despair

Part II of a novel

what strange compulsion drove the merchant to precipitate this fateful confrontation with his wastrel double?

Synopsis: A curious fellow, to be sure, is the insouciant Hermann, a man as fond of himself as Narcissus. Indeed, Hermann rarely passes a mirror without a backward glance. He is a Russian-born chocolate merchant who lives what one could perhaps call a happy life, in a small but attractive flat in Berlin, with his wife Lydia, a good-natured, careless, sensual woman, and their maid Elsie. A frequent caller is Lydia's cousin, the strapping painter Ardalion. The latter and Lydia are often together swimming and playing cards. But, for the most part, Hermann ignores them, so engrossed is he by his mirrors and so harassed by his failing chocolate business.

On a visit to Prague, Hermann encounters Felix, a wandering ne'er-do-well whom Hermann recognizes as his double: "We were two with but a single face. Our resemblance struck me as a freak bordering on the miraculous."

Felix, however, does not seem to recognize the resemblance. "A rich man never quite resembles a poor one" he observes obsequiously, "but I dare say you know better."

Without fully understanding why--compulsively--Hermann feels he must not let Felix slip completely from his life. He promises to get Felix a job, so that he can keep close track of him, then returns to Berlin. When Hermann, Lydia and Ardalion go to a picnic at the painter's retreat in a nearby wood, Hermann finds himself strangely drawn to a lonely, mossy, fertile lakeside. Ardalion sketches his portrait, and Hermann tries to guide the conversation to the subject of doubles, with which he is increasingly preoccupied. But Ardalion won't cooperate, and Hermann subsides into reverie: "I developed a somber and painful liking for that lone wood, with the lake shining on its midst . . . my business had taken a sorry turn that summer and I was fed up with everything; that filthy chocolate of mine was ruining me . . ."

Now Hermann resumes his narrative.

How Shall We begin this chapter? I offer several variations to choose from. Number one (readily adopted in novels where the narrative is conducted in the first person by the real or substitute author):

It is fine today, but cold, with the wind's violence unabated; under my window the evergreen foliage rocks and rolls, and the postman on the Pignan road walks backward, clutching at his cap. My heart is heavy . . .

The distinctive features of this variation are rather obvious: it is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page. While he muses and writes, there is something or other going on around him; there is, for instance, this wind, this whirl of dust on the road which I see from my window (now the postman has swerved round and, bent double, still fighting, walks forward). A nice refreshing variation, this number one; it allows a breather and helps to bring in the personal note; thus lending life to the story--especially when the first person is as fictitious as all the rest. Well, that is just the point: a trick of the trade, a poor thing worn to shreds by literary fictionmongers, does not suit me, for I have become strictly truthful. So we may turn to the second variation which consists of at once letting loose a new character, starting the chapter thus:

Orlovius was displeased.

When he happened to be displeased or worried, or merely ignorant of the right answer, he used to pull at the long lobe of his left ear, fringed with gray down; then he would pull at the long lobe of his right ear too, so as to avoid jealousies, and look at you over his plain, honest spectacles and take his time and then at last answer: "It is heavy to say, but I--"

"Heavy" with him meant "hard," as in German; and there was a Teutonic thickness in the solemn Russian he spoke.

Now this second variation of a chapter's beginning is a popular and sound method--but there is something too polished about it; nor do I think it becoming for shy, mournful Orlovius to fling open, spryly, the gates of a new chapter. I submit to your attention my third variation.

In the meantime . . . (the inviting gesture of dots, dots, dots).

Of old, this dodge was the darling of the Kinematograph, alias Cinematograph, alias Moving Pictures. You saw the hero doing this or that, and in the meantime . . . Dots--and the action switched to the country. In the meantime ... A new paragraph, please.

. . . Plodding along the sun-parched road and trying to keep in the shade of the apple trees, whenever their crooked whitewashed trunks came marching by its side . . .

No, that is a silly notion: he was not always wandering. Some filthy (continued on page 156) despair (continued from page 126) kulak would require an additional hand; another back would be needed by some beastly miller. Having never been a tramp myself, I failed--and still fail--to rerun his life on my private screen. What I wished to imagine most was the impression left upon him by a certain morning in May passed on a patch of sickly grass near Prague. He woke up. At his side a well-dressed gentleman was sitting and staring. Happy thought: might give me a smoke. Turned out to be German. Very insistently (was perhaps not quite right in the head?) kept pressing upon me his pocket mirror; got quite abusive. I gathered it was about likenesses. Well, thought I, let them likenesses be. No concern of mine. Chance of his giving me some easy job. Asked about my address. One can never know, something might come of it.

Later: conversation in a barn on a warm dark night: "Now, as I was saying, that was an odd'un, that bloke I met one day. He made out we were doubles."

A laugh in the darkness: "It was you who saw double, you old sot."

Here another literary device has crept in: the imitation of foreign novels, translated into Russian, which depict the ways of merry vagabonds, good hearty fellows. (My devices seem to have got mixed up a little. I am afraid.)

