I DIED. I have searched long and hard for the right words to describe what happened, and, convinced that none of the usual, familiar terms will do, have finally settled on one associated with what seems the least imprecise of realms: death. I died in the month of June, at night, during one of my first years abroad. This, however, was far less remarkable than my being the only person to know of this death, the only one to have witnessed it. I saw myself in the mountains; with that absurd invariable sense of urgency characteristic of events in which personal considerations for some reason cease to play any part, I found myself having to scale a high cliff with a sheer drop. Here and there little thorn-bushes somehow managed to cut through the brownish-grey rock surface; in places there were even dead tree trunks and roots creeping along rugged perpendicular clefts. Below, where I had begun my ascent, there was a low stone ledge skirting around the cliff, and lower still, in the dark abyss, was the distant muffled rumble of a mountain river. At length I climbed up, carefully groping for cavities in the stone and clinging now to a bush, now to the root of a tree, now to a jagged rock jutting out of the cliff face. I was slowly nearing a small shelf that had been obscured from below, but from which I somehow knew a narrow path led away; I couldn’t shake off the oppressive and incomprehensible—like everything else that was going on—presentiment that I was destined nevermore to see it or to follow those narrow bends as it spiralled up unevenly, strewn with pine needles. Later, I remembered that I had sensed someone waiting for me up there, someone’s keen, impatient desire to see me. I had at last almost reached the top; with my right hand I grabbed onto a pronounced stone ledge and in another few seconds I might have managed to pull myself up, when suddenly the solid granite crumbled beneath my fingers and I began to fall headlong, my body hitting the cliff face as the latter seemed to be soaring upwards before my eyes. Then came a sharp, almighty jolt that winded me and made the muscles in my arms ache—I was suspended in mid-air, my numb fingers clinging convulsively to the dried-out branch of a dead tree that had once nestled in a horizontal crevice in the rock. Below me was a void. I dangled there, my wide eyes transfixed by the patch of granite in my field of vision, as I sensed the branch steadily yielding beneath my weight. A small transparent lizard flashed for an instant a little above my fingers, and I distinctly saw its head, its flanks rising and falling rapidly, and its deathly gaze, cold and unmoving—a reptile’s gaze. Then in one agile, elusive movement it darted upwards, vanishing. Shortly thereafter I heard the intense buzzing of a bumblebee, rising and falling in pitch, although not without a certain insistent melodiousness in some way resembling a vague acoustic memory, which I expected to crystallize at any moment. But the branch gave more and more under my fingers, and the terror penetrated deeper and deeper inside me. Least of all did this terror lend itself to description; what prevailed was an understanding that these were the final moments of my life, that no power on earth could save me, that I was alone, utterly alone, and that beneath me in those abysmal depths, which I could sense with every sinew of my body, death awaited me, and I was powerless against it. Never before had it occurred to me that these feelings—loneliness and terror—could be experienced not only mentally, but literally with every fibre of one’s being. And although I was still alive and there was not a single scratch on my body, I was, at a phenomenal speed which nothing could halt or even slow, undergoing such mental agony, such chilling languor and insurmountable anguish. Only at the very last second, or even fraction of a second, did I feel something like sweet sacrilegious exhaustion, curiously inseparable from the languor and anguish. It seemed to me that if I were to combine into a single entity every sensation I had experienced over the course of my life, the collective power of these would still pale in comparison with what I had experienced in these past few minutes. But this was my final thought: there was a snap, the branch broke, and around me the rocks, bushes and ledges began spinning with such unbearable speed, until finally, after an eternity, amid the humid air there came the heavy crunch of my plummeting body hitting the rocks on the riverbank. A moment later I watched helplessly as the image of the sheer cliff and the mountain river disappeared before my eyes; then it was gone, and nothing remained.

Such was my recollection of death, after which I mysteriously continued to survive, if I am to assume that I did in fact remain myself. Prior to this, as with the majority of people, I had often dreamt that I was falling, but each time I had awoken during the fall. Yet as I made this arduous ascent to the top of the cliff, and when I met the cold gaze of the lizard, and when the branch broke beneath my fingers, I was aware that I was not asleep. I have to say that throughout this vivid and frankly banal incident, devoid as it was entirely of any romantic or chimeric nuances, there were two people present—a witness and a victim. This duality, however, was barely noticeable, at times imperceptible. And so, having returned from oblivion, I once again found myself in the world where until now I had led such a notional existence; it was not that the world around me had changed all of a sudden, but rather that I couldn’t tell, amid the disorderly and random chaos of memories, unfounded concerns, contradictory emotions, sensations, odours and sights, what it was that demarcated my own existence, what belonged to me and what to others, and what was the illusive significance of that unstable compound of various elements, the absurd amalgam of which was theoretically supposed to constitute my being, imparting to me my name, nationality, date and place of birth, my personal history, which is to say that long sequence of failures, accidents and transformations. I felt as though I were slowly re-emerging, in the very place where I was never supposed to return—having forgotten everything that had taken place before now. But this wasn’t amnesia in the literal sense of the word: I had just forgotten irrevocably what one was supposed to consider important, and what insignificant.

I could now sense the strange illusoriness of my own life everywhere—an illusoriness that was many-layered and inescapable, irrespective of whether it had to do with projects, plans or the immediate material conditions of life, all of which had the ability to change entirely over the course of a few days or a few hours. In any case, I had been acquainted with this state for some time; it was one of the things I hadn’t forgotten. For me, the world consisted of objects and sensations that I recognized—as if I had experienced them long ago and only now were they coming back to me, like a dream lost in time. This had even been the case when I encountered them probably for the very first time in my life. It seemed as if, amid an enormous, chaotic combination of vastly disparate things, I had blindly sought the path I had trod before, without knowing how or where. Perhaps this is why the majority of events left me entirely indifferent and only a rare few moments containing—or seeming to contain—some sort of coincidence arrested my attention with incredible force. It would be difficult for me to pinpoint how exactly these moments differed from others—some inexplicable nuance, some random detail that was plain for me to see. They almost never influenced my own fate or personal interests directly; they were visions that usually appeared out of the blue. There had been years when my life somehow clearly didn’t belong to me, and I took only an external, insignificant role in its events: I was entirely indifferent to what went on around me, despite there having been tempestuous scenes, sometimes involving mortal danger. But I understood this danger only theoretically, and I could never fully appreciate its true meaning, which would probably have struck terror in my soul and compelled me to live other than I did. It often seemed to me—when I was alone and there was no one to prevent me from immersing myself in this endless series of vague sensations, visions and thoughts—that I lacked the strength for one last push, in order to discover myself and suddenly to comprehend at long last the hidden meaning of my destiny, which had until now been going through my memory like some haphazard relay of random occurrences. But I never managed to do this, nor did I even manage to comprehend why one thing or another, on the face of it bearing no relation to me whatsoever, would suddenly take on such a significance that was as incomprehensible as it was plainly apparent.

Now began a new phase in my life. A whole series of oddly powerful sensations, many of which I had never before experienced, passed through my very being: an unbearable thirst and the heat of the desert, the icy waves of a northern sea that surrounded me and in which I would spend hours swimming towards a far-distant rocky shore, the burning touch of a swarthy female body that I had never known. Often I endured torturous physical pain symptomatic of incurable diseases whose descriptions I would later find in medical textbooks—diseases from which I never suffered. I had gone blind more than once, I had been left crippled many times over, and one of the rare physical pleasures known to me was that of regaining consciousness and realizing that I was in the fullest of health and that due to some incomprehensible convergence of events I was now beyond these excruciating states of sickness or injury.

Of course, it was far from always the case that I had to endure such things. What had now become utterly immutable was a peculiarity owing to which I felt almost like a stranger to myself. Whenever I happened to be alone, I would be engulfed instantly by the troubled movements of a vast, imaginary world; it would hurtle me along uncontrollably and I would scarcely be able to keep pace with it. There was visual and auditory chaos, comprised of an array of disparate elements; sometimes it would be the music of a distant march, ensconced on all sides by high stone walls; sometimes it was the silent motion of an endless green landscape, broken only by the rolling hills and their strange undulation; sometimes it was the outlying environs of a Dutch town with stone troughs of uncertain origin, where the water trickled with a steady murmur—to intensify this obvious infringement of Dutch realism, women would go to them, one after another, carrying jugs on their heads. Nowhere was there any logical pattern in this, and the shifting chaos clearly failed to present even a remote semblance of any harmonious order. And so, accordingly, at that point in my life, which was marked by the constant attendance of chaos, my inner existence acquired an equally false and wavering character. I could never be certain how long any one feeling would last, I never knew what would come to replace it the very next day or in a week’s time. And just as I had been amazed to learn upon reading my first books, after having mastered the alphabet, that the people there managed to speak in full sentences, using classical constructions of subject and predicate with a full stop at the end—although it seemed to me that no one ever did this in reality—so too it now appeared almost inconceivable to me that one person or another could be an accountant or a minister, a labourer or a bishop, and remain firmly convinced that his work was more important and enduring than anything else, as if a bishop’s cassock or a labourer’s jacket mysteriously but exactly corresponded to the personal calling and vocation of the man who wore it. I knew, of course, that within a given timeframe and under normal circumstances a labourer would never become a bishop, just as a bishop would not turn into a labourer, and often this state of affairs would last until death set them equal with grim indifference. Yet I also sensed that the world in which the former was fated to be this, and the latter that, could suddenly turn out to be notional and illusory, and that everything could alter beyond recognition. In other words, the arena in which my life unfolded was for me devoid of any clearly defined and in any way concrete features; there was nothing constant about it—the objects and ideas that comprised it could change in form and content, like the impossible metamorphoses of a never-ending dream. And each morning, upon waking, I would gaze with troubled wonderment at the wallpaper patterns in my hotel room, which always seemed different from the night before, because so many changes had occurred between yesterday and today, and I knew instinctively that I too might have changed, swept up by that imperceptible and irresistible motion. I seemed to be living in an almost abstract world, never quite managing to uncover the logic behind certain objects and concepts that had seemed so crucial and definitive to a number of my former teachers, a sort of fundamental law of all evolution and human existence.

