“Well …” ATMAN was smiling like a man hesitating before revealing something momentous, “… nothing special. I wanted to drop you a line, send you a parcel perhaps. It was her idea that we should send you a parcel.”
“Viviana’s?” All of Melkior’s nerve fibers quivered, but everything subsided again presently, he’s lying! ATMAN’S lying! and aloud he said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Why not? She’s got a kind heart. She even knitted you a pair of woolen gloves herself. That is to say, her Aunt Flora did, but she bought the wool and generally saw to it … But there was no address, so she gave them to me — here they are.” ATMAN produced a pair of gray knitted gloves from his pocket and put them on the table as evidence. “Here, take them, they’re yours after all. Only you’ll find the fingers too long, she took the measurements from my hands, and I have long fingers, heh-heh, look,” and he put his hands on the table — bony, heavy, with unusually long, hard fingers. Terrible hands. Poor Numbskull, thought Melkior, that must have hurt something awful. …
“I see you don’t like my hands.” He bunched his fingers, making his joints crack with an ugly sound. “Neither do I, believe me. I saw a film, a silent one, long ago, where Conrad Veidt played a famous pianist. He’d lost his hands in a railway crash. It so happened that a vile murderer was executed at the same time and the surgeons … I really have great respect for surgeons, they’re the only ones I appreciate in the entire medical profession … grafted the murderer’s hands onto the pianist’s arms. That’s where his suffering begins: wearing the hands of a murderer. He goes on playing, true — but with a murderer’s hands! On top of which the murderer visits him in his dreams demanding his hands back. Now there’s surgical charity for you! Must appreciate them all the same, don’t we?” ATMAN gave Melkior a barely noticeable wink, then suddenly thrust his hands at him and laughed with an ugly cawing sound: “Horrible, aren’t they? As if they’d been taken off a murderer. By surgeons. And the worst thing is I have to wear them all the time. Caressing and embracing women with these! That may be why women dislike me. You’re all right. Not only are you able to caress them with words, you also have fine, white hands with delicate fingers … That’s why they go for you so much, thinking they’d like to send you parcels, and gloves for your gentle hands. And yet — shame on you — you don’t write to any of them. Not even to … hm … so she came around for a bit of soothsaying. But what could I say? The surgeons have been mobilized, too, called up for exercises, that is, the army’s taken away all the joys: men, food, automobiles, the lot.”
“Who came to see you? Why should I care about your customers anyway?”
“Unh-unh, this one you should, er … and it’s only proper that you, er … I spoke to her in the … is it correct to say ‘rosiest’? Well, those are the terms I spoke to her about you in … all flowery and rosy. When abandoned by men, these kinds of desperate women are apt to do anything.”
“Such as hang themselves,” said Melkior vengefully, malice oozing from his eyes, “and when you take them off the rope they hang themselves around your neck.”
“Heh-heh, some truly are like that,” ATMAN gave a flattered laugh. “Allusion understood — and a valid one it is. Only she’s not really hanging around my neck; your informant (is that the right word?) was exaggerating just a bit. Anyhow, it’s wise to have someone on hand for our physical ‘needs,’ and we are well able, are we not, to keep the dirty and vulgar stuff separate from our i-de-als, we who know ideal love — Platonic, if you’ll permit. It’s an entirely different kettle of fish from physical need … off the rope: We’re masters of that pitiful parade there, indeed we are tyrants with terrible demands. We torment those she-apes of ours, do we not, Mr. Melkior, and enjoy seeing it make them even crazier about us. And then we take the notion — out of sheer caprice — to start ex-pa-ti-ating (God, what a word, I’ve got my tongue all twisted) as if we resent their being unfaithful to Coco — with anyone but us. Because we’re but a guiltless instrument of their sordid will in the whole affair; pretty nearly innocent victims of their lust, too.”
He squeezed all this out of her, fool, Melkior fumed at Enka, he milked her dry. …
“You are so experienced in the matter.” He resolved to respond in kind. “You must have suffered terribly over Eve.”
“Over … Eve?” ATMAN was momentarily flummoxed and his forehead went a shade pale; his lower jaw trembled slightly, as though with fear or a sour memory; but he presently accomplished his derisive smile and stretched it over his face like a mask. “Heh, because my name’s Adam? Your catechist taught you well, that must be why you’ve remained so loyal to him.”
“Unh-unh, I was not referring to the biblical Eve,” triumphed Melkior at embarrassing ATMAN. “But it is true they called her Eve because of your name being Adam.”
“Ah, so …” ATMAN almost said “… you know”; he was effecting a tactical retreat. “Stories from the Olden Days. It is a small world indeed.” ATMAN was at a loss all the same, the fount of his eloquence had gone dry; he fell silent and seemed to be lost in thought. Melkior was sorry he’d told him — he might have done better to save this trump card for a more decisive moment, or simply to have kept his silence. He preferred ATMAN speaking to ATMAN silent. He was now afraid of the silence, who knows what the fellow might be up to?
“Ah, here comes the hot brandy at last,” stirred ATMAN. “That was a good idea of yours — I’ve been feeling all frozen … inside.”
They sipped the hot brandy in tandem, blowing “haah” from their warmed throats.
“Perhaps it wasn’t nice of me to bring that matter up,” began Melkior; he wanted to break ATMAN’S strange silence.
“Nice or not … you wanted to get your own back at me,” smiled ATMAN by way of a grimace. “All right, so be it. Did they at least tell you Eve was beautiful, very beautiful?”
“Like a goddess!” exclaimed Melkior jokingly.
“Goddess nothing! All the goddesses I’ve seen, in paintings and so on, are poorly built — childbearers, every last one, with no waist to speak of. Now she was well-filled yet slender; the legs, the bosom, the eyes, everything … no, she was a magnificent woman, if that isn’t a ridiculous way of putting it.”
“Why did you break up, then?”
“She was too beautiful for me,” said ATMAN uncertainly, looking at Melkior with suspicion: does he know more by chance? He probably saw some tiny ironical twitch on Melkior’s face; that was why he went on straight away, though not readily: “There were certain incompatibilities in our characters … For all that we were what I may well call madly in love, I suffered. Her beauty was simply too much for me to bear. She knew it and liked to torment me. Just for fun, on a whim, as women amuse themselves. She said such things were inevitable in a happy marriage. She used to tell me about men from our circle of friends molesting her, laughing at me behind my back. … She had me at odds with everyone. I had truly become suspicious and horrible. There was a boy I beat to within an inch of his life. She had complained about him propositioning her brazenly in public, what would people think of her, and once the rumors got started I was going to end up believing them myself, no, honestly, it had gone past being a joke, after all she didn’t want me to be everyone’s laughingstock, and so on … and I went and beat the hell out of the cur, or rather the pup — he was small, frightened, and miserable.”
Poor Numbskull.
“What did you beat him with? A dog whip?” Melkior broke out in goose bumps.
“Whip nothing — I used these instruments,” he thumped his dreadful hands on the table. “She admitted later on she’d made it all up. Why? Well, she wanted me to thrash someone over her.”