The Book of Happiness

I

Sam lay on his back, his eyes closed, right at the edge of the broad, low bed. The slightest movement and it seemed he might slip off like a sack onto the goatskin rug that was spread out over a red carpet. Jerked back by the recoil, clutching a revolver, Sam's stilled hand reached toward the shaggy gray fur. His face, staring up at the ceiling, was calm, and only his black punctured temple which had stopped bleeding a long time ago lent something extraordinarily sad to the wave of ginger hair and the paleness of the freckled forehead.

    He was dressed in tails. His white chest still puffed out and bulged over his cummerbund. His feet were spread apart; shod in glossy dress shoes, they looked like the feet of someone sleeping, more alive than anything else about Sam's body. His left hand rested on his chest put there by the doctor probably, although why then leave the right hanging?--because they had searched for a pulse in his left arm. But hadn't found it, naturally. Yellowed, also freckled, with the powerful fingers of a true since childhood musician and barely noticeable coppery fuzz curling away under his starched cuff, his hand lay there as if it wanted to listen to the beating of his heart but hadn't got quite that far, had been distracted, and here it was--asleep. There were noises outside, the morning noises of the capital. You would have sworn he was just about to wake up and wiggle his fingers, which would be followed by his eyes stirring under their lids. But the beeping of the automobiles was not resurrecting this lifeless face. The cold calm of death, so terrifying to the living and so inconvenient for the management of the Grand Hotel, emanated from Sam, from his body, which continued to cool, and soon, despite the sunny May day, threatened to turn icy.

    The doctor--a police physician who combed his hair over his bald spot--a police official, a rogue newspaperman with a notepad in his restless hands, and a muscular, dignified gentleman who had been called over from the American embassy--all of them had been here before. Elevator boys, hall attendants, maids, and funeral home employees passed in and out among them. The police and the American embassy had been informed immediately when Sam, who had asked to be awakened at nine, did not respond to the knock of the maid, who was carrying his breakfast tray and who had first knocked cautiously with her elbow. Only then did the doorman place a call from the glass phone booth to a certain lady whose address and telephone Sam had left on the night stand.

    "You've been asked to come," said an unfamiliar voice, which seemed much too peremptory. "Your friend has been in an accident."

    "Where? Who?" the lady asked guardedly, certain that some one was playing a joke on her and feeling a deep but squeamish irritation.

    "Your friend at the Grand Hotel."

    Silence. "I don't have a friend at the Grand Hotel. I beg you to leave me in peace."

    "Madam, it's Mr. Adler." The doorman experienced a moment of cruel joy at hitting his mark. There was silence at the other end of the line. "Mr. Adler is critically ill. He gave us your address."

    Her slipping consciousness caught only a few words. "Has he been in Paris long?" she asked.

    "Two days."

    This lady--actually, she looked more like a very young woman--was now standing dumbstruck in the middle of the spacious hotel room. The door was open to the bathroom, where someone was shuffling across the slate floor. Through the window she could see the Place de l'Opera and the beginning of the Boulevard des Capucines, as if someone had started some director's old film running on the screen of the window. Any moment now and Max Linder would ride out from around the corner on a pair of white horses, fire blanks at a passing beauty, and doff his top hat to hide his face from the policeman. How long ago all that was! The director in the courtyard of the unprepossessing building on Nevsky, either the Union or the Arts. On the canvas screen, in the black rain of the scratchy film, a city of squares, arches, and automobiles, with the profile of an iron tower in the cloud-heaped sky of the Ile-de-France. And she and Sam, in the depths of a dark hall, sneaking away from everyone, in the sworn secrecy of escaping from the house together for the very first time.

    And now here he was lying, on this bed, the revolver still not pulled out of his stiffening hand, which just yesterday must have held a bow, and outside--Paris, this intersection, seen for the first time on the screen ten years before, seen that evening when a light snow was falling and street lamps were sparkling, when the flowers in the florist's window promised such a happy and tremendous life, that evening when he wore a sealskin cap with earflaps and she a gray fur coat with a faint line across the shoulder from her knapsack.

