I got up. It was still deep night, although I could already feel the approach of morning. I let Lutetia lie. I thought she was asleep. But she said in a tender, loving, childish voice: “Promise to come tomorrow to the shop. Protect me from your cousin. I cannot bear him. I love you!”
I went home, through the silent, fading night. I walked carefully, for I expected to meet Lakatos every moment.
It seemed, also, as though I could hear from time to time a soft, dragging step. Although I was afraid of my friend, I believed that that night I needed him urgently. I needed, so I believed, his advice. And yet I knew that it would be advice from Hell.
The next day, before I went to the dressmaker’s — that is, to Lutetia — I drank heavily. And while I befuddled myself, I believed that my brain was gradually growing clearer and clearer and forging cleverer and cleverer plans.
The dressmaker greeted me enthusiastically. His creditors — recognizable at first glance by their gloomy smiles and eloquent silence — were waiting for him in the next room.
I did not know exactly what I was saying. I wanted to see Lutetia. She was standing in her dressing room, between three mirrors, while a designer was trying different stuffs on her, alternately wrapping and unwrapping her, and it looked as though he were martyring her to a slow and elegant death with a hundred pins.
“Has he been here?” I asked, over the oily heads of three youths who were grouped around with materials and pins.
“No. He only sent some flowers!”
I wanted to say something more, but firstly I began to choke, and secondly Lutetia waved to me to leave the room. “This evening,” she said.
Monsieur Charron was waiting for me outside the door. “This afternoon, for certain,” I said, in order to avoid having to speak with him further, although I had no great: hopes that Solovejczyk would give me the money.
I went out quickly and drove to Solovejczyk.
I knew very well that he was seldom to be found at this hour. His room had two anterooms, each on an opposite side. The anterooms hung on the central room just like two ears on a head. One anteroom was reached through a white door with gilded moldings. — The other, on the opposite side, was curtained off by a heavy green portière. In the first room waited the unsuspecting, those who knew nothing of Solovejczyk’s real activities. In the second waited the others, we the initiated. I did not know them all, only a few. Through the portière we could hear everything that Solovejczyk discussed with the unsuspecting. They were mostly ridiculous matters: the export and import of grain, special concessions for hop merchants in the season, extension of passports for the sick, recommendations for businessmen to foreign governments. For us, the initiated, all these things held no interest; but our ears, trained to listen, took in everything. We could easily have talked with one another while we were thus waiting, but none of us could control our professional urge to listen; and so we avoided conversation, which would only have interfered with our listening. Also we mistrusted one another, even avoided one another. As soon as Solovejczyk had finished with the unsuspecting, he drew back the green portière, looked into our anteroom and selected, according to the importance of the person or the case, the first of us to go in. At this point, the other “initiateds” had to go out and along the corridor into the opposite anteroom, the one separated by a door through which one could hear nothing.
That afternoon Solovejczyk arrived late, but the unsuspecting — with whom he used to talk loudly, often indeed shouting — were soon disposed of. There were six of us waiting to see him. He called me in first.
“You have been drinking,” he said. “Sit down.”
Friendly as he had never been before, he offered me a cigarette out of a heavy silver box.
I had carefully prepared the beginning of my speech, but his friendliness dazed me and I forgot everything.
“I have nothing special to report,” I said. “I have only one request. I need money.”
“Of course,” said Solovejczyk. “The Prince is here.” He blew a cloud of smoke into the air. “Young man,” he began, “you will never be able, in the long run, to hold out against this competition. You will fail miserably.” He dissected and distended the word “miserably.” It was an endless, boundless “miserably.” “You are a person,” he continued, “whom I myself”—and for the first time I perceived a sort of vanity in him—“whom I myself,” he repeated, “cannot quite make out. You refuse to accept money. You wanted to get the Rifkins set free. You are gifted, certainly. But you are not complete. How can I express it — you are still a man. You are already a scoundrel — pardon the word; coming from my mouth it is not meant personally, but, so to speak, ‘literally’ But you still have human weaknesses. You must decide.”
“I have decided,” I said.
“Tell me honestly,” asked Solovejczyk, “were you really intending to set a trap for the Prince when you asked him to intervene on behalf of the Rifkins?”
“Yes,” I said, although, as you know, that was not true.
“I see,” said Solovejczyk. “Then you are complete. It would have been useless. The Prince will never let himself be caught. But you can still have the money. And you will bring the little Rifkin to Russia.”
“But how?” I asked. “She is suspicious.”
“How, is your affair,” said Solovejczyk. “You can forge.”
I extinguished my cigarette in the black agate ashtray.
“I don’t know how to forge,” I said helplessly, like a child.
I was lost. Before my eyes stood the brave little Jewess. Before my eyes stood my beloved Lutetia. Before my eyes stood the enemy of my life, young Krapotkin. Before my eyes Lakatos suddenly limped into sight with his dragging foot. All of them, all, so it seemed to me, ruled my life. Only what was it now? Was it still my own life? A great rage against all four surged through me. An equal hatred against all of them, my friends, although I knew exactly how to differentiate between them, although I knew exactly that I really loved the brave Channa Rifkin, that I desired and despised Lutetia, only desiring her because I hoped to win thereby a petty, cheap, miserable triumph over Krapotkin, and that I feared Lakatos as the actual emissary of Satan who had thought out for me, for me especially, a little private devil. A sudden, indescribable, ecstatic desire filled me, the desire to be stronger than all of them, stronger even than my own feelings which bound me to them; to be stronger than my real love for the Jewish girl; stronger than my hatred for Krapotkin; stronger than my desire for Lutetia; stronger than my fear for Lakatos. Yes, I wanted to be stronger even than myself; that was what it really was.
So I plunged into the greatest crime of my life. But I did not yet know how to set about it, in the safest way, and I asked again timidly: “I don’t know how to forge.”
Solovejczyk looked at me with his dead, pale gray eyes and said: “Perhaps your old friend can advise you. Go out there.” And he pointed, not to the door, but to the portière through which I had come in.
One thing is certain, my friends. Fate guides our steps. A reasonable assumption, and as old as Fate itself. We see it sometimes. Mostly we do not wish to see it. I, too, belonged to those who are unwilling to see it, and all too often I closed my eyes tight in order not to see it, just as a child shuts its eyes in the dark so as not to be afraid of the darkness around it. But as for me — perhaps I was accursed, perhaps I was elect — Fate compelled me at every step, and in obvious, almost banal ways, to open my eyes again and again.