And speaking of literature, there is not a thing about it that I do not know. It has always been quite a hobby of mine. As a child I composed verse and elaborate stories. I never stole peaches from the hothouse of the north Russian landowner whose steward my father was. I never buried cats alive. I never twisted the arms of playmates weaker than myself; but, as I say, I composed abstruse verse and elaborate stories, with dreadful finality and without any reason whatever lampooning acquaintances of my family. But I did not write down those stories, neither did I talk about them. Not a day passed without my telling some lie. I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating. For such sweet lying my mother would give me a cuff on the ear, and my father thrash me with a riding whip which had once been a bull's sinew. That did not dismay me in the least; rather, on the contrary, it furthered the flight of my fancies. With a stunned ear and burning buttocks, I would lie on my belly among the tall weeds in the orchard, and whistle and dream.

At school I used, invariably, to get the lowest mark for Russian composition, because I had a way of my own with Russian and foreign classics; thus, for example, when rendering "in my own words" the plot of Othello (which was, mind you, perfectly familiar to me) I made the Moor skeptical and Desdemona unfaithful.

A sordid bet won from a wenching upperformer resulted in a revolver's coming into my possession: so I would trace with chalk, on the aspen trunks in the wood, ugly, screaming, white faces which I then proceeded to shoot, one by one.

I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?

For several years I was haunted by a very singular and very nasty dream: I dreamed I was standing in the middle of a long passage with a door at the bottom, and passionately wanting, but not daring to go and open it, and then deciding at last to go, which I accordingly did; but at once awoke with a groan, for what I saw there was unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed room. That was all, but it was so terrible that I never could hold out; then one night a chair and its slender shadow appeared in the middle of the bare room--not as a first item of furniture but as though somebody had brought it to climb upon it and fix a bit of drapery, and since I knew whom I would find there next time stretching up with a hammer and a mouthful of nails, I spat them out and never opened that door again.

At 16, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdyhouse; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my affection on roly-poly Polymnia with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard--I simply adore orchards.

During the War, as I may have already mentioned, I moped in a fishing village not far from Astrakhan, and had it not been for books, I doubt whether I should have lived through those dingy years.

I first met Lydia in Moscow (whither I had got by miracle, after wriggling through the accursed hubbub of civil strife), at the flat, belonging to a chance acquaintance of mine, where I lived. He was a Lett, a silent, white-faced man with a cuboidal skull, a crewcut, and fish-cold eyes. By profession a teacher of Latin, he somehow managed, later, to become a prominent Soviet official. Into those lodgings Fate had packed several people who hardly knew one another, and there was among them that other cousin of Lydia's, Ardalion's brother Innocent, who, for some reason or another, got executed by the shooting squad soon after our departure. (To be frank, all this would be far more befitting at the beginning of the first chapter than at the beginning of the third.)

Bold and scoffing but inwardly tortured

(O, my soul, will your torch not ignite?),

From the porch of your God and His orchard

Why take off for the Earth and the night?

My own, my own! My juvenile experiments in the senseless sounds I loved, hymns inspired by my beery mistress--and "Shvinburne" as he was called in the Baltic provinces ... Now, there is one thing I should like to know: was I endowed in those days with any so-called criminal inclinations? Did my adolescence, so dun and dull to all appearances, secrete the possibility of producing a lawbreaker of genius? Or was I, perhaps, only making my way along that ordinary corridor of my dreams, time after time shrieking with horror at finding the room empty, and then one unforgettable day finding it empty no more? Yes, it was then that everything got explained and justified--my longing to open that door, and the queer games I played, and that thirst for falsehood, that addiction to painstaking lying which had seemed so aimless till then. Hermann discovered his alter ego. This happened, as I have had the honor of informing you, on the ninth of May; and in July I visited Orlovius.

The decision, which I had formed and which was now swiftly brought into execution, met with his full approval, the more so, as I was following an old piece of advice of his.

A week later I asked him to dinner. He tucked the corner of his napkin sideways into his collar. While tackling his soup, he expressed displeasure with the trend of political events. Lydia breezily inquired whether there would be any war and with whom? He looked at her over his spectacles, taking his time (such, more or less, was the glimpse you caught of him at the beginning of this chapter) and finally answered: "It is heavy to say, but I think war excluded. When I young was, I came upon the idea of supposing only the best" (he all but turned "best" into "pest," so gross were his lip-consonants). "I hold this idea always. The chief thing by me is optimismus."

"Which comes in very handy, seeing your profession," said I with a smile.

He lowered at me and replied quite seriously:

"But it is pessimismus that gives clients to us."

The end of the dinner was unexpectedly crowned with tea served in glasses. For some unaccountable reason Lydia thought such a finish very clever and nice. Orlovius at any rate was pleased. Ponderously and lugubriously telling us of his old mother, who lived in Dorpat, he held up his glass to stir what remained of his tea in the German fashion--that is, not with a spoon, but by means of a circular motion of the wrist--so as not to waste the sugar settled at the bottom.

