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all admitted frankly that Russia is done for, that our ‘saintly’ Russian peasantry has turned out to be nothing but gray scum—as might have been expected, by the way—and that our country is finished for good.”
    Ganin laughed. “Quite, quite, Aleksey Ivanovich.”
    Alfyorov wiped his gleaming face from top to bottom with his palm and suddenly smiled a wide, dreamy smile. “Why aren’t you married, old chap, eh?”
    “Never had the chance,” Ganin replied. “Is it fun?”
    “Delightful. My wife is adorable. A brunette, you know, with such lively eyes. Still very young. We were married in Poltava in 1919, and in 1920 I had to emigrate. I’ve some photos in the desk drawer—I’ll show them to you.” Crooking his fingers underneath it, he pulled open the wide drawer.
    “What were you in those days, Aleksey Ivanovich?” Ganin inquired without curiosity.
    Alfyorov shook his head. “I don’t remember. How can oneremember what one was in a past life—an oyster maybe, or a bird, let’s say, or perhaps a teacher of mathematics? In any case our old life in Russia seems like something that happened before time began, something metaphysical or whatever you call it—that’s not quite the word—yes, I know: metempsychosis.”
    Ganin looked at the photograph in the open drawer without much interest. It was the face of a tousled young woman with a merry, very toothy mouth. Alfyorov leaned over his shoulder. “No, that’s not my wife, that’s my sister. She died of typhus, in Kiev. She was a nice, jolly girl, very good at playing tag.”
    He produced another photograph.
    “And that’s Mary, my wife. Poor snapshot, but quite a good likeness all the same. And here’s another, taken in our garden. Mary’s the one sitting, in the white dress. I haven’t seen her for four years. But I don’t suppose she’s changed much. I really don’t know how I’ll survive till Saturday. Wait! Where are you going, Lev Glebovich? Do stay!”
    Ganin, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, was walking toward the door.
    “What’s the matter, Lev Glebovich? Did I say something that offended you?”
    The door slammed shut. Alfyorov was left standing alone in the middle of his room.
    “Really! How rude,” he mumbled. “What’s bitten him?”

three
    That night, as every night, a little old man in a black cape plodded along the curb down the long deserted avenue, poking the point of a gnarled stick into the asphalt as he looked for cigarette-ends—gold, cork or plain paper—and flaking cigar butts. Occasionally, braying like a stag, a motorcar would dash by or something would happen which no one walking in a city ever notices: a star, faster than thought and with less sound than a tear, would fall. Gaudier, gayer than the stars were the letters of fire which poured out one after another above a black roof, paraded in single file and vanished all at once in the darkness.
    “Can—it—be—possible,” said the letters in a discreet neon whisper, then the night would sweep them away at a single velvet stroke. Again they would start to creep across the sky: “Can—it—”
    And darkness descended again. But the words insistently lit up once more and finally, instead of disappearing at once, they stayed alight for a whole five minutes, as had been arranged between the advertising agency and the manufacturer.
    But then who can tell what it really is that flickers up there in the dark above the houses—the luminous name of a product or the glow of human thought; a sign, a summons; a questionhurled into the sky and suddenly getting a jewel-bright, enraptured answer?
    And in those streets, now as wide as shiny black seas, at that late hour when the last beer-hall has closed, and a native of Russia, abandoning sleep, hatless and coatless under an old mackintosh, walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour down those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a