The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 30

He was a comrade of my brother Gregory, who had a feverish, poetic pa.s.sion for extreme forms of organized society (forms that had long been alarming the meek const.i.tution we then had) in the final years of his short life: he drowned at twenty-three, bathing one summer evening in a wide, very wide river, so that when I now recall my brother the first thing that comes to my mind is a s.h.i.+ny spread of water, an islet overgrown with alder (that he never reached but toward which he always swims through the trembling haze of my memory), and a long, black cloud crossing another, opulently fluffed-up and orange-colored one, all that is left of a Sat.u.r.day-morning thunderstorm in the clear, turquoise Sunday's-eve sky, where a star will s.h.i.+ne through in a moment, where there will never be any star. At any time I was much too engrossed in the history of painting and in my dissertation on its cave origins to frequent watchfully the group of young people that had inveigled my brother; for that matter, as I recall, there was no definite group, but simply several youths who had drifted together, different in many respects but, for the time being, loosely bound by a common attraction to rebellious adventure. The present, however, always exercises such a perverse influence on reminiscence that now I involuntarily single him out against the indistinct background, awarding him (neither the closest nor the most vociferous of Gregory's companions) the kind of somber, concentrated will deeply conscious of its sullen self, which in the end molds a giftless person into a triumphant monster.

I remember him waiting for my brother in the gloomy dining room of our humble provincial house; perching on the first chair he saw, he immediately began to read a rumpled newspaper extracted from a pocket of his black jacket, and his face, half-hidden by the armature of smoke-colored gla.s.ses, a.s.sumed a disgusted and weepy expression, as if he had hit upon some scurrilous stuff. I remember that his sloppily laced town boots were always dirty, as if he had just walked many miles along a cart road between unnoticed meadows. His cropped hair ended in a bristly wedge on his forehead (nothing foretold yet his present Caesar-like baldness). The nails of his large, humid hands were so closely bitten that it was painful to see the tight little cus.h.i.+ons at the tips of his hideous fingers. He gave off a goatish smell. He was hard up, and indiscriminate as to sleeping quarters.

When my brother arrived (and in my recollection Gregory is always tardy, always comes in out of breath, as if hastening terribly to live but arriving late all the same-and thus it was that life finally left him behind), he greeted Gregory without smiling, getting up abruptly and giving his hand with an odd jerk, a kind of preliminary retraction of the elbow; it seemed that if one did not s.n.a.t.c.h his hand in time it would bounce back, with a springy click, into its detachable cuff. If some member of our family entered, he limited himself to a surly nod; per contra, he would demonstratively shake hands with the cook, who, taken by surprise and not having time to wipe her palm before the clasp, wiped it afterwards, in a retake of the scene, as it were. My mother died not long before his first visits, while my father's att.i.tude toward him was as absentminded as it was toward everyone and everything-toward us, toward life's adversities, toward the presence of grubby dogs to whom Gregory offered shelter, and even, it seems, toward his patients. On the other hand, two elderly aunts of mine were openly wary of the "eccentric" (if anyone ever was the opposite of eccentric it was he) as, for that matter, they were of Gregory's other pals.

Now, twenty-five years later, I often have occasion to hear his voice, his b.e.s.t.i.a.l roar, diffused by the thunders of radio; back then, however, I recall he always spoke softly, even with a certain huskiness, a certain susurrous lisp. Only that famous vile bit of breathlessness of his, at the end of a sentence, was already there, yes, already there. When he stood, head and arms lowered, before my brother, who was greeting him with affectionate exclamations, still trying to catch at least an elbow of his, or his bony shoulder, he seemed curiously short-legged, owing, probably, to the length of his jacket, which came down to midhip; and one could not determine whether the mournfulness of his posture was caused by glum shyness or by a straining of the faculties before uttering some tragic message. Later it seemed to me that he had at last uttered it and done with it, when, on that dreadful summer evening, he came from the river carrying what looked like a heap of clothes but was only Gregory's s.h.i.+rt and canvas pants; now, however, I think that the message he seemed to be always pregnant with was not that one after all, but the m.u.f.fled news of his own monstrous future.

