“Oh merciless destiny, how sorely heavy hast thou stamped with both thy feet upon all the Persian race!” says the Writer, but when he says “Persian” it’s only a manner of speaking: neither Nelly nor Vasily is Persian. It’s simply that the Writer requires an ancient race, upon which, because of its antiquity, the weight of destiny will fall more visibly. How right one of his biographers is to affirm that all literary production prior to him “seems like a panoramic literature, a bird’s-eye view.” Because where another writer would simply have written “destiny,” in the sense that destiny fell on Vasily, the Writer has destiny jumping up and down on him—and with both feet!
Those feet that enter our visual field as they descend, the large, heavy feet of Kirpich and Raketa in their swanky Ferragamos. Though they didn’t trample on your father, that’s not what gangsters do nowadays, or only in the movies, to provide a more precise visual idea of the humiliation endured by the fallen man. Same thing with the Writer, in this passage where he speaks so wisely of the Persians and a thing as ancient as human dignity, which he places on the same level as the antiquity of the Persian race, all in that brilliant prose of his that seems to recast the literary erudition of the West beneath the enormous weight of the years.
All possible hues of literature in him, all sensibilities: so great a Writer! For at times he writes with the force and parsimony of Franz Kafka in Prague, in books that fall on us like a stroke of bad luck and distress us as profoundly as the death of a person we loved. Or else with the terrible obsession of the possessed, the bloodshot eyeball, the bitter misanthropy of a Thomas Bernhard, an author who was, curiously, subsequent. Or the faint gleam of those parts of the Book where the enigmatic words of Confucius blossom, without being him! Amalgamated into his unique style, cast in gold and silver. Not a cento, not a florilegium, not a chain of commentaries.
I could enumerate a thousand reasons to explain this to you, cite you his words in infinite numbers to illustrate what can appear to be a miracle: the breadth, the cosmic coherence, the profound ethical sensibility of the Book. Easier and more credible if taken for a miracle, the fruit of a roll of the dice, than for the vision that the Commentator slyly insinuates. Of an astute flaneur strolling through the literary wardrobe of the West and pilfering as he goes along, an overcoat here, a vest there, a pair of velvet gloves over there, a hat here.
An image against which my entire being and even my common sense rebels, and therefore I do not hesitate to exchange it at once for that of a prince, a king, a great personage whom I watch make his way into the forest of the years. Inclining with infinite humility before its carnelian and lapis lazuli fruits, harvesting authorities: here a diamond in Aeschylus (this being where he includes, in an astonishing great leap backward, the Persians), there a ruby in Stevenson, there a precious blue gem in Poe.
But not even that, for this metaphor of the gleaner vanishes, disappears in the presence of the giant who makes his entrance at the very end of the Book, the surprising reappearance on its final page, five lines from its grand finale, of the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh.
Here, Petya, where it says: like giants submerged in the years. Like Goya’s colossus, many leagues in height, who advances with the clouds around his knees, who keeps the secret of death hidden away in his chest. Moving toward that abyss that only he from his height can behold, the rest of us inevitably falling into it, without exception. A place from which no one returns, from which the only thing that reaches us is the distant uproar of battle, the clamor of a clash lasting for centuries, millennia, with a single foreseeable result: the crushing defeat of the human forces.
And men must rise up, rebel against such a fate, believe fervently in victory, discover that they could die without finding any secret behind the enchanted forest, knot themselves together into a single sheaf, conquer fear, prepare to die, no longer live lying flat on the ground, like a defeated man (tablet 12, column 4, verse 270).
The Pool stolen, and the glass jar where he piled up his diamonds as well; the press broken, which I saw for the first time and approached, intrigued, having suspected its existence, but seeing it that morning for the first time, strange as an engine that runs on ethereal fluid, unreal as an antigravity shield.
Someone, perhaps Larissa, called him at that moment. His cell phone trilled and lit up with a green light like a goldfinch with a mottled throat, a bird singing from his shoulder, the brilliance of its screen illuminating the helmet’s visor, its lifeless eyes. I didn’t take the call, didn’t touch the telephone. I was the youthful page weeping inconsolably for the death of his lord, small and insignificant, the grass as high as my knees.
