Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson

An Interview with Jacques Derrida

on the Limits of Digestion

Your lecture this year was entitled “The Tropes of Cannibalism.” Could you say a bit about the basic ideas of the lecture?

In Glas, my work on Hegel, I had already become interested in the figures of incorporation that are to be found in speculative thought—the very notion of comprehending as a kind of incorporation. The concept of “Erinnerung,” which means both memory and interiorization, plays a key role in Hegel’s philosophy. Spirit incorporates history by assimilating, by remembering its own past. This assimilation acts as a kind of sublimated eating—spirit eats everything that is external and foreign, and thereby transforms it into something internal, something that is its own. Everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive system—nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism. The figures of incorporation in hermeneutics and speculative philosophy are what I call the “tropes of cannibalism.” Nowhere is this clearer than in Hegel, but these tropes are at work everywhere in Western thought. Eating is, after all, the great mystery of Christianity, the transubstantiation occurs in the act of incorporation itself: bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ. But it is not simply God’s body that is incorporated via a mystical eating—it is also his words.

Do you think that interpretation of the Scriptures—biblical hermeneutics—is also a kind of sublimated eating?

Yes, by analogy with the assimilation of the body of Christ in the Holy Communion. It is overarching figures and connections of this sort that I’m trying to map out. Eating God’s words constitutes a parallel to the Holy Sacrament—here too, a divine transubstantiation takes place. And that has left its mark on modern hermeneutics, which of course has its roots in biblical interpretation: little wonder that Gadamer’s philosophy is so marked by terms taken from digestion, that he is such a gluttonous thinker. His hermeneutics is, after all, precisely about assimilating that which is foreign. What is radically alien in the other doesn’t have a chance—it will be digested, melted down in the great tradition, wolfed down mercilessly.

But I would like to point out that this relationship between understanding and eating is in no way specific to a given current in the thought of the West, but can more accurately be regarded as a cultural a priori.

In what sense is this a cultural phenomenon? How different is man’s way of eating from that of animals?

Hegel draws a distinction between man’s relation to the world and animals’ relation to the world as two different forms of eating. Animals have a negative relation to the object because they simply swallow it. Human negativity, however, is reflected: man does not in fact devour the object, but rather incorporates it abstractly, and thereby creates the inner space that is the subject. It is a variation on the old humanist song and dance.

I have become increasingly interested in the philosophical border between man and animal, which also becomes an examination of the traditional boundary between culture and nature. I have chosen to tackle this issue via the thinkers who seem to have questioned the self-sufficiency of humanism most deeply: Heidegger and Lévinas. Despite their critique of a traditional concept of the subject, they remain humanists by insisting on an absolute distinction between humans and animals. The establishment of man’s privileged position requires the sacrifice and devouring of animals. Not even Lévinas is willing to sacrifice the sacrifice.

But in Heidegger, the interpretative act is surely not about interiorizing or incorporating, right?

No, not in any simple way, given that he dissolved the idea of a subjective interiority. But the difference itself between what is one’s own and what is foreign remains—understanding is still an assimilation. Heidegger is not as voracious a philosopher as Hegel; not everything for him can be assimilated. What Heidegger calls the “ontological difference” between “being” (Sein) and “beings” (Seienden)—which is of course the very essence of his philosophy—indicates such a limit. Being always remains inaccessible. Being is never given as a being, a thing in the world that can be named and captured with the question What? Being transcends beings—it evades linguistic naming.

So you take Heidegger’s ontological difference to be the boundary between what can be eaten and what cannot be eaten?

Yes, exactly. The ontological difference is the boundary between what can be assimilated and what is already presupposed in all assimilation, but which itself is inaccessible. This is the most profound and most difficult to comprehend movement in the Heideggerian concept of being. Being makes beings accessible in the world, yet itself withdraws. This movement is what Heidegger called das Ereignis—the event (or “the coming-about”).

