looking like a tapering alabaster column.
Sensing my gaze, the Princess turned to present me with her profile, which I could not make out clearly, since her majesty's face was half-covered with a hazy veil, but what I did see was enough: a slim nose with the very slightest of aquiline curves, eyes with a moist glint … You are familiar with that female peculiarity (ah, but yes, how could you be, with your celibate status!) of surveying an extremely broad sector of the immediate vicinity with the edge of their vision without actually turning around very far. A man would have to twist around his entire neck and his shoulders, but a charming creature such as this one merely turns her eye a little to the side and sees everything she needs in an instant.
I am sure that the Princess made out all the details of my modest (oh, very well—let it be immodest) person. And, note, she did not turn away immediately, but first gently touched her throat and only then turned the regal back of her head to me once again. Oh, how much that gesture means, that spontaneous raising of the fingers to the source of the breath!
Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that the beauty was sitting in the coffee shop alone—you must admit that this is not entirely usual, and it intrigued me too. She might possibly have been waiting for someone, or perhaps she was simply looking out the window at the square. Inspired by those fingers, my secret allies, I bent all my mathematical abilities to solving the problem of how best to strike up an acquaintance with this Circe of New Ararat, but I had no time to complete the integral calculation. She rose abruptly to her feet, dropped a silver coin on the table, and walked out quickly, casting another swift, coal black glance at me from behind her half veil. The waiter told me that this lady often comes to the coffee shop. That means I will have another chance, I thought, and for lack of other employment I began imagining all sorts of seductive scenes, about which you, as a man of the church, do not need to know.
I had better share with you my impressions of the island.
Well, this is a really strange place to which you have sent me, Rabbi. The central square, on which the hotel stands, seems to have been cut out of some Baden-Baden or other with a pair of scissors: brightly painted stone houses two or three stories high, clean people strolling about everywhere, almost as bright in the evening as it is during the day. And everywhere there are establishments that could hardly be more worldly—I would even call them vain in the biblical sense—with quite incredible names: a restaurant serving meat in abundance called Balthasars Feast, a hairdresser's called Delilah, a souvenir shop called Gifts of the Magi, a bank called The Widows Mite, and more in the same vein. But only a few minutes’ walk away from the square you find yourself transported to the banks of the Neva shortly after the foundation of our consumptive capital, in 1704: workers running about with wheelbarrows, hammering stakes into the swampy ground, sawing logs, digging pits. All with beards and black cassocks, but with their sleeves rolled up and wearing oilcloth aprons—the veritable realization of the revolutionary dream of making the parasitical estate of clerics perform socially useful work.
Several times a day, in the most unexpected places, you come across the lord and master of this entire ant army, the archimandrite Vitalii II (sic!) , who really does look like Peter the Great: long and lanky, menacing, impetuous, striding along so vigorously that his cassock balloons up around him and his retinue can hardly keep up behind. Not a priest, but a cannonball, blasted from a cannon. I would love to set you, Monk Peresvet of Kulikovo, against him one to one, and see who would come off best. I would probably bet on you anyway—the archimandrite may be more rapid-firing, but your caliber is heavier.
Here on the islands they seem to have mastered the
Sensing my gaze, the Princess turned to present me with her profile, which I could not make out clearly, since her majesty's face was half-covered with a hazy veil, but what I did see was enough: a slim nose with the very slightest of aquiline curves, eyes with a moist glint … You are familiar with that female peculiarity (ah, but yes, how could you be, with your celibate status!) of surveying an extremely broad sector of the immediate vicinity with the edge of their vision without actually turning around very far. A man would have to twist around his entire neck and his shoulders, but a charming creature such as this one merely turns her eye a little to the side and sees everything she needs in an instant.
I am sure that the Princess made out all the details of my modest (oh, very well—let it be immodest) person. And, note, she did not turn away immediately, but first gently touched her throat and only then turned the regal back of her head to me once again. Oh, how much that gesture means, that spontaneous raising of the fingers to the source of the breath!
Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that the beauty was sitting in the coffee shop alone—you must admit that this is not entirely usual, and it intrigued me too. She might possibly have been waiting for someone, or perhaps she was simply looking out the window at the square. Inspired by those fingers, my secret allies, I bent all my mathematical abilities to solving the problem of how best to strike up an acquaintance with this Circe of New Ararat, but I had no time to complete the integral calculation. She rose abruptly to her feet, dropped a silver coin on the table, and walked out quickly, casting another swift, coal black glance at me from behind her half veil. The waiter told me that this lady often comes to the coffee shop. That means I will have another chance, I thought, and for lack of other employment I began imagining all sorts of seductive scenes, about which you, as a man of the church, do not need to know.
I had better share with you my impressions of the island.
Well, this is a really strange place to which you have sent me, Rabbi. The central square, on which the hotel stands, seems to have been cut out of some Baden-Baden or other with a pair of scissors: brightly painted stone houses two or three stories high, clean people strolling about everywhere, almost as bright in the evening as it is during the day. And everywhere there are establishments that could hardly be more worldly—I would even call them vain in the biblical sense—with quite incredible names: a restaurant serving meat in abundance called Balthasars Feast, a hairdresser's called Delilah, a souvenir shop called Gifts of the Magi, a bank called The Widows Mite, and more in the same vein. But only a few minutes’ walk away from the square you find yourself transported to the banks of the Neva shortly after the foundation of our consumptive capital, in 1704: workers running about with wheelbarrows, hammering stakes into the swampy ground, sawing logs, digging pits. All with beards and black cassocks, but with their sleeves rolled up and wearing oilcloth aprons—the veritable realization of the revolutionary dream of making the parasitical estate of clerics perform socially useful work.
Several times a day, in the most unexpected places, you come across the lord and master of this entire ant army, the archimandrite Vitalii II (sic!) , who really does look like Peter the Great: long and lanky, menacing, impetuous, striding along so vigorously that his cassock balloons up around him and his retinue can hardly keep up behind. Not a priest, but a cannonball, blasted from a cannon. I would love to set you, Monk Peresvet of Kulikovo, against him one to one, and see who would come off best. I would probably bet on you anyway—the archimandrite may be more rapid-firing, but your caliber is heavier.
Here on the islands they seem to have mastered the
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