The agreement I signed with his firm was, on my part, a curiously hazy and (continued overleaf) insignificant action. It was about that time I became so depressed, silent, absentminded: even my unobservant wife noticed a change in me--especially as my lovemaking had lapsed into a drab routine after all that furious dissociation. Once, in the middle of the night (we were lying awake in bed, and the room was impossibly stuffy, notwithstanding the wide-open window), she said:

"You do seem overworked, Hermann; in August we'll go to the seaside."

"Oh," I said, "it's not only that, but town life generally, that's what is boring me to death."

She could not see my face in the dark. After a minute she went on:

"Now, take for instance Aunt Elisa--you know that aunt of mine who lived in France, in Pignan. There is such a town as Pignan, isn't there?"

"Yes."

"Well, she doesn't live there any more, but has gone to Nice with the old Frenchman she married. They've got a farm down there."

She yawned.

"My chocolate is going to the devil, old girl," said I and yawned also.

"Everything will be all right," Lydia muttered. "You must have a rest, that's all."

"A change of life, not a rest," said I with the pretense of a sigh.

"Change of life," said Lydia.

"Tell me," I asked her, "wouldn't you like us to live somewhere in a quiet sunny nook, wouldn't it be a treat for you, if I retired from business? The respectable rentier sort of thing, eh?"

"I'd like living with you anywhere, Hermann. We'd have Ardalion come too, and perhaps we'd buy a great big dog."

A silence.

"Well, unfortunately we shan't go anywhere. I'm practically broke. That chocolate will have to be liquidated, I suppose."

A belated pedestrian passed by Chock! And again: chock! He was probably knocking the lampposts with his cane.

"Guess: my first is that sound, my second is an exclamation, my direct will be prefixed to me when I'm no more; and my whole is my ruin."

The smooth sizzle of a passing motorcar.

"Well--can't you guess?"

But my fool of a wife was already asleep. I closed my eyes, turned on my side, tried to sleep too; was unsuccessful. Out of the darkness, straight toward me, with jaw protruding and eyes looking straight into mine, came Felix. As he closed up on me he dissolved, and what I saw before me was merely the long, empty road by which he had come. Then again, from afar, there appeared a form, that of a man, giving a knock with his stick to every wayside tree trunk; nearer and nearer he stalked, and I tried to make out his face ... And lo, with jaw protruding and eyes looking straight into mine--But he faded as before, the moment he reached me, or, better say, he seemed to enter into me, and pass through, as if I were a shadow; and then again there was only the road stretching out expectantly, and again a figure appeared, and again it was he.

I turned on my other side, and for a while all was dark and peaceful, unruffled blackness; then, gradually, a road became perceptible: the same road, but the other way round; and there appeared suddenly before my very face, as if coming out of me, the back of a man's head and the bag strapped to his shoulders; slowly his figure diminished, he was going, going, in another instant would be gone ... but all of a sudden he stopped, glanced back and retraced his steps, so that his face grew clearer and clearer; and it was my own face.

I turned again, this time lying supine, and then, as if seen through a dark glass, there stretched above me a varnished blue-black sky, a band of sky between the ebon shapes of trees which on either side were slowly receding; but when I lay face downward, I saw running below me the pebbles and mud of a country road, wisps of dropped hay, a cart rut brimming with rainwater, and in that wind-wrinkled puddle the trembling travesty of my face; which, as I noticed with a shock, was eyeless.

"I always leave the eyes to the last," said Ardalion self-approvingly.

He held before him, at arm's length, the charcoal picture which he had begun making of me, and bent his head this way and that. He used to come frequently, and it was on the balcony that we generally had the sitting. I had plenty of leisure now: it had occurred to me to give myself something in the way of a small holiday.

Lydia was present too, curled up in a wicker armchair with a book; a half-squashed cigarette end (she never quite crushed them to death) with grim tenacity of life let forth a thin, straight thread of smoke out of the ashtray: now and then some tiny wind would make it dip and wobble, but it recovered again as straight and thin as ever.

"Anything but a good likeness," said Lydia, without, however, lifting her eyes from her book.

"It may come yet," rejoined Ardalion. "Here, I'm going to prune this nostril and we'll get it. Kind of dull light this afternoon."

"What's dull?" inquired Lydia, lifting her eyes and holding one finger on the interrupted line.

Let me interrupt this passage, too, for there is still another piece of my life that summer worthy of your attention, reader. While apologizing for the muddle and mottle of my tale, let me repeat that it is not I who am writing, but my memory, which has its own whims and rules. So, watch me roaming again about the forest near Ardalion's lake; this time I have come alone and not by car, but by train (as far as Koenigsdorf) and bus (as far as the yellow post).

On the suburban map Ardalion left on our balcony one day all the features of the locality stand out very clear. Let us suppose I am holding that map before me; then the city of Berlin, which is outside the picture, may be imagined somewhere in the vicinity of my left elbow. On the map itself, in its southwestern corner, there stretches northward, like a black and white bit of scaled tape, the railway line, which, metaphysically at least, runs along my sleeve cuffward from Berlin. My wrist watch is the small town of Koenigsdorf, beyond which the black and white ribbon turns and proceeds eastward, where there is another circle (the lower button of my waistcoat): Eichenberg.