But as far as Heidegger’s qualified humanism is concerned, which transfers the specifically human from man’s interior to his hand, the boundary between human and animal still remains something which is impossible to call into question. It is not a traditional humanism, but a determination of the location—the place (Dasein) where meaning can be received. The location is not explicitly determined as Man, but Heidegger nonetheless provides a description of this place that excludes animals. Only man has hands, says Heidegger, and, through the hand, he has access to a world of meaningful action. The ape, however, possesses only “Greifsorgane” (organs for grasping) and is therefore excluded from the realm of the human. This distinction between hand and organ for grasping is not something Heidegger arrived at by studying apes in the Black Forest, but rather has a purely stipulative character. Here, as always, humanism rests on the sacrifice of the animal, on the implicit swallowing up of the animal.

Does the symbolic eating always remain an invisible precondition of thought? Or does this set of metaphors become apparent within the work of certain poets or artists?

Yes, of course. I recently saw Peter Greenaway’s film about the cook and the thief—in this, I found a cannibalistic structure of sacrifice that I have seen elsewhere. It is a frightfully clear film. Also, my last three seminars have been dedicated to a fragment of Novalis, in whom one really can find everything. He links the sublime mystery of the Holy Communion to the most base expression of a cannibalistic incorporation of the friend’s body. What matters is “to enjoy, with bold, supersensual imagination, his flesh in every bite, and his blood in every gulp.”

And one can encounter an equally astonishing and explicitly worded insight in Kleist’s “Penthesilea,” where a cannibalistic desire can freely find expression. To love without wanting to devour must surely be anorexic . . .

What are you working on these days?

I am currently focused on the ritual practices that express a culture’s view of food: what one is allowed to eat, what one is not allowed to eat. The various views that different cultures have on excrement—the scatological rites—belong to this complex as well, of course. I am currently working my way through a vast amount of anthropological material, and am reading theoretical studies related to the perception of eating and defecation—Frazer, Freud, Bataille, and others.

It is a study of more concrete cultural phenomena than those I had worked on earlier. Previously, I documented in great detail the tropes of incorporation in Hegelian discourse. I did this, as I mentioned, in Glas. and it was also done by Werner Hamacher in Pleroma, with which you are probably familiar. I have looked for similar figures in other philosophies and theoretical discourses as well. In my foreword to Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham’s study on the Wolf Man, I analyzed ingestion in Freud’s theories of mourning and melancholy. And in my text “Economimesis,” I have tried to show how a concept of economy acquired from digestion governs the view of the beautiful in Kantian aesthetics. While the beautiful is a name for the balanced and harmonious metabolism, the closed economy remains threatened from within by disgust, and this analytic of the beautiful falls apart when it reaches the point of disgust and vomiting—a point at which the economy reaches its limit in terms of what is absolutely inassimilable.

As you can see, the actual interest in the metaphor of digestion in speculative thought is nothing new for me—it was twenty years ago that I wrote Glas. What I’m doing now is broadening the field of research from the philosophical and speculative to the more generally cultural.

[Our conversation is interrupted when the phone rings. Derrida returns after a few minutes with a smile on his face. It was his friend Emmanuel Lévinas.]

It’s always the same thing. He always thinks I am going to hang up before the conversation is over, and constantly interrupts with anxious exclamations: hello, hello! He who talks about faith in the other . . .

[Derrida now begins discussing his relationship with Lévinas. He emphasizes Lévinas’ deep originality, but also points out what is problematic in his humanism.]

Lévinas, more than anyone else, has emphasized the sovereign inaccessibility of the other. The other can never be understood as presence, but only with concepts like traces and exteriority. He has completely broken with the phenomenological metaphysics of presence—the other can never be understood in a theoretical act, but only by means of ethical responsibility: I take responsibility for the other. But this responsibility applies only to the other human being—Lévinas’ humanism is based on an exclusion of the animal, just as in Heidegger. The biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” applies to humans, but leaves out animals. Our culture rests on a structure of sacrifice. We are all mixed up in an eating of flesh—real or symbolic. In the past, I have spoken about the West’s phallic “logocentrism.” Now I would like to broaden this with the prefix carno- (flesh): “carnophallogocentrism.” We are all—vegetarians as well—carnivores in the symbolic sense.

