He was not allowed to sleep in his old room upstairs after all. Nothing he had expected happened. The house was full up. It seemed that since the adoption Nikolas and Nina had given up their flat in Old Quarter and moved back here till they came in line for a larger flat. They were in Eduard’s old room, and their baby was in Nikolas’s old room; Retsia and her three were in the nursery; the cousin slept on the living-room couch; there was nothing left for him but the leather couch in the glassed-in porch off the music room, downstairs. Only the mother’s room was empty. He did not see it. He did not go upstairs. Retsia brought down blankets, then a quilt, finally a warm dressing gown of Nikolas’s. “It’s terrible out here, terrible, poor Eduard. If you sleep in this it might help you stay warm. Oh, how strange everything is!” Her hair was braided for sleep, she wore a pink wool wrapper. She looked broad, competent, maternal, beautiful; her face was illuminated as if she were listening to music. That is grief, he thought.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“But you always get cold feet at night. It’s terrible to stick you out here. I don’t know what we’ll do when Tomas comes. Oh, Eduard, I do so wish that you’d got married, I hate for people to be alone! I know you don’t mind, but I do. The curtains won’t close, will they? Oh, Christ, I’ve torn the side hem. Well, there’s nothing to shut out here but the rain.” The ready tears stood in her eyes; her warmth and strength enveloped him a moment as she hugged him. “Good night!” she said and left, shutting the curtained glass door behind her, and he heard her voice and the cousin’s in the next room.
She went upstairs. The house grew silent. He rearranged the blankets and quilt and lay down on the couch. He read the book he had read on the train, a long-term project for goals and fund allocations in the department that would, in May, come under the administration of his bureau. Rain brushed the windows above the couch. His hands grew cold. Silently and suddenly the light in the next room went out, leaving the curtained glass door black, and the light from his small reading lamp very dim. The cousin was in that room. The house was full of people he did not know. This porch, cold, in night and rain, was strange to him. They never used the porch except in summer, on hot days. This was not the trip he had started out on. To come home, that was one true direction, but now it had lost its sense, he had ended up in a strange place. Was this confusion what they called grief? She is dead, he thought, she is dead, as he lay fairly comfortably propped against the arm of the couch, the book open against his raised knees under the quilt, gazing at the page numbers 144, 145, and waited for the reaction. But he had left home so long ago, after all. 144, 145. His eyes returned to the paragraph he had been reading. He read on to the end of the section. His watch said two-thirty. He turned off the bronze-shaded reading lamp and huddled down under the blankets and quilts; he heard the rain brush quietly against the windows. “I am going to Paraguay,” he told the salesman, annoyed at being asked. “To Paraguananza, the capital of the nation.” But they met with long delays along the line from floods of water, and when he got there, across terrible abysses, to Paraguananza, it was no different from here.
2. METEMPSYCHOSIS
When the lawyer’s letter came, Eduard Russe thought nothing at first about the house that had been willed to him, but tried only to dredge up from the shifty bogs of memory some shard or fragment, a cranium, a fingerbone, of that great-uncle, his mother’s father’s brother, who had seen fit, or been forced by a paucity of survivors, to leave him the house in Brailava. He had always lived in Krasnoy; when he was nine or ten he had gone with his mother to visit their Northern relatives, but of that journey he could recall only the most trivial things—a hen with her brood of chicks in a back yard by a basket, a man standing and singing aloud on a street corner directly under (so his child’s eye averred) a huge, dark-blue mountain. Of the grandfather who had then owned the house, of the great-uncle who had next inherited it, nothing remained but a discomfort of dark rooms and loud old voices. Old men, deaf, not the same species as himself, no kin. Crossed swords with basket grips and curved blades hanging on a chimney: sabres. He had never seen a sabre. He was not allowed to play with them.The old men did nothing with them, did not keep them polished. If they had let him take them down he would have polished them. He was ashamed, now, of this ingratitude of mind which left him only his own childish envies and not one glimpse of the man who had given him a house—even if he did not want the house and could wish the old man had, equally, forgotten him. What was he to do with a house in Brailava? What was he supposed to reply to the lawyer’s letter? Employed in the Bureau of Housing, on modest salary, he had never had any use for lawyers and had kept well clear of the breed. His wife would have known how to answer the letter; she had good sense about such things, and good manners too. Following what he imagined Elena might have written, he produced a short, civil acknowledgment of the lawyer’s communication, posted it, and then, in fact, altogether forgot about the great-uncle, the legacy, the property in Brailava. He was busy, having undertaken an extra task of the kind he was good at, a reorganisation and simplification of record-keeping. People would say he was trying to lose himself in his work, but though he had always liked his work and still did, he knew there was no way to lose himself in it. Rather he found himself in it constantly, met himself in the work he had done, in the people he worked with. On every street corner on the way to the Bureau he met himself coming back from work to the apartment on Sidres Street were Elena, who taught in the College of Applied Arts, would be home already, unless it was Wednesday night when she had a class from four to six—
His days were punctuated by these dashes, not periods but breaks, empty spaces in which he stopped himself from finishing the thought, or from trying to finish the thought which no longer had an end, since in this case Elena had no class from four to six on Wednesday, because she was dead of an aneurysm of the heart and had been dead for three months, and in any case all thoughts led to this same non-end or stopping place and were there, as in the cremator’s fire, destroyed.
He knew he could manage his misery in a wiser way, without these breaks and terrible repetitions, if he could sleep well. But he could never sleep, now, more than two or three hours at a time, and then would wake and lie awake as long as he had slept. He tried drinking, and he tried the sleeping pills a friend at work recommended. Both gave him five hours’ sleep, two hours’ nightmare, and a day of sick despair. He went back to reading during his night wakings. He read anything, but preferred history, the histories of other countries. Sometimes, at three in the morning, he cried, as he read the history of Renaissance Spain, ignoring his tears. He had no dreams. She had taken his dreams, and they had gone with her too far, by now, to find their way back to him. They had got lost and petered out, dried up, somewhere in that thick, rock-ridden darkness through which Elena had very slowly gone, tunnelling her way forward, heavily, without breathing. He felt that she was beyond that now, in some other region, but not one he was able to imagine.
A second letter arrived from the law firm in Brailava. The envelope was double-weight manila, heavy, portentous. Resigned, he opened it. The lawyer’s letter was short and only moderately obscure, appearing to suggest, with due caution, that as things stood (and undoubtedly given his professional affiliation he was far better informed on this subject than the writer), he might find, if he decided to consider selling the house, that it was possible to get a good price for it; dissociating himself promptly, the lawyer, whom Eduard now envisaged as almost inevitably sixty and clean-shaven with a long upper lip, went on to remark that there were several reputable real-property agents in Krasnoy with Northern branches, if he did not wish to be troubled with the business himself. However, personal belongings left in the house might demand, at least briefly,, his presence and decision as to whether the furniture, papers, books, etc., were of value, monetary or sentimental. With the letter were some documents, evidently deeds, descriptions, and so on, concerning the property, and, in an old, soft, rather mangy leather pouch, a steel ring on which were six keys.