Until he was fifteen, Peters held his grandmother’s hand when they walked on the street. First she supported him and then vice versa. At home they played dominoes and solitaire. Peters used a jigsaw. He wasn’t a good student. Before dying, his grandmother got Peters into a library school and willed him to protect his throat and wash his hands thoroughly.
The day she was buried the ice broke on the Neva River.
In the library where Peters worked, the women were not attractive. And he liked attractive women. But what could he offer such a woman, if he ever met one? A pink belly and tiny eyes? If only he were a brilliant conversationalist, if only he knew German well; but no, all he remembered from his childhood was Karlsruhe. But in his imagination he has an affair with a gorgeous woman. While she does this and that, he reads Schiller out loud to her. In the original. Or Holderlin. She doesn’t understand a word, naturally, nor could she, but that’s not important; what’s important is how he reads—with inspiration, with a musical ripple in his voice… Holding the book close to his nearsighted eyes… No, no, of course he’ll get contact lenses. Though they say they pinch. So, here he is reading. “Drop the book,” she says. Kisses, tears, and the dawn, the dawn… And the contacts pinch. He’ll blink and squint and poke his fingers in his eyes…. She’ll wait a bit and then say, “Just peel those damned bits of glass off, good lord!” And get up and slam the door.
No. This is better. A sweet, quiet blonde. Her head on his shoulder. He is reading Holderlin out loud. Maybe Schiller. Dark forests, mermaids… He’s reading and reading, his mouth is dried out. She’ll yawn and say, “Good lord, how long am I supposed to listen to this stuff?”
No, that wouldn’t do, either.
What if he left out the German? Without the German, it could go something like this: a knockout woman, like a leopard. And he’s like a tiger. Have to have ostrich feathers, a lithe silhouette on the couch…. (Have it slipcovered.) The silhouette, then. The cushions fall to the floor. And the dawn, the dawn… Maybe I’ll even marry her. Why not? Peters looked at his reflection in the mirror, the fat nose, the eyes rolling with passion, the soft flat feet. And so what? He looked a bit like a polar bear, women ought to like that and be pleasantly frightened. Peters blew at himself in the mirror to cool off. But neither friendships nor affairs happened.
Peters tried going to dances, stumbling about, panting, and stepping on young ladies’ feet: he would approach a group of laughing and chatting people, clasp his hands behind his back, tilt his head to one side, and listen to the conversation. It was getting dark, August was blowing cool air from the stiff bushes, sprinkling the red dust of the last rays over the black foliage and the park’s paths; lights went on in the stalls and kiosks selling wine and meat, and Peters went past severely holding on to his wallet, but unable to resist the wave of hunger that engulfed him, bought a half dozen pastries, went off to the side, and in the gathered darkness hurriedly consumed them from the glinting metal plate. When he came out of the darkness, blinking, licking his lips, with white cream on his chin, and mustered his courage, he approached people and introduced himself— blindly, headlong, seeing nothing out of fear, clicking the heels of his flat feet—and women recoiled and men intended to punch him, but took a closer look and changed their minds.
No one wanted to play with him.
At home Peters beat egg yolks and sugar for his throat, washed and dried the glass, then set his slippers neatly on the bedside rug, got into bed, stretching his arms out on top of the covers, and lay motionless, staring into the twilit, pulsating ceiling until sleep came for him.
Sleep came, invited him into its loopholes and corridors, made dates on secret stairways, locked the doors and rebuilt familiar houses, frightening him with trunks and women and bubonic plagues and black diamonds, quickly led him along dark passages, and pushed him into a stuffy room where a man sat at a table twiddling his thumbs, shaggy and laughing mockingly, knowledgeable in many nasty things.
Peters thrashed in his sheets, begged forgiveness, and forgiven this time, once again plunged to the bottom until morning, confused in the reflections of the crooked mirrors of the magic theater.
When a new person appeared in the library, dark and perfumed, in a berry-colored dress, Peters grew agitated. He went to the barber and had his colorless hair cut, then swept his apartment an extra time, and switched the chest of drawers and armchair around. Not that he expected Faina to come over right away; but just in case, Peters had to be ready.
At work there was a New Year’s party, and Peters bustled about, cutting out snowflakes the size of saucers and pasting them on the library windows, hanging pink crepe paper, getting tangled in foil icicles, the small Christmas tree lights were reflected in his rolling eyes, it smelled of pine and garlic, and dry snow came through the open window. He thought: if she has, say, a fiance, I could come over to him, quietly take him by the hand and ask in a regular, man-to-man way: leave Faina, leave her for me, what’s it to you, you can find someone else for yourself, you know how to do it. But I don’t, my mother ran off with a scoundrel, my father’s floating in the sky with blue women, Grandmother ate Grandfather with the rice porridge, ate my childhood, my only childhood, and girls with warts don’t want to sit on the couch with me. Come on, give me something, huh?
The burning candles stood, chest-high in translucent apple light, a promise of goodness and peace, the pink-yellow flame nodded its head, champagne fizzed, Faina sang to guitar accompaniment, Dostoevsky’s picture on the wall averted its eyes; then they told fortunes, opening Pushkin at random. Peters got: “Adele, love my reed.” They laughed at him and asked him to introduce them to Adele; they forgot about it, talking on their own, and he sat quietly in the corner, crunching on cake, figuring out how he would see Faina home. As the party broke up, he ran after her to the coat room, held her fur coat in outstretched arms, watched her change shoes, putting her foot in colored stocking into the cozy fur-lined boot, wrapping a white scarf around her head, and hoisting her bag on her shoulder— everything excited him. She slammed the door, and he saw only her—she waved a mitten, jumped into the trolley, and vanished in the white blizzard. But even that was like a promise.
Triumphant bells rang in his ears, and his eye saw what had previously been invisible. All roads led to Faina, all winds trumpeted her glory, shouted out her dark name, whirled over the steep slate roofs, over towers and spires, snaked in snowy strands and threw themselves at her feet, and the whole city, all the islands and the water and embankments, statues and gardens, bridges and fences, wrought-iron roses and horses, everything blended into a circle, weaving a rattling winter wreath for his beloved.
He could never manage to be alone with her and he sought her out on the street, but she always whizzed past him like the wind, a ball, a snowball thrown by a strong arm. And her friend who looked in at the library in the evenings was horrible, impossible, like a toothache—an outgoing journalist, all creaking leather, long-legged, long-haired, full of international jokes about a Russian, a German, and a Pole measuring the fatness of their women and the Russian winning. The journalist wrote an article in the paper, where he lied and said that “it is always very crowded at the stands with books on beet raising” and that “visitors call librarian Faina A. the pilot of the sea of books.”
Faina laughed, happy to be in the newspaper, Peters suffered in silence. He kept mustering his strength to at last take her by the hand, lead her to his house, and after a session of passion discuss their future life together.