How is this massive project on eating related to deconstruction, as we have come to know it? If understanding can be compared to a kind of eating, what would a deconstructionist reading of a text be?

It would mean respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated. My thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety the same schema as my theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written.

This conversation took place on October 25, 1990. A portion of the text was previously published in the Swedish newspaper Expressen (February 15, 1991).

-- Sounds --

by Vladimir Nabokov

It was necessary to shut the window: rain was striking the sill and splashing the parquet and armchairs. With a fresh, slippery sound, enormous silver specters sped through the garden, through the foliage, along the orange sand. The drainpipe rattled and choked. You were playing Bach. The piano had raised its lacquered wing, under the wing lay a lyre, and little hammers were rippling across the strings. The brocade rug, crumpling into coarse folds, had slid partway off the piano's tail, dropping an opened opus onto the floor. Every now and then, through the frenzy of the fugue, your ring would clink on the keys as, incessantly, magnificently, the June shower slashed the windowpanes. And you, without interrupting your playing, and slightly tilting your head, were exclaiming, in time to the beat, "The rain, the rain. . . I am go-ing to drown it out. . . ."
But you could not.
Abandoning the albums that lay on the table like velvet coffins, I watched you and listened to the fugue, the rain. A feeling of freshness welled in me like the fragrance of wet carnations that trickled down everywhere, from the shelves, from the piano's wing, from the oblong diamonds of the chandelier.
I had a feeling of enraptured equilibrium as I sensed the musical relationship between the silvery specters of rain and your inclined shoulders, which would give a shudder when you pressed your fingers into the rippling luster. And when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that--homogeneous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you. . . All was unified, equivalent, divine. You got up. Rain was still mowing down the sunlight. The puddles looked like holes in the dark sand, apertures onto some other heavens that were gliding past underground. On a bench, glistening like Danish china, lay your forgotten racquet; the strings had turned brown from the rain, and the frame had twisted into a figure eight.
When we entered the lane, I felt a bit giddy from the motley of shadows and the aroma of mushroom rot.
I recall you within a chance patch of sunlight. You had sharp elbows and pale, dusty-looking eyes. When you spoke, you would carve the air with the riblike edge of your little hand and the glint of a bracelet on your thin wrist. Your hair would melt as it merged with the sunlit air that quivered around it. You smoked copiously and nervously. You exhaled through both nostrils, obliquely flicking off the ash. Your dove-gray manor was five versts from ours. Its interior was reverberant, sumptuous, and cool. A photograph of it had appeared in a glossy metropolitan magazine. Almost every morning, I would leap onto the leather wedge of my bicycle and rustle along the path, through the woods, then along the highway and through the village, then along another path toward you. You counted on your husband's not coming in September. And we feared nothing, you and I--not your servants' gossip, not my family's suspicions. Each of us, in a different way, trusted fate.
Your love was a bit muted, as was your voice. One might say you loved askance, and you never spoke about love. You were one of those habitually untalkative women, to whose silence one immediately grows accustomed. But now and then something in you burst forth. Then your giant Bechstein would thunder, or else, gazing mistily straight ahead, you would tell me hilarious anecdotes you had heard from your husband or from his regimental comrades. I remember your hands-- elongated, pale hands with bluish veins.
