her return. Something had flown into the violinist’s eye. He stood at the front of the bandstand, helplessly holding his instrument at arm’s length, while his colleagues tried to remove the offending speck with their handkerchiefs. Entranced, the diners stared up at the stage, as though they were watching a group of acrobats performing a difficult trick. The fiddler cried out in pain and begged his comrades in God’s name not to be so rough; then he sprang backward, fending off the others with his bow and shouting that he required medical attention. After a moment, he stepped forward again and began to speak, just as if his speech were part of the performance. “Please excuse me, but my pain is too great,” he said. “Is there a doctor in this esteemed audience?”
Nobody responded to the violinist’s appeal, whereupon he actually bowed and then, with both eyes tightly shut, staggered off the stage. The bassist took over as announcer and informed the public that it would unfortunately be impossible for the group to continue without a violin. The members of the band formed a row, faced the audience, bowed as their injured colleague had done, and left the bandstand, accompanied by irritated applause. They marched past Anna, who then returned to her table and found Lyushin eating with apparent delight.
“Most delicious,” he said, holding out a skewered snipe’s egg to her. A half-full glass of vodka was on the table in front of him; between bites, he tossed down the remaining half. “It’s not only poets who are poetic,” he declared in a surprisingly loud voice. “Some sort of lyricism is granted to every creative person. We scientists, for example, possess as much imagination as writers do.”
The waiter brought another glass of vodka.
“How else could we have named the streams of cosmic elements ‘proton showers’ or ‘electron sheaves’? In order to characterize the quantum numbers of particles that have existed only in theory until now, we ascribe magical properties to them. Theoretical physics is the poetry of the sciences!”
Anna looked on as her companion got steadily drunker.
“The poetic in us is the longing to see into the depths of things, to comprehend their connections, to call out to the passing moment and say, Stay awhile! Do you understand that, Anna?” It was obvious that he needed no encouragement to go on. “And I have succeeded!” He reached for his glass. “I have brought the moment to a halt. And I needed no Mephistopheles to help me do it!” He spoke the last words so loudly that a couple at a nearby table turned around. “Similar projects are under way in Japan and the States,” he continued more softly. “But they haven’t got as far as we have. Not even close. They can’t come up with any conclusive formula.” He pointed at himself with his fork. “I can.”
Anna’s initial irritation had turned into amusement, which now gave way to curiosity. “The last time I saw you, you said you’d failed.”
“It depends on how one fails,” Lyushin said. He pushed his plate away and treated himself to another swallow of vodka. “I need more time, more time! But the dogs are breathing down my neck. They’re after me like hyenas.”
“Who’s breathing down your neck, Professor Lyushin?”
A man in a black overcoat approached the part of the restaurant where gilded columns screened off the recesses containing individual tables from the rest of the dining room. His upper body leaned forward from the waist as he headed toward his goal. Anna noticed him first. While she was still wondering why he hadn’t handed in his outer garments at the cloakroom, he entered the circle of light shed by the chandelier. With his hat on his head, Alexey looked to Anna like a Party leader from the provinces. In the shadow of the hat brim, his eyes were invisible, but his nose and cheeks were red from the cold.
“Well, this is certainly a surprise,” he said, coming to a halt in front of the table.
At first, Lyushin had trouble reconciling Bulyagkov’s presence with that time and place. Holding his glass in his right hand, he pointed at the newcomer with his left as if he’d forgotten the newcomer’s name. “What are you doing here?”
“That’s what I was about to ask you,” Bulyagkov said to Anna.
She felt as though she’d landed in a scene from some anachronistic farce. There sat Lyushin, the charmer, too drunk to function; there stood Alexey, the lover, who seemed to have