No need, however, to travel as far as that yet; we get off at Koenigsdorf. As the railway line swerves to the east, its companion, the main road, leaves it and continues north alone, straight to the village of Waldau (the nail of my left thumb). Thrice a day there is a bus plying between Koenigsdorf and Waldau (17 kilometers); and it is at Waldau, by the bye, that the center of the land-selling enterprise is situated; a gaily painted pavilion, a fancy flag flapping, numerous yellow signposts: one, for instance, points "to the bathing beach," but there is yet no beach to speak of--only a bog on the lip of the Waldau lake; another points "to the casino," but the latter is likewise absent, though represented by something looking like a tabernacle, with an incipient coffee stall; still another sign invites you "to the sports ground," and sure enough you find there, newly erected, a complicated, affair for gymnastics, rather like gallows, but there is nobody who might use the thing, apart from some village urchin swinging head downward and showing the patch on his bottom; and all around, in every direction, lie the lots: some of them are half sold and on Sundays you see fat men in bathing suits and horn-rimmed glasses sternly engaged in building rudimentary bungalows; here and there you may even see flowers freshly planted, or else a pink privy enlaced with climbing roses.

We shall, however, not go as far as Waldau either, but leave the bus on the tenth kilometer from Koenigsdorf, at a point where a solitary yellow post stands on our right. On the east side of the highway the map shows a vast space all dotted over: it is the forest; there, in its very heart, lies the small lake we bathed in, with, on its western bank, spread fanwise like playing cards, a dozen allotments, only one of which is sold (Ardalion's--if you can call it sold).

We are now getting to the exciting (continued on page 194) despair (continued from page 158) part. Mention has already been made of the station of Eichenberg which comes after Koenigsdorf when you travel east. Now comes a technical question: can a person starting from the neighborhood of Ardalion's lake reach Eichenberg on foot? The answer is: yes. We should go round the southern side of the lake and then bear east through the wood. After a four-kilometer walk, keeping in the wood all the time, we come out to a rustic lane, one end of which leads no matter where, to hamlets we need not bother about, while the other brings us to Eichenberg.

My life is all mangled and messed, but here I am clowning away, juggling with bright little descriptions, playing on the cosy pronoun "we," winking at the tourist, the cottage owner, the lover of Nature, that picturesque hash of greens and blues. But be patient with me, my reader. The walk we shall presently take will be your rich reward. These conversations with readers are quite silly, too. Stage asides. The eloquent hiss: "Soft now! Someone is coming..."

That walk. I was dropped by the bus at the yellow post. The bus resumed its course taking away from me three old women in polka-dotted black; a fellow wearing a velvet waistcoat, with a scythe wrapped in sackcloth; a small girl with a large parcel; and a man in an overcoat despite the heat, with a heavy-looking traveling bag on his knees: probably a veterinary surgeon.

Among the spurge and scutchgrass I found traces of tires--the tires of my car which had bumped and bounced here several times, during the trips we had made. I wore plus fours, or as Germans call them: "knickerbockers" (the "k" is sounded). I entered the wood. I stopped at the exact spot where I and my wife had once waited for Ardalion. I smoked a cigarette there. I looked at the little puff of smoke that slowly stretched out in midair, was folded by ghostly fingers, and melted away. I felt a spasm in my throat. I went on to the lake and noticed, on the sand, a crumpled black and orange scrap of film wrap (Lydia had been snapping us). I went round the lake on its south side and then straight east through the thick pine wood.

After an hour's stroll I came out on the country road. I took it and in another hour was in Eichenberg. I boarded a slow train. I returned to Berlin.

Several times I repeated this monotonous walk without ever meeting a soul in the forest. Gloom and a deep hush. The land near the lake was not selling at all; indeed, the whole enterprise was in a bad way. When we three used to go out there for a swim, our solitude all day long remained so perfect that one could, if a body desired, bathe stark naked; which reminds me that once, at my order, frightened Lydia peeled off her bathing suit and, with many a pretty blush and nervous giggle, posed in the buff and the brown (fat thighs so tightly pressed together she could hardly stand) for her portrait before Ardalion, who all of a sudden got huffed about something, probably about his own lack of talent and, abruptly ceasing to draw, stalked away to look for edible toadstools.

As to my portrait, he worked at it stubbornly, continuing well into August, when, having failed to cope with the honest slog of charcoal, he changed to the petty knavishness of pastel. I set myself a certain time limit: the date of his finishing the thing. At last there came the pear-juice aroma of lacquer, the portrait was framed, and Lydia gave Ardalion 20 German marks, slipping them, for the sake of elegancy, into an envelope. We had guests that evening, Orlovius among others, and we all stood and gaped; at what? At the ruddy horror of my face. I do not know why he had lent my cheeks that fruity hue; they are really as pale as death. Look as one might, none could see the ghost of a likeness! How utterly ridiculous, for instance, that crimson point in the canthus, or that glimpse of eyetooth from under a curled, snarly lip. All this--against an ambitious background hinting at things that might have been either geometrical figures or gallow trees...