On that happy day when the rain was lashing and you played so unexpectedly well came the resolution of the nebulous something that had imperceptibly arisen between us after our first weeks of love. I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean and the long golden drops rustling and pattering in the lane. I glanced at a birch tree's shiny bark and suddenly felt that, in place of arms, I possessed inclined branches covered with little wet leaves and, instead of legs, a thousand slender roots, twining into the earth, imbibing it. I wanted to transfuse myself thus into all of nature, to experience what it was like to be an old boletus mushroom with its spongy yellow underside, or a dragonfly, or the solar sphere. I felt so happy that I suddenly burst out laughing, and kissed you on the clavicle and nape. I would even have recited a poem to you, but you detested poetry.
You smiled a thin smile and said, "It's nice after the rain." Then you thought for a minute and added, "You know, I just remembered-- I've been invited to tea today at. . . what's his name. . . Pal Palych's. He's a real bore. But, you know, I must go."
Pal Palych was an old acquaintance of mine. We would be fishing together and, all of a sudden, in a creaky little tenor, he would break into "The Evening Bells." I was very fond of him. A fiery drop fell from a leaf right onto my lips. I offered to accompany you.
You gave a shivery shrug. "We'll be bored to death there. This is awful." You glanced at your wrist and sighed. "Time to go. I must change my shoes."
In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.
It happened like this. On one bank of the river was your park, your meadows, and on the other stood the village. The highway was deeply rutted in places. The mud was a lush violet, and the grooves contained bubbly, café-au-lait water. The oblique shadows of black log isbas extended with particular clarity.
We walked in the shade along a well-trodden path, past a grocery, past an inn with an emerald sign, past sun-filled courtyards emanating the aromas of manure and of fresh hay.
The schoolhouse was new, constructed of stone, with maples planted around it. On its threshold a peasant woman's white calves gleamed as she wrung out a rag into a bucket.
You inquired, "Is Pal Palych in?" The woman, with her freckles and braids, squinted against the sun. "He is, he is." The pail tinkled as she pushed it with her heel. "Come in, ma'am. They'll be in the workshop."
We creaked along a dark hallway, then through a spacious classroom.
I glanced in passing at an azure map, and thought, That's how all of Russia is--sunlight and hollows. . . . In a corner sparkled a crushed piece of chalk.
Farther on, in the small workshop, there was a pleasant smell of carpenter's glue and pine sawdust. Coatless, puffy, and sweaty, his left leg extended. Pal Palych was planing away appetizingly at a groaning white board. His moist, bald pate rocked to and fro in a dusty ray of sunlight. On the floor under the workbench, the shavings curled like flimsy locks.
I said loudly, "Pal Palych, you have guests!"
He gave a start, immediately got flustered, bestowed a polite smack on the hand you raised with such a listless, familiar gesture, and for an instant poured his damp fingers into my hand and gave it a shake. His face looked as if it had been fashioned of buttery modeling clay, with its limp mustache and unexpected furrows.
"Sorry--I'm not dressed, you see," he said with a guilty smile. He grabbed a pair of shirt cuffs that had been standing like cylinders side by side on the windowsill, and pulled them on hastily.
"What are you working on?" you asked with a glint of your bracelet. Pal Palych was struggling into his jacket with sweeping motions. "Nothing, just puttering," he sputtered, stumbling slightly on the labial consonants. "It's a kind of little shelf. Haven't finished yet. I still have to sand and lacquer it. But take a look at this--I call it the Fly. . . ." With a spinning rub of his joined palms, he launched a miniature wooden helicopter, which soared with a buzzing sound, bumped on the ceiling, and dropped.
The shadow of a polite smile flitted across your face. "Oh, silly me," Pal Palych started again. "You were expected upstairs, my friends. . . . This door squeaks. Sorry. Allow me to go first. I'm afraid my place is a mess. . . ."
"I think he forgot he invited me," you said in English as we began climbing the creaky staircase.
I was watching your back, the silk checks of your blouse. From somewhere downstairs, probably the courtyard, came a resonant peasant-woman voice, "Gerosim! Hey, Gerosim!" 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.