It was in these distant and neurotic times that I met a man who seemed to have been summoned out of inexistence with the sole purpose of appearing before me at this precise stage in my life. Strictly speaking, he was not a man, but the unrecognizable, distorted spectre of someone who had once been alive. That man was no more, he had vanished, but not without trace, as there yet remained what I saw when the figure first approached me and said:

“Excusez-moi de vous déranger. Vous ne pourriez pas m’avancer un peu d’argent?” *

His face was dark and covered in thick grey-and-ginger stubble, his eyes were swollen and his eyelids sagged; he wore a frayed black hat, a long jacket that looked like a short overcoat, or a short overcoat that looked like a very long jacket, dark grey in colour, black-and-whitish boots that were split all along the seams, and light-brown trousers covered in myriad specks of dirt. His eyes, however, looked ahead calmly and lucidly. But it was his voice that particularly struck me, being quite out of keeping with his appearance—a flat, deep voice, with an astonishing hint of confidence. It was impossible not to detect the echo of some other world, and not the one to which this man so evidently belonged. No vagrant or beggar should have, or has indeed ever had, the ability or the right to speak in such a voice. And if I had required irrefutable evidence that this man was himself the living spectre of another, someone who had vanished, then these intonations and this acoustic revelation would have proved more convincing than any biographical testimony. It immediately made me pay much more attention to him than I would have done to a common tramp asking me for alms money. The second factor that piqued my interest was his unnaturally correct French.

The encounter took place towards the end of April, in the Jardin du Luxembourg; I was sitting on a bench, reading notes on Karamzin’s travels. He fleetingly glanced at the book and launched into Russian—a very pure and correct Russian that preserved, incidentally, a few archaic turns of phrase: “I should consider it my duty”, “if you would deign to take into account”. Within a very short space of time he had divulged to me a number of details about himself that seemed no less fantastic than did his appearance; among these figured the misty buildings of the Imperial University in St Petersburg, where at one point he had studied, the Faculty of History, and some vague, cagy allusions to vast wealth, which he either had lost, or else was due to receive.

I extracted a ten-franc note and handed it to him. He bowed, maintaining an air of dignity that was perfectly out of place, and lifted his hat with a sort of undulating gesture, the likes of which I had never before seen. Then he walked off unhurriedly, carefully alternating his feet cased in their torn boots. Even in his back, however, there was none of that timid restraint or physical indignity symptomatic of people of his sort. Slowly he receded farther and farther into the distance; the April sun was already setting, and my imagination, running a few minutes ahead of itself like a bad watch, had already projected along the railings of the Jardin du Luxembourg the twilight that was to come a little later, but was absent at the time. And so this image of a beggar remained fixed in my memory, shrouded in the dusk that was yet to set in; the figure moved off and dissolved amid the milky softness of the outgoing day, and in this state, neurotic and illusory, it prompted several images in my mind. I later recalled that I had seen such light—light in which the last, just-departed ray of sun seems to have left a subtle though unmistakeable trace of its unhurried dissolution in the air—in a number of paintings, in particular one of Correggio’s, although I was unable to remember which.

Yet for me these efforts of memory were transforming imperceptibly into something else, something no less customary, but recently more intense: an endless sequence of haunting visions. I would see a woman in a black dress buttoned up to the neck trudging along a narrow street in a mediaeval town, a thickset man wearing spectacles and European clothes, lost and unhappy, searching for something he could not find, a tall, elderly man walking down a winding, dusty road, and a woman’s wide, terror-stricken eyes set in a pale face that was somehow very familiar to me. Simultaneously I would experience strange, distressing sensations that mingled with my own feelings on some event or other in my life. And I noticed that some states of mind triggered by very definite factors would persist long after their causes had disappeared, and so I would ask myself what actually came first—the cause or the state of mind; and if the latter, then did it not in certain circumstances predetermine something irrevocable and substantial, something belonging to the material world? Besides, I was faced with yet another persistent question: what was it that connected me to these imaginary people whom I had never wittingly invented and who would appear to me so unexpectedly—like the one who had fallen from the cliff, in whose body I had died not so long ago, like that woman in black, like those others undoubtedly lurking ahead, eagerly waiting to embody me for a few brief, illusory moments. Each of them had been unlike the one that followed, and it was impossible to confuse them with one another. What tied me to them? The laws of heredity, whose lines criss-crossed in such fantastical arabesques all around me, someone’s forgotten memories that were for some unknown reason being dredged up within me, or was it that I was part of some vast human collective and the impenetrable membrane that separated me from other people and contained my individuality had suddenly lost its impermeability, allowing something foreign to rush in, like waves crashing into the crevice of a cliff ? I was unable to tell anyone about this, knowing that it would be taken for delirium or some peculiar form of madness. But it was neither of these. I was perfectly healthy, every muscle in my body responded with an automatic precision, I found none of my university courses in any way difficult, and my logical and analytical faculties were fine. I had never experienced fainting fits and I knew almost no physical fatigue: I was built, as it were, for the real world. Yet there was another—illusory—world that pursued me everywhere, hounding me. And nearly every day, sometimes in my room, sometimes in the street, in the woods or in the garden, I would cease to exist—I as such-and-such a person, born in such-and-such a place, in such-and-such a year, having completed my secondary education only a few years ago and attending lectures at such-and-such a university—and with peremptory inevitability, someone else would take my place. This metamorphosis would usually be preceded by torturous physical sensations, sometimes taking over the entire surface of my body.

I remember waking up one night and distinctly feeling my long, greasy, rank hair against my face, the slackness of my jowls, and the curiously familiar sensation of my tongue touching the gaps in my mouth where I was missing teeth. Seconds later, however, the awareness that I was merely a spectator in all this, as well as the heavy odour I had detected from the outset, would vanish. Then slowly, like a man gradually beginning to distinguish objects in the half-light—which, incidentally, was typical at the start of almost all these visions—I would discover this next distressing incarnation, the victim to which I had now fallen. I saw myself as an old woman with a tired, haggard body, deathly pale in colour. Through a small window overlooking a dark, narrow courtyard the oppressive stench of a deprived neighbourhood blew into the room in sultry summer waves; amid the suffocating heat this decrepit body, by whose sides drooped long, fleshy breasts and whose stomach with its roll of fat concealed the origin of two equally chubby legs that ended in black ragged toenails, lay on a grey-and-white bed sheet that was damp with sweat. Sound asleep next to it, head thrown back, mouth agape and white teeth bared, like a dog, was an Arab boy with tight thick curls of black hair, whose back and shoulders were covered in pimples.

The image of this old woman did not, however, occupy my mind for long. She gradually faded into the semi-darkness, and once again I found myself on my narrow bed, in my room with its high window overlooking a quiet street in the Latin Quarter. In the morning, when I awoke and opened my eyes again, I saw—this time entirely as a spectator to the event—that the Arab boy was gone, and on the bed remained only the corpse of the old woman, the sheets stained with dried blood from a terrible wound at her neck. I never saw her again: she disappeared for ever. But this was undoubtedly the most repulsive sensation I had ever experienced in my life—this body, fat and sagging, in such a cruel state of muscular incapacity.

Since the day that I first met the Russian beggar in the Jardin du Luxembourg, so clearly and indelibly etched in my memory—the black frayed hat, the stubble on his face, the tattered boots and that amazing garment, be it an overcoat or something resembling a jacket—nearly two years had passed. For me these had been long, almost endless years, filled with swarms of silent, delirious visions that blended corridors leading God knows where, narrow chasm-like vertical shafts, exotic trees on the far-distant shores of a southern sea, black rivers that flowed into dreams, and an uninterrupted stream of various people, both men and women, the reason for whose appearance invariably eluded my comprehension, but who were inseparable from my own existence. Nearly every day I would feel this almost abstract psychological weariness, the result of some manifold, unrelenting madness that curiously affected neither my health nor my faculties—nor even did it prevent me from sitting the occasional exam or memorizing a host of university lectures. Sometimes this noiseless torrent would come to a sudden halt without any forewarning whatsoever; I was drifting through life then without a care in the world, breathing in the damp winter air of the Parisian streets and with carnivorous zeal devouring plates of meat in restaurants, tearing at the succulent morsels with my voracious teeth.

