“What do you think? — I served you out of pity!”
He mustn’t back down, not for anything; if he did back down, he’d lose. Dames don’t get nuances: a violent man is strong, a tiresome man is persistent: boorish pestering in pubs — that’s what they call strength. That’ll do! He’d seen them, those raw youths who aren’t put off by an elbow to the ribs or even a smack in the face; they know dames like the back of the hand. Zinaida’s driver — and who knows, perhaps such a thing exists — he, too, got her only because he dared to take a shot. — “I served you out of pity!”? — And that she tore free from me? — That’s it! I see, and I raise!
“Out of pity? Oh, you poor thing!”
Something was tickling him on the lips: Zinaida’s tousled hair. Aha! He had already assumed an attacking position without knowing it. On the table, her hand like a bird on guard; his left hand has fallen beside it like a shot-down buzzard; his pinkie is creeping clumsily toward hers, his right hand, a soused, yet not blacked-out oaf, was lapping at her waist.
“No way! Just take a look at yourself!”
He saw her stand up; he saw her standing; he saw it a smidge before feeling the sting of a sprightly, dry, precisely-landed slap. At the same time, he reckoned, as though with the raking of a croupier’s rake, what had actually happened. Just then he caught Zinaida’s alarm as well, but an alarm morbidly erasing itself before the unutterable ugliness that was squeezing it violently from her features. (And he was stalking after this profligate alarm, which had dropped down suddenly as though through a chute, but was somewhere now outside of Zinaida, somewhere where she no longer remembered it, and it became clear to him that she thus no longer remembered him now, too); then, behind the girl, like an optical syncopation, there flashed the hurriedly unoccupied shadow of a young man, two automatically enflamed little lights in his eyes shining upon some side agreement between them both. Automatically? He was flooded with such certainty that he was at least the electrical switch that had made those little lights glow that he would rather seek refuge back in Zinaida’s eyes, even though he was well aware what awaited him there. — No, he didn’t know; it was something still much worse; Zinaida spotted it and knew what it was; he could immediately read that she had seen through him, that he was lying if he was pretending (and he was even pretending to himself) that he had cast a glance at those little lights only out of a contemptuous curiosity. Zinaida’s eyes laughed with the irrefutable certainty that he had reached for those will-o’-the-wisps for some other, concealed reason. — And everything was as though it had hatched all at once in the middle of a very short sentence that had begun like an escape hatch (around which he was bumbling comically, as though looking for the latch) and ended like an insurmountable wall, from which he fell like a sack:
“Hilarious! I mean, hilarious! — But haven’t you ever taken a look at yourself?”
She cast this at him as though it were a tight net, with no room to move; with this toss she caught both the cleverly probing noose he’d thrown after the fleet-footed ephebe, as well as the furious shrug of the shoulders, with which she confirmed for herself that the noose had gotten tangled.
“You pig, you!” she flung at him, God knows whether it was with her mouth or rather the grocer-like propping of her arms on her sides, and she vanished, God knows whether it was in the mist that had descended in the meantime, or rather in the sparse bunch of gawkers.
They were giving him a good going-over, exploiting the twilight that the pavement afforded them, whereas on the lighted terrace he was like a nudist in a display window. He saw them, not seeing them, but suffering through them; rather, he saw only something frighteningly languid, which was about to dispense with him. Dis-pense-with-him! He knew he was an object to them. An ob-ject! He reckoned roughly the kind of resistance that would be put to him should he wish to get away from them, not really understanding himself how he actually ventured to reckon the resistance (and according to what scale!), he gained the quite assured certainty that it would be an admittedly awkward resistance, but not too tough. He threw his money down on the table, stood up, and leaped out into the evening; he had a kind of unconscious impression that he was expending a certain physical effort, and an impression as though of an oversimplified satisfaction that he was not expending it for nothing. For he felt that he was outdoing something evil, thereby blazing himself a path toward something, not better, but toward something that was, perhaps though still worse, at least less artfully so. Something was troubling him: maybe the curses, maybe the clumps of desiccated muck — and out of the blue, a pitch-black and limpid silence; a solitude gaspingly encouraging a permissive acquiescence to his feeling his limbs. They were barely strained, nothing more. They started to stir; nowhere were they hindered; they started to walk, to turn the head, to thrash the arms; it didn’t hurt; he tried to speak: he could; he stopped and listened: he heard, and he recognized: distant footsteps, the slamming of front doors, trees rustling somehow like Corot’s trees. He was imbued with an immense gratitude to the world; he saw it as good. He knew that his gratitude was effusive, but there was nothing to be done about that—péché mignon—all he could do was be effusively grateful to it. He learned that beneath the terrace was a “lane for lovers.” He was undertaking something along the lines of excavating a well, someone else would say: he went deep into himself. But wherever he climbed in his self-excavation, there were, everywhere, just the same cool and limpid springs. It seemed to him that everything was freshness. Somewhere the word “universe” leaped out, it had the quality of a roomy, trusted thing, even homely, in no way devastating, and he must have said to himself sulkily, but with a strained sulkiness, “the universe! Like it’s now me and the universe.” He couldn’t help himself: he saw it, not with his eyes, but he saw it nonetheless, and as if in remarkably complete abbreviation. He didn’t, however, feel like he was part of it: he was a spectator, an impartial, unprejudiced, undemanding, and undesiring spectator — perceptive, indulgently self-restrained, and compassionate. — He was digging, digging, and with a great scientific curiosity as to whether he might strike some wish: he didn’t. As to whether he might strike some aspiration: he had none. He noticed that he had no right to anything, but at the same time he noticed that he was therefore the freest of all. He was looking, so that he might find someone he would hate; someone he would at least have a grudge against: he didn’t. He was casting about as far as he could, so that he might find an enemy, a disparager, a slanderer: on the clean-cut and bright horizon, no one anywhere, nothing. And what if there were no him there, either? Oh what joy, what joy — not to be! He stepped slowly, lightly, as though on cloudlets. The slightly denser form that crossed the path over there, what is it? Who is it? Never again would he encounter someone whose gaze he would fear. No one who would, upon encountering him, not meet his gaze. Who was it who had flashed across his path? Some young woman. Their eyes met. Why did she stop, why did she turn around? And this cone, upon the surface of which the woman’s puffed-out skirt fell as she whipped around in flight; this cone, wobbling like a top after the initial spin. Where was she fleeing to? Why? The terrace’s underpinning is entirely inviting nooks. It rustles, clucks, sighs. In one such nook, the fleeing woman vanished.