The Buddha's Return by Gaito Gazdánov Read Free Book Online

times almost ceased to exist, but which nevertheless constituted my last hope of returning to the real world and not one darkened by chronicmadness, I tried stoically to endure these departures and excursions. Yet every time I returned I found myself in the grip of despair. The inability to overcome this inexplicable ailment was akin to being conscious of my own impending doom, of some moral handicap that set me apart from other people, as if I were unworthy of the popular happiness of being the same as everyone else. That evening, as I read those letters on the blue plaque, after a few moments of joy, I experienced something like the pain of a man who has just received confirmation of a terminal diagnosis. Paris that night seemed different than usual and unlike its true self; with a tragic finality the vista of street lamps illuminating the foliage on the trees served only to emphasize the incurable sorrow I felt. I thought about the future that lay ahead of me, the growing complexity of my existence, and my real life, which was difficult to discern among this mass of morbid, fantastical distortions that haunted me. I was unable to complete a single task that required any sustained effort or whose solution demanded an unbroken application of logic. Even in my personal relations there was always, or there always risked being, that element of mental derangement, which could strike at any moment and would distort everything. I could not be held wholly accountable for my actions, could never be certain of the reality of what was happening to me; I often found it difficult to distinguish what was real and what was a hallucination. And now, as I walked aboutParis, the city seemed no more real to me than the capital of the fantastical Central State. I had begun my latest journey in Paris, but where and when could I ever have witnessed anything like that imaginary labyrinth where the imperative momentum of my madness had driven me? The reality of that passageway, however, was borderline, and I remembered the turning and those strange recesses in the wall no less clearly than I did all the buildings in the street where I lived in the Latin Quarter. Of course, I knew for a fact that the street did exist, whereas the passageway had just been a product of my imagination; and yet this incontestable difference between the street and the passageway lacked the definite, concrete persuasiveness it ought to have held for me.
    Now my thoughts turned elsewhere. Of all the districts in Paris, why had I wound up specifically in this one and not in another, not in Montmartre, for example, or in the Grands Boulevards? It was hardly likely to have happened by chance. I was unable to recall where I had headed as I left my apartment and what had induced me to undertake this journey. In any case, I had walked along, oblivious to both the buildings and the streets, as all this time I had been imprisoned in the Central State; nevertheless, I had set off in a particular direction and had apparently not lost my way, although it was clear that the part of my consciousness leading me there had functioned beyond any control of my own. There musthave been an automatic precision, as happens when a man stops thinking about what he is doing and his actions take on a speed and accuracy that would be impossible were they to be directed by his consciousness. It was no coincidence that I had ended up here. But where could I have been going? A few years before I would often travel this route, because a woman with whom I had been very close lived nearby; back then I had known every building and every tree in the area. However, we parted a long time previously, and thereafter the streets leading to her apartment had shed their once thrilling aspect; their even vistas, at whose ends stood a building with an apartment on the fourth floor where my whole world—warm and transparent—had once been centred, now appeared unrecognizably foreign to me.
    I couldn’t remember,