“Ah-ha, ‘Mon ami’! And yet he says he didn’t know!” the judge laughs sourly. “This is a hoax, all right, gentlemen. Let’s go back to sleep. Good night. As for you, Mr. Tresić, kindly save this kind of buffoonery for your drinking binges and let us get some sleep. Some of us are early risers.”
And the judge leaves. He pulls behind him his wife and his virgins, who are reluctant to go: they are held back by curiosity. How is it going to end? “Tell me, my friend: who is the sleep-murderer?” Four Eyes asks of Melkior soberly, worriedly even, having dropped his embrace. A blast of brandy shoots out of his mouth.
Melkior steps aside in disgust. He is shaking with rage.
“Mr. Adam, if you don’t lead your ape away instantly, I will thrash him!”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” ATMAN speaks up with dignity, “do you see an ape here? Pull yourself together, Mr. Melkior, if you please. We have all been roused in the middle of the night. We are all finding things a bit out of the ordinary.”
The audience is on ATMAN’S side. But Melkior is not aware of his own failure.
“This is the second time this drunkard has insulted me today. I don’t even know him.”
“Perhaps, Mr. Melkior, in a previous life?” ATMAN is being kind like a psychiatrist with a madman patient. “Never mind, eventually you will remember …” Then to the audience, “Under hypnosis, ladies and gentlemen, the soul acquires what is known as metempsychic memory. Here you have a typical example. You have just seen a hypnotized subject find the man he was searching for. In a previous life, as I said, they may well have grazed on the same meadow or, apologies to the ladies present, chased the same bitch. And now, having been reincarnated …”
“Will you stop the drivel, you ass? You read about that in the paperback you borrowed from me the other day!”
Even Melkior himself now sees he is losing. If only the judge had stayed behind: he might have been able to grasp a point or two. But these people just stare with fascination at ATMAN, the man in the know.
“There you are, gentlemen, ‘in the paperback.’ Paperbacks are just about at our level. Whereas they read about things in thick volumes. The secrets of the occult, Mr. Melkior, are to be found not in paperbacks but in here,” and the palmist tapped his forehead. “If you wish, I can lead you, too, as a medium, up and down these steps, for all your libraries. In the paperback, indeed!”
ATMAN is offended. But he is immediately rewarded by the sympathies of all those present, which after all is what he was after. The effect is complete: everyone despises Melkior and takes no pains to hide it.
But nobody notices the disappearance of the subject. Four Eyes, possibly at some secret sign from the palmist, has lost himself — simply melted away like a specter. And later on, when his disappearance is noticed, nobody believes any longer that he was there at all. They even believe that the snoring was produced by ATMAN and that the entire incident at the staircase was merely a nocturnal magic trick to surprise them, and they are grateful to him for it. They disperse with smiles, marveling at the artifice.
ATMAN, too, has made for his room downstairs, but Melkior stops him. “Just a moment, Mr. Adam.”
Turning toward Melkior, ATMAN smiles innocently.
“What was the idea of all this business with Four Eyes tonight?”
“Four Eyes? What Four Eyes?”
“Four Eyes the drunkard. You brought him here and arranged this monkey business with him. We’re alone, you can speak freely.”
“Hypnosis is monkey business? Is that the way for a psychologist to talk? You saw that nobody else understood anything. They just marveled. But you, Mr. Melkior …!”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” says Melkior almost threateningly. “Why did you bring Four Eyes here?”
“Here, you even know his name! Yet you pretended not to know him.”
“Just tell me why you brought him here.”
“Why ask me? He’s your friend, ‘Votre ami,’ am I right?”
“I heard four feet when you were going up the stairs …”
“Well, well, you are good at colorful insults! What a clever way of calling me a jackass! Four legs, huh? There, there, don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be literary about it — insult me directly. I won’t sue you.”
“I’m … I’m going to …”
“Kill me?” the palmist whispers sensuously, squinching an eye. He is offering his cheek to Melkior’s blow wholeheartedly, almost politely. It is as if he asks for nothing but being strangled by Melkior forthwith.
He is standing dreadfully close. Melkior feels some maddened cat move inside him because of that nose, those ears, those cheeks … But the eyes, the palmist’s eyes, set so close to each other under the straight line of the eyebrows, watch him from under a mask, as if through slits, with a different look, one that does not go with his words. With a distant, threatening look that “knows all” and means business.
His beast takes fright, bends its spine, curls into a cuddly ball, meows ingratiatingly.
“Why do you follow me around?” he asks of the palmist in an almost supplicating whisper, despondently.
The palmist’s eyes go mellow again, come closer, amicably, intimately touching Melkior’s with a sort of kindness.
“Tut, tut, Mr. Melkior,” ATMAN was shaking his head, “what an idea! Follow? Me follow you? Isn’t it in fact you who are the follower of certain interesting persons?”
“Follower? Of what persons?”
“Follower is a deliberately chosen word to underline a certain little idea. Follower of interesting, truly interesting persons, Mr. Melkior. I repeat — interesting.”
“You remind me of a fishmonger in my hometown. He would invent things all day long at the fish market and confound people. He ‘knew all.’”
“The fishmonger may have invented things; I do not. Try to remember, Mr. Melkior … today, this afternoon …” The palmist squinches an eye again, derisively. Then Melkior remembers. Prompted by the squinch, perhaps. He had indeed followed Dom Kuzma. So …
“So you were following me this afternoon as well?”
“Hah, you think I have nothing better to do? You’ve lost a great deal of weight lately. Do you weigh yourself every day or just now and then?”
“What concern is that of yours, damn you?” shouts Melkior, quite furious now.
“I wonder myself. What concern is it of mine? Well, I am concerned — not so much with your person as with your error. Your erroneous reckoning, that is. Circulus vitiosus, is that right? Because what’s the use of a life that you are bound to lose in another way — to disease, I mean? You saw the catechist. But he had been mortifying his body for different reasons. And even he changed his mind. He would now like to live. Too late. He had been renouncing life through penitence, whereas you, contrariwise, want to live. Which is why you’re killing yourself. I perceive the absurdity of it, that is what I have long meant to tell you.”
“I’m not killing myself in any way. This is just another of your ridiculous conjectures.”
But Melkior suddenly realizes he is defending himself, retreating. Why on earth is he letting the cad meddle in his affairs in the first place?
“And stop speculating about my private life!” he says vigorously and somehow definitively.
“Why, Mr. Melkior, it’s not your private life I’m speculating about. It’s the problem itself, the very interesting problem of saving one’s life from one peril — a grave and dreadful peril, granted — at the price of bringing on another peril which is no less grave or dreadful. You are not aware of the latter peril now — you are overpossessed by the fear of the former. I can understand a prisoner mortifying and thinning his body in order to fit it through a hole. His object is right there: getting through, and after the hole come recuperation and fattening. But what’s your hole? Where’s the hole you wish to fit through?”