Sometimes, through a half-open door, I could hear his abnormally halting speech in a talk with my brother; or he would be sitting at the tea table, breaking a pretzel, his night-bird eyes turned away from the light of the kerosene lamp. He had a strange and unpleasant way of rinsing his mouth with his milk before he swallowed it, and when he bit into the pretzel he cautiously twisted his mouth; his teeth were bad, and to deceive the fiery pain of a bared nerve by a brief whiff of coolness, he would repeatedly suck in the air, with a sidewise whistle. Once, I remember, my father soaked a bit of cotton wool for him with some brown drops containing opium and, chuckling aimlessly, recommended that he see a dentist. "The whole is stronger than its parts," he answered with awkward gruffness, "ergo I will vanquish my tooth." I am no longer certain, though, whether I heard those wooden words personally, or whether they were subsequently repeated to me as a p.r.o.nouncement by the "eccentric"; only, as I have already said, he was nothing of the sort, for how can an animal faith in one's blear guiding star be regarded as something peculiar and rare? But, believe it or not, he impressed people with his mediocrity as others do with their talent.

6.

Sometimes his innate mournfulness was broken by spasms of nasty, jagged joviality, and then I would hear his laughter, as jarring and unexpected as the yowl of a cat, to whose velvet silence you grow so accustomed that its nocturnal voice seems a demented, demonic thing. Shrieking thus, he would be drawn by his companions into games and tussles; it turned out then that he had the arms of a weakling, but legs strong as steel. On one occasion a particularly prankish boy put a toad in his pocket, whereupon he, being afraid to go after it with his fingers, started tearing off the weighted jacket and in that state, his face darkly flushed, disheveled, with nothing but a d.i.c.key over his torn unders.h.i.+rt, he fell prey to a heartless hunchbacked girl, whose ma.s.sive braid and ink-blue eyes were so attractive to many that she was willingly forgiven a resemblance to a black chess knight.

I know about his amorous tendencies and system of courts.h.i.+p from that very girl, now, unfortunately, deceased, like the majority of those who knew him well in his youth (as if death were an ally of his, removing from his path dangerous witnesses to his past). To this vivacious hunchback he would write either in a didactic tone, with excursions-of a popular-educational type-into history (which he knew from political pamphlets), or else complain in obscure and soggy terms about another woman (also with a physical defect of some kind, I believe), who remained unknown to me, and with whom at one time he had shared bed and board in the most dismal part of the city. Today I would give a lot to search out and interrogate that anonymous person, but she, too, no doubt, is safely dead. A curious feature of his missives was their noisome wordiness: he hinted at the machinations of mysterious enemies; polemicized at length with some poetaster, whose verselets he had read in a calendar-oh, if it were possible to resurrect those precious exercise-book pages, filled with his minuscule, myopic handwriting! Alas, I do not recall a single phrase from them (at the time I was not very interested, even if I did listen and chuckle), and only very indistinctly do I see, in the depths of memory, the bow on that braid, the thin clavicle, and the quick, dusky hand in the garnet bracelet crumpling his letters; and I also catch the cooing note of perfidious feminine laughter.

7.

The difference between dreaming of a reordered world and dreaming of reordering it oneself as one sees fit is a profound and fatal one; yet none of his friends, including my brother, apparently made any distinction between their abstract rebellion and his merciless l.u.s.t for power. A month after my brother's death he vanished, transferring his activity to the northern provinces (my brother's group withered and fell apart and, as far as I know, none of its other partic.i.p.ants went into politics), and soon there were rumors that the work being done there, both in its aims and methods, had grown diametrically opposed to all that had been said, thought, and hoped in that initial young circle. When I recall his aspect in those days, I find it amazing that no one noticed the long, angular shadow of treason that he dragged behind him wherever he went, tucking its fringe under the furniture when he sat down, and letting it interfere strangely with the banister's own shadow on the wall of the staircase, down which he was seen to the door by the light of a portable kerosene lamp. Or is it our dark present time that was cast forward there?

I do not know if they liked him, but in any case my brother and the others mistook his moroseness for the intensity of spiritual force. The cruelty of his ideas seemed a natural consequence of enigmatic calamities he had suffered; and his whole unprepossessive sh.e.l.l presupposed, as it were, a clean, bright kernel. I may as well confess that I myself once had the fleeting impression that he was capable of mercy; only subsequently did I determine its true shade. Those who are fond of cheap paradoxes took note long ago of the sentimentality of executioners; and indeed, the sidewalk in front of butcher shops is always dampish.