I required no proof whatsoever, had no need to turn to any kind of writing or for conclusions substantiated by any authority. I knew who had betrayed him, who had shown his killers the way. Here I can break the principle of authority, and I’m breaking it, Petya. I saw it with my own eyes, beneath the empyrean sky of my vision.
“But it isn’t a vision? It isn’t a dream?”
“What do you mean: a vision? a dream? It’s a device, an invention, a mental experiment. Not even Einstein, a contemporary of the Writer (more than contemporary, didn’t you tell me they were friends? Yes, also a friend of the Writer): Did Einstein physically carry out his experiments, in real life?”
Mental or imagined all of them, that of the lift falling in a building in Zurich when its steel cables are severed. Or the other one, still more astonishing, in which he straddles a ray of light and rides upon it. Mine, my vision of Batyk, the way he took Kirpich to the laboratory, your parents’ bathroom, is also a mental experiment, though one based on investigation. And with a result no less immutable and trustworthy than C, the constant.
I watched the Buryat show the killers the way, I saw him moving silently up from step to step, one foot (carefully) behind the other (very, very carefully). The pantomime that the Writer describes with jocular and chilling precision in the passage devoted to the Art of Ascending a Stairway … Turning in an angle of the landing, raising his eyes to the skylight from which they could have let down a rope, though no need for that thanks to Batyk, who opened the door to them, who gave them easy access to the place where otherwise they could never have …
Vasily sleeps, exhausted after the long party, minuscule hand beneath enormous jowl, thread of saliva hanging from his lip … All in the Writer’s aerial swimming pool, the cube of condensed water. I see them walking, Kirpich and Raketa, stopping in front of the bedroom, awakening him with a kick. Because they must have wanted to give him some final message. Something like: Take that, you dog! (in an infinity of writers). Or: Did you think you could hide from us forever?
The Pool in Batyk’s clutches, Batyk who tries, at that moment, inappropriate as ever, to drum its blue surface with his claws. He smiles then, with perverse delight, letting it roll from his palm, furrowed by the deep lines of destiny, all of them fatal or obscure, into the simian hand or palm of Kirpich.
Your father pivoting his head like a basilisk, explaining to them between clenched teeth how much gold, how many jewels (“Fakes!” his killers exclaim in unison at that point, they can’t help themselves, “Fakes!”) he could give them, how many mines and factories in the Urals he could hand over to them.
And I imagine and see clearly in the condensed air how the two thugs laugh in his face, accusing him, like children, of being a liar, someone who wasn’t going to scalp them again, this time they’d do it to him, in the sense of the phrase used by Fenimore Cooper, another author much admired by the Writer during his childhood in Combray. In that sense, Kirpich and Raketa promised to scalp your father.
Kirpich brought the butt of his pistol down hard on the Pool, which instantly shattered, the huge stone, the unique gem, transformed into a fine powder that blew across your father’s feet. Vasily tried, with an automatic reflex, to catch the Pool, as if it had been liquidated, and as he moved forward, thrown off balance, shots fired by both killers entered his body.
I want to shout, to stop the murder, but I’m as powerless down below as a spectator before a screen, though the effect is incommensurably more vivid.
The shots resolve, visually, in curving, dotted lines, as in a naïf Haitian painting, which disappear into Vasily’s immense bulk, lift him off the ground.
In the lower parts of the cube, next to the real or submerged swimming pool, a few of the guests from the night before are sleeping: you can always count on finding two or five drunks on the lawn after a party with Russians (and non-Russians! And non-Russians, Okay). Nelly is dreaming placidly next to the czarevitch, next to you, Petya, where she fell asleep after the stroll along the shore … And in the watery air above her head, something like a cloudy excrescence that surrounds her head like a nimbus and which, more closely analyzed by me, as I stand on tiptoe, turns out to be something material, tangible. The dream that her brain secretes as the liver secretes bile, as the Writer affirms in his Against Avenarius, a book prior to and lesser than the Book. There, in that cloud, the very bright red of a peasant blouse and the vivid green of a rustic skirt that is pleated for pure joy. A man and a woman on the bank of a river, its water suggested by the blue lines at their feet. A pair of lovers, their hands interlaced … I could tell you who your mother was, is, in love with, who she was with in her dreams, abandoned to her love without a second’s anguish. A young man, not fat like your father, to whom she’s turning in this tableau, in the cloud, and at whom her eyes are smiling.
