The Eye (6 page)

In the same way I resolved to dig up the true Smurov, being already aware that his image was influenced by the climatic conditions prevailing in various souls—that within a cold soul he assumed one aspect but in a glowing one had a different coloration. I was beginning to enjoy this game. Personally, I viewed Smurov without emotion. A certain bias in his favor that had existed at the outset, had given way to simple curiosity. And yet I experienced an excitement new to me. Just as the scientist does not care whether the color of a wing is pretty or not, or whether its markings are delicate or lurid (but is interested only in its taxonomic characters), I regarded Smurov, without any aesthetic tremor; instead, I found a keen thrill in the classification of Smurovian masks that I had so casually undertaken.

The task was far from easy. For instance, I knew perfectly well that insipid Marianna saw
in Smurov a brutal and brilliant officer of the White Army, “the kind that went around stringing people up right and left,” as Evgenia informed me in the greatest secrecy during a confidential chat. To define this image accurately, however, I would have had to be familiar with Marianna’s entire life, with all the secondary associations that came alive inside her when she looked at Smurov—other reminiscences, other chance impressions and all those lighting effects that vary from soul to soul. My conversation with Evgenia took place soon after Marianna Nikolaevna’s departure; it was said she was going to Warsaw, but there were obscure implications of a still more eastwardly journey—perhaps back to the fold; and so Marianna carried away with her and, unless someone sets her right, will preserve to the end of her days, a very particular idea of Smurov.

“And how about you,” I asked Evgenia, “what idea have
you
formed?”

“Oh, that’s hard to say, all at once,” she replied, a smile enhancing both her resemblance to a cute bulldog and the velvety shade of her eyes.

“Please,” I insisted.

“In the first place there is his shyness,” she
said swiftly. “Yes, yes, a great deal of shyness. I had a cousin, a very gentle, pleasant young man, but whenever he had to confront a crowd of strangers in a fashionable drawing room, he would come in whistling to give himself an independent air—casual and tough at the same time.”

“Yes, go on?”

“Let me see, what else is there … Sensitivity, I would say, great sensitivity, and, of course, youth; and lack of experience with people …”

There was nothing more to be wheedled out of her, and the resulting eidolon was rather pale and not very attractive. It was Vanya’s version of Smurov, however, that interested me most of all. I thought about this constantly. I remember how, one evening, chance seemed about to favor me with an answer. I had climbed up from my gloomy room to their sixth-floor apartment only to find both sisters with Khrushchov and Mukhin on the point of leaving for the theater. Having nothing better to do, I went out to accompany them to the taxi stand. Suddenly I noticed that I had forgotten my downstairs key.

“Oh, don’t worry, we have two sets,” said Evgenia, “you’re lucky we live in the same
house. Here, you can give them back tomorrow. Good night.”

I walked homeward and on the way had a wonderful idea. I imagined a sleek movie villain reading a document he has found on someone else’s desk. True, my plan was very sketchy. Smurov had once brought Vanya a yellow, dark-dappled orchid somewhat resembling a frog; now I could ascertain if perhaps Vanya had preserved the cherished remains of the flower in some secret drawer. Once he had brought her a little volume of Gumilyov, the poet of fortitude; it might be worth while checking if the pages had been cut and if the book were lying perhaps on her night table. There was also a photograph, taken with a magnesium flash, in which Smurov had come out magnificently—in semiprofile, very pale, one eyebrow raised—and beside him stood Vanya, while Mukhin skulked in the rear. And, generally speaking, there were many things to discover. Having decided that if I ran into the maid (a very pretty girl, by the way), I would explain that I had come to return the keys, I cautiously unlocked the door of the Khrushchov apartment and tiptoed into the parlor.

