Part 26 (1/2)
The top of the commode was shared by an alcohol burner and an orange.
”Delighted,” said Romantovski softly. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and with bent forehead, its V-vein inflamed, started to lace his shoes.
”You were resting,” said Gustav with ominous courtesy. ”We come at the wrong time?”
Not a word, not a word, did the lodger say in reply; instead he straightened up suddenly, turned to the window, raised his finger, and froze.
The brothers looked but found nothing unusual about that window; it framed a cloud, the tip of the poplar, and part of the brick wall.
”Why, don't you see anything?” asked Romantovski.
Red sweater and gray went up to the window and actually leaned out, becoming identical twins. Nothing. And both had the sudden feeling that something was wrong, very wrong! They wheeled around. He stood near the chest of drawers in an odd att.i.tude.
”I must have been mistaken,” said Romantovski, not looking at them. ”Something seemed to have flown by. I saw once an airplane fall.”
”That happens,” a.s.sented Gustav. ”Listen, we dropped in with a purpose. Would you care to buy this? Brand new. And there's a nice sheath.”
”Sheath? Is that so? Only, you know, I smoke very seldom.”
”Well, you'll smoke oftener. We sell it cheap. Three-fifty.”
”Three-fifty. I see.”
He fingered the pipe, biting his nether lip and pondering something. His eyes did not really look at the pipe, they moved to and fro.
Meanwhile the brothers began to swell, to grow, they filled up the whole room, the whole house, and then grew out of it. In comparison to them the young poplar was, by then, no bigger than one of those toy treelets, made of dyed cotton wool, that are so unstable on their round green supports. The dollhouse, a thing of dusty pasteboard with mica windowpanes, barely reached up to the brothers' knees. Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with fecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ign.o.ble fear. I don't know why they push against me; I implore you, do leave me alone. I'm not touching you, so don't you touch me either; I'll give in, only do leave me alone.
”All right, but I don't have enough change,” said Romantovski in a low voice. ”Now if you can give me six-fifty-”
They could, and went away, grinning. Gustav examined the ten-mark bill against the light and put it away in an iron money box.
Nevertheless, they did not leave their room neighbor in peace. It just maddened them that despite their having got acquainted with him, a man should remain as inaccessible as before. He avoided running into them: one had to waylay and trap him in order to glance fleetingly into his evasive eyes. Having discovered the nocturnal life of Romantovski's lamp, Anton could not bear it any longer. He crept up barefoot to the door (from under which showed a taut thread of golden light) and knocked.
Romantovski did not respond.
”Sleep, sleep,” said Anton, slapping the door with his palm.
The light peered silently through the c.h.i.n.k. Anton shook the door handle. The golden thread snapped.
Thenceforth both brothers (but especially Anton, thanks to his lacking a job) established a watch over their neighbor's insomnia. The enemy, however, was astute and endowed with a fine hearing. No matter how quietly one advanced toward his door, his light went out instantly, as if it never had been there; and only if one stood in the cold corridor for a goodish length of time, holding one's breath, could one hope to see the return of the sensitive lamp beam. Thus beetles faint and recover.
The task of detection turned out to be most exhausting. Finally, the brothers chanced to catch him on the stairs and jostled him.
”Suppose it's my habit to read at night. What business of yours is it? Let me pa.s.s, please.”
When he turned away, Gustav knocked off his hat in jest. Romantovski picked it up without a word.
A few days later, choosing a moment at nightfall-he was on his way back from the W.C. and failed to dart back into his room quickly enough-the brothers crowded around him. There were only two of them, yet they managed to form a crowd. They invited him to their room.
”There will be some beer,” said Gustav with a wink.
He tried to refuse.
”Oh, come along!” cried the brothers; they grabbed him under the arms and swept him off (while at it, they could feel how thin he was-that weakness, that slenderness below the shoulder offered an irresistible temptation-ah, to give a good squeeze so as to make him crunch, ah, hard to control oneself, let us, at least, dig into him on the move, just once, lightly ...).
”You are hurting me,” said Romantovski. ”Leave me alone, I can walk by myself.”
The promised beer, the large mouth of Gustav's fiancee, a heavy smell in the room. They tried to make him drunk. Collarless, with a copper stud under his conspicuous and defenseless Adam's apple, long-faced and pale, with quivering eyelashes, he sat in a complicated pose, partly doubled up, partly bent out, and when he got up from his chair he seemed to unwind like a spiral. However, they forced him to fold up again and, upon their suggestion, Anna sat in his lap. He kept glancing askance at the swell of her instep in the harness of a tight shoe, but mastered his dull anguish as best he could, not daring to get rid of the inert red-haired creature.