On one such day I was sitting at a table in a large café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. Behind me, an assured male voice, evidently concluding—judging by his final intonation—some period that I hadn’t heard, said:

“And believe me, I have enough experience in life to know.”

I turned around. There was something familiar about his voice. However, the man I saw was completely unknown to me. I quickly looked him over: he was wearing a fitted overcoat, a shirt with a starched collar, a deep-crimson tie, a navy-blue suit and a gold wristwatch. A pair of spectacles rested on his nose, and there was a book lying open in front of him. Next to him sat a blonde woman of around thirty, an artist whom I had met a few times at evenings hosted by some friends; she was puffing away on a cigarette and seemed to be listening to him distractedly. He then closed the book and took off his glasses—he was evidently far-sighted—and that was when I saw his eyes. To my utter disbelief, I recognized the man to whom I had given the ten francs in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I could never have identified him solely on the basis of his eyes and his voice, though, for the man sitting here in the café seemed to have nothing in common with the beggar who had approached me two years ago, asking for money. Never before had it occurred to me that clothes could so change a man. There was something unnatural and implausible about his metamorphosis. It was as if time had fantastically regressed. Two years ago this man had been a mere shadow; now he had miraculously transformed back into the man he had once been, whose disappearance ought to have been irreversible. I was unable to come to my senses for genuine astonishment.

The female artist got up to leave, waving to me both hello and goodbye simultaneously as she made her exit. Then I went up to the gentleman’s table and said:

“Forgive me, but I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you somewhere before.”

“Please, do sit down,” he replied with quiet courtesy. “It’s a credit to your memory. You’re the first of those who knew me in the old days to have recognized me. You say we’ve met? You’re quite correct. It was back when I was living in a slum, in Rue Simon le Franc.”

He made a vague hand gesture.

“I presume you would like to know what happened to me? Well then, let us begin with the fact that miracles simply do not happen.”

“Until a few moments ago I’d have agreed with you, but now I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Oh, you’d be wrong to doubt it,” he said. “There’s nothing more deceptive than appearances. One can make assertions on the basis of these only if one acknowledges their total arbitrariness beforehand. In five minutes’ time the causes of my metamorphosis will seem entirely natural to you.”

He leant his elbows on the table.

“I don’t recall whether I told you back then…”

And so he told me exactly what had happened to him, and truly there was nothing miraculous about it. In one of the Baltic states—he neglected to mention which—lived his elder brother, who, in the wake of the Revolution, had managed to retain a sizeable fortune. According to my acquaintance, he was a cruel and miserly man, who hated everyone who had, or might have had, cause to ask him for money. He never married and he had no heirs. Some time ago he had drowned while bathing in the sea, and so the inheritance passed on to his brother, whom a solicitor tracked down in Paris, living in Rue Simon le Franc. Once the formalities had been concluded, he came into possession of a fortune valued at many hundreds of thousands of francs. Then he took an apartment on Rue Molitor, living alone and passing the time, as he put it, between reading and pleasant idleness. He invited me to drop by one day between appointed hours; there was no need to call in advance. Thereupon we parted. I stayed on in the café, and again, just as I had done two years ago, I watched him leave. It was April, but the day was cold by comparison with the previous year. He walked along the wide passage between the little café tables and slowly vanished into the soft electric light in his new fitted overcoat and new hat; now the assuredness of his gait could seem in no way out of place to anyone, even to me, who had been so struck by it at our first meeting.

Alone, I lapsed into thought—contemplative at first and without aim; then, among the formless motion of images, features gradually drew into focus and I began to recall the events that had taken place two years ago. Now it was cold, but then it had been warm, and I had remained sitting on that bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I did now in the café, following the man’s departure. Back then, of course, I had been reading Karamzin: immediately forgetting the words on the page, my thoughts kept returning to the nineteenth century and its sharp disparity with the twentieth. I even pondered the differences in political regimes—thoughts that, generally speaking, very seldom captivated my attention—and it seemed to me that the nineteenth century had known none of the barbaric and violent forms of government that characterized the history of certain nations in the twentieth century. I recalled Durkheim’s theory of “social constraint”, contrainte sociale, and, deviating once again from the university’s course material, I proceeded to considerations of a more general and more contentious order. I mused on the idiocy of state-led violence and how it ought to have been much more apparent to contemporaries than to so-called “future historians”, who would fail to grasp the personal tragedy of this oppression, along with its palpable absurdity. I also thought how state ethics, taken to their logical paroxysm—as the culmination of some collective delirium—would inevitably lead to an almost criminal notion of authority, and that, in such periods of history, power truly belongs to ignorant crooks and fanatics, tyrants and madmen: sometimes they end their life on the gallows or at the guillotine, sometimes they die of natural causes, their coffin accompanied on its journey by the unspoken damnation of those whose misfortune and disgrace it was to be their subjects. I also thought of the Grand Inquisitor and the tragic fate of his author, and how personal, even illusory freedom can essentially prove to have a negative value, with a meaning and significance that frequently eludes us because it contains, in an extremely unstable equilibrium, the roots of opposition.

But now I was far from such thoughts; they seemed obscure and insignificant by comparison with the egotistical considerations of my own destiny, the illusory and uncertain nature of which had never ceased to captivate my attention, all the more so as today’s encounter had coincided with the demise of this happy phase of my life, the blessedness—I could find no other word for it—of which lay in the fact that during these past few weeks I had lived without dreaming and without thinking about anything.

The previous day I had been seized by a vague sense of anxiety, inexplicable as always and for that very reason particularly troubling. The next day the feeling intensified, and now it no longer left me. It began to seem to me as if some danger, intangible and unfathomable in equal measure, were lurking in the wings. Had I not been so used to the constant presence of this hallucinatory world that so doggedly pursued me, I might perhaps have been frightened that this was the onset of some persecution complex. Yet the singularity of my situation resided in the fact that, as opposed to people afflicted by genuine madness, those utterly convinced that some invisible, elusive figure truly was following them—someone with a multitude of agents at their disposal: a bus conductor, a laundress, a policeman, a strange gentleman in spectacles and a hat—I knew that my unease could be attributed wholly and exclusively to random flights of imagination. Living as I did, with almost no independent means at my disposal, unaffiliated with any political organization, partaking in no form of social activity and in no way distinguishing myself from the anonymous multimillion mass of the Parisian public, I knew there was no way I could be the object of anyone’s pursuit. There was not a single person in existence to whom my life could have presented any interest, no one who could have envied me. I understood perfectly that my vague anxiety was entirely pointless, that there were and could be no grounds for it. Yet as inconceivable as it was, still the feeling persisted, and the fact that it was clearly unfounded failed to extricate me from this situation. Meanwhile, in contrast to maniacs, whose attention is strained to breaking point, who never miss a single detail of what is happening around them as they resolutely seek out the presence of their pursuant adversary, I lived and moved as if surrounded by a thin veil of fog, one that deprived objects and people of their sharply defined contours.

I would fall asleep and awake with this feeling of vague unease and foreboding. Days went by like this, and the feeling persisted until the moment when, in the twilight of a Parisian evening, while wandering aimlessly through the streets in an unfamiliar part of the city, I cut down a narrow passageway between two buildings. By now it was almost completely dark. The alley turned out to be surprisingly long, and when I reached the end I found myself standing in front of a blind wall, with a left turn leading off at right angles. I carried on, presuming a way out to be round the corner, but it grew even darker. As I walked between the two walls, I could just make out that one of them had been built with niches at regular intervals. Their purpose was a mystery to me. I continued another few dozen metres in the gloomy darkness, above which was a starless sky; there was total silence, broken only by the sound of my own footsteps along the uneven paving. Suddenly, as I drew abreast of one of the niches I had spotted earlier, without a sound a man’s black shadow leapt out in front of me with extraordinary speed, and for a brief fraction of a second I experienced that mortal terror for which this unrelenting state of disquiet had prepared me over the course of many days. I then felt at my neck the vicelike fingers of the man who had so suddenly and unaccountably lunged at me. As strange as it may seem, from that moment on I ceased to feel any abstract unease or immediate terror. Then again, I had no time for it. Now amid the action there was something concrete and tangible; there was reality, not irresistible abstraction. Instinctively I tensed the muscles in my neck. Judging by the frantic clutch of fingers at my throat, it was obvious that they belonged to a strong adult male, who moreover had the element of surprise on his side. However, it was also clear to me that despite the apparent superiority of his position and the desperation of my own, the advantage ultimately lay with me. I comprehended this in the very first seconds; I was well trained in various types of sport, particularly combat, and I had no difficulty in determining that my assailant knew nothing of this and only hoped to rely on brute strength. He was probably expecting me to grab him by the hands and attempt to prise them from my neck—the natural and most often useless defence of the unprepared man. By now already choking, however, I groped in the dark for his two little fingers, and then simultaneously, using both my hands, I bent them back sharply, breaking their lower joints. He gasped and started to groan, and my breathing strangely eased after he let go of my throat. He was now silently writhing about in front of me in the darkness, and at any other time this would no doubt have roused some compassion in me. But I was in a state of sudden, furious rage—as if this unidentified man had been the cause of that lengthy unease that had tormented me all this time, as if he himself were the culprit. I pressed into one of his shoulders while at the same time pulling the other one towards me, and when, without his having the time to realize what was happening, he turned away from me, I seized his neck from behind using my right arm bent at almost ninety degrees. With the fingers of my left hand I grasped my right wrist and began to tighten my deadly grip on him, not letting up for an instant. In short, I did what he ought to have done when trying to strangle me—precisely what he had failed to do, thus signing his own death warrant. He twitched a few times, although I knew that his situation was hopeless. Then, once all trace of resistance had vanished, I let go and his corpse slumped heavily to my feet. It was so dark that I was unable to examine his face properly. I noted only that he had a little moustache and black curly hair.

