I studied that cinder for a second, not a trace of the title’s gilded letters at the center, nothing to signify the Book, the name of the Writer, the cursive of his signature. I understood immediately what the Book’s fate had been and flung the cover away from me with a movement of the wrist, just as I throw the Frisbee to Almaz, the borzoi.
And it rose through the night to the back of the garden; it rose, caught and propelled by the turbulence its very advance and rotation were generating, and sailed neatly over the wall. Impossible now for me to walk into the house with that black cinder and throw it in the face of the Buryat, who would pale, etcetera. A cackle of laughter or the air that could have erupted into a cackle of laughter filled my chest without my actually laughing into the night, only my eyes: HA! And I turned around to present my face and my laughing eyes to the lights of the house, for at the moment the wafer of the Book went flying off into the night, my eyes had seen an illuminated stele of light advancing toward me through the air. Without any laborious searching, I’d come up with a passage from the Book about wild laughter. This one: He picked up the turban and put it on all different ways until — oh wonder of wonders! — when he looked at himself in the mirror, he had disappeared! He gave the turban another spin and there he was in the mirror again. He turned it again and disappeared. He took it off and could see himself in the mirror. Then he burst out in peals of wild laughter, bellowing, “All glory to Chernomor and his turban! Terror begone! May joy return to my heart!”
2
Allow me to stress this point: I suspected nothing. I hadn’t seen it coming, never imagined it for a moment. Ersatz diamonds. There was nothing to foretell it, nothing in the Writer to help me understand. A subject unworthy of him, a matter to which he would never have devoted a sentence, not even as a joke, an exercise: never! The manufacture of ersatz diamonds, the double cross an ersatz diamond inevitably and almost automatically places in the soul of its creator: would such a subject occur to a gentleman? Would a gentleman devote himself to the manufacture of ersatz diamonds? Would a courteous young man — myself, for example — ever wonder for one second whether the diamonds his employer’s wife, a beautiful woman with exquisite manners, had placed in his hands as payment for his educational efforts were in fact ersatz? Never. There are things about which it’s best not to think, things upon which a limpid and upright soul never dwells. Allow myself to be invaded by your father’s hammered gold chains and ruffian manners, the way the bottoms of his trousers swept his shoes as he walked? To what end? Toward what objective?
I’d been afraid, had imagined him shoving me along the top of a cliff, pebbles rolling beneath my feet, a question in his bad eye: Have you been seducing my wife? Giving me a beating that is precisely described in the passage of the Book that prefigures The Matrix (everything is there in the Book!), the scene in The Matrix when one of the agents catches up with Neo in a metro station and launches a series of quick blows, a wheel of fists hitting Neo’s torso like the blades of a windmill — what a minor nineteenth-century writer might call a “hail” of fists, when it is in fact, as the Writer describes it, a constellation of fists, which fall by the simple force of gravity, breaking the torque at a certain point and then smashing down like pile drivers … All that, in this passage of the Book: as an astral phenomenon appears in the sky, … two ovoid forms … with vertiginous speed … Saint-Loup’s two fists … that enabled them to create, in front of [Smith, Agent Smith], an unstable constellation, etcetera.
I’m sure of this. I cannot be mistaken about something like this: I hold the whole Book in my memory, its text incarnate in me. Nor should you be confounded by the turban and cackling laughter, which may appear to be a later addition, a corruption introduced in a subsequent era. The same goes for this passage with the unusual image of the constellation of fists.
Carried away with that image, I was imagining fists in the air all the way to Torremolinos and the whole time we were there with Larissa. But there were no fists. Quite the contrary: Vasily was friendly and indulgent, a scientist who entirely understands that a young man, almost a boy, in so luxurious a mansion, in the company of so lovely a woman. Surrounded by diamonds, this woman, not only her neck but her whole being, an entourage, a cloud of diamonds orbiting around her: how could anyone not fall in love, not fall madly in love with such a woman?
Your papa’s demeanor had deceived me, I was thrown off, never having seen real mafiosi, only in the movies. I’d taken him for, believed him to be, one of those.
Now I understood: he was a defenseless scoundrel, a petty thief, a small-time crook, garroted by fear. His terror palpable in the way his eyes swept the top of the wall as he emerged from the swimming pool, putting his hands on the edge and pulling himself up, then quickly turning toward the wall as if someone might take advantage of his back in the water, a swimmer’s vulnerability, to put two bullets into him, a sudden red stain in the swimming pool spreading out in a purple cloud, and Vasily floating strangely in the center, fixedly observing or as if fixedly observing the glint of a coin at the bottom, the bullets that missed.
But this, too, this thought yielding speedily to fear of an encounter with the windshield, even more terrible!
These people I’d believed and imagined to be fabulously rich, immensely affluent? Horribly poor, in reality! Bankrupt! He himself had confessed it: bankrupt! Catastrophically bankrupt! Nobodies!
Profoundly swindled, Petya. I felt profoundly swindled by your parents, deeply deceived by this couple who had so well, so consummately, so garishly played the role of supperrich. To the point that I’d believed them, presumed I was living in a castle, sucking deeply and directly from the udder of their wealth and congratulating myself upon it. And let’s be clear about this: only to gain some time and make myself a little money (never enough) to save up for the hard days ahead and go on with my journey. True, I’d had moments of suspicion, sudden rushes of glimmerings, my hands and feet trying to correct the false picture, the mistaken perception my brain was constructing.
For example, there was the exaggerated tip I’d seen him give a few hours earlier on the way out of a disco even more luxurious and expensive than Ishtar. Indignant over it, angry at seeing myself forced to emend the error, wrest the bill away from the astonished doorman … And the worst of it was — my gaze fixed on a church steeple that I didn’t stop watching until it disappeared around a bend in the road — they hadn’t paid me! At all! Ersatz diamonds? They hadn’t paid me!
How much is an ersatz diamond worth? How much money can an ersatz diamond be sold for?
He read it all in my face, Vasily; he didn’t stop watching me all the way there, but without ever seeming anxious or cornered. Quite the contrary: a smile on his lips. A smile of aplomb and impudence, of smug self-satisfaction with the car he was driving, the lovely creature he had for a wife, and the beauty, the ineffable beauty, he had for a lover. I studied her again this morning, couldn’t take my eyes off her: Larissa, standing there in front of her house, then walking back toward the door in her sequined jean jacket, thick blonde hair halfway down her back, turning and waving to me happily, her arm held high. To the point that I wondered, as in a nineteenth-century noveclass="underline" Will I see her again? Ever?