    She stood over him and strained to recognize in this much too dead face those lively features that had lived on in her memories before she crossed the threshold of this room. It was like trying to lay a negative over a printed photograph so that they coincided, so that there were no gaps--of white and black--and she just couldn't manage it. It was like trying to do it in a dream. She held an envelope that had her address and her name written on it, and the gloves on her hands and the tears falling on them neither disconcerted nor distracted her. She looked at the formally attired corpse of one with whom she shared the whole long story of their childhood and without which the future held only emptiness. No one could ever take his place. She thought about how the film outside kept running, how life went on, how she ought to call home and say she would be right back, how she should telegraph Polina, Sam's sister, in that mountainous Swiss land. Polina, whom she still pictured as a slender, magnificent girl, the way she was in Petersburg before their departure. She could not convince herself that Polina had filled out, given birth to two children, and was wildly jealous of her fat, goggle-eyed husband.

    More powerfully than anything else, though, she wanted to go home, to Sam's letters, because now she distinctly remembered that there were hints in them about what had happened here. Not threats or complaints, but certain frightening, self-ironical words that for him had led, it turned out, down the straight, blazed trail to death but for her had had no consequences whatsoever. She had glided right over them, forgotten them. He had started writing her a year ago, after she found herself abroad and they had located one another. During the years since they had parted a segment of their life had come to a close--their two separate adolescences. She had been in Paris; he in America. The director of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra had taken him under his wing. Once, Sam had sent her a long newspaper clipping, a review of his first concert. Then several times he had sent photographs: here he was in tails, his violin on his shoulder, his bow flying; and here he was in a bathing suit, holding a beach ball over his head you could see what strong legs he had now; here he was leaning over a chasm with a buddy another Russian, now a music critic and two girls, one of whom had put her hand on his shoulder. "You know, I'm a little in love," he wrote, "with this whining little idiot. She wears these bows I cannot abide." Then he had been expected. He was supposed to come to Europe in the autumn; his father was near death and wanted to say goodbye, but he never did come and old man Adler was buried without him. Indeed, she and Sam hadn't seen each other once in the last five years, but he had not forgotten her. Yesterday he had written her his final letter, which she gulped down before she had scarcely entered the room, and now it seemed to her that she had heard this before, not read it--that he had told her all this.

    It was morning. A muffled sound rose like the sea toward the windows. The glass chandelier tinkled in response to the honking of the automobiles and the rumble of the buses. Vera walked over to the bed, and since there was nowhere to sit down--Sam was lying at the edge--she sat next to him on a chair, took his hand in hers, and looked at him. Here lay her dead childhood, her dead past, returned to her so suddenly and mournfully. A chunk had been broken off from her life, and this chunk would be buried to Jewish canticles and weighed down by a stone Pentateuch, and the rabbi, the same one who had buried Sam's father, would deliver a brief eulogy for Sam, whom he had not known but whom he would place in the lap of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

II

The building had been a private residence at one time. A plaque had been nailed to the facade fronting on the quiet, old street. Here lived and died a French grandee of the early eighteenth century. Now there were apartments--large, chilly rooms with high ceilings and semicircular windows framed in dark wood and draped with coarse silk. One could not rearrange the mirrors because they were set into the piers. Nor could one move the armoire or sofa. Everything had grown into the floor long ago, and when anyone had wanted to rehang a picture or simply remove it and send it to storage portraits of unidentified officers in battalions from the Napoleonic era, they discovered that one couldn't do that either, as the silk wallpaper had faded so badly. The thick rugs concealed a blackened, creaking parquet that was full of cracks, and on a sunny day, in the column of dust by the portiere, one could see a sated moth flying heavily from tassel to tassel.

    Vera walked in and listened closely.

    It was quiet in the building and quiet out the large windows, where time flowed on. The smell of two-hundred-years-old dust and dampness began at the staircase, which was broad, twisting, and stone and had a huge spiderweb hanging like a hammock in the well. Windows were kept open often and for long periods of time here in the apartment someone was ill, but nonetheless it smelled of the last century--a century that nauseated Vera. Actually, it wasn't the last century "steam and electricity" but the next to the last that slumbered here in its indestructible grandeur and onerous stability. Vera threw her hat and coat on a cumbersome hanger. There was no child or animal in the apartment to sense her arrival. Cautiously she crosssed to her room. Liudmila's humming reached her from the kitchen.

    Carefully, so that nothing could be heard in the next room, she sat down at her desk and pulled out the drawer. Sometimes she sat here listening to what was happening on the other side of the wall or the door: the rustling and breathing. Now she had to do everything possible to keep them from guessing she had returned, to keep from rustling the papers. Sam's letters, his photographs, even that newspaper clipping were all intact. His telegram, which she had received a few days previously--"Will be in Paris at end of week. Concert the eighteenth. Will inform day and hour of arrival"--now hinted at deception, a previously formed intention. Vera took today's letter out of her purse and reread it:

    "Verka, forgive me for the dramatics, but I'm going to shoot myself without having seen you. Probably just because I don't especially feel like it. And that's fine. Life tricked me. That's the problem. It won by trickery, and I'm surrendering with honor before it's too late. Farewell!