8.

The first days after the tragedy he kept turning up, and several times spent the night in our place. That death did not evoke any visible signs of grief in him. He behaved as always, which did not shock us in the least, since his usual state was already mournful: and as usual he would sit in some corner, reading something uninteresting and behaving, in short, as, in a house where a great misfortune has occurred, people do who are neither close intimates nor complete strangers. Now, moreover, his constant presence and sullen silence could pa.s.s for grim commiseration-the commiseration, you see, of a strong reticent man, inconspicuous but ever-present-a very pillar of sympathy-about whom you later learn that he himself was seriously ill at the time he spent those sleepless nights on a chair among tear-blinded members of the household. In his case, however, this was all a dreadful misconception: if he did feel drawn to our house at the time, it was solely because nowhere did he breathe so naturally as in the sphere of gloom and despair, when uncleared dishes litter the table and nonsmokers ask for cigarettes.

I vividly remember setting out with him to perform one of the minor formalities, one of the excruciatingly dim bits of business with which death (having, as it always has, an element of red tape about it) tries to entangle survivors for as long as possible. Probably someone said to me, "There, he will go with you," and he came, discreetly clearing his throat. It was on that occasion (we were walking along a houseless street, fluffy with dust, past fences and piles of lumber) that I did something the memory of which traverses me from top to toe like an electrical jolt of insufferable shame: driven by G.o.d knows what feeling-perhaps not so much by grat.i.tude as by condolence for another's condolence-in a surge of nervousness and ill-timed emotion, I clasped and squeezed his hand (which caused us both to stumble slightly). It all lasted an instant, and yet, if I had then embraced him and pressed my lips to his horrible golden bristles, I could not have felt any greater torment now. Now, after twenty-five years, I wonder: the two of us were walking alone through a deserted neighborhood, and in my pocket I had Gregory's loaded revolver, which, for some reason or other, I kept meaning to hide; I could perfectly well have dispatched him with a shot at point-blank range, and then there would have been nothing of what there is today-no rain-drenched holidays, no gigantic festivities with millions of my fellow citizens marching by with shovels, hoes, and rakes on their slavish shoulders; no loudspeakers, deafeningly multiplying the same inescapable voice; no secret mourning in every other family, no a.s.sortment of tortures, no torpor of the mind, no colossal portraits-nothing. Oh if it were possible to claw into the past, drag a missed opportunity by its hair back into the present, resurrect that dusty street, the vacant lots, the weight in my hip pocket, the youth walking at my side!

9.

I am dull and fat, like Prince Hamlet. What can I do? Between me, a humble teacher of drawing in a provincial high school, and him, sitting behind a mult.i.tude of steel and oaken doors in an unknown chamber of the capital's main jail, transformed for him into a castle (for this tyrant calls himself "prisoner of the will of the people that elected him"), there is an unimaginable distance. Someone was telling me, after having locked himself in the bas.e.m.e.nt with me, about an old widow, a distant relative of his, who succeeded in growing an eighty-pound turnip, thus meriting an audience with the exalted one. She was conducted through one marble corridor after another, and an endless succession of doors was unlocked in front of her and locked behind her, until she found herself in a white, starkly lit hall, whose entire furnis.h.i.+ngs consisted of two gilt chairs. Here she was told to stand and wait. In due time she heard numerous footfalls from behind the door, and, with respectful bows, deferring to each other, half a dozen of his bodyguards came in. With frightened eyes she searched for him among them; their eyes were directed not at her but somewhere beyond her head; then, turning, she saw that behind her, through another, unnoticed door, he himself had noiselessly entered and, having stopped and placed a hand on the back of one of the two chairs, was scrutinizing the guest of the State with a habitual air of encouragement. Then he seated himself and suggested that she describe in her own words her glorious achievement (here an attendant brought in and placed on the second chair a clay replica of her vegetable), and, for ten unforgettable minutes, she narrated how she had planted the turnip; how she had tugged and tugged without being able to get it out of the ground, even though she thought she saw her deceased husband tugging with her; how she had had to call first her son, then her nephew and even a couple of firemen who were resting in the hayloft; and how, finally, backing in tandem arrangement, they had extracted the monster. Evidently he was overwhelmed by her vivid narrative; "Now that's genuine poetry," he said, addressing his retinue. "Here's somebody the poet fellows ought to learn from." And, crossly ordering that the likeness be cast in bronze, he left. I, however, do not grow turnips, so I cannot find a way to him; and, even if I did, how would I carry my treasured weapon to his lair?

