“Fine,” said the other. “As you wish. The police will be here in half an hour. As you wish.”
The door of the Établissement flew open with a crash and Professor Lyubanarov tumbled in. “Give me a drink!” he bellowed, tossing a handful of coins and banknotes into the room. “Here you have it, the bread of my children — but give me something to drink!” He stumbled over to the proprietor. “What’s got into you, you cesspool? All of a sudden you’re afraid. Of me! You’re afraid of me! But I don’t intend to do anything to you, little one. I never lay a hand on the pupils. Quem taurum metuis, vitulum mulcere solebas—there’s no need to be afraid.” He brushed him aside with a swipe of his hand, stepped toward Tildy, and collapsed massively on the chair next to the major. “I’m drinking away the bread of my children, you hear, the bread of your little hungry nieces. Despise me for that, spit in my face, I can see from your cold expression that I’m too low even for that, too inconsequential … But I, too, even I, once lived in a glorious city — a city beautiful and orderly as you wish to see erected around you — and it came to an end just like yours, her glorious inhabitants rotted and dead, sintered corpses with gaping mouths stuffed with ashes, nothing left but a few mucky bits of wall — and on it goes, the swarm of base peoples, the rich fall to ruin, temples crumble to dust, while the mongrel race endures, building their filthy huts from the wrecked marble columns of the sun gods, and whoring on the graves of the poets whose mouths were blessed by the sun … And we realize that we, too, belong to the mongrels, and yet we dare to emulate the children of the sun, appropriating their gestures as if they could become our own, presuming upon what they designed; if they were not mute shadows in the realm of Orcus, the world would shatter from the laughter we elicit from them. But I can hear it, you know, I hear it when I am drunk, because their laughter causes the bell of my intoxication to reverberate as though someone were furiously ringing the clapper, crushing me into that which I truly am — a nothing, a worm, one of any million swarming maggots that have been feeding off the cold golden body of mankind’s one-time glory for two thousand years, and have consumed it entirely down to a few measly remains. The same celestial bodies that stand above it stand over us, the same riddles of the world, the same eternal questions, the same torments, multiplied by one thing only: namely, by the fact that our mouths have not been loaned the honey of speech so that we might call them by names of our own invention. Apes learned to speak and jabber away in countless tongues. And behold: they love each other, they caress each other, they pick fleas from each other’s behinds and bite them in two, they sling their arms around each other and hold each other tight, their eyes filled with the anguish of loneliness, the primal mother fear that sets them in a frenzy so that they bite each other when they couple. Because love is guilt, it promises salvation and then swindles us out of it — Eros the charlatan, the quack, the barker, the thief, the con artist — Eros laughs! Laughs at the apes! People say that in India, the apes even build cities — are you listening, brother? — the city you wish to envision around you, the apes will build for you in India, yes … That is a deep thought, understand what I’m saying, better than the manure from which it sprouted. In India they will erect your city — hahahahaha …”
Time crawled slimily to the verge of endurance. Finally it passed, and the girl returned. She sat down, her hands in her lap. “Our debt is paid,” she said.
“Come!” said Tildy, standing up and taking her by the hand. She followed him. Near the door that led upstairs she stopped and looked at him. He realized that she had misunderstood; he didn’t want to go up to the rooms with her, he wanted to take her with him, out of this place. “Come!” he said once again and tried to lead her away.
“Where to?” she asked, hard — and he grasped exactly how she meant it: this time she had clearly understood him.
“I will take care of you. Don’t be afraid,” he repeated.
“Do you have a house for tonight?”
“We will find one.”
She stood very close to him. “My father is a millionaire in America,” she said quickly and quietly. Then she burst out laughing. “How gullible can a man be? What a joke!”
Tildy saw her coarse, mean laugh and slapped her face.
She stood for a second as if blinded. “Kiss me, to take that away,” she said, and held her face up to him, with closed eyes and a smile woven with pain.
He drew her in and kissed her like a holy object.
“Come!” she said.
Professor Lyubanarov came staggering after them, nearly running them over at the door; he stumbled with them onto the street and tottered away in front of them. “Nempe haec assidue iam clarum mane fenestras,” he sang, “intrat et augustas extendit lumine rimas …”
The morning was dawning. On the street by the station Lyubanarov tapped with his cane to find the tram tracks. He poked it into one of the rail grooves and let himself be led uphill as if tethered to a pole. Tildy and the girl, Mititika Povarchuk, were no more than ten yards away from him.
By one of those inexplicable coincidences that we call fate, the driver of the streetcar whose brakes failed was the Widow Morar’s eldest son, the one who worked for “the line.” He later maintained that he had recognized the vehicle’s defect days earlier and reported the same, and had been assured that the malfunction would be corrected overnight in the streetcar shed. So on that morning he had climbed aboard his streetcar in good faith and during the level stretch of the route had had no occasion to learn that the repair had not been made and that the vehicle was still unfit for service. After he had rounded the loop at the Ringplatz and arrived at the incline where the Bahnhofstrasse ran into the Volodiak Valley, he reduced his speed, according to regulations. At first his brakes held, but the second time he applied them they failed entirely.
Fortunately there were very few passengers: apart from the ticket-taker, who jumped off as soon as he realized what was happening, just a few drowsy railroad men, a woman with a basket of eggs, and the director of the Klokuczka Horticultural Academy, who having spent the previous day taking care of official business in Czernopol, was planning to catch an early train back home. Widow Morar’s son, who was the first to notice the general danger, could have also been quick to abandon the car, but his sense of duty pinned him to the driver’s seat like the captain of a ship — even though there was nothing he could do in the circumstances — a fact that was justly emphasized in the press. He maintained there was nothing for him to do except pray that the tram not jump its tracks as it went careening down the steep slope with an alarming acceleration, and that it not collide with anything so solid as to shatter the car to pieces — which was hardly the case for the group of three people that made up the only obstacle along its hell-bound path.
It was Tildy who first saw the wagon racing toward them. He and Mititika Povarchuk were on the sidewalk along the Bahnhofstrasse, so the only person in danger was Professor Lyubanarov, who was moving along the tracks. Tildy raced in to yank him back, but Lyubanarov was too drunk to react rationally. He felt Tildy grab hold of him, and presumably in a dim recollection of his recent eviction from the Établissement Mon Repos, he fell into a blind fury and hurled the much smaller man right in the direction of the oncoming streetcar. This caused the professor to lurch away from the tracks, so that he himself escaped being hit. But Tildy stumbled, and as he fell, the fender of the racing vehicle struck him right in the face.
Mititika Povarchuk covered him with her coat. The ermine collar covered the bloody mess that had once borne his “English” expression.