“Incidentally, the kind of death that mine will be has not been experienced by anyone, ever! Did you notice my choice of words, Eustachius, ‘to experience death’? Ha-ha, nobody can honestly say, ‘I have experienced death.’ Danton noticed it on the eve of being executed: you can’t say, ‘I was guillotined.’ But forget the guillotine — it’s so ordinary.”
Maestro fell silent and seemed to be musing about something.
“I chose my death long ago, before I sold myself to the Institute of Anatomy. (‘Sold myself’ sounds a bit prostitutional, don’t you think?) That was precisely why I sold myself: because I had chosen. What a death, Eustachius, my boy!” He was waxing ecstatic. “Nobody has ever died that way! So appropriately! So ironically triumphant. Symbolic! So complete!”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Maestro,” Melkior was anxious. “You’re not thinking of killing yourself, are you?”
“Kill myself, he says … Don’t drag me through the mud, Eustachius!” Maestro was seriously offended. “Killing oneself is for abandoned pregnant dames and spotty boys crossed in love. Also, you need equipment to kill yourself. I despise it. Maiming your body is undignified and hideous! And that’s precisely what all the suicides do: they shoot themselves in the head, slash their wrists, throats, bellies, drive knives into their hearts (even nails into their brains!), destroy internal organs using all manner of poisonous slops, drown themselves, fling their bodies from great heights, have them mangled and massacred under the wheels of an engine … Horrifying and disgusting. The vicious criminals! The perverted scum! If they didn’t do it themselves it would be necessary to put them to death for it. And rid life of those damned slaughterers and lunatics.
“No, Eustachius,” Maestro went on in a sentimental tone, “my death is going to be brand-new, medicinally pure, so to speak. No blood, no shit. You’ll see. Only I must start urinating more. Urinating harder, that is. I must switch to beer — it promotes micturition. I must begin exercising right away, ha-ha … Don’t ask questions, Eustachius the Merciful. One day this will all make sense.”
It’s revolting all the same, your medicinal purity, thought Melkior, getting up. He was disgusted by poor Maestro. Unless the man was merely dramatizing some rotten affair of his in which he would like to play a major role? A hoax. He had very nearly fallen for it. Or was it all an exercise in purposely fouling some very intimate purity? No telling what all you can find in a dustbin.
“Are you leaving me, merciful Eustachius?” and Maestro stretched out his arms after him, desperately.
“I must,” Melkior replied briefly, to break free as quickly as possible. “You’re not going upstairs, I hope?” Maestro warned him. “I don’t think the time is yet ripe.”
“No, I’m not. By the way, would you mind passing this review on to the Arts Editor? I’ve got some business to attend to elsewhere, it’s …”
“Sexual?” Maestro chortled with libertine envy. “In thy orisons be all my sins remember’d. Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe!”
Melkior almost ran toward the phone booth. It’s nearly ten! God, what if she’s out? He could not allow being rejected today. The digits were wheeling too slowly on the dial. His impatience was in a hurry to hear her voice, to expunge “the fourth ape this morning” together with that laugh of hers …
“Ambulance Service?” his voice quavered with male excitement.
“Yes, what can I do for you?” It was a man’s voice.
Of course, he’d made a mistake, he’d actually dialed the Ambulance Service, 3 instead of 4. Make the last digit 4, 4, 4!
“Hullo, Ambulance Service?”
“Yes, yesss …” Enka was laughing her familiar laugh, the beckoning one. “How serious is it?”
“Very, Enkie, very serious.” What a relief! He pounced on her voice, he sensed she was naked beneath her housecoat. “Can I come over, Enkie?” He was barely able to say the words.
“When, Kior, when can you come?” She was offering herself to him. “Can you come right now?”
“Right now, Enkie, right now!”
“Come over, Kior. I’m still in bed. I’m waiting for you, you know …”
I know, oh yes I know! Naked, warm … And the tram arrived at just the right moment. The conductor tore off his ticket with a smile. “You’re off then, eh?” his thin moustache was saying.
He let his body hang slackly, holding on to two straps, careless, sailorlike. He had surrendered to the ride. MEN’S WEAR gave him MEN SWEAR. BOOKING OFFICE: BOO KING OFF ICE. The booking office hours were part of a poster for SWAN LAKE: ENKA’S LAW, anagrammatically. And what would yield ENKA’S BODY? O’DYE’S BANK? No, there was no such name as O’Dye. Let’s see. EBONY KADS? No, it’s c-a-d-s, not k-a-d-s, and she’s Enka, not Enca. Anyway, kads or cads, it simply did not make sense.
“And what did you say?”
“I told him he was an idiot. The one Tolstoy wrote!”
The two girls exploded into laughter, enjoying themselves. The idiot. They were in love with him, both of them. Pretty, scented, dressed for town.
“I’ll go and see it in the theater next week. With him. I told him so.”
“See what?”
“The Idiot. It’s on this season.”
“I don’t really like Russian plays. They’re all about tramps waxing philosophical …”
“Did you know there’s this play where they say ‘hooker’ on stage?”
“No, actually they say ‘whore,’ ” she replied in a whisper.
“You don’t say. …” They laughed. Saying “whore” on stage was funny. Melkior jumped out before the tram had come to a stop. I expect they like the word. They use it more often than we men. They feel it more intimately. In the second act Leone says, “a common, anonymous whore.” La grande putana. Boucher’s azure-and-pink bare-bottoms. Not forgetting Dante—“donne, ch’avete inteletto d’amore!” or something — the Aristotelian quintessence of the brothel. The grain of salt in the brain of the animal designated to give pleasure. A modest dose, just enough to avoid insipidity. They then use it to produce — pohoetry! Oho-etryoho-oho-et … oho-oho et …
He bounded up the stairs, two steps, three steps at a time, hurriedly, thieflike.
This was how Raskolnikov had climbed toward Alyona’s room, with his axe beneath his coat. No, not like this: Raskolnikov climbed slowly, cautiously, listening for telltale sounds. Incidentally, there were seventy-two steps to climb. Today was the first time he had forgotten to count them. Did this mean something? ATMAN would have been able to spin some little meaning out of it. …
The seventy-second step. Coco’s brass nameplate gleamed with hospitable welcome to the old acquaintance and … household friend, he added hesitatingly. M.D., Professor, surgeon … He felt respect before the gravity of the profession. It was she who first called him Coco, he hastily said in his own defense at the door. He pressed the bell, long-short-long, a long-arranged Morse K. For Kior, as she called him. But the door had been awaiting him impatiently — ajar.
“Kior,” Enka crooned, stretching herself. “Lock it on the inside.” He had already done so, automatically, out of habit.
She was lying in the spacious double bed, her hands under her head, her breasts uncovered as far as the teasing border, in refined style. She was smiling a come-to-me smile.
He threw himself on her as he was, fully dressed …