On occasion he appears before the people, and, even though no one is allowed near him, and everyone has to hold up the heavy staff of an issued banner so that hands are kept busy, and everyone is watched by a guard of incalculable proportions (to say nothing of the secret agents and the secret agents watching the secret agents), someone very adroit and resolute might have the good fortune to find a loophole, one transparent instant, some tiny c.h.i.n.k of fate through which to rush forward. I mentally considered, one by one, all kinds of destructive means, from the cla.s.sic dagger to plebeian dynamite, but it was all in vain, and it is with good reason that I frequently dream I am repeatedly squeezing the trigger of a weapon that is disintegrating in my hand, whilst the bullets trickle out of the barrel, or bounce like harmless peas off the chest of my grinning foe while he begins unhurriedly to crush my rib cage.

10.

Yesterday I invited several people, unacquainted among themselves but united by one and the same sacred task, which had so transfigured them that one could notice among them an inexpressible resemblance, such as occurs, for instance, among elderly Freemasons. They were people of various professions-a tailor, a ma.s.seur, a physician, a barber, a baker-but all exhibited the same dignified deportment, the same economy of gestures. And no wonder! One made his clothes, and that meant measuring his lean, yet broad-hipped body, with its odd, womanish pelvis and round back, and respectfully reaching into his armpits, and, together with him, looking into a mirror garlanded with gilt ivy; the second and third had penetrated even further: they had seen him naked, had kneaded his muscles and listened to his heart, by whose beat, it is said, our clocks will soon be set, so that his pulse, in the most literal sense, will become a basic unit of time; the fourth shaved him, with crepitating strokes, down on the cheeks and on the neck, using a blade that to me is enticingly sharp-looking; the fifth, and last, baked his bread, putting, the idiot, through sheer force of habit raisins instead of a.r.s.enic into his favorite loaf. I wanted to palpate these people, so as to partake at least in that way of their mysterious rites, of their diabolical manipulations; it seemed to me that their hands were imbued with his smell, that through those people he, too, was present. It was all very nice, very prim at that party. We talked about things that did not concern him, and I knew that if I mentioned his name there would flash in the eyes of each of them the same sacerdotal alarm. And when I suddenly found myself wearing a suit cut by my neighbor on the right, and eating my vis-a-vis' pastry, which I washed down with a special kind of mineral water prescribed by my neighbor on the left, I was overcome by a dreadful, dream-significant feeling, which immediately awakened me-in my poor-man's room, with a poor-man's moon in the curtainless window.

I am grateful to the night for even such a dream: of late I have been racked by insomnia. It is as if his agents were accustoming me beforehand to the most popular of the tortures inflicted on present-day criminals. I write "present-day" because, since he came to power, there has appeared a completely new breed, as it were, of political criminals (the other, penal, kind actually no longer exists, as the pettiest theft swells into embezzlement which, in turn, is considered an attempt to undermine the regime), exquisitely frail creatures, with a most diaphanous skin and protruding eyes emitting bright rays. This is a rare and highly valued breed, like a young okapi or the smallest species of lemur; they are hunted pa.s.sionately, self-obliviously, and every captured specimen is hailed by public applause, even though the hunt actually involves no particular difficulty or danger, for they are quite tame, those strange, transparent beasts.

Timorous rumor has it that he himself is not loath to pay an occasional visit to the torture chamber, but there is probably no truth in this: the postmaster general does not distribute the mail himself, nor is the secretary of the navy necessarily a crack swimmer. I am in general repelled by the homey, gossipy tone with which meek ill-wishers speak of him, getting sidetracked into a special kind of primitive joke, as, in olden times, the common people would make up stories about the Devil, dressing up their superst.i.tious fear in buffoonish humor. Vulgar, hastily adapted anecdotes (dating back, say, to Celtic prototypes), or secret information "from a usually reliable source" (as to who, for instance, is in favor and who is not) always smack of the servants' quarters. There are even worse examples, though: when my friend N., whose parents were executed only three years ago (to say nothing of the disgraceful persecution N. himself underwent), remarks, upon his return from an official festivity where he has heard and seen him, "You know, though, in spite of everything, there is a certain strength about that man," I feel like punching N. in the mug.

