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The doorknob creaked timidly, the flame of the runny candle tilted, and he hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the pollen of the frosty, starry night.
Martin placed his hand on my shoulder, gave me such a shake that, had I been an apple tree in the garden, the apples would literally have come tumbling off me,
It was necessary to shut the window: rain was striking the sill and splashing the parquet and armchairs.
and for an instant poured his damp fingers into my hand and gave it a shake.
And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards.
When thinking in passing about Pal Palych, I had the impression for some reason that he had not only a dark-blond mustache but even a matching little beard. An imaginary beard is a characteristic of many Russian faces.
I cannot live without you. That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. He’ll give me a divorce right away. And then, say in the fall, we could …’ I interrupted you with my silence. A spot of sunlight slid from your skirt onto the sand as you moved slightly away.
A bat darted above the rose-colored mirror surface. The reflection of the foliage looked like black lace. Pal Palych, from afar, was shouting something, beckoning with his hand. A second Pal Palych quivered in the black ripples. Laughing aloud, I pushed away from the handrail.
Countless ski tracks flowed like shadowy hair down the shoulders of the snowy hills.
‘Biblical God … Gaseous vertebrate … I am not a believer.’ ‘That’s from Huxley,’
Kern dashed off with a splashlike gesture of his hands. Monfiori’s gaze came unstuck with what seemed like a smack.
In a wink the square of black night in the window opening filled and came aboil with solid, boisterous fur.
We hurtle into a black chasm and speed with a hollow din far underground, hanging on to leather straps. With a pop the amber lamps are extinguished for an instant, during which flimsy globules burn with a hot light in the dark – the bulging eyes of demons, or perhaps our fellow passengers’ cigars.
The wind comes rumbling upon me from behind like a limp doll and tickles my neck with its downy paw.
Today I understood the beauty of intersecting wires in the sky, and the hazy mosaic of factory chimneys, and this rusty tin with its inside-out, semidetached, serrated lid. The wan grass hurries, hurries somewhere along the dusty billows of the vacant lot.
At present, he felt his life wasting away. Too-frequent sniffs of cocaine had ravaged his mind; the little sores on the inside of his nostrils were eating into the septum.
The Princess moved a little closer and went on, in a clear, slightly lilting voice, without sadness, for she knew that happy things can only be spoken of in a happy way, without grieving because they have vanished:
The Princess was dozing, her open mouth a black cave.
I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.
and among the dark houses on the opposite side of the empty street a night echo clop-clopped in time with his footfalls;
where, in the daytime, shirts, crucified on sun-bright clotheslines, shone through the lilac bushes.
Bashful, quiet Simpson, who was seated between McGore and his wife, had put his large fork to work prematurely during the second course when he should have used the small one, so that he had only the small fork and a large knife for the meat course, and now, as he manipulated them, one of his hands had a kind of limp. When the main course was brought around the second time, he helped himself out of nervousness, then noticed he was the only one eating and everyone was waiting impatiently for him to finish.
and began slowly reddening. He had already come ablaze several times during dinner, not because he actually had something to be ashamed about, but because he thought how he might blush for no reason, and then the pink blood colored his cheeks, his forehead, even his neck, and it was no more possible to halt that blind, agonizing, hot flush than to confine the emerging sun behind its cloud.
had a very funny small rounded blue chin that resembled a sea urchin.
Bachmann would walk onstage rapidly, as if escaping from an enemy or simply from irksome hands. Ignoring the audience, he would hurry up to the piano and, bending over the round stool, would begin tenderly turning the wooden disc of the seat, seeking a certain mathematically precise level.
Fashion breathes through the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion’s breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances.
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously
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I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
With a decrepit kind of circumspection, a wrinkly flat head and two totally useless paws emerge in slow motion from under the two-hundred-pound dome. And with its thick, spongy tongue, suggesting somehow that of a cacological idiot slackly vomiting his monstrous speech, the turtle sticks its head into a heap of wet vegetables and messily munches their leaves.
It was in the foreign city I reached next day that I was to have my encounter with supreme terror. To begin with, I slept badly for three nights in a row and did not sleep at all during the fourth. In recent years I had lost the habit of solitude, and now those solitary nights caused me acute unrelieved anguish.
And I know that my brain is doomed, that the terror I experienced once, the helpless fear of existing, will sometime overtake me again, and that then there will be no salvation.
detest rising early: for me the most ravishing dawn in the world cannot replace the hours of delicious morning sleep;
Now he tried to picture her face, but his thoughts obstinately refused to take on color, and he simply could not gather in a living optical image what he knew in his mind:
and the light (which he had quite forgotten to turn off) lent a pale gloss to his sweaty forehead.
Actually he was a pessimist and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.
He felt the tickling vacuum that always accompanied the urge to write. In this vacuum something was taking shape, growing.
When finally Sommer said that on the fourth he would give a definite answer, Pilgram decided that the dream of his life was about to break at last from its old crinkly cocoon.
With perfect good sense he could be called a ‘busy man,’ for the subject of his occupation was his own soul
Henceforth he began to fear everything – the lift, a draft, builders’ scaffolds, the traffic, demonstrators, a truck-mounted platform for the repairing of trolley wires, the colossal dome of the gashouse that might explode right when he passed by on his way to the post office,
and poor Graf explained this sympathy by assuming his neighbor to be a businessman of no culture, remote from literature and other mountain resorts of the human spirit,
a small, dark woman with a rash on her forehead – and Ilya Borisovich paced his study in circles, and the circles would tighten around her at the approach of this or that spectacular passage.
As he watched the boy’s ears, edged with fair down, he tried to imagine the degree of tedium and detestation he must arouse in David, and this distressed him. He saw himself from the outside – a blotchy complexion, a feu du rasoir rash, a shiny black jacket, stains on its sleeve cuffs – and caught his own falsely animated tone, the throat-clearing noises he made, and even that sound which could not reach David – the blundering but dutiful beat of his long-ailing heart.
first of all, to introduce myself, so that my visual image may show through like a watermark; this is much more honest than to encourage by silence the incorrect conclusions that the eye involuntarily draws from the calligraphy of penned lines. No, in spite of my slender handwriting and the youthful flourish of my commas, I am stout and middle-aged; true, my corpulence is not flabby, but has piquancy, zest, waspishness.
The peasant boys, per contra, kept floundering till complete exhaustion; finally, shivering, with chattering teeth and a turbid snot trail from nostril to lip, they would hop on one foot to pull their pants up to their wet thighs.
They stood, as happens in such cases, both singly and together, in a kind of grief-stricken expectation, while the humble ritual, punctuated by the secular stir of the boughs overhead, ran its course.
Again and again she hurriedly appeared in the margins of my life, without influencing in the least its basic text.
A moth dashed about the ceiling, hobnobbing with its shadow.
Timorous rumor has it that he himself is not loath to pay an occasional visit to the torture chamber, but there is probably no truth in this: the postmaster general does not distribute the mail himself, nor is the secretary of the navy necessarily a crack swimmer.
For two hours the enormous voice thundered throughout our city, erupting with varying degrees of force from this or that window, so that, if you walk along a street (which, by the way, is deemed a dangerous discourtesy: sit and listen), you have the impression that he accompanies you, crashing down from the rooftops, squirming on all fours between your legs, and sweeping up again to peck at your head, cackling, cawing, and quacking in a caricature of human speech, and you have no place to hide from the Voice, and the same thing is going on in every city and village of my successfully stunned
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but it always, always happened that the scarf would soon get soiled, the pen broken, despite the meticulous, even pious, care he took of things.
