The Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

big tight bun low on the nape. But the elder’s hair did not lie with the same heavenly smoothness, and lacked that precious gloss. I want to shake off Evgenia, get rid of her altogether, so as to have done with the necessity of comparing the sisters; and at the same time I know that if it were not for the resemblance, Vanya’s charm would not be quite complete. Only her hands were not elegant: the pale palm contrasted too strongly to the back of the hand, which was very pink and large-knuckled. And there were always little white flecks on her round fingernails.
    What further concentration is needed, what added intensity must one’s gaze attain, for the brain to enslave the visual image of a person? There they are sitting on the sofa; Evgenia is wearing a black velvet dress, and large beads adorn her white neck; Vanya is in crimson, with small pearls in place of beads; her eyes are lowered under their thick black brows; a dab of powder has not disguised the slight rash on the wide glabella. The sisters wear identical new shoes, and keep glancing at eachother’s feet—no doubt the same kind of shoe does not look so nice on one’s own foot as on that of another. Marianna, a blonde lady doctor with a peremptory voice, is speaking to Smurov and Roman Bogdanovich about the horrors of the recent civil war in Russia. Khrushchov, Evgenia’s husband, a jovial gentleman with a fat nose—which he manipulates continually, tugging at it, or getting hold of a nostril and trying to twist it off—is standing in the doorway to the next room, talking with Mukhin, a young man with a pince-nez. The two are facing each other from opposite sides of the doorway, like two atlantes.
    Mukhin and the majestic Roman Bogdanovich have long known the family, while Smurov is comparatively a newcomer, although he hardly looks it. None could discern in him the shyness that makes a person so conspicuous among people who know each other well and are bound together by the established echoes of private jokes and by an allusive residue of people’s names that to them are alive with special significance, making the newcomer feel as if the magazine story he has started to read had really begun long ago, in old unobtainable issues; and as he listens to the general conversation, rife with references to incidents unknownto him, the outsider keeps silent and shifts his gaze to whoever is speaking, and, the quicker the exchanges, the more mobile become his eyes; but soon the invisible world that lives in the words of the people around him begins to oppress him and he wonders if they have not deliberately contrived a conversation to which he is a stranger. In Smurov’s case, however, even if he did occasionally feel left out, he certainly did not show it. I must say that he made a rather favorable impression on me those first evenings. He was not very tall, but well proportioned and dapper. His plain black suit and black bow tie seemed to intimate, in a reserved way, some secret mourning. His pale, thin face was youthful, but the perceptive observer could distinguish in it the traces of sorrow and experience. His manners were excellent. A quiet, somewhat melancholy smile lingered on his lips. He spoke little, but everything he said was intelligent and appropriate, and his infrequent jokes, while too subtle to arouse roars of laughter, seemed to unlock a concealed door in the conversation, letting in an unexpected freshness. One would have thought Vanya could not help liking him immediately because of that noble and enigmatic modesty, that pallor of forehead andslenderness of hand … Certain things—for example, the word
“blagodarstvuyte”
(“thank you”), pronounced without the usual slurring, in full, thus retaining its bouquet of consonants—were bound to reveal to the perceptive observer that Smurov belonged to the best St. Petersburg society.
    Marianna paused for an instant in her account of the horrors of war: she had noticed at last that Roman