11.

In the published letters of his "Sunset Years" a universally acclaimed foreign writer mentions that everything now leaves him cold, disenchanted, indifferent, everything with one exception: the vital, romantic thrill that he experiences to this day at the thought of how squalid his youthful years were compared with the sumptuous fulfillment of his later life, and of the snowy gleam of its summit, which he has now reached. That initial insignificance, that penumbra of poetry and pain, in which the young artist is on a par with a million such insignificant fellow beings, now lures him and fills him with excitement and grat.i.tude-to his destiny, to his craft-and to his own creative will. Visits to places where he had once lived in want, and reunions with his coevals, elderly men of no note whatsoever, hold for him such a complex wealth of enchantment that the detailed study of these sensations will last him for his soul's future leisure in the hereafter.

Thus, when I try to imagine what our lugubrious ruler feels upon contact with his past, I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that he, our ruler, is the incarnate negation of a poet. And yet the foreign papers, especially those whose names have vesperal connotations and which know how easily "tales" can be transformed into "sales," are fond of stressing the legendary quality of his destiny, guiding their crowd of readers into the enormous black house where he was born, and where supposedly to this day live similar paupers, endlessly hanging out the wash (paupers do a great deal of was.h.i.+ng); and they also print a photo, obtained G.o.d knows how, of his progenitress (father unknown), a thickset broad-nosed woman with a fringe who worked in an alehouse at the city gate. So few eyewitnesses of his boyhood and youth remain, and those who are still around respond with such circ.u.mspection (alas, no one has questioned me) that a journalist needs a great gift for invention to portray today's ruler excelling at warlike games as a boy or, as a youth, reading books till c.o.c.kcrow. His demagogic luck is construed to be the elemental force of destiny, and, naturally, a great deal of attention is devoted to that overcast winter day when, upon his election to parliament, he and his gang arrested the parliament (after which the army, bleating meekly, went over at once to his side).

Not much of a myth, but still a myth (in this nuance the journalist was not mistaken), a myth that is a closed circle and a discrete whole, ready to begin living its own, insular life, and it is already impossible to replace it with the real truth, even though its hero is still alive: impossible, since he, the only one who could know the truth, is useless as a witness, and this not because he is prejudiced or dishonest, but because, like a runaway slave, he "doesn't remember"! Oh, he remembers his old enemies, of course, and two or three books he has read, and how the man thrashed him for falling off a woodpile and crus.h.i.+ng to death a couple of chicks: that is, a certain crude mechanism of memory does function in him, but, if the G.o.ds were to propose that he synthesize himself out of his memories, with the condition that the synthesized image be rewarded with immortality, the result would be a dim embryo, an infant born prematurely, a blind and deaf dwarf, in no sense capable of immortality.

Should he visit the house where he lived when he was poor, no thrill would ripple his skin-not even a thrill of malevolent vanity. But I did visit his former abode! Not the multiplex edifice where he is supposed to have been born, and where there is now a museum dedicated to him (old posters, a flag grimy with gutter mud, in the place of honor, under a bell jar, a b.u.t.ton: all that it was possible to preserve of his n.i.g.g.ardly youth), but those vile furnished rooms where he spent several months during the period he and my brother were close. The former proprietor had long since died, roomers had never been registered, so that no trace was left of his erstwhile sojourn. And the thought that I alone in the world (for he has forgotten those lodgings of his-there have been so many) knew about this filled me with a special satisfaction, as if, by touching that dead furniture and looking at the neighboring roof through the window, I felt my hand closing on the key to his life.

12.