And beyond the calm of the dream, beyond that haven, though still within the cube or blue block of water, the still larger diorama of the house, the darker cloud in which the Buryat turbidly moves. Rubbing his hands together in glee, the pink hairless little paws of a mole like the one who marries Thumbelina, the same type of horror. Without need for any kind of proof, Petya, without having to subject him to any interrogation.
I’ve reached this point, this construction, only by imagining his steps, mentally extrapolating the duplicity of his silent, cunning movements, the grim gaze of his almond eyes. Brought here, me, by something my heart tells me; he, by his black heart itself; me, to the discovery of his crime; he, to the crime itself, planned and committed.
A traitor. A betrayal.
Which I’ve not stopped pondering, studying as I leaned down over that cube of water, my light illuminated by that faint blue light. For I would never give you that advice, Petya, never tell you to let your feelings grow cold, to write from a healthy distance, to recollect in tranquillity, at your desk, the emotion that led you to love someone more than anything else in the world. For that day, the morning after the party, when I got up and peered through the Venetian blinds, I saw the Castle as the happiest place, the happiest existence, and thought of her. Of the hand I had kissed, the smooth, delicate skin on her hands, the tiny, fine wrinkles around her eyes. Desirable and lovable in all the fragility of her human form …
Me, guilty? Me, who with my stupid confidence and absurd party had ruined everything, cleared the way for and given easy entrance to Kirpich and Raketa, as Larissa has not ceased to insinuate to me, jeering at me, hurling it bitterly in my face? How to believe that even for a second, Petya? And Batyk, whose body, whose scrawny corpse never appeared? Whose betrayal was apparent from the very first, the way he put himself first, letting them in if they would promise to spare his life. Not Lifa, Lifa died, and so did Astoriadis, and the dogs. And you, Nelly, and I would have met the same fate were it not for the power of the Book, which turned the heavy steering wheel of fate, which took you by the hand and led you down to the sea, and us after you.
If we hadn’t flown that night, hadn’t kissed, if I hadn’t watched her preening in the bathroom (But was that it? All you did was spy on her while she was naked, all you did was kiss her, Psellus? No, Petya … Wait. Or yes, what does it matter?). If I hadn’t seen her naked, a vision that inflamed my passion and made me pursue her through the night, if the Book hadn’t intervened, we’d all be dead, Petya, corpses, horribly.
How your mother wept, sobs that made her face puffy, how bitterly she lamented when we found your father’s body on top of the shattered diamond. And when the police, the Guardia Civil, arrived at the scene, they had to walk across that iridescent dust and draw the body’s silhouette not on the floor, the mosaic of the floor, as is usual, but on that luminous dust. And when one of them went to the window and raised the Venetian blinds, a torrent of light poured through the panes, which seemed to move and run like tiny ants, a whole army of them, with Vasily, your father, lying there suspended between the glittering diamond dust and the luminous uproar raised by the windowpanes at the sight of their owner, dead.
And me? And me? And the pain I felt, the rage, the stab to the heart? And how, like Vagaus in Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans, I shouted: Furiae! Furiae!
Her breast beneath the purple of the dress, her wings (turning her toward me). Kissing her back, the birthplace of her wings, the way she had of placing a colored stone on each of her moles, the way she would jump up in a single bound, her white thighs filling my eyes, the two panels of the armoire opening together. In the same impulse, because it was enough to open one and both would open, and she would take out the jar of colored stones and hold it up in the air. From which she would extract, from that red heart in the center of her chest, the gems she would place in my hand and with which I would cover, one by one, the beauty spots on her body, a bejeweled bosom, a breast studded with diamonds.
And nevertheless she left. And nevertheless I let her go, I said good-bye that same night, Petya, as you know.
In the darkness of my room I had caught the scent of the air of hers, like an animal, feeling it waft through the whole house. And read on that air, on the disposition of its volumes, that her door was open, that now was the time to get up, go down the dimly lit hallway, occupy your father’s place at her side. Not because the obstacle of her husband had disappeared. None of that I would tell her, to none of those causes or base motives would I allude, but only bring to its culmination what the two of us had begun. Obstinately: bring her to the throne, make her Empress of Russia, demonstrate the correctness of our calculations, the unerringness of the Book. My right eye peering through the crack of that idea: the faceted columns of a chamber in the depths of the walled city, the ermine cape on my shoulders, bent over a terraqueous globe, frozen in that pose, playing the regent until the czarevitch attained his majority, feigning to be from Italy or Monaco, from a country that would make me more bearable to the Russian people. As if not only your mother were awaiting me with her door open, but all of Russia, my adopted country.
