part 3)

The third and final part of Sinyavsky's story. You can read the original here.

"All I wanted, my friend, was a word alone.  You're a joker, that's for sure!  My wife loves to remind me about that evening.  We certainly a lot of fun!  How we laughed, how we laughed!  Now, be honest, did you really believe that old fool?  All she was supposed to do was roast the duck and see to the guests ... that's all.  Then you made that joke and I got it immediately.  "Right through you," he says, "I can see right through you!"  Ha ha ha!  Ah, yes!  Oh, you joker, you!  D'you want me to get down on my knees and beg?  I'm just joking, joking, don't get mad.  I'm just saying all this out of respect.  Maybe you're still offended by what I said, old boy?  Is it because of Lida?  Forgive an old, foolish lecher.  You have nothing to be sorry about, we'll be completely fine in the end.  Eat to your heart's content!  A simple affair, and who remembers this stuff, anyway?  You understand, I'm old enough to be the father of either one of you.  I'm just like Christopher Columbus, the first one there, that's all.  I beat Lobzikov and Polyansky to it.  But I'm sorry all the same.  An lascivious itch, nothing more.  We too had our hour of glory.  But I see that you're different, you have your principles.  "I can see right through you!"  What was all that about?  Let's be calm and understanding.  Now, do you want me to get down on my knees and beg for your forgiveness?  I'd only do it for you because I respect you so much.  Want me to?"

But you didn't manage to figure out what all of this meant.  Looking around hastily, you didn't see how Heinrich Ivanovich Graube, in his hat and with his briefcase in hand, fell to his knees on the ground.  His massive physiognomy, yellowing under the ambient light, was full of the sadness of a noble plea.

For a second you entertained the wild notion that Heinrich Ivanovich was actually afraid of you.  

Then you chased away your illusions.  You realized just in time what sublime strategy was contained in such a lowly pose.  From below, rising from the dirt, it was easier to take hold of a human soul.  From below you could be easily assaulted.  Falling on his knees before you gives him the advantage of being able at any time to grab you from behind your legs and topple you onto your back.

Therefore, not waiting any longer, you recoiled to the side and seeing Graube's brows arch in surprise, you smacked him in the face, but not in his brows, in his eyes.  You turned around in the street.  Heinrich Ivanovich was sitting on the snow, his thick briefcase lying flat in front of him.  Graube was covering half of his face with one hand, but the healthy half continued looking at you.

"Wait!  Don't go!  You're wrong, I assure you!" he said, sniffing and howling lightly.  "How could I be your rival?  You're worried for nothing.  You're younger than I am, make sure that you look after your health.  Lida's going to show up right now, just whistle and she'll come.  D'you want me to tell her that you haven't left for Yalta?  She'll come running.  Want me to?"

But you didn't take the bait.  You forgot about the sausage you wanted to buy, ran home at full speed, and locked the door. 

5

And that same evening Lida came to visit him.  She rang twice, but no one answered.  Through the mail slot a sliver of the foyer was visible, dim and littered with the dregs of second-rate housecleaning.  Two legs stood there at an angle; Lida recognized them by their boots and pants.  Everything else was beyond her ken.   

"It's me, Lida!  Open up, Nikolai Vasileevich!" Lida screamed happily through the mail slot.

To her surprise the legs she recognized did not budge.  They twitched almost unnoticeably but did not approach her.  Propriety dictated  that she ring again, which she did.

The heat rumbled and began circulating.  Downstairs on the first floor, a radio was playing.

"Nikolai Vasileevich, it's me, just me, Lida.  Why are you so silent?  Think I can't see you?  You're standing all the way over there in the corner, and you're still wearing those same wool-blend Czechoslovakian pants.  Come on, let me in for a minute."

The light went off the foyer, the thin strip of radiance extinguished.  Rattled and indecisive, Lida began pacing in a circle in front of the door.

"Are you embarrassed because you promised to marry me?  Please don't think that, that's not why I'm here.  I don't need to get married officially, I swear to you.  Why'd you turn off the light?  Nikolai Vasileevich!  In any case, I can still hear everything.  You're standing there and breathing out.  Aren't you ashamed of yourself!  Maybe you heard some things about me ... well, don't listen to anyone.  I haven't had anything with Lobzikov for four months now, nor with Polyansky.  When you took leave I ... I couldn't stop thinking about you.  I didn't even kiss anyone while you were gone, honest.  Nikolai Vasileevich, if you so choose, I will be yours and yours alone for the rest of our lives.  I will love you forever, just like a husband.  I'll even cook dinner for you if you'd like."

She pressed her eyes then her lips against the door.  Silence reigned in the apartment of Nikolai Vasileevich.  But from there – through the narrow crack in the door – came a warm somewhat rotting smell.

"Oh, sweetie pie, so you didn't want to pluck the rose?"  she whispered, blushing.  Then she caught one last whiff of the dark crack and went back home.

You only dared to stir once she had left, stretching your tense limbs.  You were hot and sweaty.  What childish behavior, jumping at the sound of the bell under the hot and oppressive light!  This negligence almost cost you your neck.  It was good at least that you remembered just in time and froze in place as if dead, as if you weren't there at all.