I have just had yet another visitor: a very seedy old man, who was evidently in a state of extreme agitation: his tight-skinned, glossy-backed hands were trembling, a stale senile tear dampened the pink lining of his eyelids, and a pallid sequence of involuntary expressions, from a foolish smile to a crooked crease of pain, pa.s.sed across his face. With the pen I lent him he traced on a sc.r.a.p of paper the digits of a crucial year, day, and month: the date-nearly half a century past-of the ruler's birth. He rested his gaze on me, pen raised, as if not daring to continue, or simply using a semblance of hesitation to emphasize the little trick he was about to play. I answered with a nod of encouragement and impatience, whereupon he wrote another date, preceding the first by nine months, underlined it twice, parted his lips as if for a burst of triumphant laughter, but, instead, suddenly covered his face with his hands. "Come on, get to the point," I said, giving this indifferent actor's shoulder a shake. Quickly regaining his composure, he rummaged in his pocket and handed me a thick, stiff photograph, which, over the years, had acquired an opaque milky tint. It showed a husky young man in a soldier's uniform; his peaked cap lay on a chair, on whose back, with wooden ease, he rested his hand, while behind him you could make out the bal.u.s.trade and the urn of a conventional backdrop. With the help of two or three connective glances I ascertained that between my guest's features and the shadowless, flat face of the soldier (adorned with a thin mustache, and topped by a brush cut, which made the forehead look smaller) there was little resemblance, but that nevertheless the soldier and he were the same person. In the snapshot he was about twenty, the snapshot itself was some fifty years old, and it was easy to fill this interval with the trite account of one of those third-rate lives, the imprint of which one reads (with an agonizing sense of superiority, sometimes unjustified) on the faces of old ragmen, public-garden attendants, and embittered invalids in the uniforms of old wars. I was about to pump him as to how it felt to live with such a secret, how he could carry the weight of that monstrous paternity, and incessantly see and hear his offspring's public presence-but then I noticed that the mazy and issueless design of the wallpaper was showing through his body; I stretched out my hand to detain my guest, but the dodderer dissolved, s.h.i.+vering from the chill of vanishment.

And yet he exists, this father (or existed until quite recently), and if only fate did not bestow on him a salutary ignorance as to the ident.i.ty of his momentary bedmate, G.o.d knows what torment is at large among us, not daring to speak out, and perhaps made even more acute by the fact that the hapless fellow is not fully certain of his paternity, for the wench was a loose one, and in consequence there might be several like him in the world, indefatigably calculating dates, blundering in the h.e.l.l of too many figures and too meager memories, ign.o.bly dreaming of extracting profit from the shadows of the past, fearing instant punishment (for some error, or blasphemy, for the too odious truth), feeling rather proud in their heart of hearts (after all, he is the Ruler!), losing their mind between supputation and supposition-horrible, horrible!

13.

Time pa.s.ses, and meanwhile I get bogged down in wild, oppressive fancies. In fact, it astonishes me, for I know of a good number of resolute and even daring actions that I have to my credit, nor am I in the least afraid of the perilous consequences that an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt would have for me; on the contrary, while I have no clear idea at all of how the act itself will occur, I can make out distinctly the tussle that will immediately follow-the human tornado seizing me, the puppetlike jerkiness of my motions amid avid hands, the crack of clothes being ripped, the blinding red of the blows, and finally (should I emerge from this tussle alive) the iron grip of jailers, imprisonment, a swift trial, the torture chamber, the scaffold, all this to the thundering accompaniment of my mighty happiness. I do not expect that my fellow citizens will immediately perceive their own liberation; I can even allow that the regime might get harsher out of sheer inertia. There is nothing about me of the civic hero who dies for his people. I die only for myself, for the sake of my own world of good and truth-the good and the true, which are now distorted and violated within me and outside me, and if they are as precious to someone else as they are to me, all the better; if not, if my fatherland needs men of a different stamp than I, I willingly accept my uselessness, but will still perform my task.

My life is too much engrossed and submerged by my hatred to be in the least pleasant, and I do not fear the black nausea and agony of death, especially since I antic.i.p.ate a degree of bliss, a level of supernatural being undreamt of either by barbarians or by modern followers of old religions. Thus, my mind is lucid and my hand free-and yet I don't know, I don't know how to go about killing him.

I sometimes think that perhaps it is so because murder, the intent to kill, is after all insufferably trite, and the imagination, reviewing methods of homicide and types of weapons, performs a degrading task, the sham of which is the more keenly felt, the more righteous the force that impels one. Or else, maybe I could not kill him out of squeamishness, as some people, while they feel a fierce aversion to anything that crawls, are unable so much as to crush a garden worm underfoot because for them it would be like stamping on the dust-begrimed extremities of their own innards. But whatever explanations I conjure up for my irresoluteness, it would be foolish to hide from myself the fact that I must destroy him. O Hamlet, O moony oaf!