I listened intently. Around me, as before, there was total silence, and as I took my first step the sound of it seemed alarmingly loud. Without looking back, I continued along the passageway. At last the indistinct light of what was probably a street lamp glinted in the distance, and I heaved a sigh of relief. However, just as I was about to leave this trap something struck me on the head with tremendous force, and I lost consciousness.

Through this blackout, I had the vague notion that I was being driven somewhere. Clearly I had been administered with some powerful narcotic, as my unconscious or semi-conscious state was unnaturally prolonged. When I finally opened my eyes, I found myself lying on a narrow stone bench in a small room with a high ceiling and three grey walls. There was no fourth wall: in its place shone a bright gaping hole. I had completely lost all concept of time. On the other side of a blind wooden door I could hear footsteps and voices shouting things that I was unable to make out. These voices soon receded into the distance. I looked around the cell and only then did I notice that I was not alone: to my right, on a second stone bench, was a figure clothed in rags, sitting with his legs crossed and leaning against the wall. His eyes were closed, but his lips moved silently. He then turned his head to me and slowly lifted his eyelids; I met his gaze—penetrating, empty and cold, so much so that I immediately felt out of sorts. I remembered everything after this exactly as it happened with the exception of one detail, which no effort of memory could ever return to me: I couldn’t remember in which language I had spoken, at first with him, and then with all the others. Some phrases seemed to have been uttered in Russian, others in French, others in English or German.

“Permit me to welcome you,” said the man in rags, whose dull, inexpressive voice immediately struck me. “I haven’t the pleasure of knowing your name.”

I introduced myself and asked whether he could explain where I was and what I was doing here.

“You’ve been remanded in custody.”

“Remanded in custody?” I repeated in astonishment. “But on what grounds?”

“The relevant charges will likely be brought against you in the near future—what they are precisely, I don’t know.”

An enormous bird with a bald neck slowly flew past the bright aperture in the wall, almost brushing it with its wing. Its appearance here, coupled with the replies of my interlocutor, seemed so improbable that I asked:

“What country is this?”

“You are in the territory of the Central State.”

For some reason I found this answer satisfactory; this was probably because of the effect of the narcotic not yet having completely worn off. With an effort, I got to my feet and took a few steps towards the opening—evidently in lieu of a window—and instinctively recoiled: it gave onto a courtyard, but the cell was unusually high up, probably on the thirtieth floor. Opposite the building, separated by a distance of forty or fifty metres, was a solid wall.

“Escape is impossible,” said my companion, who had been following my every move.

I nodded. Then I told him that I refused to recognize the reasons for my being held here, that I was guilty of no crime and all this was utterly absurd. Next I asked him why he had been arrested and what lay in store for him. Then for the first time he smiled and replied that in his case there had been a clear misunderstanding and that he would personally face no punishment.

“But what exactly happened to you?” he asked.

I related to him in great detail the little-convincing facts that had led me here so unexpectedly. He asked me a few more pieces of information about my life and, having heard me out, said that he was entirely satisfied by my account and would advocate my release. Such a statement ought to have seemed at least a little strange coming from a prisoner in rags. However, I took him at his word; my analytical faculties had not yet returned to me.

After a while the door to the cell opened, and two armed soldiers, one of whom barked out my surname, escorted me down a long corridor with pink walls and a multitude of turns. At each turn hung the same enormous portrait of some elderly, clean-shaven man, with a face that looked like a common workman’s, albeit with an unnaturally narrow forehead and minuscule eyes; he was wearing something between a jacket and a military tunic decked with medals, anchors and stars. The walls of the corridor were lined with several statues and busts of the same man. Finally we arrived—in complete silence—at a door, through which I was shoved into a room, where an elderly man in glasses was sitting at a large table. He was dressed in some peculiar semi-military, semi-civilian uniform, similar in style to the one depicted in the portraits and on the statues.

He began by extracting a massive revolver from a drawer and placing it beside a paperweight. Then, suddenly lifting his head and looking me straight in the eye, he said:

“Naturally you’ll be aware that only a full and frank confession can save you?”

After the long walk down the corridor—the soldiers had walked briskly and I had been obliged to keep pace with them—I felt as if the almost semi-unconscious state in which I had until now found myself had at last given way to something more normal. My body once again felt as it usually did, I could see what was before my eyes with perfect clarity, and now it became more apparent to me than ever that what had happened was obviously the result of some misunderstanding. At the same time, however, the prison setting and the prospect of an arbitrary interrogation rather vexed me. I looked at the seated figure in glasses and asked:

“Forgive me, but who are you?”

“There’ll be no questions here!” he answered sharply.

“There appears to be some confusion,” I said. “I seem to recall hearing a distinctly interrogatory tone in your voice when you just addressed me.”

“Try to understand that we’re dealing with your life here,” he said. “It’s too late now for dialectics. Though perhaps it would be beneficial to remind you that you stand accused of high treason.”

“High treason, no less?”

“No less indeed. You must have no illusions about it: it is a terrible charge. I repeat that only a full and frank confession can save you now.”

“In what respect am I alleged to have committed high treason?”

“You have the impertinence to ask? Very well, I’ll tell you. There is high treason in the very fact that you allow for the unlawful principle of there being any legitimacy in pseudo-governmental ideas that contradict the Great Theory of the Central State which has been devised by the foremost geniuses of mankind.”

“What you’re saying is so absurd and naive that I’m at a loss to respond. I would like only to point out that the possible admission of one principle or another is a theoretical stance, not a fact on the basis of which it’s possible to prosecute a man.”

“Even here, at a tribunal of the Central Government, you speak in a language whose every word echoes your crime. In the first instance, a representative of the state, particularly an investigator, is, as far as you’re concerned, infallible, and no word of his may be termed either ‘absurd’ or ‘naive’. But that’s not all. Now, after what you’ve just said, there’s another point that further compounds your guilt: causing insult to a representative of the Central Government. You stand accused of high treason, of conspiracy to assassinate the head of state and, finally, of the death of Citizen Ertel, one of our finest representatives beyond these borders.”

“Who is this Ertel?”

“The man you killed. Don’t try to deny it: nothing escapes the knowledge of the Central Government. A full confession is your only option; it is what the state and the people expect of you.”

“The only response I’m able to give concerns Ertel. That man was a hired assassin. I was in a position of lawful self-defence. Evidently until now Ertel never had to deal with people in the habit of defending their own life, and this blunder wrought his downfall. As far as the remaining accusations are concerned, they’re sheer nonsense, which speaks volumes for the intellectual capacity of the people who contrived them.”

“You’ll sorely repent of those words.”

“May I point out that the verb ‘to repent’ is inherently religious in its connotations? It seems strange to hear it on the lips of a representative of the Central Government.”

“What will you say when confronted with your accomplices?”

I shrugged.

“Enough!” he said, firing the revolver: the bullet hit the wall about a metre and a half above my head. The door opened, and the soldiers who had brought me here entered the room.

“Take the accused to his cell,” said the investigator.

As I was returning to my cell, glancing from time to time at the portraits and statues, only then did it occur to me that I had acted wrongly, that I should never have answered the investigator as I had done. I simply had to prove to him that there was no way I could be the man for whom he had mistaken me. Rather than adopt this tactic, however, I had spoken to him as though I admitted the absurd legitimacy of his argument, and in disagreeing with it, as it were, dialectically, I was playing straight into his hands. Besides, it was obvious that I was a complete stranger to this world in which I now found myself. The faces of the soldiers who escorted me had displayed a complete absence of thought or emotion. These portraits looked like oleographs produced by a workman whose lack of artistry unwittingly provoked both pity and scorn; likewise the statues. The investigator’s words bore the mark of an equally grim intellectual poverty and, in the world I came from, any such man would have had no place in the machinery of justice.

Back in my cell, I was just about to tell my companion about the interrogation, when immediately I was led off again, this time in a different direction; I landed in front of a second investigator, who addressed me rather differently than the first had done.