And what were you supposed to have done?  Let her in?  Showcase to everyone the very details of your personal life?  And with whom, precisely?  With that same woman – and now you knew the story in full – who was assigned to you by Graube?  Back then, in front of all the guests, when she evoked sweet love within you, and you were about to ... Run!  Run before it's too late!  Before she comes back, before she draws you to her under the guise of being your bride, obliged by her love to follow you everywhere you go.  And all because you had the misfortune of groping her a mere three centimeters above the usually accepted level.

You looked out the window, disappearing behind the door jamb and not turning on the light.  The path was cut off: Lida was keeping guard below.  She was not about to abandon you.  She paced in front of the house like a sentry.

Your feet in their overheated boots were now swollen in pain.  Your hand ached, your pinky having been injured by Graube's arched brows.  Worst of all was the unshakeable feeling, the repulsive, prickly feeling of your own skin.  You kept wincing and shaking your head, then ferociously wiped your cheeks and forehead with the palms of your hands.

... This wretched sight hurt my eyes – they were already extremely sore.  Matches seemed to have been placed between my eyelids like crosspieces, and both of my eyeballs were scratched and bloody.

To give myself a breather and to lessen as much as possible the suffering caused by my vigilance, I tried to look the other way and chose the farthest alleys and side streets for my walk – Marina Roshcha, Bolshaya Olenya near Sokolniki – but none of this helped.  Wherever I went, on foot or by tram, the same angry eyes appeared before me, the same freckled fingers covered in red hair.

I knew that all of this could end rather badly.  When I couldn't take it any more, I hailed a taxi and drove to the scene of the events.

My plan was to lure Lida away from her post and in so doing, right the situation.  I was hoping to reduce the number of eyes which he had directed towards himself by force of imagination.  But there was another impetus: I wanted to get my mind off things.  I needed a third person to distract and protect me from my pursuer.

Lida was freezing in her selfless vigil under his dark windows.  Although we only knew one another, so to speak, by sight, her soft spots were no secret to me.  Striking up a conversation and inviting her out of the cold and into a nearby café would only take five minutes.  I called myself the first name that came to mind – Hippolytus, I believe – and she agreed.  Anyway, she had no other place to go.

While we were waiting for satsivi and shashliks, I paid her a few compliments to make her feel better.

"Why do you have a beard?" she asked flirtatiously.  "To look tougher?  It makes you look older.  And anyway, beards don't suit redheads."

"What are you talking about?!  A redhead, me?!" I shot back, horrified at her ability to inflict her taste on what she saw.

"Now wait a minute, you do have red hair!" said Lida, stubbornly.  "With a reddish tint.  You look a bit like a friend of mine..."

I saw no need to push the matter any further since it was dangerous for us all.  Yet I made no effort to hide my dislike of redheads.  Redheads always think that everyone's looking at them, and for that reason they're terribly high on themselves and trust no one.  But in fact no one pays redheads any attention, nor do they want to have anything to do with them.  

"On the other hand," Lida boasted, "they're the jealous type.  And sensitive.  And they understand the finer points of things."

Oh, I knew precisely where her thoughts were heading.  But it was all in vain.  At the same time as our lunch was being brought out, her red-haired hunk had progressed further in his destructive ingenuity.  Lying in the darkness with his face pressed in his pillow, he was trying with all his might to think about nothing.

"Di di di, la la la.  Di di di, la la la," he mumbled, concentrating.

Now he thought that by dumbing down his brain with obvious nonsense, he could save himself from his observers spying on him from within.  Apparently it wasn't enough to get the whole world up in arms against him; no, now he had taken note of my secret investigation and elected to battle me on the crossroads of his consciousness.  "Di di di, la la la," just try to break through this wall – it's a hopeless scenario.  What was the meaning of this dim-witted, talentless di-di-di-la-la-la-ing?

So, spilling the cognac, I said to Lida:

"Sing, Lidochka.  Sing, Lididiliya.  We won't think about any redheads, no redheads.  Don't pay any attention to redheads.  You'll feel better right away.  Eat the satsivi and shashlik.  Shashlik!  Shashlik! Satsivi!"

"Di di di, la la la!  Uncle!  Uncle!  Uncle!  Di di di, li di di!"

"Satsivi! Satsivi!  Eat, Lidochka, some shashlik.  Fatty, fatty, redheaded shashlik!  Shash or shish?  Lik?  Lik! Lik!  Satsivi!"

Yet however hard we tried, we couldn't distract each other nor fight off the tension drawing us closer to catastrophe.  For that same reason Lida was bothering both him and me.  Having warmed up after her third drink, she then said:

"I like you, Hippolytus.  You really do look like a friend of mine.  He also fed me when we were over at some friends' apartment.  The only thing I ask of you is please shave the beard.  I beg you, just do it for me.  Get your razor and shave it off!"

Upon hearing her proposal, I could hardly breathe.

"Shut up!" I screamed at her.  "Not a word more!  Not a word more about such sensitive subjects!  Do you hear me?!"