There was a minute when it seemed to them that he was broken, that he had become one of them. In fact, Gustav said, ”You see, you were silly to look down on our company. We find offensive the way you have of keeping mum. What do you read all night?”
”Old, old tales,” replied Romantovski in such a tone of voice that the brothers suddenly felt very bored. The boredom was suffocating and grim, but drink prevented the storm from bursting out, and, on the contrary, weighed the eyelids down. Anna slipped off Romantovski's knee, brus.h.i.+ng the table with a drowsy hip; empty bottles swayed like ninepins, one collapsed. The brothers stooped, toppled, yawned, still looking through sleepy tears at their guest. He, vibrating and diffusing rays, stretched out, thinned, and gradually vanished.
This cannot go on. He poisons the life of honest folks. Why, it can well happen that he will move at the end of the month-intact, whole, never taken to pieces, proudly strutting about. It is not enough that he moves and breathes differently from other people; the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger upon the difference, cannot catch the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that cannot be palpated, measured, counted.
A series of trivial torments began. On Monday they managed to sprinkle his bedclothes with potato flour, which is said to provoke a maddening itch. On Tuesday they ambushed him at the corner of their street (he was carrying books hugged to his breast) and hustled him so neatly that his load landed in the puddle they had picked out for it. On Wednesday they painted the toilet seat with carpenter's glue. By Thursday the brothers' imagination was exhausted.
He said nothing, nothing whatever. On Friday, he overtook Anton, with his flying step, at the gate of the yard, and offered him an ill.u.s.trated weekly-maybe you'd like to look at it? This unexpected courtesy perplexed the brothers and made them glow still hotter.
Gustav ordered his fiancee to stir up Romantovski, which would give one the opportunity to pick a quarrel with him. You involuntarily tend to set a football rolling before kicking it. Frolicsome animals also prefer a mobile object. And though Anna, no doubt, greatly repelled Romantovski with those bug-brown freckles on her milky skin, the vacant look in her light eyes, and the little promontories of wet gums between her teeth, he found fit to conceal his distaste, fearing to infuriate Anna's lover by spurning her.
Since he went all the same to the cinema once a week, he took her with him on Sat.u.r.day in the hope that this attention would be enough. Unnoticed, at a discreet distance, both wearing new caps and orange-red shoes, the brothers stole after the pair, and on those dubious streets, in that dusty dusk, there were hundreds of their likes but only one Romantovski.
In the small elongated movie house, night had started to flicker, a self-manufactured lunar night, when the brothers, furtively hunching, seated themselves in the back row. They sensed the darkly delicious presence of Romantovski somewhere in front. On the way to the cinema, Anna failed to worm anything out of her disagreeable companion, nor did she quite understand what exactly Gustav wanted of him. As they walked, the mere sight of his lean figure and melancholy profile made her want to yawn. But once the picture started, she forgot about him, pressing an insensate shoulder against him. Specters conversed in trumpet tones on the newfangled speaking screen. The baron tasted his wine and carefully put his gla.s.s down-with the sound of a dropped cannonball.
And after a while the sleuths were pursuing the baron. Who would have recognized in him the master crook? He was hunted pa.s.sionately, frenziedly. Automobiles sped with bursts of thunder. In a nightclub they fought with bottles, chairs, tables. A mother was putting an enchanting child to bed.
When it was all over, and Romantovski, with a little stumble, followed her out into the cool darkness, Anna exclaimed, ”Oh, that was wonderful!”
He cleared his throat and said after a pause, ”Let's not exaggerate. In real life, it is all considerably duller.”
”It's you who's dull,” she retorted crossly, and presently chuckled softly as she recalled the pretty child.
Behind them, gliding along at the same distance as before, came the brothers. Both were gloomy. Both were pumping themselves up with gloomy violence. Gloomily, Anton said, ”That's not done, after all-going out walking with another's bride.”
”And especially on Sat.u.r.day night,” said Gustav.
A pa.s.serby, coming abreast of them, happened to glance at their faces-and could not help walking faster.
The night wind chased rustling rubbish along the fences. It was a dark and desolate part of Berlin. Far to the left of the road, above the ca.n.a.l, blinked scattered lights. On the right were vacant lots from which a few hastily silhouetted houses had turned their black backs away. After a little while the brothers accelerated their step.
”My mother and sister live in the country,” Anna was telling him in a rather cozy undertone amid the velvety night. ”As soon as I get married, I hope to visit them with him. Last summer my sister-”
Romantovski suddenly looked back.