Pal Palych's room was sunny and somewhat cramped. A crimson rug with a yellow lion embroidered in its center was nailed to the wall above the bed. On another wall hung a framed chapter from Anna Karenin, set in such a way that the interplay of dark and light type together with the clever placement of the lines formed Tolstoy's face.
Rubbing his hands together, our host seated you. As he did so, he knocked an album off the table with the flap of his jacket. He retrieved it. Tea, yogurt, and some insipid biscuits appeared. From a dresser drawer, Pal Palych produced a flowery tin of Landrin hard candy. When he stooped, a fold of pimply skin bulged behind his collar. The down of a spiderweb on the windowsill contained a yellow, dead bumblebee. "Where is Sarajevo?" you asked suddenly, rustling a newspaper page that you had listlessly picked up from a chair. Pal Palych, busy pouring tea, replied, "In Serbia."
And, with a trembling hand, he carefully gave you the steaming glass in its silver stand.
"There you are. May I offer you some biscuits? . . . And what are they throwing bombs for?" he addressed me with a jerk of his shoulders.
I was examining, for the hundredth time, a massive glass paper-weight. The glass contained pinkish azure and St. Isaac's Cathedral specked with golden sandy grains. You laughed and read aloud, "Yesterday, a merchant of the Second Guild named Yeroshin was arrested at the Quisisana Restaurant. It turned out that Yeroshin, under the pretext of. . ." You laughed again. "No, the rest is indecent."
Pal Palych grew flustered, flushed a brownish shade of red, and dropped his spoon. Maple leaves glistened immediately beneath the windows. A wagon rattled past. From somewhere came the plaintive, tender cry "Ice--cream! . . ."
He began talking about school, about drunkenness, about the trout that had appeared in the river. I started scrutinizing him, and had the feeling I was really seeing him for the first time, even though we were old acquaintances. An image of him from our first encounter must have remained impressed on my brain and never changed, like something accepted and grown habitual. 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. Now, having given him a special look, so to speak, with an internal eye, I saw that in reality his chin was rounded, hairless, and had a slight cleft. He had a fleshy nose, and I noticed, on his left eyelid, a pimplelike mole I would have dearly loved to cut off--but cutting would have meant killing. That little grain contained him, totally and exclusively. When I realized all this, and examined all of him, I made the slightest of motions, as if nudging my soul to start it sliding downhill, and glided inside Pal Palych, made myself comfortable inside him, and felt from within, as it were, that growth on his wrinkly eyelid, the starched winglets of his collar, and the fly crawling across his bald spot. I examined all of him with limpid, mobile eyes. The yellow lion over the bed now seemed an old acquaintance, as if it had been on my wall since childhood. The colored postcard, enclosed in its convex glass, became extraordinary, graceful, joyous. It was not you sitting in front of me, in the low wicker armchair to which my back had grown accustomed, but the benefactress of the school, a taciturn lady I hardly knew. And right away, with the same lightness of movement, I glided into you too, perceived the ribbon of a garter above your knee and, a little higher, the tickle of batiste, and thought, in your stead, that it was boring, it was hot, one wanted to smoke. At that instant you produced a gold case from your purse and inserted a cigarette into your holder. And I was within everything--you, the cigarette, the holder. Pal Palych scrabbling awkwardly with his match, the glass paperweight, the dead bumblebee on the windowsill.
Many years have sailed by, and I do not know where he is now. timid, puffy Pal Palych. Sometimes, though, when he is the last thing I am thinking about, I see him in a dream, transposed into the setting of my current existence. He enters a room with his fussy, smiling gait, faded panama in hand; he bows as he walks; he mops his bald spot and ruddy neck with an enormous handkerchief. And when I dream of him you invariably traverse my dream, looking lazy and wearing a low-belted silk top.

