A Hunt for Optimism. Viktor Shklovsky

head and didn’t hurry at all.

      Finally the man stood up. He went out into the foyer. The foyer was cut off by plywood walls. It turned into a hallway that resembled a quiet street. The floor in the hallway reminded one of the asphalt in Berlin. There were cartons on the coat rack and a huge trunk pushed underneath it.

      The man stretched out a hand toward his coat, then said:

      “You know, I forgot to tell you something.”

      He went back into the room. He was silent for a moment. The pipes were singing under the floor.

      “The room, which you exchanged for this one, has been sealed off.”

      “You’re left without a room?” asked Ksana.

      She looked at her sculpture machines. She just couldn’t leave this place.

      “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

      She remembered a scene from a film. It seemed as if it should have been raining outside.

      I even almost wrote that it was raining outside and the steel windowsill was lightly trembling.

      They drank tea. He had nowhere else to go and he wasn’t in a hurry.

      Ksana kept going out of the room into the hallway. She would go into the dark, savage bathroom where the baby carriages, trunks, and mannequins lived. She soaked the heavy clay rags in the water; the pipes became lively with water. It was deafening in the room.

      “What is he supposed to do?” she thought.

      The heavy rags were tightly embracing the sculpture. The woman with heavy molding and gentle hands, the woman, who was not needed here, disappeared behind the canvas.

      The guest stood up and prepared to leave. The foyer door opened once again. The room with long walls filled with darkness pouring in from the street. The mattress was still propped up against the wall without a frame. It stood there like that since yesterday. He stood there for about a minute. He won’t live through this minute. He’ll never move into that building, the walls of which have already been marked with armature nets.

      It was dark in the stairwell. The dogs slept in different apartments. They were all different and walked in the streets at different hours. And on the whole, nothing was clear.

      The coat was still hanging in the foyer and all those who passed through the main hallway noticed it in the morning.

      The man had stayed.

       IV

      Life is simple. And things are simple when one takes them without resisting.

      Shorosh hung in the Tiergarten, not as a man, but as a painting.

      The woman was beautiful. She lived in the attic room and didn’t drink wine and didn’t know that to live with her one only had to stay.

      She finally looked closely at her husband. He had a mustache. Gray eyes. A slightly shorter upper lip.

      And he was quite unusual, on the whole.

       RUDIN

       I

      Do you remember Pisarev from “A Russian Man at a Rendezvous”?³

      Remember Rudin in a gondola, stroking, I think, the hair of a Venetian girl under the stars and probably talking about the waves?

      Beautiful people are always more translatable, or it is perhaps the manner in which they carry that beauty that’s translatable.

      Or they simply don’t know how to wear it.

      It’s either that or I’m jealous.

      The person whom I’ll call Sokolov was a very handsome man.

      He had a strong neck that smoothly transitioned to his shoulders. And his head was well set on his shoulders.

      His back wasn’t hunched.

      You could see the shape of his legs through his wide pants. It was obvious that one could walk rather impressively with such legs.

      His correctly positioned feet were visible through his boots.

      He was well-put-together as a whole.

      His lips were not chiseled, but sculpted on the face.

      His eyes — gray or blue, depending on taste — were set wide apart, and his ears weren’t too large.

      He was always a little melancholy and full of life at the same time.

      I had seen him a few times drinking wine. I’d always arrive later than everyone else, when the wine inside the bottle had already turned into a yellow mirror and could have been reflected on the ceiling if anyone cared.

      It could have been used in cinematography as a device to surprise viewers, to show how attentive we are.

      They would sit drinking for a while. The tram cars would quiet down.

      Then the woman with small ears and close-cropped hair that deprived her face of convexity would say:

      “The arc of the tram car whistles along the wire like an off-key flute. The chest of the street hums under the rail strings with wooden altos, or whatever they are called. Night . . .”

      The night would advance. The clock on the post outside the window would frame it.

      “. . . is advancing. The orchestra becomes silent. Only the drum roll remains. The sound of the late night buses . . .”

      Illuminated from the back, the clock would comply, casting shadows on the dial with its hands.

      “. . . buses. The iron curtain falls as in a theater. The spectators have dispersed. They have already gone home. They have nothing else to do . . .”

      The mirror descends into the bottom of the bottle.

      “. . . to do. And the last spectator, who evidently has nowhere else to go, who feels melancholy, to whose challenging call nobody will respond or emerge from behind the iron ribcage of the curtain, is still applauding in the empty hall. That’s the last coachman — the sound of the horseshoe clanging against the stone.”

      “There was an accident,” said the man whom I was just describing. “You see, I’m going through a crisis. My bride, remember, when we were at the café, remember the blonde, who kept smiling at us when she was serving? . . . She wore a little uniform. They wash their uniforms at home. She lives on the seventh floor . . .”

      “I know,” my neighbor interrupted, “I’ve been there . . .”

      “Wait,” said Sokolov, “you don’t know anything. You ought to feel ashamed. She was trying to hang her robe out of the window to dry. I can only imagine. She must have misplaced her hand. Grabbed nothing but air. She slipped and fell off. I found out from the paper. I can’t even go into that neighborhood.”

      Well then.

      The hands of the clock made their circular journey. We turned silent. I went to see him off.

      As you may know, it was spring. My head stopped spinning in the street, my legs were lighter without the galoshes. There was a tent at the crossroad with a blinding light in it. And two moving shadows of welders on the wall.

      Occasionally a carriage would go by and you could see the pavement through the wheels. People on the carriages turned pale from the light of the dawn.

      We were walking around the Sadovy Circle. The day was breaking. The leaves on the trees were opening up. We walked without talking. Then Sokolov said:

      “She was my fourth. They . . .”

      I really didn’t want to hear about it. I started to hum something and he stopped talking.

      The empty streets stretched to the side and upwards from the Sadovy Circle. We were going far, like tram cars, and it kept