14.

He has just given a speech at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new, multistoried greenhouse, and, while he was at it, he touched on the equality of men and the equality of wheat ears in the field, using Latin or dog-Latin, for the sake of poetry, arista, aristifer, and even "aristize" (meaning "to ear")-I do not know what corny schoolman counseled him to adopt this questionable method, but, in recompense, I now understand why, of late, magazine verse contains such archaisms as: How sapient the veterinarian

Who physics the lactific kine.

For two hours the enormous voice thundered throughout our city, erupting with varying degrees of force from this or that window, so that, if you walk along a street (which, by the way, is deemed a dangerous discourtesy: sit and listen), you have the impression that he accompanies you, cras.h.i.+ng down from the rooftops, squirming on all fours between your legs, and sweeping up again to peck at your head, cackling, cawing, and quacking in a caricature of human speech, and you have no place to hide from the Voice, and the same thing is going on in every city and village of my successfully stunned country. Apparently no one except me has noticed an interesting feature of his frenzied oratory, namely the pause he makes after a particularly effective sentence, rather like a drunk who stands in the middle of the street, in the independent but unsatisfied solitude characteristic of drunks, and while declaiming fragments of an abusive monologue, most emphatic in its wrath, pa.s.sion, and conviction, but obscure as to meaning and aim, stops frequently to collect his strength, ponder the next pa.s.sage, let what he has said sink in; then, having waited out the pause, he repeats verbatim what he has just disgorged, but in a tone of voice suggesting that he has thought of a new argument, another absolutely new and irrefutable idea.

When the Ruler at last ran dry, and the faceless, cheekless trumpets played our agrarian anthem, I not only did not feel relieved, but, on the contrary, had a sense of anguish and loss: while he was speaking I could at least keep watch over him, could know where he was and what he was doing; now he has again dissolved into the air, which I breathe but which has no tangible point of focus.

I can understand the smooth-haired women of our mountain tribes when, abandoned by a lover, every morning, with a persistent pressure of their brown fingers on the turquoise head of a pin, they p.r.i.c.k the navel of a clay figurine representing the fugitive. Many times, of late, I have summoned all the force of my mind to imagine at a given moment the flow of his cares and thoughts, in order to duplicate the rhythm of his existence, making it yield and come cras.h.i.+ng down, like a suspension bridge whose own oscillations have coincided with the cadenced step of a detachment of soldiers crossing it. The soldiers will also perish-so shall I, losing my reason the instant that I catch the rhythm, while he falls dead in his distant castle; however, no matter what the method of tyrannicide, I would not survive. When I wake up in the morning, at half past eight or so, I strain to conjure up his awakening: he gets up neither early nor late, at an average hour, just as he calls himself-even officially, I think-an "average man." At nine both he and I breakfast frugally on a gla.s.s of milk and a bun, and, if on a given day I am not busy at the school, I continue my pursuit of his thoughts. He reads through several newspapers, and I read them with him, searching for something that might catch his attention, even though I know he was aware the evening before of the general content of my morning paper, of its leading articles, its summaries and national news, so that this perusal can give him no particular cause for administrative meditation. After which his a.s.sistants come with reports and queries. Together with him, I learn how rail communications are feeling today, how heavy industry is sweating along, and how many centners per hectare the winter wheat crop yielded this year. After looking through several pet.i.tions for clemency and tracing on them his invariable refusal-a penciled X-the symbol of his heart's illiteracy-he takes his usual walk before lunch: as in the case of many not overbright people devoid of imagination, walking is his favorite exercise; he walks in his walled garden, formerly a large prison yard. I am also familiar with the menu of his unpretentious lunch, after which I share my siesta with him and ponder plans for making his power flourish further, or new measures for suppressing sedition. In the afternoon we inspect a new building, a fortress, a forum, and other forms of governmental prosperity, and I approve with him an inventor's new kind of ventilator. I skip dinner, usually a gala affair with various functionaries in attendance, but, on the other hand, by nightfall my thoughts have redoubled their force and I issue orders to newspaper editors, listen to accounts of evening meetings, and, alone in my darkening room, whisper, gesticulate, and ever more insanely hope that at least one of my thoughts may fall in step with a thought of his-and then, I know, the bridge will snap, like a violin string. But the ill luck familiar to overly eager gamblers haunts me, the right card never comes, even though I must have achieved a certain secret liaison with him, for around eleven o'clock, when he goes to bed, my entire being senses a collapse, a void, a weakening, and a melancholy relief. Presently he sleeps, he sleeps, and, since, on his convict's cot, not a single praedormitory thought troubles him, I too am left at liberty, and only occasionally, without the least hope of success, try to compose his dreams, combining fragments of his past with impressions of the present; probably, though, he does not dream and I work in vain, and never, never, will the night be rent by a royal death rattle, leading history to comment: "The dictator died in his sleep."