“We are aware,” he began, “that we are dealing with a relatively cultured man, and not just some mercenary from a hostile political organization. You must surely know that we are surrounded by enemies; this forces us to increase our vigilance and sometimes compels us to adopt measures that, although they may appear rather drastic, are not always avoidable. Such has been the case with you. We know, or at least we hope to establish, that your guilt is less severe than it may initially have seemed. Be candid with us; it is in your, and our, best interests.”

Judging by the way he spoke, it was obvious that this man was much more dangerous than the first investigator. But I was almost glad of it; it was possible to talk to him in a different language.

“I can understand your frustration during the earlier interrogation,” he continued. “There was a mistake, a most regrettable one: the investigator you spoke with usually handles only the simplest of cases, although he invariably strives towards matters clearly exceeding his competency. You see, he owes his position to party membership; one cannot make too many demands of him. Let us, however, get down to business. Are you aware of the charges brought against you?”

“I would like to know,” I said, “who it is that I’ve been mistaken for. It’s obvious to me that what has happened here is the result of some misunderstanding, which I would very much like to clear up. My surname is”—I gave him my surname—“I live in Paris and I am a student of history at the university there. I have never—as is easy to ascertain through even the most superficial of investigations—engaged in any political activity, nor have I ever belonged to any political organization. The accusations concerning terrorist intentions are so absurd and illogical that I see no point in discussing them further. I admit that the man you take me for may be both a terrorist and your political adversary, but that has nothing to do with me. I only hope that your state apparatus is sufficiently organized to establish this.”

“Are you alleging that Rosenblatt was mistaken? If so, your case will take a decidedly tragic turn.”

“Who is this Rosenblatt? This is the first time I’ve heard the name, I’ve never seen the man.”

“I must say, you did everything you could so that no one would ever see him again: you strangled him.”

“Forgive me, but half an hour ago I was told that his surname was Ertel.”

“That was a mistake.”

“What, another mistake?”

“Personally speaking, I never much rated Rosenblatt,” continued the investigator. “When you called him a hired assassin, you weren’t far from the truth. The pity is that he was the only man who could have saved you. You’ve robbed him of the opportunity to do so. We have in our possession his secret report on you and your activities. The intelligence it contains is much too detailed and accurate to be a fabrication. And in any case, the man was utterly bereft of imagination.”

“It’s entirely possible that the intelligence contained in his report is accurate. But the single most important factor in all this is that it concerns someone else, and not me.”

“Yes, but how are we to prove this?”

“For a start, this man cannot be my twin. Moreover, I presume he would have a different surname. Then, of course, there are other distinguishing features: age, height, hair colour, and so forth.”

“Rosenblatt’s report, although comprehensive in all other respects, unfortunately contains none of these indicators. And anyway, why should I believe you and not him?”

“You may not believe me. But there would be nothing easier than to make enquiries in Paris.”

“We avoid, insofar as possible, all contact with foreign police.”

It began to dawn on me that my situation was hopeless. The judicial machinery of the Central State displayed absolute rigidity and a lack of any interest in the accused; its function was solely punitive. The primitivism characteristic of all justice had been reduced to an absurdity. There was one single formula: anyone brought before the court stood accused of crimes against the state and was liable to be punished. The innocence of the accused was admissible theoretically, although it was bound to be disregarded. Obviously a hint of desperation glinted in my eyes, for the investigator said:

“I’m afraid you will find it objectively impossible to prove any error on our part. This leaves you with a choice: either to persist in this fruitless denial and thus knowingly to consign yourself to death, or else to sign a confession and make peace with the fact that you will spend a short period of time in prison, after which freedom awaits you.”

“Do you hold the accused to be innocent until proven guilty?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I cannot sign a confession for an act I haven’t committed: doing so would result in my consciously perverting the course of justice in the Central State.”

“Ideologically speaking, you’re correct. But that isn’t the point. You are obliged to act within the limitations of the options available to you. Unfortunately these are rather narrow, I’ll grant you that. Let us enumerate them once again. On the one hand, a complete denial of guilt and the prospect of capital punishment. On the other, a confession and temporary deprivation of liberty. The rest is all theory. I advise you to think about this. I’ll call for you again in the near future.”

Back in my cell, I recounted the details of my first and second interrogations to my companion. He listened to me, sitting in that same pose with his eyes closed. When I finished, he said:

“That was easily foreseeable.”

Again I looked upon his rags and his unshaven face and recalled that this man had promised my release.

“Do you think there’s anything to be done about it?”

“You see,” he began, disregarding my question, “I know these laws better than any investigator. They aren’t actually laws, they’re more the spirit of the system, not a statutory code of any sort.”

He spoke as if he were giving a lecture.

“The absence of elementary legal norms is exacerbated by the fact that the ordinary workers of the judiciary are outstanding for a prodigious lack of culture and confuse their functions with those of some judicial executioner. You can crush their arguments and prove to them that twice two is four, that they are wrong and that the prosecution’s case is based on naive folly, which is the case more often than not. But this simply doesn’t register with them. They will still sentence you and adopt punitive measures—not because you’re guilty and it has been proven, but because this is how they understand the task of the Central Judiciary. Objection is unfavourable and punishable in principle. To argue with the law is a crime against the state, as is to doubt its inerrancy. There are a dozen formulas, each of which expresses a particular type of ignorance; all the miscellaneous activities of millions of people can be condensed into these dozen formulas. To fight this system, which is difficult to define in a few words…”

“I would say: grim idiocy.”

“Splendid. So, to fight this grim idiocy by rational means is impossible. One has to employ other strategies; which did you adopt when Ertel-Rosenblatt tried to strangle you?”

“Those that my sports instructors had taught me.”

“Very well. Had you acted otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have been long for this world.”

“Quite possibly,” I said, recalling the darkness, the fingers clutched at my neck, and how I had begun to choke.

“In this instance, knowing that neither your innocence nor your ability to prove it will achieve anything, you’ve got to change tack. I’ve discovered a way out; it’s cost me dearly, but I have nothing left to fear now. My method is infallible, and that’s why I assured you that you’d be freed. I repeat this promise to you now.”

“I’m sorry, but if you have such a powerful weapon against this, then how is it that you’ve come to be in the same position as I am?”

“I already told you there’s been a misunderstanding,” he replied with a shrug. “They arrested me during the night, as I slept.”

“What exactly is this weapon?”

He said nothing for a long time, although his lips moved silently, as they had done when I first saw him. Then, without raising his head, he said:

“I’m a hypnotist. It is I who dictates the findings to the investigator.”

“And if he resists hypnosis?”

“I’ve yet to encounter such a case. But even if he were to resist this type of hypnosis, he would surely succumb to another.”

“In other words…”

“In other words, I’d force him to end his life by committing suicide, and the matter would be reassigned to someone else who would be susceptible.”

“One more thing,” I said, astonished by his confidence. “I’ll soon be summoned by the investigator, but you won’t be present for the interrogation. Are you able to bend him to your will from a distance?”

“That would be significantly more difficult. But you and I shall be summoned almost simultaneously.”

“How do you know that?”

“While you were being questioned by the first investigator, I was being questioned by the second.”

Then this calm man sank into total silence, which he did not break during the course of those three days that passed as I awaited the next interrogation, at which—if I were to believe him—such incredible things were to occur. We were given food twice daily; at first I was unable to eat it, as it was so disgusting. Only on the third day did I manage to swallow a few spoonfuls of some clear-grey liquid and a crust of poorly baked bread that was revoltingly chewy. I felt weak, but my mind was alert. During all this time my cellmate did not touch his food. Mostly he remained absolutely still, and it was impossible to fathom how his muscles and joints could withstand such prolonged strain. Lying on my stone bed, I pondered how fantastical reality could be, and how there was a palpable sense of sheer inescapability in all my surroundings: the geometric composition of the walls and ceiling, opening onto a thirty-storey precipice where the sun and rain alternated, and the constant presence of this strange, ragged vagrant. Once, to break this stony silence, I started whistling an aria from Carmen, but the notes sounded so flat, so wild and so misplaced that I immediately stopped. I had time enough to contemplate many times over in minute detail what had happened to me and to establish that despite there being an undoubted logic to it, the combination of factors could but seem entirely irrational. Least of all did I think of the danger hanging over me, and in spite of the outward implausibility of what my companion had promised, I believed his every word.

Finally, on the evening of the third day, they came for me. I got up and for the first time in all this while felt a strange chill inside me, perhaps the remote fear of death, perhaps a deep-seated dread of the unknown. In any case, I knew that I was now powerless to defend myself. I thought how this made everything simpler and how I had faced less danger in that dark Parisian alley with the hands of an unknown assassin at my throat. Previously I had depended on myself for survival, on some primitive mental alertness and my natural agility. Now I was defenceless.

I was led into the investigator’s office. He indicated a seat and offered me a cigarette. Then he asked:

“Have you thought about what I said to you during our last meeting?”

I nodded. The chill within me was for some reason preventing me from speaking.

“Will you sign your confession?”

