Invitation to a Beheading (13 page)

Now newspapers were no longer brought to the cell: having noticed that everything that might have any connection with the execution was clipped out, Cincinnatus himself had declined to receive them. Breakfast had grown simpler: instead of chocolate—albeit weak chocolate—he would receive some slop with a flotilla of tea leaves; the toast was so hard he could not bite through it. Rodion made no secret of the fact that he had grown bored with serving the silent and fastidious prisoner.

He would deliberately busy himself for a longer and longer time in the cell. His flame-red beard, the imbecile azure of his eyes, his leather apron, his clawlike hands—all this accumulated through repetition to form such a depressing,
tedious impression that Cincinnatus would turn away toward the wall while the cleaning was in progress.

And that is how it was this day—only the return of the chair, with the deep imprints of bulldog teeth on the top edge of its straight back, served as a distinguishing feature for the day’s beginning. Together with the chair Rodion brought a note from M’sieur Pierre; a fleecily curling script, elegant punctuation marks, signature like a seven-veil dance. In jocular and kindly words his neighbor thanked him for yesterday’s friendly chat and expressed hope that it would be repeated shortly. “Let me assure you,” thus ended the note, “that I am physically very, very strong [twice underlined with a ruler], and if you are still not convinced of this, I shall be honored some time to show you certain further interesting [underlined] demonstrations of agility and astounding muscular development.”

After this, for two hours, with imperceptible intervals of mournful torpor, Cincinnatus, now pinching at his mustache, now flipping the pages of a book, walked about the cell. He had by now made a completely precise study of it—he knew it much better than, for instance, the room where he had lived for many years.

This is how matters stood with the walls: their number was unalterably four; they were painted a uniform yellow; but, because of the shadow covering it, the basic hue seemed dark and smooth, claylike as it were, in comparison with that shifting spot where the bright ochre reflection of the window spent the day: here, in the light, all the small protuberances of the thick yellow paint were in evidence-even the wavy curve of the tracings left by the joint passage of brush hairs—and there was the familiar scratch
which the precious parallelogram of sunlight would reach at ten in the morning.

A creeping, heel-clutching chill rose from the dusky stone floor; an underdeveloped, mean little echo inhabited some part of the slightly concave ceiling, with a light (wire-enclosed) in its center—no, that is, not quite in the center: a flaw that agonizingly irritated the eye—and, in this sense, no less agonizing was the unsuccessful attempt to paint over the iron door.

Of the three items of furniture—cot, table, chair—only the last was movable. The spider also moved. Up above, where the sloping window recess began, the well-nourished black beastie had found points of support for a first-rate web with the same resourcefulness as Marthe displayed when she would find, in what seemed the most unsuitable corner, a place and a method for hanging out laundry to dry. Its paws folded so that the furry elbows stuck out at the sides, it would gaze with round hazel eyes at the hand with the pencil extended toward it, and would begin to back away, without taking its eyes off it. It was most eager however, to take a fly, or a moth from the large fingers of Rodion—and now, for example, in the southwest part of the web there hung a butterfly’s orphaned hind wing, cherry-red, with a silky shading, and with blue lozenges along its crenelated edge. It stirred slightly in a delicate draft.

The inscriptions on the walls had by now been wiped away. The list of rules likewise had disappeared. Also taken away—or perhaps broken—was the classic pitcher with spelaean water in its resonant depths. All was bare, redoubtable, and cold in this chamber where the prisonlike character was suppressed by the neutrality of a waiting room—
whether office, hospital or some other kind—when it is already getting to be evening, and one hears only the humming in one’s ears … and the horror of this waiting was somehow connected with the incorrectly located center of the ceiling.

Library volumes, in black shoe-leatherlike bindings, lay on the table, which had been covered for some time already with a checkered oilcloth. The pencil, which had lost its slender length and was well chewed, rested on violently scribbled pages, stacked windmill fashion. Here also had been thrown a letter to Marthe, completed by Cincinnatus the day before, that is, the day after the interview: but he could not make up his mind to send it, and had therefore let it lie a while, as though expecting from the thing itself that fruition which his irresolute thoughts, in need of another climate, simply could not achieve.

The subject will now be the precious quality of Cincinnatus; his fleshy incompleteness; the fact that the greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here—a poor, vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble and foolish as people are in their sleep. But even during this sleep—still, still—his real life showed through too much.

Cincinnatus’s face, grown transparently pallid, with fuzz on its sunken cheeks and a mustache with such a delicate hair texture that it seemed to be actually a bit of disheveled sunlight on his upper lip; Cincinnatus’s face, small and still young despite all the torments, with gliding eyes, eerie eyes of changeable shade, was, in regard to its expression, something absolutely inadmissible by the standards of his
surroundings, especially now, when he had ceased to dissemble. The open shirt, the black dressing grown that kept flying open, the oversize slippers on his slender feet, the philosopher’s skullcap on the top of his head and the ripple (there was a draft coming from somewhere after all!) running through the transparent hair on his temples completed a picture, the full indecency of which it is difficult to put into words—produced as it was of a thousand barely noticeable, overlapping trifles: of the light outline of his lips, seemingly not quite fully drawn but touched by a master of masters; of the fluttering movements of his empty, not-yet-shaded-in hands; of the dispersing and again gathering rays in his animated eyes; but even all of this, analyzed and studied, still could not fully explain Cincinnatus: it was as if one side of his being slid into another dimension, as all the complexity of a tree’s foliage passes from shade into radiance, so that you cannot distinguish just where begins the submergence into the shimmer of a different element. It seemed as though at any moment, in the course of his movements about the limited space of the haphazardly invented cell, Cincinnatus would step in such a way as to slip naturally and effortlessly through some chink of the air into its unknown coulisses to disappear there with the same easy smoothness with which the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror moves across every object in the room and suddenly vanishes, as if beyond the air, in some new depth of ether. At the same time, everything about him breathed with a delicate, drowsy, but in reality exceptionally strong, ardent and independent life: his veins of the bluest blue pulsated; crystal-clear saliva moistened his lips; the skin quivered on his cheeks and his forehead,
which was edged with dissolved light … and all this so teased the observer as to make him long to tear apart, cut to shreds, destroy utterly this brazen elusive flesh, and all that it implied and expressed, all that impossible, dazzling freedom—enough, enough—do not walk any more, Cincinnatus, lie down on your cot, so you will not arouse, will not irritate … And in truth Cincinnatus would become aware of the predatory eye in the peephole following him and lie down or sit at the table and open a book.

