I watched him. It lasted seconds, minutes; to me it seemed hours. The hair over his temple shone faintly gray, and the muscles along his chin rippled incessantly. It looked as though he were chewing over his reflections. At last he got up, walked across to the window, pulled the curtain back a little and beckoned to me. I came over to him. “Look there,” he said, and pointed at a figure on the opposite side of the street. “Do you know him?” I strained my eyes, I peered through the darkness, but all I could see was a smallish, well-dressed man, with a turned-up fur collar and brown hat, and a black stick in his right hand. “Do you recognize him?” asked Solovejczyk again. “No,” I said. “Well, we will wait a bit!” Good, we waited. In a short while the man began to walk up and down. After he had taken about twenty paces, a flash went through me. My eyes had not recognized him, my brain had not remembered him, but it flashed into my heart, my blood began to pulse faster. It was suddenly as though my muscles, my hands, my fingertips, my hair, had retained the memory which had been denied to my brain. It was he. It was the same half dragging, half tripping gait which once, when I was still young and innocent, I had noticed, in a fraction of a second and in spite of my inexperience, in Odessa. That was the first and only time in my life when I had seen that a limp could be graceful and that a foot could disguise itself as otherwise only a face can. And so I recognized the man on the opposite side of the street. It was none other than Lakatos
“Lakatos!” I said.
“You see!” said Solovejczyk, and stepped back from the window.
We sat down again opposite one another, exactly as we had sat before. With his gaze lowered to the papers on the desk, Solovejczyk said: “You have known Lakatos a long time?”
“A very long time,” I replied. “He is always meeting me. I would almost say, he is always meeting me in the decisive hours of my life.”
“He will often meet you again — probably,” said Solovejczyk. “I rarely believe, and only very unwillingly, in the supernatural. But with Lakatos, who visits me from time to time, I cannot avoid a certain superstitious feeling.”
I was silent. What could I have said? It seemed to me inexorably clear that I had been helplessly caught. A prisoner of Solovejczyk’s? A prisoner of Lutetia’s? A prisoner, even, of Lakatos’s?
After a pause Solovejczyk said: “He will betray you and perhaps destroy you.”
I picked up the papers containing my orders, a considerable bundle, and went.
“AufWiedersehen, until next Thursday,” said Solovejczyk.
“If I am to see you again,” I answered.
My heart was heavy.
When I left the house Lakatos was no longer to be seen. Far and wide — no Lakatos, although I searched thoroughly for him, anxiously even. I was afraid of him, and so I sought him anxiously. But I felt already, while I was trying to hunt him out, that I should not find him. Yes, I was certain that I would not find him.
How can one find the Devil by searching for him? He comes, he appears unhoped for, he vanishes. He vanishes, and he is always there.
From that hour I no longer felt safe from him. But it was not from him alone that I felt unsafe, it was from the whole world. Who was Solovejczyk? Who was Lutetia? What was Paris? Who was I myself?
More than all the others, I feared myself. Was it my own will which still decided my day, my night, and all my actions? Who was driving me to do what I did at that time? Did I love Lutetia? Did I not only love my passion, or rather my need to confirm myself, my humanity so to speak, through my passion? Who and what was I really — I, Golubchik? If Lakatos were there, I should cease to be Krapotkin, that seemed certain. Suddenly it became clear to me that I could be neither Golubchik nor Krapotkin. Soon I was spending half my days and nights with Lutetia. I had long ago ceased to hear what she said to me. She only spoke of unimportant things. I merely noticed many expressions which had hitherto been unknown to me, the cadence of words and sentences. Concerning my progress in French, I had much to thank her for. For, helpless as I was during those days, I never forgot that a “command of languages” might prove valuable to me — as Solovejczyk had once suggested. Well, after a few weeks I had a complete command of French. At home I sometimes dipped into English, German, Italian books; I stupefied myself with them, and I imagined that through them I was really enjoying an existence, a real existence. For example, I read English newspapers in the hotel lounge. And while I read them it seemed to me as though I were a fellow countryman of the white-haired, bespectacled English colonel over in the opposite armchair. For half an hour I persuaded myself that I was an Englishman, a colonel from the Colonies. And why shouldn’t I be an English colonel? Was I Golubchik? Was I Krapotkin? Who and what was I really?
Every moment I was afraid of meeting Lakatos. He might come into the hotel lounge. He might come into the great showrooms of the fashionable dressmaker where I sometimes went to fetch Lutetia. He might betray me every moment. He had me in his hand. He might even betray me to Lutetia — and that would be the worst. In proportion as my fear for Lakatos increased, grew also my passion for Lutetia. It was a sublimated passion, a passion, so to speak, of the second degree. For in reality, during those weeks, it was no longer a true love, it was a flight to passion, just as the doctors today call certain symptoms in women “a flight to sickness.” Yes, it was a flight to passion. I was only safe, sure of myself, sure of my own identity, during those hours when I held and loved Lutetia’s body. I loved it, not because it was her body, but because it was to a certain extent a refuge, a cell, a sanctuary, safe and secure from Lakatos.
Unfortunately there now happened what needs must have happened sooner or later. Lutetia, who believed as implicitly in my inexhaustible wealth as she would have liked to have believed in her rag-and-bone merchant story, needed money and more money. She needed more and more money. After a few weeks it became clear that she was just as mercenary as she was beautiful. Oh, not that she had tried secretly to put money by, in the way which characterizes so many middle-class women. No! She really spent it. She spent it!
She was like most women of her kind. She did not want to “use up” anything. But something in her wished to make use of opportunities, of all opportunities. Weak she was, and immeasurably vain. With women vanity is not only a passive weakness, it is also an extremely active passion, such as only games are with men. Again and again they keep giving birth to this passion; they incite it and at the same time are incited by it. Lutetia’s passion dragged me with it. Until then I had never dreamed how much a single woman could spend — and that always in the belief that it is only what is “absolutely necessary” Until then I had never dreamed how powerless a loving man is against the foolishness of a woman. And at that time I was striving to be a loving man; which amounted to the same thing as being really in love. It was just the foolish and unnecessary things that she did which appeared to me to be both necessary and natural. And I will admit that her foolishness flattered me and at the same time confirmed my sham princely existence — for I needed such confirmation. I needed all this outward confirmation: clothes for me and Lutetia, the servility of the tailors who measured me in the hotel with careful fingers as though I were a fragile idol; who scarcely had the courage to touch my shoulders and legs with the tape measure. Just because I was a Golubchik I needed all that which would have wearied a Krapotkin: the menial look in the porter’s eyes, the obsequious bowing of the waiters and servants, of whom I saw little more than their faultlessly shaved necks. And money — money I needed, too.