The fear that bred and burrowed through the city, which had never known anything like it, was the surest sign of their foreignness. When the Soviets ran away, this instinctive sixth sense of foreign presence remained with him, and that’s why he, unlike so many others, never doubted that the Germans would not stay long either, not even in the very beginning, before the arrests. They were also strangers here, just as foreign, though they maintained the appearance of human beings so much more than those other ones: their officers wore gloves, made use of handkerchiefs, and when they gave their “word of honor,” they did keep it, even while they were calmly and efficiently robbing people’s homes of anything that had remained after the Soviets. Just like the others, they spun the city into a spider web of fear, and just like the others, they were blind: they had no eyes to see how drastically they did not fit here, that they were a carbuncle, a pimple that the body would expunge, burn off with fever. Against the intimacy he had with the city—and he hadn’t really ever been this close with a woman, hadn’t ever had one he could truly call his—this innate rejection of the foreign raised in him, when he was on a mission, a sense not even of righteousness but of his own mystical invincibility. He was untouchable. How could he fail when every pebble was on his side? Afterward, he would always pray and ask God to forgive him for his pride, if this was pride—he wasn’t sure; he had lost the habit of deeper contemplation when he began living in the running stream of each moment, so in all moral questions he had placed his trust in God: he knew better.
And here’s the streetcar stop, a trifle left to do, a few minutes: give the briefcase to the girls, get on the streetcar with them, jump down at the convenient turn off the Lychakivska (Oststrasse, man, Oststrasse!)—and that’s it. He’s done.
TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… And that’s when an invisible wave of heat washes over him, out of nowhere, and his blood thunders in his temples—never mind that his body mechanically continues on its course, at the same brisk tempo of an inaudible lively march. His lips grow instantly dry and he gasps for air like a fish, mouth open wide—he can’t breathe.
This is not a signal of danger—something else, something other waits ahead—something is closing the distance between them, heading to their inexorable collision at the streetcar stop, something that could not, should not be there. Something whose presence at today’s assassination of the Polish police Commandant is absolutely inconceivable—incompatible by blood type.
He has seen, but he cannot believe: his blood resists, all his many years of honed underground instincts, everything that made him invincible. A single memory shoots through all those years, incinerates everything they contain into ash, throws the heart of the once-lived time: the orchestra is playing tango with Polish lyrics—“I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one, I will let you go your way”—and the smell of a girl’s blonde hair under the electric lights, the intoxicating light smell, the sharp torment of unspeakable tenderness that turns everything inside you into a flower, a bloom of animate, tickling petals (and, at the same time, the nagging fear—what if she catches a waft of his sweat and it disgusts her—so delicate, so small and light that it makes him want to fall, drop himself as a shower of petals under her feet). He feels all this hit his chest with a force no lesser than that of the bullet he fired into the police executioner sentenced to death by the Organization—as if his own shot caught up with him in the middle of the street, and Beast goes faint and soft, about to collapse like the man he killed, and he will now see everything he did not stay to watch earlier on Serbska. This painfully clear, visceral realness of the memory is the most surprising part of it all—that it should be so perfectly alive after being pried out of some long-barricaded corner of his past that he considered irrevocably severed from his present: this is the amazement he felt as a little boy when, in the middle of the winter, he beheld the gleaming round smoothness of an apple pulled from the cellar where it had been kept in its underground nest of straw—by what magic did it preserve that smoothness, that deep, slightly bitter breath of autumnal orchards?
He does not collapse; he is carried forward, dizzy with the merciless shortening of the distance between them, and his past melts inside him with brutal, catastrophic speed. He sees himself as one does in one’s moment of death—or the instant after dying?—from outside: among all the people out walking on this downtown street at this early hour, he is the most vulnerable, an open moving target. A slow, wet, gaping wound.
TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…
My name—Adrian Ortynsky.
He is happy.
He sees with great clarity the wet rounds of cobblestones, and the hem of ice at the edge of the sidewalk, and the shiny streetcar tracks. He sees before him, growing closer with every step, the two girls’ faces: one, Nusya’s, as though muted, dim, and the other—yes, he knew, he’d been told that there would be two of them, that Nusya would bring a companion, but Lord, who could imagine!—the other blazes in his eyes like a dazzling flare that remains after looking at the sun; he can’t see her features, but he doesn’t have to see them in order to know—with his entire being, his whole life at once—it is She.
She.
TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… “I have time, I will wait,” the orchestra plays, and the couples spin on the dance floor. How long he’s been waiting—all these years, and he didn’t even know it. And now the waiting is over.
Closer. Closer still. Another moment—and his hand would fall into hers. He is not surprised to notice that it suddenly begins to snow—someone up above also waited for this moment to give his signal, to let large white flakes spin in the air, settle on Her hair, the golden curls around the small beret, on Her eyelashes, instantly fuzzy as though bleached. Her eyelashes. Her lips.
Somewhere in the back of his mind a watchful half-thought perks up, as if transplanted from someone else’s mind, that snow is bad news, he’ll leave tracks when he runs across the park—but nothing of this kind has any chance of rising to the surface of his consciousness at the moment. Does she recognize him? She is snowflaked. Smiling. Serene. Snow Queen—that’s what he called her that night when he walked her home, to the Professors’ Colony far up Lychakivska, her tall lace-up boots leaving tiny, miniscule impressions in the snow, child’s tracks, and when he pointed it out to her, she indulged him with a small laugh, slightly coy, “What fancy is that, Mister Adrian; it’s just my foot, it’s plenty common.” “But I insist, Miss Gela, be so kind as to compare,” and he carefully planted his bear paw next to her little delicate trace like an imprint of a flower petal with the minute bud of her heel at the bottom, and it felt as though he were protecting it from a stranger’s prying eyes, shielding her with his own imprinted presence—“Take a look, be so kind, I insist”—once, and again, and the whole way home. To see their footprints next to each other, again and again, was rapture beyond compare, like touching her in some mysteriously intimate way, and when she flitted away from him, almost startled, when she drew back her hand and hid in her towered fortress—her eminent professorial villa guarded by a quietly watchful army of relatives and maids, invisible at this late hour, and with doors that creaked like a living baritone in surprise—he remained standing just outside her porch, rooted to the spot where she had abandoned him, without the slightest idea of where he should go next or why.