Orlovius, with whom shortsightedness was a form of stupidity, went up to the portrait as close as he could and after having pushed his spectacles up on his forehead (why ever did he wear them? They were only a hindrance) stood quite still with half-opened mouth, gently panting at the picture as if he were about to make a meal of it. "The modern style," he said at length with disgust and passed to its neighbor, which he began to examine with the same conscientious attention, although it was but an ordinary print found in every Berlin home: The Isle of the Dead.

And now, dear reader, let us imagine a smallish office room on the sixth story of an impersonal house. The typist had gone; I was alone. In the window a cloudy sky loomed. On the wall a calendar showed a huge black nine, rather like the tongue of a bull: the ninth of September. Upon the table lay the worries of the day (in the guise of letters from creditors) and among them stood a symbolically empty chocolate box with the lilac lady who had been untrue to me. Nobody about. I uncovered the typewriter. All was quiet. On a certain page of my pocket diary (destroyed since) there was a certain address, written in a half-illiterate hand. Looking through that trembling prism I could see a waxen brow bending, a dirty ear; head downward, a violet dangled from a buttonhole; a black-nailed finger pressed upon my silver pencil.

I remember, I shook off that numbness, put the little book back into my pocket, took out my keys, was about to lock up and leave--was leaving, but then stopped in the passage with my heart going pit-a-pit ... No, it was impossible to leave ... I returned to the room and stood awhile by the window looking at the house opposite. Lamps had already lit up there, shining upon office ledgers, and a man in black, with one hand behind his back, was walking to and fro, presumably dictating to a secretary I could not see. Ever and anon he appeared, and once, even, he stopped at the window to do some thinking, and then again turned, dictating, dictating, dictating.

Inexorable! I switched on the light, sat down, pressed my temples. Suddenly, with mad fury, the telephone rang; but it proved a mistake--wrong number. And then there was silence once more, save for the light patter of the rain quickening the approach of night.

"Dear Felix, I have found some work for you. First of all we must have an eye-to-eye monolog and get things settled. As I happen to be going to Saxony on business, I suggest that you meet me at Tarnitz, which I hope is not far from your present whereabouts. Let me know without delay whether my plan suits you. If it does, I shall tell you the day, the hour and the exact place, and send you such money as your coming may cost you. The traveling life I lead prevents me from having any fixed abode, so you had better direct your answer 'post office' (here follows the address of a Berlin post office) with the word 'Ardalion' on the envelope. Goodbye for the present. I expect to hear from you." (No signature.)

Here it is before me, the letter I finally wrote on that ninth of September, 1930. I cannot recollect now if the "monolog" was a slip or a joke. The thing is typed out on good, eggshell-blue note paper with a frigate for watermark: but it is now sadly creased and soiled at the corners; vague imprints of his fingers, perhaps. Thus it would seem that I were the receiver--not the sender. Well, so it ought to be in the long run, for haven't we changed places, he and I?

There are in my possession two more letters written on similar paper, but all the answers have been destroyed. If I still had them--if I had, for instance, that idiotic one which, with beautifully timed nonchalance, I showed to Orlovius (and then destroyed like the rest), it would be possible now to adopt an epistolic form of narration. A time-honored form with great achievements in the past. From Ex to Why: "Dear Why"--and above you are sure to find the date. The letters come and go--quite like the ding-dong flight of a ball over a net. The reader soon ceases to pay any attention whatever to the dates: and indeed what does it matter to him whether a given letter was written on the ninth of September or on September the sixteenth? Dates are required, however, to keep up the illusion.

So it goes on and on, Ex writing to Why and Why to Ex, page after page. Sometimes an outsider, a Zed, intrudes and adds his own little contribution to the correspondence, but he does so with the sole aim of making clear to the reader (not looking at him the while except for an occasional squint) some event, which, for reasons of plausibility and the like, neither Ex nor Why could very well have explained.

They, too, write with circumspection: all those "do-you-remember-that-time-whens" (detailed recollections follow) are brought in, not so much with the object of refreshing Why's memory as in order to give the reader the required reference--so that, on the whole, the effect produced is rather droll, those neatly inscribed and perfectly unnecessary dates, being, as I have already said, especially good fun. And when at last Zed butts in suddenly with a letter to his own personal correspondent (for it is a world consisting of correspondents that such novels imply) telling him of Ex's and Why's death or else of their fortunate union, the reader finds himself feeling that he would prefer the most ordinary missive from the tax collector to all this. As a rule I have always been noted for my exceptional humorousness; it goes naturally with a fine imagination; woe to the fancy which is not accompanied by wit.

One moment. I was copying that letter and now it has vanished somewhere.

I can continue; it had slipped under the table.

A week later the answer arrived (I had been to the post office five times and my nerves were on edge): Felix informed me that he gratefully accepted my suggestion. As often happens with illiterate people, the tone of his letter was in complete disagreement with that of his usual conversation: his epistolary voice was a tremulous falsetto with lapses of eloquent huskiness whereas in real life he had a self-satisfied baritone sinking to a didactic bass.

