Doesn’t it seem improbable that the imperturbable Arsénie Negovan should have given way to panic simply because he got caught up in a riot, which even so was no more unbearable than the rush hour on the Paris Métro?
In that crisis, no jovial comparisons with Paris came to mind. The thing I was absolutely certain of was that I was screaming for help as if someone were about to cut my throat. The sounds that came from my throat weren’t words. Probably that’s why I can’t remember them. We were all behaving like wild animals.
The Honorary Vice-President of the Chamber of Commerce, a Negovan, behaving like one of a pack of wolves!
At Solovkino Station, in 1919…
Unconventional behavior, to say the least.
And then my hat fell off.
How did that happen?
Those hooligans knocked it off my head. For a few seconds it bounced against my shoulders like a frightened gray bird against a wall (a rather stiff Borsalino with a curled brim, and a wide black band around its crown) — bounced like a gray bird with black feathers around its throat, then disappeared.
A hat! They’re trampling you underfoot like so much dog shit, and you’re carrying on about your hat!
A gray Borsalino with a stiff crown, a deep fold at its crown, an upturned brim, and a black silk band around it. Constantine gave it to me for my birthday.
Anyway, the people, caught up in a national dance, accepted you as one of them: you were striking out with your fists just as they were, and you were shouting just as they were. Deceived by your eagerness for battle, they grabbed you under the arms and took you along with the main stream?
Carried.
All right, carried — carried you off like a sack from the market, carried you off like a cripple, like a helpless paralytic.
True. At that moment I was a kind of paralytic. And not just in the physical sense. Everything had happened so quickly. It was all so incompatible with my tranquil, cork-paneled, lavender-sprinkled study where, behind the cotton curtains which tempered the harsh March daylight, I had leafed through my saffian notebook, glancing at Niké’s carte d’identité for the last time before the auction. So incompatible with the Regency drawing room where I had said good-by to Katarina and her guests for afternoon tea. God, how sincere I had been, how approachable, even exhilarated, if such expressions weren’t out of character with my normal habit: “They say it’s us they’re auctioning.” “It’s my Niké they’re selling, madame, but we’re up for auction too.” “They say that the only thing we have is the Army.” “I don’t know, madame, I’m not a recruiting officer.” “They say that if there’s a war, we’ll be in Vienna in three days.” “Perhaps, madame, but with our hands tied behind our backs.” “My husband says that the English will land.” “Well, madame, the English are always landing somewhere.” “He says that it’s not a Putsch but a national revolution.” “It’s an officers’ game, madame.” “What does General Negovan say about it?” “Madame, General Negovan is a complete idiot!”
Yes, it was incompatible with that entrenched world between the fortress walls of No. 17 Kosančićev Venac, where everything from the furniture to the people, their thoughts and feelings, their actions and conversations moved, glided noiselessly, like railway cars over permanent, well-oiled rails laid down long ago.
But here in the street everything was unnatural, so that from the beginning I was unaware of what was happening to me and to my attention — if one can term “attention” that blind absorption with extraneous details of the situation: details such as my hat with the fold down the middle of its gray crown, its stiff, upturned brim, and its five centimeters of black silk band; or the semitransparent back of the placard carried in front of me, on which, since I could only read the inscription from behind, I persistently and foolishly scanned the same words: “retteB raw naht eht tcaP, retteb eht evarg naht eb a evals.” My attention was disoriented, not fixed; it seized on every detail that rushed into my nightmarish field of vision, yet I could make no sober assessment of the situation. Furthermore, I had forgotten why I was there, what I was looking for, and why I was tumbling down the street like a stone.
Even so, you mustn’t forget that this experience lasted only a short time.
I don’t know how long it lasted.
It can’t have lasted long because you yourself observed that your rank was moving in a line parallel with the left corner of Kosmajska Street.
Perhaps it was the sight of that corner which brought me to my senses. Arsénie, what are you doing, I thought, they’re waiting for you at Stefan’s. You’re going to an auction! They’re selling Niké. What’s happening to you, for Christ’s sake?
You’d been caught up in a howling dance, that’s what. And as they carried you along arm in arm, they were chanting: “Better war than the Pact, better a grave than be a slave!” And your feet in your lacquered shoes were dangling in the air, hardly touching the ground. You were held by two fat women in suffragette’s black whose biceps, wound around your arms, looked like a crab’s shiny claws tearing their prey apart. The two women were breathing like two balloons overfilled with explosive gas, forcing air out of their lungs and showering you with saliva like frothy gruel.
“Better war than the Pact, better a grave than be a slave!”
I was hatless, and my light summer coat was almost torn off my back. I had to do something.
“My good ladies—”
“War grave, war grave!”
“I beg you—”
“War grave war grave!”
“I believe that all this is quite—”
“Wargravewargravewargravewargrave!”
An extremely undignified situation — I would even say comical — if at the same time it hadn’t all been so pitiful, if I hadn’t been violently pushed, jostled, banged, scratched, pulled, tugged in that wave from whose foaming crest I was dangling like an eggshell battered against a cliff.
I think you said something else to the woman on your left?
The lady had a brigand’s mustache and a voice like a stonecrusher at full blast. She wasn’t a woman! She was a loading crane!
What did you say to her?
That I was sorry but we had to part now, that I was glad to have met her, and that my name was Arsénie Negovan.
I don’t think she was listening.
I told her that it was our last chance to say good-by.
You said that to the one on your right.
It was no longer a woman lurching about there, but a war veteran who had pushed his hook under my elbow so skillfully that my arm felt like a telegraph pole, a pygmy-size telegraph pole along whose miniature iron crosspieces a tiny leather creature was climbing.
“What time is it?”
Yes, I actually asked him what time it was because I couldn’t get my hand down to my vest. He said he didn’t know, but thought Comrade N.N. would start the meeting at any moment.
Meeting! We thought with alarm of Stefan, of Niké, and the auction. And we made one more heroic effort to break out of the onrushing mass, this time without saying anything to anyone.