What’s giving him away? He was looking, not flattering himself. He was looking with the slightly fearful animosity with which we look upon a stranger. He knew that he was seeing an unattractive face; he could go further: judge what was unattractive about it. But where might it be, the reason all those looks were like sentences broken by a sudden ugliness? The bottom lip? Is this the lip of a miser? The bags under his eyes? They hold the strangled cravings of sleepless nights; maybe it was visible — all those limp corpses? The gerbil cheeks? The runaway stubble and eyebrows? He was hiding his rotten teeth: yes, such a perfidiously crooked-toothed smile. . But let’s be fair! Heaping shame upon oneself, and nothing but shame, reeks just as bad as self-praise. — That’s not all there is, there’s also this here (and he knows it; for he has known it): this exposed stringer of a forehead — disparage, if you can, that glacis, the likes of which doesn’t take the wicked into its confidence! And the eyes: they look upon him as though into an abyss they fear, but without despair. Why mightn’t he at least feel sorry for them? He pities strangers who’ve suffered a wrong, too. .
And now another nice about-face: hadn’t he said a moment ago that he was searching his features for what had been giving him away? But didn’t he just say that it was his eyes that were being wronged? And that they therefore didn’t take their own side! And that he therefore doesn’t brag as though he were any better than what they take him for! What misery, not to get out of this vicious circle. For every “guilty” there was also, immediately, a mitigating circumstance. And what a mitigating circumstance! Ablutions, apology, exaltation. And when it’s still so simple to say, “They’re moving their seats away, so I suppose they have a reason; a person can’t be litigant and judge at the same time, isn’t that so?”
But here was heard something so quiet that it might have been a voice other than his, and it said, “And why would it be that it’s only the judge who is infallible? Because he knows less than the defendant? Why would ‘more’ be less than ‘less’?”
That’s what he said, but to himself he concluded with this: “So be it. Surely they’re right.” — He added: “This thought is sinful.” — But he held something back, and it sounded like this: “But it’s a sin that I delight in, for it’s a sinful hope.”
He bared his rotten teeth.
“The Church warns against excessive humility. It’s right. The Church forbids you from disdaining your own soul. It’s right. Disdain your own soul?: too easy an alibi; and who knows, maybe it’s laziness, and who knows, maybe it’s pride in disguise?”
The worst thing was that the words “you silly, why are you against yourself?” were stuck in him like an indigestible morsel; worse was that they thwarted his equivocation; “jerk,” he said, thinking of himself as if thinking of a stranger. “Jerk,” which, to any personal question, keeps spouting the same lie: “Like I’d want something like that? Abstinence madness? Ach! Spiritual hunger, spiritual hunger!”; worse was that it reminded him not of hunger, but of denying hunger. Liars are disgusting. Not because they deceive, but because they fake. Faking is a synonym for ugliness. –
The following day, strolling on the ramparts, on top of which people lived — the only wise people in this petty-bourgeois town — who didn’t even fake curiosity, he was suddenly handed — it had just gotten dark — a key: “Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête.” — Not words, not a thought. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête. — Like a thing he grasps in his hand, a thing forged with care, with distinct, even somewhat exaggerated contours, a thing that has weight, and that unlocks. A key. To him it was like it was for the person who has already been working a big ring of keys in front of a locked door for a long time, so long that it’s now just more for his conscience than out of hope that he might still finally arrive at the one that fits; without reveling in it — for he is so weary — only with dull surprise: “Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête.” And right there, a common denominator! For here we have a common denominator, and it comes out to: sex.
It’s so simple!
It had begun — how? With the idyll with Zinaida. The beast, which wanted to be an angel at all costs, adapted the idyll into a bucolic chant accompanied by bagpipes—caritas— and shawms — equality, liberty, fraternity. (“No, Zinaida, don’t call me ‘sir.’ Speak to me naturally,” his craving kowtowed, playing the democrat.) An unhypocritical beast would have grabbed Zinaida, who had wished for nothing else, grabbed her by the waist, seized the opportunity by the hair, and done what any country boy would — but yes, in mill-side meadows, in the willows past the pool! After noontime, in the scorching heat, when the whole house was having a siesta. — In the evening, in the yard, he would wait for his supper, a gratified little beasty, a benevolent little creature, a kind little monster. It was an evening so becalmed — he recalls — one of those evenings in which the gratified, and only they, can be innocents for a moment, with the mystical innocence in which love blossoms afresh like a lotus. — Gratified, refreshed, benevolent, kind. A car would have arrived, a car of swaggering upstarts; they would have motioned to him with a teaser’s sprightly irony. They would have asked him for his room; he would have surrendered it to them grumbling, but grumbling heroically; no pedantry, no bachelor worry about “pardon the mess” he’d have been left in peace at his table; but no, he’d have gone upstairs; to help; let’s say that even then he would have gone “to help”; let’s say that it still would have come to a “misunderstanding”; and what then? It would have stopped at the misunderstanding, it would have dissolved the way mere misunderstandings do: with Homeric laughter, which opens the tears’ floodgates and peoples’ arms; for the male, when the satisfied female sets her gaze upon him, is cheerful, bold, and invincible; the female happy, and Zinaida, Zinaida had, after all, been there, she had been there from start to finish. She, his fair-haired, almost-new woman, heavy around the hips, with down on the back of her neck, with breath like mature rye. . Move out of Benedictine Mill? Away from Zinaida, from the meadows and willows? Out of the question. He would remain there always, until the seductive September mists, when Paris’s “happy hour” buzzes at those who know when they’ve heard it, even as far as mountain villages in the middle of nowhere.
Then, early one morning and in mist that stretches all the way to cities and arouses in them an atavistic, ephemeral memory of their country origin, Zinaida would have been helping him load up the carriage, and a swish of the driver’s whip would have entwined the two of them and the simultaneous “until two weeks from now, in Paris,” and this melodious ribbon would have become entangled in the looks of two creatures, boldly measuring themselves up, who had long since gone down that easy path from words of passion to words of reason, the path that the predestined couple are walking, and this melodious ribbon would then have been rolled up by the happy voices of boarders and landlords bidding farewell merely warmly, but warmly, and they’d then press her upon him even into the carriage, when it was already in motion. .