I had to make an exceptional effort to reply to the investigator’s question in the negative. I knew, however, that only the word “no” could possibly save me. I felt as if I lacked the strength to utter the word, and in that moment it dawned on me why people admit to crimes they have not committed. Every muscle in my body was tensed, the blood rushed to my face, and I felt as if I were bearing up an enormous weight. At last I replied:

“No.”

Everything came crashing down before me, and I thought I was on the verge of losing consciousness. Yet I distinctly heard the investigator’s voice:

“We’ve been able to ascertain that your testimony, while on first appearance most convincing—which will aggravate your guilt—was false. Your right-hand man in the organization you headed has betrayed you and signed a full confession.”

I felt an immediate sense of relief. However, I had the impression that my voice lacked conviction.

“Neither the man, nor the organization you mention has ever existed. Your methods of prosecution are absurd.”

At that moment the door opened and some soldiers brought my cellmate in. Then they withdrew. I quickly glanced at him; he instantly seemed to grow taller.

“Do you recognize this man?” asked the investigator.

“I do.”

He obviously wanted to add something, but refrained from doing so. Silence ensued. The investigator got up from his chair and took a few steps about the room. Then he went over to the window and opened it. Next he returned, zigzagging, to his chair, but decided not to sit down, instead remaining standing in an unnatural and uncomfortable pose, half bent over. I sensed that something strange and troubling was happening to him.

“Are you feeling ill?” I asked.

He did not answer. The man in rags was staring at him intently, standing there without moving or saying a word.

The investigator again went over to the window and half leant out of it. Then, finally, he sat down at his desk again and began writing. Several times he tore up the sheets of paper and threw them into the waste-paper basket. This went on for some time. Beads of sweat formed on his face; his hands started shaking. Then he stood up and said in a strangled voice:

“Yes. I see that you’ve been the victim of some terrible mistake. In accordance with your request, I promise to undertake a thorough investigation of the matter and punish the guilty parties. On behalf of the Central Government, please accept my apologies. You are free to go.”

He rang a bell. An officer in a blue tunic entered, and the investigator issued him with a pass. We left the room and delved once again into the endless passageways and corridors, whose walls were covered in those same paintings, lending the impression that we were walking past some military line-up of semi-officers, semi-civilians, great in number and all identical. Finally we reached an enormous gate, which silently swung open before us. Then I turned my head to speak to my companion and I nearly stopped dead in my tracks with amazement. Beside me was a tall, clean-shaven man in a handsome European suit; on his face he wore a sardonic smile. While the gates closed just as silently behind us, and before I could say a word, he waved goodbye to me, turned right and disappeared.

Try as I might to look for him, I was unable to find him. It was a sultry summer evening, the street lamps were lit, passing motor cars were sounding their horns, and the traffic lights were flashing green and red at the crossings. Savouring the joys of liberty, I fell to thinking about what I might do in this foreign city where I knew no one and had no place of refuge. But I continued walking. The traffic began to quieten down. I crossed a narrow river on a bridge flanked by impressive statues of water nymphs; then I cut across some boulevard and started walking up a street leading off at a slight angle. By now it was perfectly quiet. I continued on for around two or three hundred metres. At a turning leading onto a road lined with single-and double-storey villas a dim street lamp illuminated the metallic blue of a sign fixed to the wall. I went up to it and with astonishing slowness made out, as though emerging from deep slumber, blurred at first, then gradually taking shape and becoming clearer and clearer, white letters in the Latin alphabet looming before my eyes. Instantly they became blurred again and vanished, but a second later they reappeared. I extracted a cigarette and lit it, burning my fingers on the match—and only then did I comprehend the happy pattern of these symbols. On a navy-blue plaque, in white lettering, was written the words: 16^e ARR-T, RUE MOLITOR.

I had long grown used to these attacks of mental illness. Within what remained of my consciousness, in this small, troubled space that at times almost ceased to exist, but which nevertheless constituted my last hope of returning to the real world and not one darkened by chronic madness, I tried stoically to endure these departures and excursions. Yet every time I returned I found myself in the grip of despair. The inability to overcome this inexplicable ailment was akin to being conscious of my own impending doom, of some moral handicap that set me apart from other people, as if I were unworthy of the popular happiness of being the same as everyone else. That evening, as I read those letters on the blue plaque, after a few moments of joy, I experienced something like the pain of a man who has just received confirmation of a terminal diagnosis. Paris that night seemed different than usual and unlike its true self; with a tragic finality the vista of street lamps illuminating the foliage on the trees served only to emphasize the incurable sorrow I felt. I thought about the future that lay ahead of me, the growing complexity of my existence, and my real life, which was difficult to discern among this mass of morbid, fantastical distortions that haunted me. I was unable to complete a single task that required any sustained effort or whose solution demanded an unbroken application of logic. Even in my personal relations there was always, or there always risked being, that element of mental derangement, which could strike at any moment and would distort everything. I could not be held wholly accountable for my actions, could never be certain of the reality of what was happening to me; I often found it difficult to distinguish what was real and what was a hallucination. And now, as I walked about Paris, the city seemed no more real to me than the capital of the fantastical Central State. I had begun my latest journey in Paris, but where and when could I ever have witnessed anything like that imaginary labyrinth where the imperative momentum of my madness had driven me? The reality of that passageway, however, was borderline, and I remembered the turning and those strange recesses in the wall no less clearly than I did all the buildings in the street where I lived in the Latin Quarter. Of course, I knew for a fact that the street did exist, whereas the passageway had just been a product of my imagination; and yet this incontestable difference between the street and the passageway lacked the definite, concrete persuasiveness it ought to have held for me.

Now my thoughts turned elsewhere. Of all the districts in Paris, why had I wound up specifically in this one and not in another, not in Montmartre, for example, or in the Grands Boulevards? It was hardly likely to have happened by chance. I was unable to recall where I had headed as I left my apartment and what had induced me to undertake this journey. In any case, I had walked along, oblivious to both the buildings and the streets, as all this time I had been imprisoned in the Central State; nevertheless, I had set off in a particular direction and had apparently not lost my way, although it was clear that the part of my consciousness leading me there had functioned beyond any control of my own. There must have been an automatic precision, as happens when a man stops thinking about what he is doing and his actions take on a speed and accuracy that would be impossible were they to be directed by his consciousness. It was no coincidence that I had ended up here. But where could I have been going? A few years before I would often travel this route, because a woman with whom I had been very close lived nearby; back then I had known every building and every tree in the area. However, we parted a long time previously, and thereafter the streets leading to her apartment had shed their once thrilling aspect; their even vistas, at whose ends stood a building with an apartment on the fourth floor where my whole world—warm and transparent—had once been centred, now appeared unrecognizably foreign to me.

I couldn’t remember, and I felt so weary that I decided to put an end to these fruitless endeavours and return home. Ultimately it did not really matter. I sat on the Métro for a long time, then I got off at Odéon and headed towards my hotel, spurred on by an irresistible urge—to lie down and sleep. By the time I finally found myself in bed, it was already night; I could hear the occasional footstep outside in the street, and from an invisible gramophone came the sound of a woman’s voice singing ‘Autrefois je riais de l’amour’.† Soon I found myself sinking into a melancholy gloom, as starless and warm as the night itself, when suddenly, just as I was on the verge of slumber, I recalled that I had planned to pay a visit to Rue Molitor that evening, to the house of my acquaintance, the one who had so miraculously and so unexpectedly come into money.

* * *

I went to see him a few days later. This time neither his apartment nor the telephone on his writing desk, neither the books on the shelves nor the unusual tidiness that was in evidence everywhere, surprised me—firstly because I could never be any more surprised than I had been when I met him that day in the café, secondly because having lived for years in squalid hovels he should naturally be attracted to things of an opposite nature: instead of apocalyptic filth, cleanliness; instead of chaos, order; instead of a spit-spattered stone floor, gleaming parquet. In his general deportment, as in his every move, one sensed the convulsive tension of newfound gentility, which, on the face of it, seemed a little affected, at least to begin with.

When I arrived at his apartment—this would have been around four o’clock in the afternoon—he was not alone. A little man of around fifty, with indefinably grey hair and small, shifty eyes, was sitting in an expectantly servile pose, giving me to think once again how the term “plastique”, so flaunted in arts and theatre reviews, was often cruelly and almost invariably inseparable from the circumstances of one’s life, milieu and state of health, and how the word was so mutely expressive. He was very shabbily dressed and held in his hands a crumpled, soiled cap that had once been light grey—this was possible to discern from the light patches of fabric showing through at the peak, which had been protected by a button. As I entered, the man with the cap, who was in the middle of saying something, fell silent and shot me a look both angry and fearful. The host, however, stood up, greeted me—he was markedly courteous—apologized and said to his guest:

“Do go on, I’m listening. You say that it happened in Lyons?”

