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

and I felt so weary that I decided to put an end to these fruitless endeavours and return home. Ultimately it did not really matter. I sat on the Métro for a long time, then I got off at Odéon and headed towards my hotel, spurred on by an irresistible urge—to lie down and sleep. By the time I finally found myself in bed, it was already night; I could hear the occasional footstep outside in the street, and from an invisible gramophone came the sound of a woman’s voice singing
‘Autrefois je riais de l’amour’
. † Soon I found myself sinking into a melancholy gloom, as starless and warm as the night itself,when suddenly, just as I was on the verge of slumber, I recalled that I had planned to pay a visit to Rue Molitor that evening, to the house of my acquaintance, the one who had so miraculously and so unexpectedly come into money.
    * * *
    I went to see him a few days later. This time neither his apartment nor the telephone on his writing desk, neither the books on the shelves nor the unusual tidiness that was in evidence everywhere, surprised me—firstly because I could never be any more surprised than I had been when I met him that day in the café, secondly because having lived for years in squalid hovels he should naturally be attracted to things of an opposite nature: instead of apocalyptic filth, cleanliness; instead of chaos, order; instead of a spit-spattered stone floor, gleaming parquet. In his general deportment, as in his every move, one sensed the convulsive tension of newfound gentility, which, on the face of it, seemed a little affected, at least to begin with.
    When I arrived at his apartment—this would have been around four o’clock in the afternoon—he was not alone. A little man of around fifty, with indefinably grey hair and small, shifty eyes, was sitting in an expectantly servile pose, giving me to think once again how the term “plastique”, so flaunted in arts and theatre reviews, wasoften cruelly and almost invariably inseparable from the circumstances of one’s life, milieu and state of health, and how the word was so mutely expressive. He was very shabbily dressed and held in his hands a crumpled, soiled cap that had once been light grey—this was possible to discern from the light patches of fabric showing through at the peak, which had been protected by a button. As I entered, the man with the cap, who was in the middle of saying something, fell silent and shot me a look both angry and fearful. The host, however, stood up, greeted me—he was markedly courteous—apologized and said to his guest:
    “Do go on, I’m listening. You say that it happened in Lyons?”
    “Yes, yes, in Lyons. So, you see, after I was arrested…”
    He told a rather convincing tale about how he had accidentally knocked down a pedestrian while riding a motorcycle, and how a long series of misfortunes had begun shortly thereafter. Judging from the way he spoke, fluently and with an astonishing lack of expression, as if the story did not concern him but some third party, to whose fate, incidentally, he was entirely ambivalent, it was clear that he had told this tale many times over and that even for him it had lost any degree of persuasiveness. I do not know whether he himself realized this. The crux of the matter was that following his release from prison his papers had been confiscated, and so now he was unableto take up any form of work, and thus found himself in a hopeless, as he phrased it, situation. The moment he uttered these words, I suddenly remembered having seen him once before and hearing those very words, whose intonation evidently never varied. I could even recall the whereabouts and the circumstances in which it had come about: it was near Gare Montparnasse, and his audience then had been a stout man with a beard—half merchant’s, half pirate’s—and the face to go with it: broad, boorish and pompous all at once. Following these words concerning the hopelessness of his situation, he