"Are you ill?" I asked.
He smiled with white lips and shook his head.
"No—but it does give me a fright sometimes when I hear that noise unexpectedly.
They ran the engine of a lorry outside the house so we shouldn't hear the shots, when my father was killed in Russia.
We did hear them, though." He smiled again as if he had to apologise. "They made less bones about my'mother; they shot her in a cellar in the early morning.
My brother and I escaped at night.
We had a few diamonds.
But my brother got frozen on the way."
"What were your father and mother shot for?"
"Before the war my father commanded a Cossack regiment that had put down a rising.
He knew it was coming to him; found it quite in order, as you might say.
Not so my mother."
"And you?"
He made a tired gesture as if to wipe out the past.
"So much has happened since then."
"Yes," said I, "that's just it.
More than one human brain can cope with."
We had reached the hotel where he worked.
A large woman stepped out of a Buick and made for him with a happy cry.
She was rather fat and smartly dressed, with the slightly washed-out look of a blonde in the forties who had never had a care or an idea in all her life.
"Excuse me," said Orlow with a hardly perceptible glance. "Business—"
He bowed to the blonde woman and kissed her hand.
In "The Bar" were Valentin, Koster and Ferdinand Grau. Lenz came a bit later.
I joined them and ordered a half-bottle of rum.
I was still feeling bloody bad.
Ferdinand, broad and massive, with bloated face and perfectly clear, blue eyes, was squatting in a corner.
He had had all kinds-of drink already.
"Well, Bob, my lad," said he clapping me on the shoulder, "what's happening wkh you?" "Nothing, Ferdinand," I replied, "that's the trouble."
He looked at me awhile. "Nothing?" said he then. "Nothing?
That's a great deal.
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world."
"Bravo!" cried Lenz grinning. "Most original, Ferdinand."
"You keep quiet, Gottfried." Ferdinand turned his great head on Lenz. "A romantic like you is only a grasshopper on the verge of life.
He understands it all wrong and manufactures his sensations out of that.
You lightweight, what do you know about Nothing?"
"Enough to be content to remain a lightweight," declared Lenz. "Decent people show a proper respect for Nothing.
They don't go rooting about in it like moles."
Grau stared at him.
"Pros't," said Gottfried.
"Pros't," said Ferdinand. "Pros't, you cork."
They emptied their glasses.
"I wouldn't mind being a cork," said I, emptying my glass likewise, "the sort that does everything right and for whom everything goes right.
For a bit, at any rate."
"Apostate!" Ferdinand threw himself back in his chair so that it creaked. "Do you want to be a deserter—to betray the brotherhood?"
"No," said I, "I don't want to betray anything.
But I do want that not everything we touch should always go to pieces." '
Ferdinand leaned forward.
His big, wild face twitched.
"To compensate, you do belong to an order, brother—the order of the unsuccessful, the unsound fellows with their desires without purpose, their ambition that brings in nothing, their love without prospect, their despair without reason." He smiled. "The secret brotherhood that prefers to go under rather than make a career, that will sooner gamble, lose, trifle their life away than forget or industriously falsify the unattainable picture—the picture they carry in their hearts, brother, indelibly engraved there in the hours, the days, the nights when there was nothing but this one thing—stark living and stark dying." He held up his glass and made a sign to Fred at the bar.
"Give me something to drink."