“Yes, yes, in Lyons. So, you see, after I was arrested…”

He told a rather convincing tale about how he had accidentally knocked down a pedestrian while riding a motorcycle, and how a long series of misfortunes had begun shortly thereafter. Judging from the way he spoke, fluently and with an astonishing lack of expression, as if the story did not concern him but some third party, to whose fate, incidentally, he was entirely ambivalent, it was clear that he had told this tale many times over and that even for him it had lost any degree of persuasiveness. I do not know whether he himself realized this. The crux of the matter was that following his release from prison his papers had been confiscated, and so now he was unable to take up any form of work, and thus found himself in a hopeless, as he phrased it, situation. The moment he uttered these words, I suddenly remembered having seen him once before and hearing those very words, whose intonation evidently never varied. I could even recall the whereabouts and the circumstances in which it had come about: it was near Gare Montparnasse, and his audience then had been a stout man with a beard—half merchant’s, half pirate’s—and the face to go with it: broad, boorish and pompous all at once. Following these words concerning the hopelessness of his situation, he paused and then said, turning away slightly and giving two half-hearted sobs, that if the gentleman did not help him, then the only thing left for him would be suicide. He added, waving his hand with casual desperation, that he had personally lost all his joie de vivre—he expressed it differently, but that was the sum of it—however, he pitied his wife, and it was possible that she would not survive the blow, for she was chronically ill and was not to blame. The mention of blame seemed rather peculiar to me, but he immediately explained that her second husband—he himself was her third—had given her syphilis, and now, he claimed, it was taking a toll on her health.

“Yes,” mused the host, “indeed…”

Then he asked in an entirely different tone of voice:

“Who gave you my address?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I asked, who gave you my address?”

“I… I’m sorry, I was just passing and thought that, perhaps, some Russians might live here…”

“In other words, you don’t want to say. As you wish. Only I know that your surname is Kalinichenko, that you were arrested not in Lyons but in Paris, and not for knocking down a pedestrian but for theft.”

The man in the cap became uncommonly agitated and, stuttering with rage, said that if the gentleman held such an unjust opinion of him then he had better take his leave. His humility having vanished, his little eyes took on a furious expression. He stood up and made a swift exit, without saying goodbye.

“Do you know him?” I enquired.

“Of course,” he replied. “We all know one another more or less. That is, I mean to say, everyone who belongs, or belonged, to that milieu. Only he failed to suspect that the Pavel Alexandrovich Shcherbakov who lives in this apartment and whose address was given to him by Kostya Voronov, despite his assurances not to pass it on to another living soul, is none other than the same who formerly lived in Rue Simon le Franc. Otherwise, of course, he wouldn’t have bothered with the story about Lyons and the motorcycle, which for thirty francs Chernov, the former writer, concocted and wrote down for him since he lacked the imagination with which to do it himself.”

“So he made up the sick wife?”

“Not entirely,” said Shcherbakov. “As far as I’m aware, my visitor has never been married. In such circles many legal formalities are deemed unnecessary. However, the woman he lives with is indeed syphilitic. But of course I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether or not she’s ever been married. I have my doubts. Let us agree that it’s of little consequence either way. And now, after all that, permit me to say how happy I am to see you here.”

The conversation immediately acquired a different, far more cultivated tone; as with everything else, there was a sense that Pavel Alexandrovich wished to forget the period preceding his current circumstances. Nevertheless, he started—he could not help but do so—with a comparison.

“For so long I was deprived,” he began, “of entry to a world that had once been my own… perhaps because I’m no philosopher, and I’m certainly no stoic. I mean to say that for a philosopher, the external conditions of life—remember Aesop’s example—should play no part whatsoever in the development of human thought. I must admit, however, that there are certain materialistic details at whose mercy a man can find himself—insects, filth, cold, foul odours…”

He was sitting in a deep armchair, smoking a cigarette, with a cup of coffee resting in front of him.

“…all this has a most unpleasant effect on a man. Perhaps it’s some law of psychological mimicry gone too far. After all, it’s quite understandable: we often know which conditions govern the inception of some biological law or other, but we cannot predict when that action will terminate, nor can we be sure that its effects will always be the same. Why is it that King Lear and Don Quixote should lose all meaning for me simply because I live in inadequately fine surroundings? And yet it is so.”

I was only half listening to him. Before my eyes, doggedly returning to me, was that day in April two years ago when I first set eyes on him, standing there in his ornamental rags, with that dark, unshaven face. Now there were books in heavy leather bindings lined above his head, and the recherché elegance of his speech could in no way seem out of place.

I spent the whole evening with him and left, taking with me the memory of this unlikely metamorphosis, which was utterly baffling and seemed to contradict everything I had until now, consciously or unconsciously, considered plausible. This man had started off in the realm of fantasy and stepped into reality, and for me his existence contained all the luxurious absurdity of a Persian fairy tale, which troubled me.

Some time after this I again—completely by chance—bumped into the residents of Rue Simon le Franc. I ran into one of my former classmates, with whom I had long ago lost touch, but about whom I occasionally read in the newspapers, most often with regard to his latest arrest or conviction. He was an astonishing man, a chronic alcoholic who had spent his entire life in a drunken haze and had been spared from the grave only by virtue of an uncommonly strong constitution. When he first arrived in France, he worked in a number of factories, although this period did not last for very long: he started seeing some well-to-do girl, taking her to all the cabarets in town; then he caught her cheating on him, shot her new lover, was sent down and on his release began leading the most disparate of lives, one with which it was difficult to draw any comparison. He worked as a gardener in the south of France, journeyed to the Alsace, and had once been spotted in a village in the Pyrenees. For the most part, however, he lived in Paris, in the outlying slums, passing from one shady episode to the next, and, whenever he spoke of it, the narrative would always feature his being released on a lack of evidence and the clarification of some misunderstanding. Then again, it was utterly impossible to keep track of his tale; there was no way to distinguish where the inebriation ended and where the madness began. In any case, there could be no talk of any chronological sequence to what he said.

“You see, just as I get back from Switzerland, she starts telling me how this lady painter from Italy is planning to go off to Sicily, but just then—can you imagine!—a police inspector investigating that Greek journalist barges in, asking me what I was doing in Luxembourg a fortnight ago, while she claims that the doctor who treated the Englishman was the victim of some night-time attack—his head was smashed in, you see, he was terribly injured, and so he decided to go straight to the lady modeller who lives near the Porte d’Orléans.”

He spoke as though each of his interlocutors was well informed about every individual he mentioned. However, I had never heard of any artists, Greek journalists or doctors, even from him, and I was not altogether sure that they really did exist, such as he described them. Amid the progressive atrophy of his mental faculties, or, rather, amid their incredible confusion, all conception of time vanished; he had no idea in which year we were living, and any semblance of continuity in his own existence appeared miraculously improbable. Thus he wandered about Paris in a drunken madness that had persisted for years, and it was astonishing that he ever found his way home or even recognized anyone. But he had grown much worse in recent years, was taken ill with consumption, and could not go on as he had done. I once met him in the street; he asked me for some money and I gave him what I had, but a few days later I received a note from him, saying that he was bedridden in his hotel room and had nothing to eat. I headed straight there.

He lived on the outskirts of the city, not far from the abattoirs. Nowhere had I seen more abject poverty. Below, a man with tattoos and the currish face of a criminal told me as he idly rinsed out cloudy glasses behind the bar that Michel lived at No. 34. Up and down the steep, narrow stairwell passed some rather suspect-looking people, and each floor bore the peculiar trace of some foul stench that seemed to permeate the entire building. Mishka was lying on the bed, unshaven, haggard and emaciated. By the head of the bed sat a woman of around sixty, clumsily trowelled in make-up and wearing a black dress and slippers. When I came in Mishka said to her in Russian:

“You may go now.”

She stood up and, with hardly any expression in her voice, said, “Goodbye,” her mouth agape, revealing a number of missing teeth, and left. I silently watched her go. Mishka asked:

“Don’t you recognize her?”

“No.”

“It’s Zina.”

“Which Zina?”

“You know, the famous one.”

I had never heard of any famous Zina.

“What is she famous for?”

“An artist’s sitter, a beauty. She was the lover of all the great artists. She was my lover, too, but now, you understand, all that’s a thing of the past. Women no longer exist for me; I’d be too out of breath. It was just before I was in Versailles that I had some business with this Albanian architect who had an imbroglio with my little Swiss—”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “Tell me a bit more about Zina.”

“She’s living with a marksman these days,” said Mishka. He was entirely sober—probably for the first time in a long while. “The little swine, we had a run-in around five years ago; he almost stole the money I’d just received from this English girl, she’d just got married and—”

“Did he steal it or not?”

“Steal it he did, but he gave it back. I twisted his arm. Such a mousey little swine, you know. Well, of course she gave him syphilis. From what I gather he’s always been a marksman, goes about telling some story involving a motorcycle, something about being arrested in Lyons. I say to him, ‘What good is Lyons when I remember you in the prison at Versailles?’ And prisons don’t come any worse, upon my word of honour, the Santé’s a thousand times better. God forbid you ever end up at Versailles, take this as a piece of friendly advice. It was Alexei Alexeyevich Chernov who wrote this chap’s entire life story for him—that, my friend, is talent. I even have something of his, typed out.”

