The Buddha's Return by Gaito Gazdánov

meaning for me simply because I live in inadequately fine surroundings? And yet it is so.”
    I was only half listening to him. Before my eyes, doggedly returning to me, was that day in April two years ago when I first set eyes on him, standing there in his ornamental rags, with that dark, unshaven face. Now there were books in heavy leather bindings lined above his head, and the recherché elegance of his speech could in no way seem out of place.
    I spent the whole evening with him and left, taking with me the memory of this unlikely metamorphosis, which was utterly baffling and seemed to contradict everything I had until now, consciously or unconsciously, considered plausible. This man had started off in the realm of fantasy and stepped into reality, and for me his existence contained all the luxurious absurdity of a Persian fairy tale, which troubled me.
    Some time after this I again—completely by chance—bumped into the residents of Rue Simon le Franc. I ran into one of my former classmates, with whom I had long ago lost touch, but about whom I occasionally read in the newspapers, most often with regard to his latest arrest or conviction. He was an astonishing man, a chronic alcoholicwho had spent his entire life in a drunken haze and had been spared from the grave only by virtue of an uncommonly strong constitution. When he first arrived in France, he worked in a number of factories, although this period did not last for very long: he started seeing some well-to-do girl, taking her to all the cabarets in town; then he caught her cheating on him, shot her new lover, was sent down and on his release began leading the most disparate of lives, one with which it was difficult to draw any comparison. He worked as a gardener in the south of France, journeyed to the Alsace, and had once been spotted in a village in the Pyrenees. For the most part, however, he lived in Paris, in the outlying slums, passing from one shady episode to the next, and, whenever he spoke of it, the narrative would always feature his being released on a lack of evidence and the clarification of some misunderstanding. Then again, it was utterly impossible to keep track of his tale; there was no way to distinguish where the inebriation ended and where the madness began. In any case, there could be no talk of any chronological sequence to what he said.
    “You see, just as I get back from Switzerland, she starts telling me how this lady painter from Italy is planning to go off to Sicily, but just then—can you imagine!—a police inspector investigating that Greek journalist barges in, asking me what I was doing in Luxembourg a fortnight ago, while she claims that the doctor who treated the Englishman was the victim of some night-time attack—hishead was smashed in, you see, he was terribly injured, and so he decided to go straight to the lady modeller who lives near the Porte d’Orléans.”
    He spoke as though each of his interlocutors was well informed about every individual he mentioned. However, I had never heard of any artists, Greek journalists or doctors, even from him, and I was not altogether sure that they really did exist, such as he described them. Amid the progressive atrophy of his mental faculties, or, rather, amid their incredible confusion, all conception of time vanished; he had no idea in which year we were living, and any semblance of continuity in his own existence appeared miraculously improbable. Thus he wandered about Paris in a drunken madness that had persisted for years, and it was astonishing that he ever found his way home or even recognized anyone. But he had grown much worse in recent years, was taken ill with consumption, and could not go on as he had done. I once met him in the street; he asked me for some money and I gave him what I had, but a few days later I received a note from him, saying that he was bedridden in his hotel room and had nothing to eat. I headed straight there.
    He lived on the outskirts of the