It is amusing to catch another’s room by surprise. The furniture froze in amazement
when I switched on the light. Somebody had left a letter on the table; the empty envelope lay there like an old useless mother, and the little sheet of note paper seemed to be sitting up like a robust babe. But the eagerness, the throb of excitement, the precipitous movement of my hand, all proved uncalled-for. The letter was from a person unknown to me, a certain Uncle Pasha. It contained not a single allusion to Smurov! And if it was coded, then I did not know the key. I flitted over into the dining room. Raisins and nuts in a bowl, and, next to it, spread-eagled and prone, a French novel—the adventures of
Ariane, Jeune Fille Russe
. In Vanya’s bedroom, where I went next, it was cold from the open window. I found it so strange to look at the lace bedspread and the altarlike toilet table, where cut glass glistened mystically. The orchid was nowhere to be seen, but in recompense there was the photo propped against the bedside lamp. It had been taken by Roman Bogdanovich. It showed Vanya sitting with luminous legs crossed, behind her was the narrow face of Mukhin, and to Vanya’s left, one could make out a black elbow—all that remained of lopped-off Smurov. Shattering evidence! On Vanya’s lace-covered pillow there suddenly appeared a star-shaped hollow—the violent imprint of my
fist, and in the next moment I was already in the dining room, devouring the raisins and still trembling. Here I remembered the escritoire in the parlor and noiselessly hurried to it. But at this moment the metallic fidgeting of a key sounded from the direction of the front door. I began to retreat hastily, switching off lights as I went, until I found myself in a satiny little boudoir next to the dining room. I fumbled about in the dark, bumped into a sofa and stretched out on it as if I had gone in to take a nap.

In the meantime voices carried from the hallway—those of the two sisters and that of Khrushchov. They were saying goodbye to Mukhin. Wouldn’t he come in for a minute? No, it was late, he would not. Late? Had my disincarnate flitting from room to room really lasted three hours? Somewhere in a theater one had had time to perform a silly play I had seen many times while here a man had but walked through three rooms. Three rooms: three acts. Had I really pondered over a letter in the parlor a whole hour, and a whole hour over a book in the dining room, and an hour again over a snapshot in the strange coolness of the bedroom? … My time and theirs had nothing in common.

Khrushchov probably went right to bed; the
sisters entered the dining room alone. The door to my dark damasked lair was not shut tight. I believed that now I would learn all I wanted about Smurov.

“…  But rather exhausting,” said Vanya and made a soft och-ing sound conveying to me a yawn. “Give me some root beer, I don’t want any tea.” There was the light scrape of a chair being moved to the table.

A long silence. Then Evgenia’s voice—so close that I cast an alarmed look at the slit of light. “…  The main thing is, let him tell them his terms. That’s the main thing. After all, he speaks English and those Germans don’t. I’m not sure I like this fruit paste.”

Silence again. “All right, I’ll advise him to do that,” said Vanya. Something tinkled and fell—a spoon, maybe—and then there was another long pause.

“Look at this,” said Vanya with a laugh.

“What’s it made of, wood?” asked her sister.

“I don’t know,” said Vanya and laughed again.

After a while, Evgenia yawned, even more cosily than Vanya.

“…  clock has stopped,” she said.

And that was all. They sat on for quite a while; they made clinking sounds with something
or other; the nutcracker would crunch and return to the tablecloth with a thump; but there was no more talk. Then the chairs moved again. “Oh, we can leave it there,” drawled Evgenia languidly, and the magical slit from which I had expected so much was abruptly extinguished. Somewhere a door slammed, Vanya’s faraway voice said something, by now unintelligible, and then followed silence and darkness. I lay on the sofa for a while longer and suddenly noticed that it was already dawn. Whereupon I cautiously made my way to the staircase and returned to my room.

