“Well, then, Zinaida, go get me my soup.”
Then, with her back to him, and with that peculiar movement of her slightly outstretched hands (this in particular was lodged in his memory; “as if she’d torn herself from some oppressive chain,” he says), she, curtly:
“It’s police orders. The master says, sir, that you’ve already been staying here for twenty-four hours. . That it has to be right away. .”
And this time, too, he did nothing; this time, too, he still felt like teasing. (Teasing!)
“Sir, Zinaida? Has a sir been staying here? What about our agreement!” Yes, and all the while he was staring ravenously at her bowed neck — in the already oblique sunlight flaxen down was prattling there. (And it was a shame for him to admit that he’d actually said “prattling” to himself.)
He’s sitting on the bed, like at first. With his chin on his knee, willingly obedient to the strict auto-prohibition against looking into the mirror. And to this suspicious willingness to sweep up after yesterday’s awkward misunderstanding (saying “misunderstanding,” he twists his lips, but without being aware of it, and in particular without being aware that he is twisting them with the same violence he’d just used to coax the little word, “misunderstanding,” from himself) for which he himself had been responsible. But the sticking point — even if it’s merely a trifle — the sticking point is in the sweeping up. He’s thinking clearly, he’s thinking very clearly, he knows himself well, he knows where he has prepared stratagems for dodging the question, or pawning it off, and being aware of them, he bypasses them. It’s odd, really, that his excessive willingness to trivialize the event is somehow a sticking point, and that it sticks by merely a trifle. For if he hasn’t known till now just how tiny of a hitch it is, he knows the hitch is tiny. The fact of his having fallen into innocent suspicion now amounts to little — to nothing — for the suspicion has been removed from him. But that Zinaida also. . For Zinaida also believed it — oh, surely, she surely believed it — and that she also believed is just the thing that makes you wonder. Makes you wonder, for three reasons. For three, also, are the reasons why, if all the others were gullible, Zinaida didn’t have to be: first off, for the idyll by the pool (he knew that there had been no idyll by the pool, but he leaped over this lie like an escaping thief over a fence, without looking back); secondly, that she alone had seen him as suspicious with a suspicion yet to be manifest; thirdly, that she knew better than anyone how indiscriminate false suspicions are, since, before him, wasn’t it she who had been suspected — hmm?
But the willingness to trivialize is a sticking point, and it sticks “by a Zinaida.” It’s stuck on the fact that Zinaida also was capable of believing it. In spite of everything. That’s it! Now’s he’s got it: she was capable. Capable? Why not just say she believed? No semantics, please: she believed, or she was capable of believing — two sides of the same coin. But the only thing still winking toward semantics is: if even Zinaida was capable, then we might suppose that, in spite of everything, she had a reason. But if, in spite of everything, even she had a reason to believe, then we might suppose the reason to believe was. — Semantics? Hold on. Let us recall, point the first: there was a why.
Again his eyes fell upon the cretonne wallpaper. Strange that this time no one gave up: the cretonne wallpaper remained cretonne wallpaper; the memory of the sham-pastoral by the pool remained mere mechanical association. No matter! That morning had begun with a fairy tale out of a Preissler painting nevertheless. Now he knows what it meant: that’s where he had been fleeing to unwittingly, from a humiliating yesterday, even before the memory had drifted back to him. He had been fleeing into make-believe. Why, if not from genuine shame? And if he had been hiding behind that fellow there by the pool, behind that fellow whom he had never been and could never be, now he knows the why for that as welclass="underline" when in need, we are nostalgic for our antipode. The one by the pool whom he wanted to be, and for whom he’d invented the devoted Zinaida, was his antipode: one of those people who are untouched by shame.
Of his having stolen the bracelet? Look at my hands; turn out my pockets — nothing there! Innocent! You can see it, after all, if someone’s innocent! Zinaida couldn’t not see that he was innocent — oh, she couldn’t! Yes, suspicion had fallen upon the innocent, but might it have fallen by chance upon a person fit for ignominy? But someone whom ignominy fits — you can see that, too. Aha! Suppose that Zinaida saw it as well. That he was innocent by chance? Just that: by chance! Accuse a proud man — he’ll rise. Within the marked man, you churn the settled dregs. Zinaida wasn’t deceiving herself; she well saw how ignominy fancies him. But how blindly he’d walked into it! Shame had arranged it so beautifully: he took to it like a mouse to bacon fat. What cunning work ignominy had made of him!
Initially, it played it haughty: “Yield my room? What a nuisance, moving, when I’ve barely settled in,” it whispered to him. Then, generously: “So be it, I’ll yield my room. But you people move my things yourself. I don’t want to know anything about it. I’m weary.” Was that all? No, not yet. Ignominy turned itself into petty unease: “If you don’t come help, your things will go missing, your things will get mixed up, maybe they’ll even be stolen.” His ignominy had turned into a perfectionist; his ignominy rebelled; it held out; he was embarrassed to submit to this pettiness, but ignominy invents it: abracadabra, and the old-lady fear for one’s allegedly endangered effects has already found a pretext to come to their aid “with head held high.” Oh, with head held high!. . In his dregs, there were always pretexts galore. It was enough for him to close his eyes and stir them a bit. Does he hear? Ha — like he wouldn’t! Ignominy feigns nobility: “Maidservants toil enough during the day as it is. Now on top of that they’re to move your things! Run and help them; it’ll be kind of you.” Did it end there? Not even close! Ignominy really outdid itself that evening: when he finally got up, and went to oversee his effects (to help, he said), he would have sworn that he had been spurred “by some convivial-sounding affability.” This master of two-faced-ness, and of the hardest sort: being two-faced with yourself.
They’d set it up superbly, superbly! Hardly had the ignominy gotten through its lie than the whole world lied itself to pieces. Except that the ignominy pretended it was lying for his sake, and that the world was just lying. . purely. But with such conviction that it out-lied the truth.
And yet he was right there when the burning match fell into the powder: “Honey, I left my bracelet next door on the washbasin; be a dear and go get it for me.” Misfortune sometimes enters so modestly, a world-weary old woman: “Just a moment, good people, to warm myself by the hearth, don’t trouble yourselves.” You’ll only flash it an unwitting glance, no differently than if you were offering it an absent greeting. — “Honey. . go and bring it to me, it’s next door, on the basin.” No more than a skip and a jump, from one room to the next; and yet how everything came to hinge on its not being hindered in its movement. No one noticed it at first, not the servant girls, nor Mr. Steel, nor his sister; nor did Mrs. Steel suspect whom it would actually let in.