I wrote to him again, this time enclosing a ten-mark note, and asking him to meet me on the first of October at five P.M. near the bronze equestrian statue at the end of the boulevard which starts left of the railway-station square, at Tarnitz. I did not remember either that bronze rider's identity (some vulgar and mediocre Herzog, I believe), or the name of the boulevard, but one day, while driving through Saxony in the car of a business acquaintance, I got stranded for two hours at Tarnitz, my companion trying to perform some complicated telephoning; and as I have always possessed a memory of the camera type, I caught and fixed that street, that statue and other details--quite a small-size photo, really; though if I knew of a way of enlarging it, one might even discern the lettering of the shop signs, for that apparatus of mine is of admirable quality.

My letter of "Sept. the 16th" is handwritten: I dashed it off at the post office, being so excited by receiving a reply to "mine of the 9th inst.," that I had not the patience to wait till I got to a typewriter. Also, there was yet no special reason to be shy of any of my several hands, for I knew that I should prove the recipient eventually. After posting the letter, I felt what probably a purple red-veined thick maple leaf feels, during its slow flutter from branch to brook.

A few days before the first of October I happened to walk with my wife through the Tiergarten: there on a footbridge we stopped, with our elbows upon the railing. Below, on the still surface of the water, we admired the exact replica (ignoring the model, of course) of the park's autumn tapestry of many-hued foliage, the glassy blue of the sky, the dark outlines of the parapet and of our inclined faces. When a slow leaf fell, there would flutter up to meet it, out of the water's shadowy depths, its unavoidable double. Their meeting was soundless. The leaf came twirling down, and twirling up there would rise toward it, eagerly, its exact, beautiful, lethal reflection. I could not tear my gaze away from those inevitable meetings. "Come on," said Lydia and sighed. "Autumn, autumn," she said after a while. "Autumn. Yes, it is autumn." She already wore her leopard-spotted fur coat. I lagged behind and pierced fallen leaves with my cane.

"How lovely it ought to be in Russia now," she said (similar utterances came from her in early spring and on fine winter days: summer weather alone had no action at all upon her imagination).

"... There is no bliss on earth ... There's peace and freedom, though ... An enviable lot long have I yearned to know. Long have I, weary slave---"

"Come on, weary slave. We are dining a little earlier."

"... been contemplating flight ... You'd probably find it dull, Lydia--without Berlin, without Ardalion's vulgar rot?"

"Why, no. I want awfully to go somewhere too ... Sunshine, sea waves. A nice cosy life. Can't understand why you should criticize him so."

"... 'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time ... The heart demands repose ... Oh, no, I'm not criticizing him. By the way, what could we do with that monstrous portrait? It is an absolute eyesore. Day after day flits by ..."

"Look, Hermann, people on horseback. I'm sure she thinks she's a beauty, that female. Oh, come on, walk. You are dragging along like a sulky child. Really, you know. I am very fond of him. I have long wanted to give him a lot of money for a trip to Italy."

"... An enviable lot ... Long have I ... Nowadays Italy would not help a bad painter. It may have been like that once, long ago. Long have I, weary slave ..."

"You seem quite asleep. Hermann. Do let us buck up, please."

Now, I want to be quite frank: I did not experience any special craving for a rest; but latterly such had become the standing topic between me and my wife. Barely did we find ourselves alone than with blunt obstinacy I turned the conversation toward "the abode of pure delight"--as that Pushkin poem has it.

Meanwhile I counted the days with impatience. I had put off the appointment till the first of October, because I wanted to give myself a chance of changing my mind; and I cannot help thinking today that if I had changed my mind and not gone to Tarnitz, Felix would still be loitering about the bronze duke, or resting on a neighboring bench, drawing with his stick, from left to right and from right to left, the earthen rainbows drawn by every man with a stick and time to spare (our eternal subjection to the circle in which we are all imprisoned!). Yes, thus he would still be sitting to this day, and I would keep remembering him, with wild anguish and passion; a huge aching tooth and nothing with which to pull it out; a woman whom one cannot possess; a place, which, owing to the peculiar topography of nightmares, keeps agonizingly out of reach.

On the eve of my departure, Ardalion and Lydia were playing patience, whereas I paced the rooms and surveyed myself in all the mirrors. At that time I was still on admirable terms with mirrors. During the last fortnight I had let my mustache grow. This altered my countenance for the worse. Above my bloodless mouth there bristled a brownish-red blotch with an obscene little notch in the middle. I had the sensation that it was glued on; and sometimes it seemed to me that a small prickly animal was settled on my upper lip. At night, half asleep. I would suddenly pluck at my face, and my fingers did not recognize it. So, as I was saying. I paced about and smoked, and out of every speckly psyche in the flat there glanced at me, with eyes both apprehensive and grave, a hastily made-up individual. Ardalion, in a blue shirt with a pseudo-Scotch tie, clapped down card after card, like a tavern gambler. Lydia sat sideways to the table, legs crossed, skirt up to above stocking line, and exhaled the smoke of her cigarette upward, with her underlip thrust out and her eyes fixing the cards on the table. It was a black and boisterous night; every five seconds there would come, skimming across the roofs, the pale beam of the Radio Tower: a luminous twitch; the mild lunacy of a revolving searchlight. Through the narrow window ajar in the bathroom there arrived from some window across the yard, the creamy voice of a broadcaster. In the dining room the lamp illumined my hideous portrait. Blue-shirted Ardalion clapped down the cards: Lydia sat with her elbow on the table: smoke rose from the ashtray. I stepped out onto the balcony.

