However, don’t forget about that book.”
Sometimes he would sit with me for a long time without saying a word, just coughing and puffing out smoke continuously.
His beautiful eyes burned painfully, and I looked at him furtively, and forgot that this man, who was dying so honestly and simply, without complaint, had once been so closely related to my mother, and had insulted her.
I knew that he lived with some sort of seamstress, and thought of her with wonder and pity. How could she not shrink from embracing those lanky bones, from kissing that mouth which gave forth such an oppressive odor of putrescence?
Just like “Good Business,” my stepfather often uttered peculiarly characteristic sayings:
“I love hounds; they are stupid, but I love them.
They are very beautiful.
Beautiful women arc often stupid, too.”
I thought, not without pride:
“Ah, if he had only known Queen Margotl”
“People who live for a long time in the same house all have the same kind of face,” was one of his sayings which I wrote down in my note-book.
I listened for these sayings of his, as if they had been treats. It was pleasant to hear unusual, literary words used in a house where every one spoke a colorless language, which had hardened into well-worn, un diversified forms.
My stepfather never spoke to me of my mother; he never even uttered her name. This pleased me, and aroused in me a feeling of sympathetic consideration for him.
Once I asked him about God — I do not remember what brought up the subject. He looked at me, and said very calmly:
“I don’t know.
I don’t believe in God.”
I remembered Sitanov, and told my stepfather about him. Having listened attentively to me, he observed, still calmly:
“He was in doubt; and those who are in doubt must believe in something.
As for me, I simply do not believe!”
“But is that possible?”
“Why not?
You can see for yourself I don’t believe.”
I saw nothing, except that he was dying.
I hardly pitied him; my first feeling was one of keen and genuine interest in the nearness of a dying person, in the mystery of death.
Here was a man sitting close to me, his knee touching mine, warm, sensate, calmly regarding people in the light of their relations to himself; speaking about everything like a person who possessed power to judge and to settle affairs; in whom lay something necessary to me, or something good, blended with something unnecessary to me.
This being of incomprehensible com plexity was the receptacle of continuous whirlwinds of thought. It was not as if I were merely brought in contact with him, but it seemed as if he were part of myself, that he lived somewhere within me. I thought about him continually, and the shadow of his soul lay across mine.
And tomorrow he would disappear entirely, with all that was hidden in his head and his heart, with all that I seemed to read in his beautiful eyes.
When he went, another of the living threads which bound me to life would be snapped. His memory would be left, but that would be something finite within me, forever limited, immutable.
But that which is alive changes, progresses.
But these were thoughts, and behind them lay those inexpressible words which give birth to and nourish them, which strike to the very roots of life, demanding an answer to the question, Why?
“I shall soon have to lie by, it seems to me,” said my stepfather one rainy day. “This stupid weakness!
I don’t feel inclined to do anything.”
The next day, at the time of evening tea, he brushed the crumbs of bread from the table and from his knees with peculiar care, and brushed something invisible from his person. The old mistress, looking at him from under her brows, whispered to her daughter-in-law:
“Look at the way he is plucking at himself, and brushing himself.”
He did not come to work for two days, and then the old mistress put a large white envelope in my hand, saying:
“Here you are! A woman brought this yesterday about noon, and I forgot to give it to you.
A pretty little woman she was, but what she wants with you I can’t imagine, and that’s the truth!”
On a slip of paper with a hospital stamp, inside the envelope, was written in large characters:
“When you have an hour to spare, come and see me.
I am in the Martinovski Hospital.
“E.
M.”
The next morning I was sitting in a hospital ward on my stepfather’s bed. It was a long bed, and his feet, in gray, worn socks, stuck out through the rails.
His beautiful eyes, dully wandering over the yellow walls, rested on my face and on the small hands of a young girl who sat on a bench at the head of the bed.
Her hands rested on the pillow, and my stepfather rubbed his cheek against them, his mouth hanging open.
She was a plump girl, wearing a shiny, dark frock. The tears flowed slowly over her oval face; her wet blue eyes never moved from my stepfather’s face, with its sharp bones, large, sharp-pointed nose, and dark mouth.
“The priest ought to be here,” she whispered, “but he forbids it — he does not understand.”
And taking her hands from the pillow, she pressed them to her breast as if praying.
In a minute my stepfather came to himself, looked at the ceiling and frowned, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he stretched his lank hand toward me.
“You?