The Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

replaced the helpless old man), knew less about him than anyone. There was in Weinstock’s nature an attractive streak of recklessness. This is probably why he hired someone he did not know well. His suspiciousness required regular nourishment. Just as there are normal and perfectlydecent people who unexpectedly turn out to have a passion for collecting dragonflies or engravings, so Weinstock, a junk dealer’s grandson and an antiquarian’s son, staid, well-balanced Weinstock who had been in the book business all his life, had constructed a separate little world for himself. There, in the penumbra, mysterious events took place.
    India aroused a mystical respect in him: he was one of those people who, at the mention of Bombay, inevitably imagine not a British civil servant, crimson from the heat, but a fakir. He believed in the jinx and the hex, in magic numbers and the Devil, in the evil eye, in the secret power of symbols and signs, and in bare-bellied bronze idols. In the evenings, he would place his hands, like a petrified pianist, upon a small, light, three-legged table. It would start to creak softly, emitting cricketlike chirps, and, having gathered strength, would rise up on one side and then awkwardly but forcefully tap a leg against the floor. Weinstock would recite the alphabet. The little table would follow attentively and tap at the proper letters. Messages came from Caesar, Mohammed, Pushkin, and a dead cousin of Weinstock’s. Sometimes the table would be naughty: it would rise and remain suspended in mid-air, or else attackWeinstock and butt him in the stomach. Weinstock would good-naturedly pacify the spirit, like an animal tamer playing along with a frisky beast; he would back across the whole room, all the while keeping his fingertips on the table waddling after him. For his talks with the dead, he also employed a kind of marked saucer and some other strange contraption with a pencil protruding underneath. The conversations were recorded in special notebooks. A dialog might go thus:
    WEINSTOCK : Have you found rest?
    LENIN : This is not Baden-Baden.
    WEINSTOCK: Do you wish to tell me of life beyond the grave?
    LENIN (
after a pause
): I prefer not to.
    WEINSTOCK : Why?
    LENIN : Must wait till there is a plenum.
    A lot of these notebooks had accumulated, and Weinstock used to say that someday he would have the more significant conversations published. Very entertaining was a ghost called Abum, of unknown origin, silly and tasteless, who acted as intermediary, arranging interviews between Weinstock and various deadcelebrities. He treated Weinstock with vulgar familiarity.
    WEINSTOCK : Who art thou, O Spirit?
    REPLY : Ivan Sergeyevich.
    WEINSTOCK : Which Ivan Sergeyevich?
    REPLY : Turgenev.
    WEINSTOCK: Do you continue to create masterpieces?
    REPLY : Idiot.
    WEINSTOCK : Why do you abuse me?
    REPLY (
table convulsed
): Fooled you! This is Abum.
    Sometimes when Abum began his horseplay, it was impossible to get rid of him throughout the séance. “He’s as bad as a monkey,” Weinstock would complain.
    Weinstock’s partner in these games was a little pink-faced red-haired lady with plump little hands, who smelled of eucalyptus gum, and had always a cold. I learned later that they had been having an affair for a long time, but Weinstock, who in certain respects was singularly frank, never once let this slip out. They addressed each other by their names and patronymics and behaved as though they weremerely good friends. She would often drop in at the store and, warming herself by the stove, read a theosophist journal published in Riga. She encouraged Weinstock in his experiments with the hereafter and used to tell how the furniture in her room periodically came to life, how a deck of cards would fly from one spot to another or scatter itself all over the floor, and how once her bedside lamp had hopped down from its table and begun to imitate a dog impatiently tugging at its leash; the plug had finally shot