    "What am I trying to justify? And to whom? You? After all, even you would say I'm not to blame. Too much was promised. How could they dare promise me so much? After all, I'd been given not only the abilities, I'd been given the `genius disease,' the distracted look, ... everything it took. But the young man grew up skilled at ... the violin? commerce? It's all coincidence.

    "I didn't become the best, or even the second-best, and I don't want to be the tenth. At one time I wanted to be the very best. Everyone--people, God, even I myself--assured me that I was special. And now I just don't care. I'm bored. I wanted something I couldn't have, and everything I did get bored me. I'm tired. You'll say it's too soon to judge, I should still try. My reply to you is quite to the contrary! I must hurry, because if I wait I won't be able to do it.

    "Verka, my golden girl, please let Polina and uncle know the addresses are in my diary--I'm too lazy to write them out. Handelman my friend and impresario will come in any event. He's been given the necessary instructions.

    "If you only knew what a temptation it is now twelve o'clock at night to walk right out of the Grand Hotel more dramatics!, hire a car, and rush to see you, knock, ring, embrace, look at him, and exclaim: `How you've aged!' And to hear from you a flimsy but tender word of consolation. ... Actually, though, the temptation isn't all that great, otherwise I would rush over, of course. I've grown cold, cold to everything and everyone. Even to you.... Farewell, Verka! I have no wish to grow soft of heart, or else I'll betray everything, grow a belly, and fiddle romances for my painted wife in the evenings. If there is anything to save, then it is only my despair.

    "Remember--I don't care if it is sentimental because whatever I do right now is all right, even if I start sniveling--remember, Verka, how you and I, in Petersburg, at our house, sometimes lay on a pelt in the twilight and chattered, or were completely silent? In the end, that was the best thing I ever had in life, I swear to you, except for the pins and needles in my heart before my first public performance. Nothing that made any sense ever came of me and women. I have freckles all over my body, which is probably laughable. Who knows, maybe love too is just as much a trick as life in general? Oh, and what nasty women I ended up with!

    "Remember the ice hill in the Tauride Garden? Remember Russia in general, which still exists somewhere and may return to you someday but never to me. Do you remember yourself, Verka, how marvelous you were, how ugly and fat? Life is unworthy of you. You too may die like me someday, but who will you write your last letter to then, my poor girl? Not really to some male dog, some scoundrel unworthy of you? Oh, Verka, Verka!

    "I feel so sorry for myself and so sorry for you. I love you, myself, and everyone so much. But life is the enemy. It's a cesspool, a swindle. Damn it! It is good, though, to have someone to say `farewell' to, and `thank you,' and `forgive me' for all the trouble I've put you through. Don't cry my dear, dear, dear girl! Don't cry."

    She was weeping, though, but without making a sound. To look at her from behind, no one would have guessed--there were no wails or sobs. She was breathing the way people do who are utterly incapable of crying and never do, but the tears flowed in such a torrent that she couldn't wipe them away and so let them fall all around her on the desk, on herself, on the rug. She stood up and walked to the doorway. She had to see someone, tell someone, and she regretted there was no child or animal in the house. All was quiet. Beyond the door, in the bedroom, too. In the kitchen, Liudmila was busy with breakfast. An old dramatic actress lived with her young lover downstairs. On the corner was a small shop with wild strawberries. And apples. After that came the city, where people she did and didn't know lived. She had absolutely no one to tell about Sam. If there had been a dog here, some mutt--a Dianka or a Jack what else do people call them usually?--she would have sat down with it in some corner, some dark corner, there were lots of them in the apartment, and told it about Sam, about herself, about how he appeared in her life, and what that had meant. But she had no one. She crept into the parlor, still dropping tears around herself. It was always dark in the parlor and always--even in the summertime--cold. From the kitchen came some tango they used to play in restaurants fifteen years ago. Softly. As they say, "Lest the wrath of God strike her dead." No, that's not it. Here's where she would have sat down and watched the big, empty fireplace. She even imagined how she would have begun her story. She would have said:

    "He appeared one day just before dark ..." and so on.

    And that would have been more or less right.

Continues...