"Shut the door--there's a draft," came Lydia's voice from the dining room. A sharp wind made the stars blink and flicker. I returned indoors.

"Whither is our pretty one going?" asked Ardalion without addressing either of us.

"To Dresden," replied Lydia.

They were now playing durachki, dupes.

"My kindest regards to the Sistine," said Ardalion. "No, I can't cover that, I'm afraid. Let's see. This way."

"He'd do better if he went to bed, he's dead tired," said Lydia. "Look here, you've no right to feel the pack, it's dishonest."

"I didn't mean to," said Ardalion. "Don't be cross, pussy. And is he going for long?"

"This one too, Ardy dear, this one too, please, you haven't covered it, either."

So they went on for a good while, talking now of their cards and now about me, as though I were not in the room or as though I were a shadow, a ghost, a dumb creature; and that joking habit of theirs, which before used to leave me indifferent, now seemed to me loaded with meaning, as if indeed it were merely my reflection that was present, my real body being far away.

Next day in the afternoon, I got out at Tarnitz. I had a suitcase with me, and it hampered my movements, for I belong to that class of men who hate carrying anything; what I like is to display expensive fawn gloves, spreading my fingers and swinging my arms freely, as I saunter along and turn out the glistening toes of my handsomely shod feet, which are small for my size and very smart in their mouse-gray spats, for spats are similar to gloves in that they lend a man mellow elegancy akin to the special cachet of high-class traveling articles.

I love those shops where suitcases are sold, smelling good, creaking; the virginity of pig leather under the protective cloth; but I am digressing, digressing--maybe I want to digress ... never mind, let us go on, where was I? Yes, I resolved to leave my bag at the hotel. What hotel? I crossed the square, looking about me not only for a hotel, but also attempting to recall the place, as I had passed there once and remembered that boulevard yonder and the post office. I had no time, however, to exercise my memory. All of a sudden my vision was crowded with the signboard of a hotel, its entrance, a pair of laurel bushes in green tubes on either side ... but that hint at luxury proved to be a deception, for as soon as you went in, you were knocked silly by the reek from the kitchen; two hirsute nincompoops were drinking beer at the bar, and an old waiter, squatting on his haunches and wagging the end of the napkin under his armpit, was rolling on the floor a fat, white-bellied pup, which was wagging its tail, too.

I asked for a room (adding that my brother might spend the night with me) and was given a fair-sized one with a couple of beds and a decanter of dead water on a round table, as at the chemist's. The waiter gone, I stood there more or less alone, my ears ringing and a feeling of strange surprise pervading me. My double was probably already in the same town as I; was already waiting, maybe, in that town; consequently, I was represented by two persons. Were it not for my mustache and clothes, the hotel staff might--but maybe (I went on, skipping from thought to thought) his features had altered and now were no longer like mine, and I had come in vain. "Please, God!" I said with force, and failed to understand, myself, why I said so; for did not the sense of my whole life consist now in my possessing a live reflection? So why then did I mention the name of a nonexistent God, why did there flash through my mind the foolish hope that my reflection had been distorted?

I went to the window and looked out: there was a dreary courtyard down there and a round-backed Tartar in an embroidered skullcap was showing a small blue carpet to a buxom barefooted woman. Now I knew that woman and I recognized that Tartar too, and the patch of weeds in one corner of the yard, and that vortex of dust, and the Caspian wind's soft pressure, and the pale sky sick of looking on fisheries.

At that moment there was a knock, a maid entered with the additional pillow and the cleaner chamber pot I had demanded, and when I turned to the window again it was no longer a Tartar whom I saw there but some local peddler selling braces, and the woman was gone. But while I looked there started afresh that process of fusion, of building, that making up of a definite remembrance; there reappeared, growing and clustering, those weeds in a corner of the yard, and again red-haired Christina Forsmann, whom I had known carnally in 1915, fingered the Tartar's carpet, and sand flew, and I could not discover what the kernel was, around which all those things were formed, and where exactly the germ, the fount--suddenly I glanced at the decanter of dead water and it said "warm"--as in that game when you hide objects; and very possibly I should have finally found the trifle, which, unconsciously noticed by me, had at once set going the engine of memory (or, again, I should not have found it, the simple, nonliterary explanation being that everything in that provincial German hotel chamber, even the view, vaguely and uglily resembled something seen in Russia ages ago) had I not thought of my appointment; and that made me draw on my gloves and hurry out.

