Oh, let’s just say it for him, for he can’t see it clearly, he doesn’t recognize it yet. Let’s say in his stead that into his rapture over yesterday, “when he’d triumphed so famously,” there flows a chastening reality. But he doesn’t know it yet — he, not knowing why, is merely unsettled by it. In spite of himself, he who wants to summon his rapture alone is also summoning those meadows, that stream, that alder, and the village rooftops, and now he’s also summoning a thin column of smoke rising from a chimney, and he’s summoning it like a fiber of the start of day — a fiber caught in a time-spinning wheel that has started whirling and reeling and spinning out its finished skein of indistinguishable days, hours, and seconds already past.
The chastening reality is pouring in, but he’s still holding out against it within the run-down redoubt of his rapture, and now he’s giving in to it — oh, it’ll be a routine capitulation, a capitulation no noisier than the collapse of a sandcastle until he catches on that he’s looking. And he does catch on, enough that his retina absorbs the group of those three people on the white lane winding beneath the wooded hillside, and it evokes an image that had overslept, that had fallen behind and is now pulling up afresh, until he catches on that there’s no way around it, and now he sees only that which is (and nothing more) — that which is, that is, that pipsqueak of an innkeeper, who “will present to you” his domain, his kingdom, who will present it with the sweepingly inattentive gestures of a tour guide for foreigners: our man sees Mr. and Mrs. Steel, doltish tourists who, oddly enough, don’t take the shopworn, well-rehearsed lecture as a personal tribute. How funny they are, his slanderers from yesterday, “over whom he’d triumphed”! He is so delighted to assign them a poor grade, knowing that it serves them right, and that they’ll pay for it. Oh, to be on the highway, to look down on them from far away and then get moving, eagerly, to pass them by, thrash them with a look, one after the other, to cut short the braggadocio of cowards pretending that it had already blown over. . Oh, so as far as you’re concerned it’s already blown over, has it?! Oh, so as far as you’re concerned it’s like last evening didn’t happen?! So you’re going to make like an ostrich?! So you. . but after all, of course! The longer he watches that group of three, the longer he sees them, the more he catches wind of the God’s honest truth that, for them, it has blown over. For real, they’re not making like an ostrich in the least; for real, as if none of it ever happened at all; it’s natural, for real, and despite that, for real, it’s so unsteady that a modicum of insolent pluck would suffice, courage would suffice to deny it — — but that’s just it!: he’s in no position. It would suffice to say “they couldn’t have forgotten,” and it would amount to the same as their not having been able to forget; it would suffice to say “no!” and it would actually be “no”. . The only thing is that he, he doesn’t measure up to that “no way”. .
“What is it?” he asked, as if compelled to return something he’d appropriated improperly.
And the voice that answered, “mail,” from behind the door sounded as though it were contemptuously tossing returned valuables. It was Zinaida’s voice. Our man had “Slip it under the door” on the tip of his tongue, but instead he stuck his head out a little and raised his forefinger; just then, however, it was as though he’d remembered that that’s how morons make a show of hitting upon “an idea,” and he scowled repentantly.
“Wait a moment, Zinaida, I’m opening the door.” And now he had. Zinaida handed him a bundle of newspapers and a postcard. She turned her head and left foot as though she were already leaving; how could she spell it out for him more explicitly that, as far as she goes, she’d rather slip the mail under the door and leave before he “would have to” see her? Can you be so sure that even he understood this?
“How did you sleep, Zinaida?”
He’d said it too late; after Zinaida, who, having given him the bundle, could at last do what she’d have rather done right away: leave. He was saying it after her, all the while with a foul bitterness in his mouth; he was saying it looking after her, quite meekly and without the slightest hope that she would answer him, when, getting ready to close the door again with mortified desolation, he was amazed to discover that the girl sort of hesitated after all, then slowed down. She slowed weirdly, and he recognized it and was intrigued by it, she slowed with the unwitting ritardando of a person in whom “it’s working.” He made out that what was working was anger contending with. . that’s it: what was hampering Zinaida’s contemptuous anger?
“Perhaps grief,” he said, testing it, but she suddenly turned her head and set off, once again quickening her pace.
“Why didn’t you smack him one?”
She said it in such a way that he immediately jumped back and slammed the door behind him. He reached for his face. Zinaida’s “why didn’t you smack him one” burned like a slap.
The postcard was from “the gang.” The first thing that struck him was Tiemen’s signature. But it was only after he had read the card a third time, a fourth — now like he’s nearsighted, now like he’s farsighted — that he caught on that what he was reading had come from “Montfort-l’Amaury.” He read the signatures one after another, he said Montfort-l’Amaury to himself again and again, trying in vain to detach the names from the steadfast place that was somehow inappropriate here, to detach them as though from a word-canvas that the rest had been embroidered into, from the blurred word underneath, which will never, never fade beneath the rest, until at last it shone through more clearly: “They have already forgotten. They have already forgotten.”
They’ve forgotten the affair with which he had been sleeping unawares, as with an infected dame. He had been sleeping with his own shame, and he didn’t know, didn’t suspect. They’d woken up so run-down from that monstrous intercourse that it had given him a moment’s peace, it let him doze a little. Oh, the idyll by the pool and the legend of yesterday sung in verse ad usum delphini: the briefest delay, the tiny indulgence of the demanding monster they had mated him with yesterday — they who have forgotten. And what was there for them to forget, actually? What? We haven’t forgotten yesterday’s farce, which we attended only to digest our dinner, and so we’d have something to kill the time before supper, we don’t forget something that lasts only through its extension in time; we don’t forget that which was not there.
But if the bracelet had actually been lying on the washbasin, if he had actually taken it, if he had actually gone out into the yard and actually dropped it in the shed, and if what had then actually transpired had occurred regardless. . Hold on! Now he has more riding on an answer: would Zinaida then have had a reason to say to him what she’d just said? Hold on! — No, she wouldn’t have had a reason, for then yesterday would have run its course the way it had, except for one thing: he would sure as hell have delivered the slap. Mr. Steel would have gotten his slap; Mr. Steel’s good cheer, his tribute to the summertime way of being, would have skipped over today. And why would this good cheer have left? Because yesterday he would have gotten slapped. And why would Mr. Steel have gotten slapped yesterday? Hold on! Because he, the one now in his room, would have had the guts. And why would he have had the guts? Because, once he’d chucked the bracelet, he would have been sure that they could keep looking until Doomsday and still wouldn’t find anything: not on him, not in his dresser, not in his bed, not in his linens. Because knowing that he’d chucked the bracelet he wouldn’t have been dying of fear that his slanderers had found the bracelet in the meantime and slipped it into his things so they’d “be right,” so they wouldn’t have to retract. Oh, how he would have stood up to them, he, who well knows that he’s already just equivocating again, that he’s already just faking again.