the same late hour.
Shorosh would wait in the dark passage by the entrance and squint his eyes when the light would turn on in the stairwell.
A silent dog and her master holding the leash would slowly descend the stairs. Shorosh would follow them. The light would automatically switch off behind the entrance door.
He didn’t say anything. The black and white paintings didn’t even cover the cost of paint. Hunger held him by the collar as he walked through the Berlin street, stumbling upon identical German shepherds walking at the same hour.
The lawn in the Tiergarten is illuminated with street lanterns and the color of the grass can only be recollected. The gray alleys stream in the unnamed color of the grass. The unrecognizable moon hangs low above the lanterns. The highways flow like wide rivers beneath the trees. The dry leaves shake from the noise of car engines. Gurgling, the water runs like that in a bathtub somewhere under a low gray bridge. The statues stand in a long row, flooded in lights. The cars turn on the wide lakes of asphalt plazas, hitting the trees with their headlights.
In a quiet, shady place Shorosh hung himself from a tree.
The incident didn’t cause any uproar in Berlin.
III
The clay didn’t stick to the rusty frame very well. The sculpture machine didn’t rotate properly.
She returned to Moscow. The unevenly illuminated city was alive. It was noisy and restless. The trees that stood in parks weren’t growing right. They seemed to have stopped for a minute, as if they were taking part in a demonstration and now were about to resume their march. The houses too were moving. They whirled in circles, wanting to break away, and they turned their backs against each other.
An extraordinary number of horses walked the streets, as they would in a village.
The room looked like a box. It had two yellow plywood walls that were incorrectly angled into the space by the window.
The feet wobble on the stones of the pavement in Moscow, and the sky is completely different. It is more purple than pink at night.
Someone was leaving and gave her the room. Then there were a lot of phone calls, the room had to be exchanged for another one, and they had to go to the housing management. People at the housing management sat with their coats on.
The cleaners swept the cobblestone pavements with brooms made of bundled twigs.
Dogs wandered the streets.
Large buildings were being built in the city.
Ksana didn’t understand anything. She had already placed her heavy sculpture machines in the long narrow room, between the plywood walls. The floor turned out to be freezing cold. This was probably why they had exchanged the apartment. The water pipes under the floor made noise. She had to buy thick shoes. Her feet became strange-looking.
She had a visitor in the evening. He slightly resembled Shorosh — a quiet man, who couldn’t have sold even one of his paintings. At first they talked about the new buildings in Moscow. They were bigger than the ones in Berlin. Huge spaces in the country had already been set in steel armature nets for concrete reinforcement.
The spaces had already been mapped and demarcated, caged in from the world as it were, but the concrete hadn’t been poured yet.
The guest talked for a while. It was clear that he wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He sat with his legs crossed, his checked socks were not pulled up. His shoes, unlike the shoes abroad, bore the marks of galoshes. He shook his “local” head and didn’t hurry at all.
Finally the man stood up. He went out into the foyer. The foyer was cut off by plywood walls. It turned into a hallway that resembled a quiet street. The floor in the hallway reminded one of the asphalt in Berlin. There were cartons on the coat rack and a huge trunk pushed underneath it.
The man stretched out a hand toward his coat, then said:
“You know, I forgot to tell you something.”
He went back into the room. He was silent for a moment. The pipes were singing under the floor.
“The room, which you exchanged for this one, has been sealed off.”
“You’re left without a room?” asked Ksana.
She looked at her sculpture machines. She just couldn’t leave this place.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked.
She remembered a scene from a film. It seemed as if it should have been raining outside.
I even almost wrote that it was raining outside and the steel windowsill was lightly trembling.
They drank tea. He had nowhere else to go and he wasn’t in a hurry.
Ksana kept going out of the room into the hallway. She would go into the dark, savage bathroom where the baby carriages, trunks, and mannequins lived. She soaked the heavy clay rags in the water; the pipes became lively with water. It was deafening in the room.
“What is he supposed to do?” she thought.
The heavy rags were tightly embracing the sculpture. The woman with heavy molding and gentle hands, the woman, who was not needed here, disappeared behind the canvas.
The guest stood up and prepared to leave. The foyer door opened once again. The room with long walls filled with darkness pouring in from the street. The mattress was still propped up against the wall without a frame. It stood there like that since yesterday. He stood there for about a minute. He won’t live through this minute. He’ll never move into that building, the walls of which have already been marked with armature nets.
It was dark in the stairwell. The dogs slept in different apartments. They were all different and walked in the streets at different hours. And on the whole, nothing was clear.
The coat was still hanging in the foyer and all those who passed through the main hallway noticed it in the morning.
The man had stayed.
IV
Life is simple. And things are simple when one takes them without resisting.
Shorosh hung in the Tiergarten, not as a man, but as a painting.
The woman was beautiful. She lived in the attic room and didn’t drink wine and didn’t know that to live with her one only had to stay.
She finally looked closely at her husband. He had a mustache. Gray eyes. A slightly shorter upper lip.
And he was quite unusual, on the whole.
RUDIN
I
Do you remember Pisarev from “A Russian Man at a Rendezvous”?3
Remember Rudin in a gondola, stroking, I think, the hair of a Venetian girl under the stars and probably talking about the waves?
Beautiful
