I couldn’t hear her. The rubber soles of her old-fashioned lace-up shoes were noiseless. But I sensed her standing behind me.
“At Salonika I used to give injections to Field Marshal Franchet d’Esperey, in his behind, Monsieur Negovan, and he never accused me of clumsiness.”
“I’m not complaining either,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “I’m no worse than your puffed-up generals!”
Generals who go into retirement, generals who get demobilized, who allow themselves to die, to be buried as civilians, and who never earned a single dinar that was spent on them. But when they come, there will be nobody to defend us. I shall have to kneel then, too, and not in a Chippendale armchair, but in the gutter in front of the house — and it won’t be Mlle. Foucault standing behind me, but some gangster with an automatic.
A feeling of coolness passed through the skin of my back; I hadn’t even felt the needle.
“I saw them in Russia, Mademoiselle Foucault, all those generals, those overpaid Czarist peacocks. I saw the red rabble ruffling their scented feathers, wiping their behinds with their medals, now that we’ve got down to behinds.” The life-giving liquid was coursing through my body. “Or perhaps my brother thinks he can hold them back with cardboard tanks and tin fortifications?”
“For God’s sake, Arsénie!” said Katarina, coming in. At last she was dressed to go out. “Just for once, leave Mademoiselle Foucault alone.”
“She passed on a greeting from George,” I said, counting on this to explain my coarse behavior. The realization that the two women were finally going to leave me alone and that I could put my plan into action — the plan which for the second time in twenty-seven years was to change my life radically, almost turn it upside down — excited me. Hurriedly I pulled up my trousers and reverted to my original position in the armchair.
“He’s got those pains in his stomach again,” said Mlle. Foucault. “I suggested to him that he get more exercise. There’s no likelihood of his getting better if he goes on lolling about within four walls.”
Mlle. Foucault got up. She could no longer stand listening to her adored general being spoken of as if he were alive. She angrily bundled the instruments into her tin box.
“I’ll wait for you on the porch, Madame Negovan.” She went outside without even looking at me.
“You were talking to her about Russia and the Bolsheviks again,” said Katarina reproachfully.
She put the little boxes of drops and pills (which I was to use in her absence if I felt ill) on a one-legged table with a striped top of black and white onyx flecked with streaks of dried coffee. The room, covered with flowered wallpaper with gold stems, was heavy from the smell of medicines, Katarina’s oriental tobacco, varnished walnut, and parched paper. The atmosphere was thick, motionless, and gray, lending the triumphant face of Saint George and the scaly dragon a sickly appearance and the color of smoke. She pulled the coffee table up to my armchair, so I could reach it in case of need.
“She has to get used to it.”
“We’re used to it already. You’ve talked so much about Russia that I’ve lived through a whole revolution.”
“You haven’t lived through anything yet. You should have been in the Ukraine in 1919 to live through something!”
I glanced at the mirror. She was putting on her black hat like a flat English tin helmet. Instead of the scaly shell of enamel on the mirror’s smoky back, flaming provinces flashed through it filled with frenzied mobs rushing toward me.
“They’ll be here too if things go on like this! They are here, everywhere, all around us.”
“I know, I know.”
“They’re only waiting for a secret sign from Moscow to crawl out of their underground lairs. They’re ragged, filthy, bearded, and enraged — yes, enraged! In their bloodstained hands they’ll be carrying scythes, hammers, red banners, and placards with demands written in red Russian letters to take away everything from us!”
Power, I thought, security, honor, hope, and our houses, my beautiful houses.
“And they’ll speak Russian! Katarina, Russian! They’ll sing Russian songs and they’ll kill in the Russian way with a bullet in the back of the head. And they’ll give us affectionate Russian names: you’ll be called Katya, Katyusha, and I’ll be called heaven knows what.”
I felt a slight pressure beneath my rib cage, and put my hand there to find the source of the pain. While I was searching for it, Katarina was already fumbling with the medicines.
“They’ll call me Arsen… Arseny… Arsenyushka…”
“Why are you always thinking about them? You know it undermines your health!”
Deftly she unwrapped a pill from its cellophane covering. I put it under my tongue and gently pressed it against my palate. My mouth was filled with a bitter taste. I managed to stay motionless. I was covered with sweat and breathing unevenly, but the pain had stopped because I had put the pill under my tongue. With that pill under my tongue I had nothing to fear.
Exhausted by the sudden feeling of helplessness, I eased my back into the padded depths of the armchair and sank into its warm softness, thinking how cruel it would be if something happened now, with such important work awaiting me. I glanced carefully at Katarina, who was bending anxiously over my helpless shoulder. I waited to hear what I had feared all day, something I myself had provoked by my careless behavior.
“Arsénie, shall I put off my trip?”
“I’m all right now.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if I stayed home? I’ll go down and tell Mélanie.”
I repeated that I was all right.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never felt better.”
“You look tired.”
“It’s the weather. You just go on out.”
“As you say. But I’ll stop off at the Mihajlovići downstairs. I’ll ask one of them to come up.”
I searched hastily for a good reason to prevent that. “No, please don’t! They’ll complain again about their rent being too high, and they’ll ask for repairs.”
“But they’ve never done that.”
“All tenants are the same.”
If I had thought sensibly — as I hadn’t had time to do — it was an excellent reason for any landlord but me. Having once become involved in property ownership, I understood and exercised it as a branch of the architect’s profession. How else would all those wonderful architectural ideas have been realized, if I hadn’t financed them? Money in itself never meant anything to me. It was a tangible recognition that a house for which rent was paid was of a corresponding value — though in reality, its value was often greater. But money in my affairs was more a mental than an economic category. Particularly in recent years, which were heavily beset by that crisis of which Katarina and Golovan informed me with unnecessary meticulousness, it was not unusual for me to forgo the rent from impoverished tenants, when I could be sure — again through Katarina and Golovan, acting as my representatives — that the tenants were making faithful efforts toward the upkeep of the leased houses, and had treated them with due respect over a long period. I had not really waived the rent — I was not by any means rich enough for that — but had simply allowed its payment to be postponed.
“What are you going to do this morning?” Katarina asked attentively.
“I don’t really know. I’ll probably sort out some old leases. Perhaps I’ll finally get around to reading that Viollet-le-Duc History of Housing which Isidor gave me.”
She bent over and touched my forehead with her lips. My forehead was cold and sweaty, with droplets of amber dew. It was always like that after a heart attack. I well knew the smell of that sweat. It was bitter, salty, and warm. With the years it had become more intense, but it hadn’t changed in essence. Nothing had really changed or worsened in me since that day at the cathedral doors when we were introduced to each other. Over Katarina’s bent shoulder, the mirror held me in that humbling certainty. The massive Roman nose between its two hollowed cheeks was still hooked. The narrow, pinkish line running across its root came from my pince-nez. Every day Katarina brushed and combed my gray hair and sprinkled it with lavender water; even now it was only thinning in places. The eyebrows were strangely dark, pitch-colored. I had a gray look about me. Mousy. The mustache was the color of wet ash, and drooped from my upper lip like tousled braiding. Yes, gray was my color, silver and gray.