I turned down the boulevard, past the post office. A brutal wind was blowing and chasing leaves--scurry, cripples!--athwart the street. In spite of my impatience I was as observant as usual, noting the faces and trousers of passers-by, the tramcars which seemed like toys compared to the Berlin ones, the shops, a giant's top hat painted on a peeling wall, signboards, the name of a fishmonger: Carl Spiess, reminding me of one Carl Spiess whom I used to know in that Volga village of my past and who likewise sold spitchcocks.

At last, reaching the end of the street, I saw the bronze horse rearing and using its tail for a prop, like a woodpecker, and if the duke riding it had stretched out his arm with more energy, the whole monument in the murky evening light might have passed for that of Peter the Great in the town he founded. On one of the benches an old man was eating grapes out of a paper bag; on another bench sat two elderly dames; an invalid old woman of enormous size reclined in a Bath chair and listened to their talk, her round eyes agog. Twice and thrice did I go round the statue, observing as I went the snake writhing under that hind hoof, that legend in Latin, that jackboot with the black star of a spur. Sorry, there was really no snake; it was just my fancy borrowing from Czar Peter--whose statue, anyway, wears buskins.

Then I sat down on an empty bench (there were half a dozen in all) and looked at my watch. Three minutes past five. Sparrows hopped about the turf. On a ridiculously curved flowerbed there grew the filthiest flowers in the world: Michaelmas daisies. Ten minutes elapsed. No, my agitation refused to keep seated. Moreover, I was out of cigarettes and craved frantically for a smoke.

I turned into a side street, passing, as I did so, a black Protestant church which affected an air of antiquity, and espied a tobacconist's. The automatic bell continued to whirr after my entering, as I had not closed the door: "Will you please---" said the bespectacled woman behind the counter, and I stepped back and shut the door sharply. Just above it was one of Ardalion's still-life pictures: a tobacco pipe, on green cloth, and two roses.

"How on earth did you---?" I asked with a laugh. She did not understand at first, and then answered:

"My niece painted it--my niece who died recently."

Well, I'm damned! (thought I). For had I not seen something very similar, if not identical, among Ardalion's pictures? Well, I'm damned!

"Oh, I see," said I aloud: "have you got--" I named the brand I usually smoke, paid for the cigarettes and went out.

Twenty minutes past five.

Not daring to return to the assigned place (so giving fate a chance of altering its program) and still feeling nothing, neither annoyance, nor relief, I walked for a pretty long time down the side street which led me away from the statue, and at every other step I stopped, trying to light my cigarette, but the wind kept filching my light until I took shelter under a porch, thus blasting the blast--what a pun! I stood under the porch and looked at two little girls playing marbles: rolling by turn the iridescent orb, now bending to give it a push with the back of the finger, now compressing it between the feet to release it with a hop, and all this in order that the marble should trickle into a tiny pit in the ground under a double-trunked birch tree; as I stood looking at that concentrated, silent and minute game, I somehow found myself thinking that Felix could not come for the simple reason that he was a product of my imagination, which hankered after reflections, repetitions, masks, and that my presence in a remote little town was absurd and even monstrous.

Well do I remember that little town--and feel oddly perplexed: should I go on giving instances of such aspects of it, which in a horribly unpleasant way echoed things I had somewhere seen long ago? It even seems to me now that it was that town, constructed of certain refuse particles of my past, for I discovered in it things most remarkably and most uncannily familiar to me: a low pale-blue house, the exact counterpart of which I had seen in a St. Petersburg suburb; an old-clothes shop, where suits hung that had belonged to dead acquaintances of mine; a street lamp bearing the same number (I always like to notice the numbers of street lamps) as one that had stood in front of the Moscow house where I lodged; and nearby the same bare birch tree with the same forked trunk in an iron corset (ah, that is what made me look at the number on the lamp). I could, if I chose, give many more examples of that kind, some of which are so subtle, so--how shall I put it? ... abstractly personal, as to be unintelligible to the reader, whom I pet and pamper like a devoted nurse. Nor am I quite certain of the exceptionality of the aforesaid phenomena. Every man with a keen eye is familiar with those anonymously retold passages from his past life: false-innocent combinations of details, which smack revoltingly of plagiarism. Let us leave them to the conscience of fate and return, with a sinking heart and dull reluctance, to the monument at the end of the street.

The old man had finished his grapes and was gone; the woman, dying from dropsy, had been wheeled away; there was nobody about, save one man, who sat on that very same bench where I had been sitting a while ago. Leaning forward a little and with knees set apart, he was dealing out crumbs to the sparrows. His stick, which was carelessly set against the seat near his left hip, came slowly into motion the moment I noticed its presence; it started sliding and plopped down on the gravel. The sparrows flew up, described a curve and settled on the surrounding shrubs. I became aware that the man had turned toward me.

You are right, my intelligent reader.

This is the second installment of "Despair", a major novel of existential fantasy and wit, by Vladimir Nabokov. Part III will appear in Playboy next month.