across the square to make it to the church before it closed.
Then I saw Trudi Pelikan walking toward me. It was the first time I’d seen her since the camp. She was using a cane. We noticed each other too late for her to avoid me, she put her cane down on the pavement and bent down over her shoe. It wasn’t even untied.
Both of us had been back in our hometown for more than half a year. For our own sakes we preferred to act as though we didn’t know each other. There’s nothing to understand about that. I quickly turned my head, but how gladly I would have put my arms around her and and let her know that I agreed with her. How gladly I would have said: I’m sorry you had to be the one to bend down, I don’t need a cane, next time I can do it for both of us, if you’ll let me. Her cane was polished and had a rusty claw on the bottom and a white knob on top.
Instead of going inside the church I made a sharp left onto the narrow street I’d come from. The sun stabbed at my back, the heat ran straight into my scalp as if my head were bare metal. The wind was dragging a carpet of dust, the treetops were singing. A little whirlwind formed on the sidewalk and swept through me, then touched down, leaving the pavement speckled with black. The wind droned and flung the first few drops. The storm was here, I heard the rustle of glass beads, and suddenly ropes of water went whipping past. I fled into a stationery shop.
As I stepped inside I wiped the water off my face with my sleeve. A salesgirl came out through a narrow curtained doorway. She was wearing worn-out felt shoes with tassels that looked like paintbrushes growing out of the insteps. She went behind the counter. I stayed next to the display window for a while, watching her with one eye and looking outside with the other. Suddenly her right cheek swelled up. Her hands were resting on the counter, her signet ring—it was a man’s ring—was much too heavy for her bony fingers. Her right cheek went flat again, even hollow, and then her left cheek swelled up. I heard something clicking against her teeth and realized she was sucking on a candy. She closed one eye and then the other, her eyelids were made of paper. She said: My tea water’s boiling. She disappeared through the little door and at that moment a cat slipped out from under the curtain, came up to me, and nuzzled my pants as if it knew me. I picked it up, it weighed practically nothing. This isn’t a cat at all, I told myself, just gray-striped boredom that’s grown fur, the patience of fear on a narrow street. The cat sniffed at my wet coat. Its nose was leathery and rounded like a heel. When it set its front paws on my shoulder and peered inside my ear, it wasn’t even breathing. I pushed its head away, and the cat jumped to the ground. It jumped without making a sound and landed like a scrap of cloth. The cat was empty on the inside. The salesgirl’s hands were also empty when she came back through the door. Where was the tea, she couldn’t have drunk it that fast. And her right cheek was swollen again.
Her signet ring scratched against the counter.
I asked for a notebook.
Graphed or lined, she asked.
I said: Lined.
Do you have something small, I can’t make change, she said. She puckered her lips and both cheeks went hollow. The candy slipped out onto the counter. It had some transparent pattern, she stuffed it quickly back in her mouth. It wasn’t candy at all, she was sucking on a polished drop of glass from a chandelier.
Lined notebooks
The next day was Sunday. I began to write in the lined notebooks. The first chapter was titled: FOREWORD. It began with the sentence: Will you understand me, question mark.
By you I meant the notebook. And seven pages had to do with a man named T.P. And another man named A.G. And one named K.H. and O.E. And a woman named B.Z. I gave Trudi Pelikan the alias SWAN. I wrote out the name of the factory Koksokhim Zavod and the coal station Yasinovataya. Also the names Kobelian and Kati Sentry. I even mentioned her