But when I had reached her, arrived in her room, I saw her sit up in bed, look at me once, only once, giving me to understand with that glance that all was lost and impossible, and dropping back to her pillow. I understood everything—it was the end!—and moaned with impotence in the hallway, gnawing my fists, quickly riffling through all possible responses, not prepared to yield. Wrapped in my bathrobe as if we were in the ancient Year of Our Lord 1997 and empires still existed, men who would kill to make room for themselves on a throne, who would poison their kings.
All that still true? All that still true, the air had sent me that message: to wed the young widow, become czar myself. A foreigner, but what did it matter? What about the other foreign emperors of Byzantium? Michael the Stammerer, Constantine the Filthy, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer? Just by stopping in my tracks or in mid-flight, returning to her eyes, caressing her slender hands.
Why didn’t I do it? Or here, you be the one to ask me: Why didn’t you do it? Little Mother Russia in the reclining figure of your mother, her alabaster thighs. Perhaps I was too young that day, I don’t know, Petya. I probed blindly at the Book, the whole text, consulted it extensively and did not find, for the first time—that’s how it was, Petya! for the first time!—a passage, words that conformed to my aims or served my purposes. I found things in other books, in certain great writers and even in minor writers, but I wasn’t going to be the one to attribute phrases to him, or even whole passages, that were not his, that clearly and patently had not emerged from his pen, Petya. Not when the heart of the matter was me, my life, this Writer. I passed over good and beautiful pages that I discarded immediately because they were not by him. I couldn’t tell myself what I had told you, Petya, couldn’t deceive myself as I had deceived you …
“I knew it, I knew it from the first time you told me about the piano that mourned like a bird abandoned by its mate and the violin that heard it and answered from the top of another tree.”
“But that is by the Writer! … It doesn’t matter … I won’t say now (though perhaps this is the reason): it was my life, it was my life that was at stake. Pusillanimous. No, it wasn’t that.”
“Listen: you could never have been our sovereign. Never!”
“I know, Petya … Piotr Vasilievich. You mean they never would have accepted me as I am? I never could have ridden into Moscow on a white horse? I know that.”
“Well, yes, he is named Borges, J. L. Borges—how did you find out? I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want his name embedded in you like the names of the philosophers in Diogenes Laërtius who are known only by the fragments he cited or commented on in his book, most irresponsibly, I would say. Such an honor for the Commentator were you to sit down some day, grown up, and write about the days in the Castle, exalt the beneficences of the Book and the intelligence of your tutor … You, Petya, who could easily write such a thing, a real book, a primary book, without commentary or citations in bold face, and without the dark gleam of his name, the Commentator’s, contained within or casting its light from any page of your book or any of the folds of your adult memory.”
There are names, experiences, upon which a good person, educated in the Book, must never set eyes or think of. Not in pursuit of greater knowledge, not in pursuit of cultural breadth. A culture and an erudition that are false!
A man—forgive me for insisting upon this point—incapable of thinking straight or of writing with the unvarying frankness of a truly great author, and who, on the single occasion he met the Writer, during a ride in an automobile, didn’t exchange a word with him but only exclaimed, toward the end, with feigned astonishment, “Sir, you slow and accelerate the rotation of the earth at your pleasure: you are greater than God.”
Greater than God? How could anyone claim to be greater than God?
The Writer never claimed that, or to have made any great scientific advance, discovered any practical application for his Book, for the fragments or blue stones of Time he holds in his hands in volume 7 and gazes at in amazement, for, having taken his sincerity further than any other Writer in the world, each time he has asked himself What is time? he has been able only to keep himself from lying, only to confess, to respond, wisely and with absolute sincerity, with Augustinian wisdom: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Or, what amounts to the same thing: We must never imagine the solution of imposture, never pretend to be more than God. Better to entrust ourselves to our fate.
