The Enchanter Read Online Free PDF

catch in his throat. “There isn’t even any question of choosing.… Heaven forbid! It was just a theoretical consideration. You’re right. All the more so, becauseI, too, value peace and quiet. Yes! I’m in favor of the status quo, and let the gossips keep jabbering. You’re right, dearest. Of course, I don’t rule out that perhaps later on, next spring … if you’re quite well again …”
    “I’ll never be quite well,” she answered softly, raising herself and, with a creak, rolling heavily onto her side. Then she propped up her cheek with her fist and, with a shake of her head and an oblique glance, repeated the same sentence.
    The next day, following the civil ceremony and a moderately festive dinner, the girl left after having twice, in front of everyone, touched his shaven cheek with her cool, unhurried lips: once over the champagne glass to congratulate him, and then at the door, as she was saying good-bye. After which he brought over his suitcases and spent a long time arranging his things in her former room where, in a bottom drawer, he found a little rag of hers that told him far more than those two incomplete kisses.
    Judging by the tone that the person (he found the appellation “wife” inapplicable to her) used to emphasize how it was generally more convenient to sleep in separate rooms (he did not argue) and how she herself, incidentally, was accustomed to sleeping alone (he let it go by), he could not avoid the conclusion that that very night he was expected to be instrumental in the first infraction of that habit. As the murk gradually thickened outside the window, and he felt increasingly foolish sitting next toher couch in the parlor, wordlessly compressing or applying to his tense jowl her ominously obedient hand, with bluish freckles on its glossy back, he perceived ever more clearly that the moment of reckoning had arrived, that now no escape remained from what he had of course long foreseen, but without giving it much thought (when the moment comes I’ll manage somehow); now that moment was knocking at the door and it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver) would be physically unable to tackle those broad bones, those multiple caverns, the bulky velvet, the formless anklebones, the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin and the as yet undisclosed miracles of surgery … here his imagination was left hanging on barbed wire.
    Already at dinner, first refusing a second glass with an apparent lack of resolve, then seeming to yield to temptation, he had, for safety’s sake, explained to her that at moments of elation he was subject to sundry angular aches. So now he began gradually releasing her hand and, rather crudely feigning twinges in his temple, said he was going out for a breath of air. “You must understand,” he added, noticing the oddly intent gaze (or was he imagining things?) of her two eyes and wart, “you must understand—happiness is so new to me … and your closeness … no, I never even dared dream of having such a wife.…”
    “Just don’t be long. I go to bed early, and don’t like being awakened,” she answered, letting down her freshly waved hair and tapping the top button of his waistcoat with her fingernail; then she gave him a little shove, and he realized that the invitation was not declinable.
    Now he was roaming amid the shivering indigence of the November night, through the fog of streets that, ever since the Great Flood, had fallen into a state of perpetual damp. In an attempt to distract himself, he concentrated on his bookkeeping, his prisms, his profession, artificially magnifying its importance in his life—and it all kept dissolving in the mush, the feverish chill of the night, the agony of undulating lights. Yet, for the very reason that any kind of happiness was totally out of the question at the moment, something else suddenly became clear. He took precise