* * *

I was not loquacious on that wonderfully happy day. I gulped the slippery flakes of curds and strained to hear every sound. When Pal Palych fell silent, I could hear his stomach muttering--a delicate squeak, followed by a tiny gurgle. Whereupon he would demonstratively clear his throat and hurriedly start talking about something. Stumbling, at a loss for the right word, he would frown and drum his fingertips on the table. You reclined in the low armchair, impassive and silent. Turning your head sidewise and lifting your angular elbow, you would glance at me from under your lashes as you adjusted the hairpins in back. You thought I felt awkward in front of Pal Palych because you and I had arrived together, and he might have an inkling about our relationship. And I was amused that you were thinking this, and amused by the dim, melancholy way Pal Palych blushed when you deliberately mentioned your husband and his work.
In front of the school, the sun's hot ochre had splashed beneath the maples. From the threshold, Pal Palych bowed, thanking us for dropping by, then he bowed again from the doorway, and a thermometer sparkled, glassy-white, on the outside wall.
When we had left the village, crossed the bridge, and were climbing the path toward your house, I took you under the elbow, and you flashed that special sidelong smile that told me you were happy. Suddenly I had the desire to tell you about Pal Palych's little wrinkles, about the spangled St. Isaac's, but, as soon as I began, I had a feeling the wrong words were coming out, bizarre words, and when you tenderly said, "Decadent," I changed the subject. I knew what you needed: simple feelings, simple words. Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious.
A workman in a puffed blouse was resonantly and firmly sharpening his scythe. Butterflies floated above the unmowed scabious flowers. Toward us along the path came a young girl with a pale-green kerchief on her shoulders and daisies in her dark hair. I had already seen her three times or so, and her thin, tanned neck had stuck in my memory. As she passed, she gave you an attentive touch of her barely slanted eyes. Then, hopping carefully across the ditch, she disappeared behind the alders. A silvery tremor traversed the matte-textured bushes. You said, "I bet she was having herself a nice walk in my park. How I detest these vacationers. . . ." A fox terrier, a plump old bitch, was trotting along the path after her owner. You adored dogs. The little animal crawled up to us on its belly, wriggling, its ears laid back. It rolled over under your proffered hand, showing its pink underbelly, covered with gray maplike spots. "Why, you sweetheart," you said with your special, petting-ruffling voice.
The fox terrier, having rolled around for a while, gave a dainty little squeal and trotted on, scuttling across the ditch.
When we were already approaching the low park gate, you decided you wanted to smoke, but, after rummaging in your handbag, you softly clucked, "How silly of me. I left the holder at his place." You touched my shoulder. "Dearest, run and fetch it. Otherwise I cannot smoke." I laughed as I kissed your fluttery eyelashes and your narrow smile.
You cried out after me, "Just hurry!" I set off at a run, not because there was any great rush, but because everything around me was running--the iridescence of the bushes, the shadows of the clouds on the damp grass, the purplish flowers scurrying for their lives into a gully before the mower's lightning.
Some ten minutes later, panting hotly, I was climbing the steps to the schoolhouse. I banged on the brown door with my fist. A mattress spring squeaked inside. I turned the handle, but the door was locked. "Who's there?" came Pal Palych's flustered voice.
I shouted, "Come on, let me in!" The mattress clinked again, and there was a slapping of unshod feet. "What do you lock yourself in for, Pal Palych?" I noticed right away that his eyes were red.
"Come in, come in. . . . Glad to see you. You see, I was asleep. Come on in."
"We forgot a cigarette holder here," I said, trying not to look at him.
We finally found the green-enameled tube under the armchair. I stuck it in my pocket. Pal Palych was trumpeting into his handkerchief.
"She's a wonderful person," he said inopportunely, sitting down heavily on the bed. He sighed and looked askance. "There's something about a Russian woman, a certain--" He got all wrinkled up and rubbed his brow. "A certain"--he emitted a gentle grunt--"spirit of self-sacrifice. There is nothing more sublime in the world. That extraordinarily subtle, extraordinarily sublime spirit of self-sacrifice." He joined his hands behind his head and broke into a lyrical smile.
"Extraordinarily. . ." He fell silent, then asked, already with a different tone, one that he often used to make me laugh, "And what else do you have to tell me, my friend?" I felt like giving him a hug, saying something full of warmth, something he needed. "You ought to go for a walk, Pal Palych. Why mope in a stuffy room?"
He gave a dismissive wave. "I've seen all there is to see. You do nothing b-but get all hot out there. . . ." He wiped his puffy eyes and his mustache with a downward motion of his hand. "Maybe tonight I'll go do some fishing." The pimplelike mole on his wrinkled eyelid twitched.
One ought to have asked him, "Dear Pal Palych, why were you lying down just now with your face buried in the pillow? Is it just hay fever, or some major grief? Have you ever loved a woman? And why cry on a day like this, with this nice sunshine and the puddles outside? . .."