But I already told you about my blindness, when I mentioned to you and commented extensively on that phrase by the Writer where he says, quite rightly: he was a good man. And allow me to add: naive.
Who took some time to understand the slander that another man, a false youth, a gentleman of Germanic surname, Aschenbach, put out against the Writer. A jeweler in Santa Monica whom I saw reading in his shop, and who did not get up when I went in, but put down the book he was reading to attend to me, placing it facedown.
So that I could read, decipher the title in English, and shiver in wonder: What? You have the Book, too? You know the Writer, too? And read him with veneration? And I asked his permission to pick it up and examined it rapturously, Petya, not understanding anything in that language, but leafing through it in ecstasy, surrendering before it.
Until I heard him speaking of the Writer as a standard-bearer—you know, Petya?—and I came to realize. That he was reading it because supposedly only in its pages would he find a knowledge and a comprehension, an exact and inclusive portrait of all the colors of the rainbow. I was horrified to hear this. The Writer as a standard-bearer!
I would dedicate an entire book, years of my life, to demonstrate the falsity in that, to clean … Petya, I couldn’t stop myself from leaping over the counter to beat him in rage, until his mouth was bleeding, the mouth that had spoken ill of the Writer and said those things, odious prevarications, never!
An instrumental use, Petya—as if the Book were some sort of manifesto. Never! I beat him until someone, an accomplice of his, his employee (Tadzio! I heard him call him, Tadzio!), must have hit me on the back and I collapsed unconscious on the floor.
The beating I got in my turn, the interrogation I was subjected to. The tooth I spat out at my feet: blood and saliva. The things I howled: Is he not an imposter? Is he not assuming the personality of another man? Is he not using his words? Is he not putting in the mouth of a single Writer the words of many other writers? Is he not eternally falling into the fallacy of amalgamating many writers into one?
On the floor of the police station, my body aching but without regretting for one second having assaulted that man. All of him false (his horrible teeth, like a young man’s), propagator of those nauseating falsehoods about the Writer. Unable to bear so much deception, so many lies: as if there, so far from death, from the place where he must be, Batyk were speaking through his mouth. But why should it matter to me: I know your mother, I know your father, I know you, Petya—all of you are full of respect for the Book.
Quelle horreur that in America, horrible Amerika, the horrible Americans should devote themselves to staining and outraging the Writer’s memory. And I leapt on him the instant I understood the ignominious intent of his words until someone, his employee, as I told you.
I wept that night on the floor of the police station but did not say, did not permit myself to say, did not sully my lips with the words of so filthy an accusation. The police unable to find an explanation or determine what had triggered (like a gun) my rage. What a child I was! How ingenuous my reaction! The shiver I felt, full of admiration, when I found him reading and saw what book it was. And how he displayed it to me in delight, believing me to belong to his cult, a worshipper of the same god.
They didn’t understand a word, the police. They beat me all morning, powerless, a feeling of impotence growing within them. Hearing me speak in that foreign language, so obviously a foreigner (there’s only one small territory on the globe where I’m not, and therefore I am a foreigner more than I am anything else).
Cuban? Cuban! I told them a thousand times. What does it matter? Cuban, yes! And I was dealt another blow. Why, then, does no one here understand you? Jorge is from Puerto Rico: Martínez, Pedro, they don’t understand a word. And he slammed his broad fist, its fingers tightly clenched—let me tell you—into my stomach again. And the questions rained down again: “Who are you talking about? Who are Pierre Hélie, Hugues de Saint-Victor, Borges?”
I looked out at them through a single eye: they’re all French, I told them, or no, from South America, from a country, I don’t remember which one (I don’t know why I thought that if I said Argentina they’d beat me with even greater fury). I woke up that morning on the floor of the cell, and through the window high above me, when I’d risen to my feet and hoisted myself up by the bars, I saw the sea. A wine-dark sea. I wept …
Exhausted now, like a swimmer who’s abandoned all struggle and floats without reaching any shore, a man who on one afternoon of his life, full of strength, has the idea—in the Writer, in John Cheever—of crossing through the swimming pools of his neighbors, behind those gigantic Californian houses, and dives through their subterranean branches without finding a way out, the way home, lost in the labyrinth, dying there. Or like a swimmer in time, borne up by the whole movement of the wave and down by the whole movement of the wave, without there being any merit in him.
