of several typewriters one could make out the swift rat-tat-tat of Tamara.
At the left was Vasiliev’s office; his lustrine jacket grew tight across his plump shoulders as, standing before the lectern he used as a writing table and puffing like some powerful machine, he wrote the leading article in his untidy handwriting with its schoolroom blots, headed: “No Improvement in Sight,” or “The Situationin China.” Suddenly stopping, lost in thought, he made a noise like a metal scraper as he scratched his large bearded cheek with one finger and narrowed his eye, overhung by a raffish black brow without a single gray hair in it—remembered in Russia to this day. By the window (outside which there was a similar multi-office building, with repairs going on so high in the sky that it seemed as though they might as well do something about the ragged rent in the gray cloud bank) stood a bowl with an orange and a half and an appetizing jar of yogurt, and in the bookcase, in its locked bottom compartment, forbidden cigars and a large blue-and-red heart were preserved. A table was cluttered with the old trash of Soviet newspapers, cheap books with lurid covers, letters—request-ind, reminding, rebuking—the squeezed-out half of an orange, a newspaper page with a window cut out and a portrait photograph of Vasiliev’s daughter, who lived in Paris, a young woman with a charming bare shoulder and smoky hair: she was an unsuccessful actress and there was frequent mention of her in the cinema column of the
Gazeta:
“… our talented compatriot Silvina Lee …”—although no one had ever heard of the compatriot.
Vasiliev would good-humoredly accept Fyodor’s poems and print them, not because he liked them (generally he did not even read them) but because it was absolutely immaterial to him what adorned the nonpolitical part of his paper. Having ascertained once for all the level of literacy below which a given contributor by nature could not fall, Vasiliev gave him a free hand, even if the given level barely rose above zero. And poems, since they were mere trifles, passed almost entirely without control, trickling through openings where rubbish of greater weight and volume would have got stuck. But what joyful, exciting squealing arose in all the peacock coops of our émigré poetry from Latvia to the Riviera! They’ve printed mine! And mine! Fyodor himself, who felt he had only one rival—Koncheyev (who, by the way, was not a contributor to the
Gazeta)—
did not concern himself with his neighbors in print and rejoiced over his poems no less than the others. There were times when he could not wait for the evening mail that brought his copy and instead would buy one half an hour earlier in the street, and shamelessly, scarcely having left the newsstand, catchingthe reddish light near the fruitstands where mountains of oranges glowed in the blue of early twilight, would unfold the paper—and sometimes find nothing: something else had squeezed it out; but if he found it, he would gather the pages more conveniently and, resuming his progress along the sidewalk, read his poem over several times, varying the inner intonations; that is, imagining one by one the various mental ways the poem would be read, perhaps was now being read, by those whose opinion he considered important—and with each of these different incarnations he would almost physically feel a change in the color of his eyes, and also in the color behind his eyes, and in the taste in his mouth, and the more he liked the chef-d’oeuvre du jour, the more perfectly and succulently he could read it through the eyes of others.
Having thus dawdled away the summer, having given birth to, raised, and stopped loving forever some two dozen poems, he went out one clear and cool day, a Saturday (tonight is the meeting), to make an important purchase. The fallen leaves lay not flat on the sidewalk but warped and stiffly crumpled so that from under each protruded a blue
At the left was Vasiliev’s office; his lustrine jacket grew tight across his plump shoulders as, standing before the lectern he used as a writing table and puffing like some powerful machine, he wrote the leading article in his untidy handwriting with its schoolroom blots, headed: “No Improvement in Sight,” or “The Situationin China.” Suddenly stopping, lost in thought, he made a noise like a metal scraper as he scratched his large bearded cheek with one finger and narrowed his eye, overhung by a raffish black brow without a single gray hair in it—remembered in Russia to this day. By the window (outside which there was a similar multi-office building, with repairs going on so high in the sky that it seemed as though they might as well do something about the ragged rent in the gray cloud bank) stood a bowl with an orange and a half and an appetizing jar of yogurt, and in the bookcase, in its locked bottom compartment, forbidden cigars and a large blue-and-red heart were preserved. A table was cluttered with the old trash of Soviet newspapers, cheap books with lurid covers, letters—request-ind, reminding, rebuking—the squeezed-out half of an orange, a newspaper page with a window cut out and a portrait photograph of Vasiliev’s daughter, who lived in Paris, a young woman with a charming bare shoulder and smoky hair: she was an unsuccessful actress and there was frequent mention of her in the cinema column of the
Gazeta:
“… our talented compatriot Silvina Lee …”—although no one had ever heard of the compatriot.
Vasiliev would good-humoredly accept Fyodor’s poems and print them, not because he liked them (generally he did not even read them) but because it was absolutely immaterial to him what adorned the nonpolitical part of his paper. Having ascertained once for all the level of literacy below which a given contributor by nature could not fall, Vasiliev gave him a free hand, even if the given level barely rose above zero. And poems, since they were mere trifles, passed almost entirely without control, trickling through openings where rubbish of greater weight and volume would have got stuck. But what joyful, exciting squealing arose in all the peacock coops of our émigré poetry from Latvia to the Riviera! They’ve printed mine! And mine! Fyodor himself, who felt he had only one rival—Koncheyev (who, by the way, was not a contributor to the
Gazeta)—
did not concern himself with his neighbors in print and rejoiced over his poems no less than the others. There were times when he could not wait for the evening mail that brought his copy and instead would buy one half an hour earlier in the street, and shamelessly, scarcely having left the newsstand, catchingthe reddish light near the fruitstands where mountains of oranges glowed in the blue of early twilight, would unfold the paper—and sometimes find nothing: something else had squeezed it out; but if he found it, he would gather the pages more conveniently and, resuming his progress along the sidewalk, read his poem over several times, varying the inner intonations; that is, imagining one by one the various mental ways the poem would be read, perhaps was now being read, by those whose opinion he considered important—and with each of these different incarnations he would almost physically feel a change in the color of his eyes, and also in the color behind his eyes, and in the taste in his mouth, and the more he liked the chef-d’oeuvre du jour, the more perfectly and succulently he could read it through the eyes of others.
Having thus dawdled away the summer, having given birth to, raised, and stopped loving forever some two dozen poems, he went out one clear and cool day, a Saturday (tonight is the meeting), to make an important purchase. The fallen leaves lay not flat on the sidewalk but warped and stiffly crumpled so that from under each protruded a blue
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