The black pile of books on the table consisted of the following: first, a contemporary novel that Cincinnatus had not bothered to read during his period of existence at liberty; second, one of those anthologies, published in countless editions with condensed rehashes of and excerpts from ancient literature; third, bound issues of an old magazine; fourth, several bedraggled little volumes of a work in an unknown tongue, brought him by mistake—he had not ordered them.

The novel was the famous
Quercus
, and Cincinnatus had already read a good third of it, or about a thousand pages. Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak. At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least.

The idea of the novel was considered to be the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree (growing lone and mighty at the edge of a canyon at whose bottom the waters never ceased to din), the author unfolded all the historic events—or shadows of events—of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue
between two warriors dismounted from their steeds—one dappled, the other dun—so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm’s blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now, upon a spread cloak a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now a brief drama in the life of some villagers. There was a paragraph a page and a half long in which all the words began with “p.”

It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light. The normal periods of inaction were filled with scientific descriptions of the oak itself, from the viewpoints of dendrology, ornithology, coleopterology, mythology—or popular descriptions, with touches of folk humor. Among other things there was a detailed list of all the initials carved in the bark with their interpretations. And, finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behavior of the weather.

Cincinnatus read for a while and laid it aside. This work was unquestionably the best that his age had produced; yet he overcame the pages with a melancholy feeling, plodded through the pages with dull distress, and kept drowning out the tale in the stream of his own meditation: what matters to me all this, distant, deceitful and dead—I, who am preparing to die? Or else he would begin imagining how the author, still a young man, living, so they said, on an island in the North Sea—would be dying himself; and it
was somehow funny that eventually the author must needs die—and it was funny because the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author’s physical death.

The light would move along the wall. Rodion would appear with what he called frühstück. Again a butterfly wing would slide between his fingers, leaving colored powder on them.

“Can it be that
he
has not arrived yet?” asked Cincinnatus; it was already not the first time he had asked this question, which greatly angered Rodion, and again he did not reply.

“And another interview—will they grant me that?” asked Cincinnatus.

In anticipation of the usual heartburn he lay down on the cot and, turning toward the wall, for a long, long time helped patterns form on it, from tiny blobs of the glossy paint and their round little shadows; he would discover, for example, a diminutive profile with a large mouselike ear; then he would lose it and was unable to reconstruct it. This cold ochre smelled of the grave, it was pimply and horrible, yet his gaze still persisted in selecting and correlating the necessary little protuberances—so starved he was for even a vague semblance of a human face. Finally he turned over, lay on his back and, with the same attention began to examine the shadows and cracks on the ceiling.

“Anyway, they have succeeded in softening me,” mused Cincinnatus. “I have grown so limp and soggy that they will be able to do it with a fruit knife.”

For some time he sat on the edge of the cot, his hands
compressed between his knees, all hunched over. Letting out a shuddering sigh he began again to roam. It is interesting, though, in what language this is written. The small, crowded, ornate type, with dots and squiggles within the sickle-shaped letters, seemed to be oriental—it was somehow reminiscent of the inscriptions on museum daggers. Such old little volumes, with their faded pages … some tinged with tawny blotches.

The clock struck seven, and shortly Rodion appeared with dinner.

“You are sure
he
still has not come?” asked Cincinnatus.

Rodion was about to leave, but turned on the threshold.

“Shame on you,” he said with a sob in his voice, “day and night you do nothing … a body feeds you here, tends you lovingly, wears himself out for your sake, and all you do is ask stupid questions. For shame, you thankless man …”

Time, humming evenly, continued to pass. The air in the cell grew dark, and when it had become quite dense and dull, the light came on in business-like fashion in the center of the ceiling—no, not quite in the center, that was just it—an agonizing reminder. Cincinnatus undressed and got in bed with
Quercus
. The author was already getting to the civilized ages, to judge by the conversation of three merry wayfarers, Tit, Pud, and the Wandering Jew who were taking swigs of wine from their flasks on the cool moss beneath the black vespertine oak.

“Will no one save me?” Cincinnatus suddenly asked aloud and sat up on the bed (opening his pauper’s hands, showing that he had nothing).

“Can it be that no one will?” repeated Cincinnatus,
gazing at the implacable yellowness of the walls and still holding up his empty palms.

The draft became a leafy breeze. From the dense shadows above there fell and bounced on the blanket a large dummy acorn, twice as large as life, splendidly painted a glossy buff, and fitting its cork cup as snugly as an egg.