And indeed he extracted from the shelf a dirty-grey notebook with very dog-eared corners and handed it to me. It was Chernov’s novel Before the Storm. I read the opening lines:

“A winter dusk was falling over Petersburg, majestic as always. Pyotr Ivanovich Belokonnikov, a wealthy man of forty, belonging both by birth and by the education he received in the Page Corps to the high society of the Palmyra of the North, was walking along the pavement, his fur coat undone. He had just taken leave of Betty, his mistress, and could not stop thinking about the marble white of her bosom and the burning caress of her sumptuous body.”

I questioned Mishka about these people whom he knew so well. Despite the disjointedness of the narrative, I nevertheless managed to ascertain that Alexei Alexeyevich Chernov was that ill-looking, shabbily dressed old man whom I had seen many times and who would ask me for alms at the entrance to the Russian church. I also learnt that Zina had a daughter, Lida, who was around twenty-six years old and had at one time been married to some Frenchman; he had died suddenly, poisoning was suspected, and Lida encountered some unpleasantness. I had already had occasion to note that in Mishka’s language the word “unpleasantness” more often than not denoted “prison”. These days she sold flowers in the streets somewhere.

I returned to Mishka’s hotel a few days later, but he was no longer there and no one could tell me what had happened to him. Only much later did I learn that he had died of consumption around a month after I last met him, in one of the sanatoriums just outside Paris. It was around the same time, while walking down Boulevard Garibaldi, that I once spotted a group of people coming towards me on the pavement. It was Zina and the mousey marksman, the one I had seen at Pavel Alexandrovich’s on the day I paid him a visit, with a young woman, very shabbily dressed, with unkempt fair hair—Lida, just as Mishka had described her to me. They were all walking almost abreast of one another. Lida was lagging just a little behind. I could see a discarded cigarette lying in the middle of the pavement in front of them. As they approached it, the mousey man was clearly about to bend down, but at that moment, with a peculiar rhythmical precision and speed, Zina pushed his shoulder so hard that he very nearly fell over. Then, in one casual, precise movement, she picked up the cigarette end and in the same step continued onward. I was put in mind of the dzhigits who, while sliding down from their saddles, are able to pick up a kerchief lying on the ground as their horse races on at full gallop. I saw Lida smile, and could not help noticing that in her drawn, sickly face, despite its youthfulness, there was a definite, if somewhat alarming, attractiveness.

That evening when I ran into these people, with recent events still fresh in my memory—the visit to Shcherbakov, the conversation with Mishka, my impressions of the mousey marksman, Zina and her daughter—that evening a great distance had separated me from them, and all this ceased to occupy my mind. During the day I had felt strangely exhausted; I had come home and slept for three whole hours. Then I got up, washed and went out to dine at a restaurant, but from the restaurant I went straight home again. It was around nine o’clock in the evening. I stood for a long time by the window, looking down onto the narrow street. Everything was as it always was: the stained glass of the brothel opposite my apartment was lit up and above it one could easily read the sign “Au panier fleuri”;‡ the concierges sat on their stools, in front of their doors, and amid the evening silence I could hear their voices conversing about the weather and the high cost of living; at the corner, where the street met the boulevard, Mado’s silhouette kept appearing and disappearing by the windows of a bookshop as she went about her work, back and forth along that same stretch—thirty paces there, thirty paces back; somewhere nearby a pianola was playing. I knew everyone on this street, just as I knew every odour, the look of every building, the glass of every window pane, and that lamentable imitation of life, intrinsic to each of its inhabitants, which never revealed its greatest secret: what inspired these people in the lives they led? What were their hopes, their desires, their aspirations, and to what end did each of them obediently, patiently repeat the same thing day after day? What could there be in all this—apart from some biological law that they obeyed unknowingly and unthinkingly? What had summoned them to life out of apocalyptic nothingness? The accidental and perhaps momentary union of two human bodies one evening or late one night a few dozen years ago? And so I recalled what Paul, a short, stout forty-year-old man in a cap, who worked as a lorry driver and lived two floors below me, had said over a glass of red wine:

“J’ai pas connu mes parents, c’est à s’demander s’ils ont jamais existé. Tel, que vous m’voyez, j’ai été trouvé dans une poubelle, au 24 de la rue Caulaincourt. Je suis un vrai parisien, moi.”§

And when I once asked Mado what she planned to do in the future and how she expected her life to turn out, she looked at me with heavily pencilled empty eyes and, shrugging her shoulders, replied that she never wasted any time thinking about such things. Then she paused for a second and said that she would work until the day she died—“jusqu’au jour où je vais crever, parce que je suis poitrinaire.”¶

I withdrew from the window. The pianola mercilessly went on playing one aria after the next. I felt as if I were venturing deeper and deeper into some vague mental fog. I tried to envisage everything my mind could envelop in the most comprehensive terms possible—the world as it was right now: the dark sky above Paris, its enormous expanse, thousands upon thousands of kilometres of ocean, the dawn over Melbourne, late evening in Moscow, the rushing of sea foam along the shores of Greece, the midday heat in the Bay of Bengal, the diaphanous movement of air across the earth, and time’s unstoppable march into the past. How many people had died while I had been standing there by the window, how many were now in their last agony as I had this very thought, how many bodies were writhing about in the throes of death—those for whom the inexorable final day of their lives had already dawned? I closed my eyes and before me appeared Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, and for whatever reason I immediately recalled his final epistle, in which he stated that he could write no more. As I remembered these lines I felt a chill run down my spine: this hand that was now incapable of writing had carved David and Moses from marble—and yet his genius was dissolving into that very same nothingness from which it had come; each of his works was an apparent victory over death and time. So that these concepts—time and death—appeared to me in all their finality, I had to tread the long path of gradual immersion, and conquer the aural inadequacy of this series of letters, “t”, “m”, “d”, “h”, and only then did the infinite perspective of my own journey towards death come into view. Those lines in Michelangelo’s letter rang in my ears, and I saw the printed page plainly before my eyes: the date, “Rome, 28 December 1563”, and the address, “Lionardo di Buonarroto Simoni, Florence”. “I have received many letters from thee of late to which I have not replied because my hand no longer submits to my will.” Two months later, in February 1564, he died. Did he still recall the tragic grandeur of that swell of muscles and bodies that his relentless inspiration had so imperiously cast down into hell—with the countless, unerring movements of that truly unique hand, the very one that would later refuse to serve him—in the days when the illusion of his superhuman might and the earthly vanity of his singular genius became so apparent? I sat in my armchair and with cold rage pondered the fundamental bankruptcy of everything, in particular any abstract morality and even the unattainable spiritual loftiness of Christianity—because of the limitations imposed on us by time, and because of the existence of death. Of course, none of these thoughts were revelatory; I had known them my whole life, just as millions of others had known them before me, but only rarely did they cross from a theoretical understanding into something tangible, and whenever they made this transition I experienced a peculiar and incomparable terror. My entire world and everything that surrounded me would lose all meaning and sense of reality. Later I developed a strange and abiding desire—to vanish into thin air, like a phantom in a dream, like a patch of morning mist, like someone’s distant memory. I wanted to forget everything, everything that constituted me, beyond which it seemed impossible to imagine my own existence, this aggregate of absurd, random conventions—as though I desired to prove to myself that I had not one life, but many, and consequently that the conditions in which I found myself in no way limited my options. I observed, from a theoretical and conceptual standpoint, the whole sequence of my gradual metamorphoses, and among the multitude of images to appear before me was the hope of some illusory immortality. I saw myself as a composer, a miner, an officer, a labourer, a diplomat, a tramp: there was something convincing about each transformation, and so I began to believe that I really had no idea who I might be the very next day or what distance would separate me from this night after the darkness had passed. Where would I be and what awaited me? I had lived what seemed like so many different lives, so often had I shuddered as I experienced the suffering of another, so often had I acutely felt what affected other people, often the dead or those far away from me, that I had long lost all concept of my own profiles. So on that evening, as happened whenever I was left alone for a lengthy period of time, I found myself surrounded by this sensual ocean of innumerable memories, thoughts, experiences and hopes, which were both preceded and succeeded by a vague and overwhelming sense of expectation. Ultimately I would be so wearied by this state of being that everything would begin to get mixed up in my imagination, and then I would either go out to a café or else try to concentrate on a single, specific idea or series of ideas, or perhaps I might try to rack my memory for some salutary melody that I would force myself to follow through to its end. As I lay in my bed in a state of total debility, I suddenly recalled the Unfinished Symphony; it resonated in the evening silence of my room, and after several minutes I began to feel as if I were once again in a concert hall: the black tail-coat of the conductor, the intricate floating dance of his baton, whose movements amid the vanquished silence led the music—strings, bows, piano keys—the immediate and essentially miraculous return of distant inspiration, halted many years ago by that blind and merciless law, the same law that stayed Michelangelo’s hand. Night was setting in and there were already stars in the sky, downstairs the concierges were asleep, the sign “Au panier fleuri” was shining brightly, and at the corner, like a pendulum, Mado was pacing back and forth—and all this filtered through the Unfinished Symphony, without darkening it or disturbing it, gradually blurring and disappearing in this whirl of sound, in this illusory victory of memory and imagination over reality and perception.