I imagined rather vividly Vanya protruding the tip of her tongue at one side of her mouth and snipping off with her little scissors the unwanted Smurov. But maybe it was not so at all: sometimes something is cut off in order to be framed separately. And to confirm this last conjecture, a few days later Uncle Pasha quite unexpectedly arrived from Munich. He was going to London to visit his brother and stayed in Berlin only a couple of days. The old goat had not seen his nieces for a very long time and was inclined to recall how he used to place sobbing Vanya across his knee and spank her. At first sight this Uncle Pasha
seemed merely three times her age but one had only to look a little closer and he deteriorated under your very eyes. In point of fact, he was not 50 but 80, and one could imagine nothing more dreadful than this mixture of youthfulness and decrepitude. A jolly corpse in a blue suit, with dandruff on his shoulders, clean-shaven, with bushy eyebrows and prodigious tufts in his nostrils, Uncle Pasha was mobile, noisy and inquisitive. At his first appearance he interrogated Evgenia in a sprayey whisper about every guest, quite openly pointing now at this person, now at that, with his index, which ended in a yellow, monstrously long nail. On the following day occurred one of those coincidences involving new arrivals that for some reason are so frequent, as if there existed some tasteless prankish Fate not unlike Weinstock’s Abum who, on the very day you return home from a journey, has you meet the man who had chanced to be sitting opposite you in the railway car. For several days already I had felt a strange discomfort in my bullet-punctured chest, a sensation resembling a draft in a dark room. I went to see a Russian doctor, and there, sitting in the waiting room, was of course Uncle Pasha. While I was debating whether or not to accost him (assuming that
since the previous evening he had had time to forget both my face and my name), this decrepit prattler, loath to keep hidden a single grain from the storage bins of his experience, started a conversation with an elderly lady who did not know him, but who was evidently fond of openhearted strangers. At first I did not follow their talk, but suddenly Smurov’s name gave me a jolt. What I learned from Uncle Pasha’s pompous and trite words was so important that when he finally disappeared behind the doctor’s door, I left immediately without waiting my turn—and did so quite automatically, as if I had come to the doctor’s office only to hear Uncle Pasha: now the performance was over and I could leave. “Imagine,” Uncle Pasha had said, “the baby girl blossomed into a genuine rose. I’m an expert in roses and concluded at once that there must be a young man in the picture. And then her sister says to me, ‘It’s a great secret, Uncle, so don’t tell anyone, but she’s been in love with this Smurov for a long time.’ Well, of course, it’s none of my business. One Smurov is no worse than another, But it really gives me a kick to think that there was a time when I used to give that lassie a good spanking on her bare little buttocks, and now there she is, a bride. She simply worships
him. Well, that’s the way it is, my good lady, we’ve had our fling, now let the others have theirs …”

So—it has happened. Smurov is loved. Evidently Vanya, myopic but sensitive Vanya, had discerned something out of the ordinary in Smurov, had understood something about him, and his quietness had not deceived her. That same evening, at the Khrushchovs’, Smurov was particularly quiet and humble. Now, however, when one knew what bliss had smitten him—yes, smitten (for there is bliss so strong that, with its blast, with its hurricane howl, it resembles a cataclysm)—now a certain palpitation could be discerned in his quietude, and the carnation of joy showed through his enigmatic pallor. And dear God, how he gazed at Vanya! She would lower her lashes, her nostrils would quiver, she would even bite her lips a little, hiding from all her exquisite feelings. That night it seemed that something must be resolved.

Poor Mukhin was not there: he had gone for a few days to London. Khrushchov was also absent. In compensation, however, Roman Bogdanovich (who was gathering material for the diary which with old-maidish precision he
weekly sent to a friend in Tallin) was more than ever his sonorous and importunate self. The sisters sat on the sofa as always. Smurov stood leaning one elbow on the piano, ardently gazing at the smooth parting in Vanya’s hair, at her dusky-red cheeks … Evgenia several times jumped up and thrust her head out of the window—Uncle Pasha was coming to say goodbye and she wanted to be sure and be on hand to unlock the elevator for him. “I adore him,” she said, laughing. “He is such a character. I bet he won’t let us accompany him to the station.”

“Do you play?” Roman Bogdanovich politely asked Smurov, with a meaningful look at the piano. “I used to play once,” Smurov calmly replied. He opened the lid, glanced dreamily at the bared teeth of the keyboard, and brought the lid back down. “I love music,” Roman Bogdanovich observed confidentially. “I recall, in my student days——”

“Music,” said Smurov in a louder tone, “good music at least, expresses that which is inexpressible in words. Therein lie the meaning and the mystery of music.”

“There he is,” shouted Evgenia and left the room.

“And you, Varvara?” asked Roman Bogdanovich
in his coarse, thick voice. “You—‘with fingers lighter than a dream’—eh? Come on, anything … Some little ritornello.” Vanya shook her head and seemed about to frown but instead giggled and lowered her face. No doubt, what excited her mirth was this thickhead’s inviting her to sit down at the piano when her soul was ringing and flowing with its own melody. At this moment one could have noted in Smurov’s face a most violent desire that the elevator carrying Evgenia and Uncle Pasha get stuck forever, that Roman Bogdanovich tumble right into the jaws of the blue Persian lion depicted on the rug, and, most important, that I—the cold, insistent, tireless eye—disappear.