just every sort of thing we all know about and some we haven't figured out yet?
Now came the audience's great moment. “Ja!” they cried out, again and again; even the waiters joined in.
Poor Mottel actually crumpled under the assault. A world he presumed to love, of order and rectitude, had been torn to shreds before his very eyes and now the truth lay bare. With regret, he bid all that fatuous old nonsense adieu. “Ja, ja,” he admitted ruefully, so it has always been, so it will always be, so, particularly so, will it be tonight.
Just then something extremely interesting caught his eye, something going on behind the curtain to his right, and, eyes glittering like a love-maddened satyr, he bequeathed his audience one final, drawn-out jaaa, then stomped off the stage to applause as the Companions struck up a circus melody and the zebras ran out from behind the curtain, bucking and neighing, pawing their little fore-hooves in the air.
Naked girls in papier-mâché zebra masks, actually. Prancing and jiggling among the tables, stopping now and again to stick their bottoms out at the customers, then taking off again with a leap. After a few minutes they galloped away into the wings, the Companions swung into a sedate waltz, and the dancers soon reappeared, without masks and wearing gowns, as Animierdamen who were to flirt with the customers, sit on their laps, and tickle them into buying champagne by the bottle.
Szara's was heavy-hipped, with hair dyed a lustrous, sinister black. “Can you guess which zebra was me? I was so very close to you!”
Later he went with her. To a secret room at the top of a cold house where you walked upstairs, then downstairs, across two courtyards where cats lived, finally to climb again, past blind turns and dark passageways, until you came to a low corridor under the roof gables.
“Zebra,” he called her; it made things simpler. He doubted he was the originator of the idea, for she seemed quite comfortable with it. She cantered and whinnied and shook her little white tummy—all for him.
His spirit soared, at last he'd found an island of pleasure in his particular sea of troubles. There were those, he knew, who would have found such sport sorrowful and mean, but what furies did they know? What waited for them on the other sides of doors?
The Zebra owned a little radio; it played static, and also a station that stayed on the air all night long, playing scratchy recordings of Schumann and Chopin from somewhere in the darkness of Central Europe, where insomnia had become something of a religion.
To this accompaniment they made great progress. And delighted themselves by feigning shock at having tumbled into such depths where anything at all may be found to swim. “Ah yes?” cried the Zebra, as though they'd happened on some new and complex amusement, never before attempted in the secret rooms of these cities, as though their daring to play the devil's own games might stay his hand from that which they knew, by whatever obscure prescience, he meant to do to them all.
Warm and exhausted at last, they dozed off in the smoky room while the radio crackled, faded in and out, voices sometimes whispering to them in unknown languages.
The leaders of the Georgian khvost of the NKVD usually met for an hour or two on Sunday mornings in Alexei Agayan's apartment on Tverskaya street. Beria himself never came—he was, in some sense, a conspiracy of one—but made his wishes known through Dershani, Agayan, or one of the others. Typically, only the Moscow-basedofficers attended the meeting, though comrades from the southeast republics stopped by from time to time.
They met in Agayan's kitchen, large, dilapidated, and very warm, on 2 i November at eleven-thirty in the morning. Agayan, a short, dark-skinned man with a thick head of curly gray hair and an unruly mustache, wore an old cardigan sweater in keeping with the air of informality. Ismailov, a Russified Turk, and Dzakhalev, an Ossete—the
Now came the audience's great moment. “Ja!” they cried out, again and again; even the waiters joined in.
Poor Mottel actually crumpled under the assault. A world he presumed to love, of order and rectitude, had been torn to shreds before his very eyes and now the truth lay bare. With regret, he bid all that fatuous old nonsense adieu. “Ja, ja,” he admitted ruefully, so it has always been, so it will always be, so, particularly so, will it be tonight.
Just then something extremely interesting caught his eye, something going on behind the curtain to his right, and, eyes glittering like a love-maddened satyr, he bequeathed his audience one final, drawn-out jaaa, then stomped off the stage to applause as the Companions struck up a circus melody and the zebras ran out from behind the curtain, bucking and neighing, pawing their little fore-hooves in the air.
Naked girls in papier-mâché zebra masks, actually. Prancing and jiggling among the tables, stopping now and again to stick their bottoms out at the customers, then taking off again with a leap. After a few minutes they galloped away into the wings, the Companions swung into a sedate waltz, and the dancers soon reappeared, without masks and wearing gowns, as Animierdamen who were to flirt with the customers, sit on their laps, and tickle them into buying champagne by the bottle.
Szara's was heavy-hipped, with hair dyed a lustrous, sinister black. “Can you guess which zebra was me? I was so very close to you!”
Later he went with her. To a secret room at the top of a cold house where you walked upstairs, then downstairs, across two courtyards where cats lived, finally to climb again, past blind turns and dark passageways, until you came to a low corridor under the roof gables.
“Zebra,” he called her; it made things simpler. He doubted he was the originator of the idea, for she seemed quite comfortable with it. She cantered and whinnied and shook her little white tummy—all for him.
His spirit soared, at last he'd found an island of pleasure in his particular sea of troubles. There were those, he knew, who would have found such sport sorrowful and mean, but what furies did they know? What waited for them on the other sides of doors?
The Zebra owned a little radio; it played static, and also a station that stayed on the air all night long, playing scratchy recordings of Schumann and Chopin from somewhere in the darkness of Central Europe, where insomnia had become something of a religion.
To this accompaniment they made great progress. And delighted themselves by feigning shock at having tumbled into such depths where anything at all may be found to swim. “Ah yes?” cried the Zebra, as though they'd happened on some new and complex amusement, never before attempted in the secret rooms of these cities, as though their daring to play the devil's own games might stay his hand from that which they knew, by whatever obscure prescience, he meant to do to them all.
Warm and exhausted at last, they dozed off in the smoky room while the radio crackled, faded in and out, voices sometimes whispering to them in unknown languages.
The leaders of the Georgian khvost of the NKVD usually met for an hour or two on Sunday mornings in Alexei Agayan's apartment on Tverskaya street. Beria himself never came—he was, in some sense, a conspiracy of one—but made his wishes known through Dershani, Agayan, or one of the others. Typically, only the Moscow-basedofficers attended the meeting, though comrades from the southeast republics stopped by from time to time.
They met in Agayan's kitchen, large, dilapidated, and very warm, on 2 i November at eleven-thirty in the morning. Agayan, a short, dark-skinned man with a thick head of curly gray hair and an unruly mustache, wore an old cardigan sweater in keeping with the air of informality. Ismailov, a Russified Turk, and Dzakhalev, an Ossete—the
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