15.

How can I get rid of him? I cannot stand it any longer. Everything is full of him, everything I love has been besmirched, everything has become his likeness, his mirror image, and, in the features of pa.s.sersby and in the eyes of my wretched schoolchildren, his countenance shows ever clearer and more hopelessly. Not only the posters that I am obliged to have them copy in color do nothing but interpret the pattern of his personality, but even the simple white cube I give the younger cla.s.ses to draw seems to me his portrait-perhaps his best portrait. O cubic monster, how can I eradicate you?

16.

And suddenly I realized I had a way! It was on a frosty, motionless morning, with a pale pink sky and lumps of ice lodged in the drainpipes' jaws; there was a doomful stillness everywhere: in an hour the town would awake, and how it would awake! That day his fiftieth birthday was to be celebrated, and already people, looking against the snow like black quarter notes, were creeping out into the streets, so as to gather on schedule at the points where they would be marshaled into different marching groups determined by their trades. At the risk of losing my meager pay, I was not making ready to join any festive procession; I had something else, a little more important, on my mind. Standing by the window, I could hear the first distant fanfares and the radio barker's inducements at the crossroads, and I found comfort in the thought that I, and I alone, could interrupt all this. Yes, the solution had been found: the a.s.sa.s.sination of the tyrant now turned out to be something so simple and quick that I could accomplish it without leaving my room. The only weapons available for the purpose were either an old but very well preserved revolver, or a hook over the window that must have served at one time to support a drapery rod. This last was even better, as I had my doubts about the performance of the twenty-five-year-old cartridge.

By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred. Along with him I would kill the world he had created, all the stupidity, cowardice, and cruelty of that world, which, together with him, had grown huge within me, ousting, to the last sun-bathed landscape, to the last memory of childhood, all the treasures I had collected. Conscious now of my power, I reveled in it, unhurriedly preparing for self-destruction, going through my belongings, correcting this chronicle of mine. And then, abruptly, the incredible intensification of all the senses that had overwhelmed me underwent a strange, almost alchemic metamorphosis. The festivities were spreading outside my window, the sun transformed the blue snowdrifts into sparkling down, and one could see playing over distant roofs, a new kind of fireworks (invented recently by a peasant genius) whose colors blazed even in broad daylight. The general jubilation; the Ruler's gem-bright likeness flas.h.i.+ng pyrotechnically in the heavens; the gay hues of the procession winding across the river's snowy cover; the delightful pasteboard symbols of the fatherland's welfare; the slogans, designed with variety and elegance, that bobbed above the marchers' shoulders; the jaunty primitive music; the orgy of banners; the contented faces of the young yokels and the national costumes of the hefty wenches-all of it caused a crimson wave of tenderness to surge within me, and I understood my sin against our great and merciful Master. Is it not he who manured our fields, who directed the poor to be shod, he whom we must thank for every second of our civic being? Tears of repentance, hot, good tears, gushed from my eyes onto the windowsill when I thought how I had been repudiating the kindness of the Master, how blindly I had reneged the beauty of what he had created, the social order, the way of life, the splendid walnut-finished new fences, and how I plotted to lay hands on myself, daring, thus, to endanger the life of one of his subjects! The festivities, as I have said, were spreading; I stood at the window, my whole being drenched with tears and convulsed with laughter, listening to the verses of our foremost poet, declaimed on the radio by an actor's juicy voice, replete with baritone modulations: Now then, citizens,

You remember how long

Our land wilted without a Father?