Only much later did I learn that he had died of consumption around a month after I last met him, in one of the sanatoriums just outside Paris. It was around the same time, while walking down Boulevard Garibaldi, that I once spotted a group of people coming towards me on the pavement. It was Zina and the mousey marksman,the one I had seen at Pavel Alexandrovich’s on the day I paid him a visit, with a young woman, very shabbily dressed, with unkempt fair hair—Lida, just as Mishka had described her to me. They were all walking almost abreast of one another. Lida was lagging just a little behind. I could see a discarded cigarette lying in the middle of the pavement in front of them. As they approached it, the mousey man was clearly about to bend down, but at that moment, with a peculiar rhythmical precision and speed, Zina pushed his shoulder so hard that he very nearly fell over. Then, in one casual, precise movement, she picked up the cigarette end and in the same step continued onward. I was put in mind of the
dzhigits
who, while sliding down from their saddles, are able to pick up a kerchief lying on the ground as their horse races on at full gallop. I saw Lida smile, and could not help noticing that in her drawn, sickly face, despite its youthfulness, there was a definite, if somewhat alarming, attractiveness.
That evening when I ran into these people, with recent events still fresh in my memory—the visit to Shcherbakov, the conversation with Mishka, my impressions of the mousey marksman, Zina and her daughter—that evening a great distance had separated me from them, and all this ceased to occupy my mind. During the day I had felt strangely exhausted; I had come home and slept for three whole hours. Then I got up, washed and went out to dine at a restaurant, but from the restaurant I went straighthome again. It was around nine o’clock in the evening. I stood for a long time by the window, looking down onto the narrow street. Everything was as it always was: the stained glass of the brothel opposite my apartment was lit up and above it one could easily read the sign “
Au panier fleuri”
; ‡ the concierges sat on their stools, in front of their doors, and amid the evening silence I could hear their voices conversing about the weather and the high cost of living; at the corner, where the street met the boulevard, Mado’s silhouette kept appearing and disappearing by the windows of a bookshop as she went about her work, back and forth along that same stretch—thirty paces there, thirty paces back; somewhere nearby a pianola was playing. I knew everyone on this street, just as I knew every odour, the look of every building, the glass of every window pane, and that lamentable imitation of life, intrinsic to each of its inhabitants, which never revealed its greatest secret: what inspired these people in the lives they led? What were their hopes, their desires, their aspirations, and to what end did each of them obediently, patiently repeat the same thing day after day? What could there be in all this—apart from some biological law that they obeyed unknowingly and unthinkingly? What had summoned them to life out of apocalyptic nothingness? The accidental and perhaps momentary union of two human bodies one evening or late one night a few dozen years ago? And so I recalledwhat Paul, a short, stout forty-year-old man in a cap, who worked as a lorry driver and lived two floors below me, had said over a glass of red wine:
“J’ai pas connu mes parents, c’est à s’demander s’ils ont jamais existé. Tel, que vous m’voyez, j’ai été trouvé dans une poubelle, au 24 de la rue Caulaincourt. Je suis un vrai parisien, moi.”
§
And when I once asked Mado what she planned to do in the future and how she expected her life to turn out, she looked at me with heavily pencilled empty eyes and, shrugging her shoulders, replied that she never wasted any time thinking about such things. Then she paused for a second and
dzhigits
who, while sliding down from their saddles, are able to pick up a kerchief lying on the ground as their horse races on at full gallop. I saw Lida smile, and could not help noticing that in her drawn, sickly face, despite its youthfulness, there was a definite, if somewhat alarming, attractiveness.
That evening when I ran into these people, with recent events still fresh in my memory—the visit to Shcherbakov, the conversation with Mishka, my impressions of the mousey marksman, Zina and her daughter—that evening a great distance had separated me from them, and all this ceased to occupy my mind. During the day I had felt strangely exhausted; I had come home and slept for three whole hours. Then I got up, washed and went out to dine at a restaurant, but from the restaurant I went straighthome again. It was around nine o’clock in the evening. I stood for a long time by the window, looking down onto the narrow street. Everything was as it always was: the stained glass of the brothel opposite my apartment was lit up and above it one could easily read the sign “
Au panier fleuri”
; ‡ the concierges sat on their stools, in front of their doors, and amid the evening silence I could hear their voices conversing about the weather and the high cost of living; at the corner, where the street met the boulevard, Mado’s silhouette kept appearing and disappearing by the windows of a bookshop as she went about her work, back and forth along that same stretch—thirty paces there, thirty paces back; somewhere nearby a pianola was playing. I knew everyone on this street, just as I knew every odour, the look of every building, the glass of every window pane, and that lamentable imitation of life, intrinsic to each of its inhabitants, which never revealed its greatest secret: what inspired these people in the lives they led? What were their hopes, their desires, their aspirations, and to what end did each of them obediently, patiently repeat the same thing day after day? What could there be in all this—apart from some biological law that they obeyed unknowingly and unthinkingly? What had summoned them to life out of apocalyptic nothingness? The accidental and perhaps momentary union of two human bodies one evening or late one night a few dozen years ago? And so I recalledwhat Paul, a short, stout forty-year-old man in a cap, who worked as a lorry driver and lived two floors below me, had said over a glass of red wine:
“J’ai pas connu mes parents, c’est à s’demander s’ils ont jamais existé. Tel, que vous m’voyez, j’ai été trouvé dans une poubelle, au 24 de la rue Caulaincourt. Je suis un vrai parisien, moi.”
§
And when I once asked Mado what she planned to do in the future and how she expected her life to turn out, she looked at me with heavily pencilled empty eyes and, shrugging her shoulders, replied that she never wasted any time thinking about such things. Then she paused for a second and
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