And at the same moment, I saw that he was raising his head.

You raised your head as if listening to our conversation, and you smiled.  You said to yourself: "Need to shave!"  And then you repeated aloud: "Need to shave! La la la!  Need to shave!"

And again you smiled, the second smile during all this time.

I was trembling.  I grabbed Lida by the hand and we ran out onto the street without finishing our cognac.  There, without  further ado, I professed my love to Lida.  I told her I was mad about her, passionately in love, and didn't even want to look at anyone else.  There was no one else I wanted to think about.  And for that reason today she was bound to belong to me – right now, here and now!

You got up and turned on the lights.  Your eyes squinted.

Lida said:

"But it's so cold here and there are so many people bustling about!  If you really want to, let's just go back to your place.  As long as you're not married, that is."

I dragged her through the streets while you were heating up water and looking for your razor and shaving brush.  I only had a few minutes left.  Our only recourse was to head into someone's entry stairwell.  At the top landing it wasn't quite as cold, and very unlikely that we'd be seen.

And what if we were seen?  What did I care?  I was preoccupied with my own problems.  It was I, I who shouldn't notice anyone!  Before it was too late I wanted to get out of this game – this game which could only end badly – but I had no other means of salvation on hand except Lida.

I kneeled before her.  One rule suddenly came to mind: "From below you could be easily assaulted.  Falling on his knees before you gives him the advantage of being able at any time to grab you from behind your legs and topple you onto your back."

And that's what happened.  Lida lovingly patted my bent head, and I seized her skinny legs with my arms and pinned her to the wall.  I didn't want to lay her down on the tiles because then she'd catch cold.

I was not shy about my intentions – I was sufficiently forthcoming, in fact.  At the end of it all, it wasn't for my benefit that I tried all this; it was because I had no alternative.

Of course it would have been better had you been here in my place.  But if there was something you lacked in life it would be openness.  Nevertheless, every man – even the most arrogant and secretive – is required willy-nilly to be relaxed in the embrace of a woman.  Perhaps even you would not push Lida away.  This might be useful and, who knows, maybe you'd even become a bit more trusting and be able to understand me better. 

But you preferred another path and now, having seized your razor in your prehensile, freckled paws, you led it across your cheeks, as if you were about to bring everything into order.  Knowing your pretenses, I made haste.  Better, much better to leave now, to plunge into my activities, so that you too, at last, could stop paying attention to me, stop being afraid, stop disappearing and harboring vengeful plans in the depths of your soul.

Lida exhaled loudly and, closing her eyes, stroked my hair:

"Kolya, Kolenka, Nikolai Vasileevich!  My redhead, o my beloved redhead!"  she sang out in every note.

No jealousy overcame me.  But I was still plagued by endless memories, that awkward proximity to you at that very moment when I had hoped to hide far, far away from you.  I approached you at breakneck speed and there I saw your eyes, widened in rage.  Back! Back!  Too late.  I entered your brain, your inflamed consciousness, and all your secrets which I had no desire to know now lay before me like an open book.

You jumped out of the chair.  All the witnesses to your evil deed were gathered around.  Aha!  Caught!  You waved to me, to Lida, to the whole world, with your ready blade.

"Stop!  Don't you dare!  What are you doing?!" 

I squinted.  And instantaneously, my long-lost feeling of calm returned to me.  It was dark and quiet.  I couldn't see you anymore.  You were no longer there. 

6

When I opened my eyes once more, Lida was putting on lipstick.  She was wiggling, shaking, straightening out her dress and fur coat.  A button jumped from her and fell down, step after step, down the stairs.  Lida went down after it and scooped it up.  Then she went down one more floor.

"Where are you off to, Lida?"  I asked, more out of politeness than genuine interest.  There was no reply:  Lida hurried off to her post which she had abandoned a hour before.  Looking out in that direction, I became convinced that she was running off in vain.  There was no one for her to guard.  Our mutual friend had collapsed under the table with his lathered cheeks and slit throat.  As he fell, he was somehow clever enough to smash the table lamp.  No light shone from his room.

I sat down on the step and waited for Lida to disappear.  But in the end she did not manage to hide from my eyes.  So I got up and, forsaking the rather hospitable entry stairwell, went through the city on my habitual rounds.

Everything was like it was before.  The snow was falling and it was the same in-between time of the day.  Two engineers – his former coworkers Lobzikov and Polyansky – were playing Chopin on the piano.  Four hundred women were giving birth, just like before, to four hundred children at the same time.  Vera Ivanovna was putting a eyebath on the blackened eye of Heinrich Ivanovich.  An auburn-haired girl was putting on pants.  A brunette was leaning over a sink, getting ready for a date with Nikolai Vasileevich, who, as usual, was running in a drunken stupor through the icy weather.  Nikolai Vasileevich's body lay in a locked room.  Lida, like a sentry, was walking back and forth underneath his windows.

I saw all this and couldn't but think of him.  I was a bit sad.

You left and I remained.  I'm not sorry about your death.  I'm only sorry I can't forget you.