Up to the service of the last emperor of Russia. The happy days after the journey to Barataria and the successful sale of the diamonds (which I didn’t tell you about), the night of the great ball, when the kingdom seemed to be at hand and I saw your mother as a queen, and flew with her over the blue and white Castle, its galactic blue glittering from the sky.
Down to that flat city, the entirely pernicious example of so many low houses, like a valid refutation of the idea of a king. And still lower, to the floor of the police station, beaten. All my efforts seeming to have led me to nothing, and left me without any desire, for the first time in years, to go down to the sea. The city awakening, its men and women breakfasting on enormous glasses of milk, steam rising from the plates that waiters held up against the sunlight as they came out of the kitchen.
(How to bring her back? How marvelous it would be to make the journey to see her, simply going down the stairs and standing on the lookout on Alondra Boulevard where the taxis pass by, having first lied to Larissa about where I was going. Waiting for one impatiently, getting in full of air, floating in the backseat like those balloons we take home from a party and push inside a taxi, riding along smiling, enormous, lips laughing, teary-eyed, happy because in only half an hour’s travel through this low city … But she does not occupy any of the blocks of its grid; none is marked by having her inside it. I’d have to subjugate myself to the pressurization of an airplane, dragging my feet along the pavement toward its steel flanks. Cuernavaca is far away. There’s no sea in Cuernavaca, I’ve checked on the map. Only green and brown on the paper, an abhorrent place the Writer never heard of, about which he never wrote, though about Los Angeles, yes, I’m sure.)
And pay attention to me here: there’s only this one point I would dispute the Writer on, one thing I don’t agree with: not without there being any merit in me.
I went, I leapt, it was I who leapt. In me, as in one of the Writer’s heros, lies dormant the stuff of which a lord is made—Tuan, he calls it—and which finally organizes itself in the air before falling into that mud, in Patusan, in … the trust, the love, the confidence of the people.
Crowned on my voyage to the sea: at the center, Petya. Speaking to you from the center of the sphere. Assisted by a cloud of instantaneous beings or winged homunculi, the yahoos, they climb high trees as nimbly as a squirrel … with prodigious agility. Small and subjugated devils who would purge the horrible guilt of the treachery of their man Batyk in the court of their fathers, or like captive angels flying to the most remote confines of the sphere. To bring back, in their beaks, fragments and passages of all books, to hold them up in the air before me with profound reverence. All the wisdom of the Book, of all books, before my eyes, infinitely wise, fabulously rich.
Infinitely wise. The generative principle of the Book understood; adding further volumes to the seven initial ones about the Perfect King, confident that perhaps, at a distance of thirty centuries, they would amalgamate into a single book, my clumsy commentaries and allusions to the warm Mediterranean commingled with his infinitely detailed pages on the sea in Normandy. In a single book? In a single book!
And fabulously rich. Because what other proof did I have? What other way of confirming my young life to the emperor of Russia (but you, so young? Yes, me, so young) but the enormous wealth, the unimaginable sum in diamonds that I carried in my pocket like a voyager across time?
Not a flower, as the Commentator falsely states: imagine that, a rose as proof of a journey to paradise! For paradise, as is well known and sustained by the authority of John the Theologian, is thickly strewn with diamonds, the stones he cites with undeniable pleasure in the final pages of the Book: jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, amethyst!
What would you bring back, Petya, from a journey through time? A rose? Or diamonds stitched into the hem of your coat that—when the friends who had gathered for a banquet in your honor reacted with incredulity to your story, all you had seen and heard in China—you would produce before their disbelieving eyes, as Marco Polo did in 1295, the final argument of the diamonds he poured out from the unstitched lining of his coat or caftan?
So that those present opened their mouths in wonder and shouted: a million! Which is what that Book is titled, the fifth I cite here, in accordance with Valentinian’s rule for commentary: no more than five authors.
Millions in diamonds! Just like me. The best and only proof of my journey through time. Remember when you asked me: What is the Book about? What is its subject? And I told you, I answered: It’s about money, about how to make money. But now I can tell you this, too—for according to an old saying in the country where I am now, time is money—it is also about time. In search of lost money? (No, that would be vulgar and loathsome. Better to seek time.) You’re right, Petya. Time.