"Well, I have to run. Pal Palych," I said, glancing at the abandoned glasses, the typographically re-created Tolstoy, and the boots with earlike loops under the table.
Two flies settled on the red floor. One climbed on top of the other. They buzzed and flew apart.
"No hard feelings," Pal Palych said with a slow exhalation. He shook his head. "I'll grin and bear it--go, don't let me keep you."
I was running again along the path, next to the alder bushes. I felt that I had bathed in another's grief, that I was radiant with his tears. The feeling was a happy one, which I have since experienced only rarely: at the sight of a bowed tree, a pierced glove, a horse"s eye. It was happy because it had a harmonious flow. It was happy as any movement or radiance is happy. I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one; tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew--secretly--the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything.
You met me on the paved section of the garden, by the veranda steps, and your first words were, "My husband called from town while I was gone. He's coming on the ten o'clock. Something must have happened. Maybe he's being transferred."
A wagtail, like a blue-gray wind, quickstepped across the sand. A pause, two or three steps, another pause, more steps. The wagtail, the cigarette holder in my hand, your words, the spots of sunlight on your dress. . . It could not have been otherwise.
"I know what you're thinking," you said, knitting your eyebrows. "You're thinking someone will tell him and so forth. But it makes no difference. . . . You know what I've. . ."
I looked you straight in the face. I looked with all my soul, directly. I collided with you. Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them--the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books. And, for the first time, your voice was limpid too. "You know what I've decided? Listen. 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.
What could I say to you? Could I invoke freedom, captivity, say I did not love you enough? No, that was all wrong.
An instant passed. During that instant, much happened in the world: somewhere a giant steamship went to the bottom, a war was declared, a genius was born. The instant was gone.
"Here's your cigarette holder," I said. "It was under the armchair. And you know, when I went in. Pal Palych must have been. . ."
You said, "Good. Now you may leave." You turned and ran quickly up the steps. You took hold of the glass door's handle, and could not open it right away. It must have been torture for you.
I stood in the garden for a while amid the sweetish damp. Then, hands thrust deep into my pockets, I walked along the dappled sand around the house. At the front porch, I found my bicycle. Leaning on the low horns of the handle bar, I rolled off along the park lane. Toads lay here and there. I inadvertently ran over one. Pop under the tire. At the end of the lane there was a bench. I leaned the bicycle against a tree trunk and sat down on the invitingly white plank. I thought about how, in the next couple of days, I would get a letter from you, how you would beckon and I would not return. Your house glided into a marvelous, melancholy distance with its winged piano, the dusty volumes of The Art Review, the silhouettes in their circular frames. It was delicious losing you. You went off, jerking angularly at the glass door. But a different you departed otherwise, opening your pale eyes under my joyous kisses.
I sat thus until evening. Midges, as if jerked by invisible threads, darted up and down. Suddenly, somewhere nearby, I became aware of a bright dapple--it was your dress, and you were--
Had not the final vibrations died away? Therefore, I felt uneasy that you were here again, somewhere off to the side, beyond my field of vision, that you were walking, approaching. With an effort, I turned my face. It was not you but that girl with the greenish scarf-- remember, the one we ran into? And that fox terrier of hers with its comical belly? . . .
She walked past, through gaps in the foliage, and crossed the little bridge leading to a small kiosk with stained-glass windows. The girl is bored, she is strolling through your park; I shall probably make her acquaintance by and by.
I rose slowly, slowly rode out of the motionless park onto the main road, straight into an enormous sunset, and, on the far side of a curve, overtook a carriage. It was your coachman, Semyon, driving at a walk toward the station. When he saw me, he slowly removed his cap, smoothed the glossy strands on the back of his head, then replaced it. A checkered lap rug lay folded on the seat. An intriguing reflection flashed in the eye of the black gelding. And when, with motionless pedals, I flew downhill toward the river, I saw from the bridge the panama and rounded shoulders of Pal Palych, who was sitting below on a projection of the bathing booth, with a fishing rod in his fist.
I braked, and stopped with my hand on the railing.
"Hey, hey. Pal Palych! How're they biting?" He looked upward, and gave me a nice, homey kind of wave.
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.
I passed the isbas in one soundless sweep along the firmly packed path. Mooing sounds floated past through the lusterless air; some skittles flew up with a clatter. Then, farther along, on the highway, in the vastness of the sunset, amid the faintly vaporous fields, there was silence.