THE LEONARDO

THE objects that are being summoned assemble, draw near from different spots; in doing so, some of them have to overcome not only the distance of space but that of time: which nomad, you may wonder, is more bothersome to cope with, this one or that, the young poplar, say, that once grew in the vicinity but was cut down long ago, or the singled-out courtyard which still exists today but is situated far away from here? Hurry up, please.

Here comes the ovate little poplar, all punctated with April greenery, and takes its stand where told, namely by the tall brick wall, imported in one piece from another city. Facing it, there grows up a dreary and dirty tenement house, with mean little balconies pulled out one by one like drawers. Other bits of scenery are distributed about the yard: a barrel, a second barrel, the delicate shade of leaves, an urn of sorts, and a stone cross propped at the foot of the wall. All this is only sketched and much has to be added and finished, and yet two live people—Gustav and his brother Anton—already come out on their tiny balcony, while rolling before him a little pushcart with a suitcase and a heap of books, Romantovski, the new lodger, enters the yard.

As seen from the yard, and especially on a bright day, the rooms of the house seem filled up with dense blackness (night is always with us, in this or that place, inside, during one part of twenty-four hours, outside, during the other). Romantovski looked up at the black open windows, at the two frog-eyed men watching him from their balcony, and shouldering his bag—with a forward lurch as if someone had banged him on the back of the head—plunged into the doorway. There remained, sunlit: the pushcart with the books, one barrel, another barrel, the nictating young poplar and an inscription in tar on the brick wall: VOTE FOR (illegible). Presumably it had been scrawled by the brothers before the elections.

Now this is the way we’ll arrange the world: every man shall sweat, every man shall eat. There will be work, there will be belly-cheer, there will be a clean, warm, sunny—

(Romantovski became the occupant of the adjacent one. It was even drabber than theirs. But under the bed he discovered a small rubber doll. He concluded that his predecessor had been a family man.)

Despite the world’s not having yet conclusively and totally turned into solid matter and still retaining sundry regions of an intangible and hallowed nature, the brothers felt snug and confident. The elder one, Gustav, had a furniture-moving job; the younger happened to be temporarily unemployed, but did not lose heart. Gustav had an evenly ruddy complexion, bristling fair eyebrows, and an ample, cupboardlike torso always clothed in a pullover of coarse gray wool. He wore elastic bands to hold his shirtsleeves at the joints of his fat arms, so as to keep his wrists free and prevent sloppiness. Anton’s face was pockmarked, he trimmed his mustache in the shape of a dark trapezoid, and wore a dark red sweater over his spare wiry frame. But when they both leaned their elbows on the balcony railings, their backsides were exactly the same, big and triumphant, with identically checkered cloth enclosing tightly their prominent buttocks.

Repeat: the world shall be sweaty and well fed. Idlers, parasites, and musicians are not admitted. While one’s heart pumps blood one should live, damn it! For two years now Gustav had been saving money to marry Anna, acquire a sideboard, a carpet.

She would come every other evening, that plump-armed buxom woman, with freckles on the broad bridge of her nose, a leaden shadow under her eyes, and spaced teeth one of which, moreover, had been knocked out. The brothers and she would swill beer. She had a way of clasping her bare arms behind her nape, displaying the gleaming-wet red tufts of her armpits. With head thrown back, she opened her mouth so generously that one could survey her entire palate and uvula, which resembled the tail end of a boiled chicken. The anatomy of her mirth was greatly to the liking of the two brothers. They tickled her with zest.

In the daytime, while his brother worked, Anton sat in a friendly pub or sprawled among the dandelions on the cool, still vividly green grass along the canal bank and observed with envy exuberant roughs loading coals on a barge, or else stared stupidly at the empty blue of the sleep-inducing sky. But presently in the well-oiled life of the brothers some obstruction occurred.

From the very moment he had appeared, rolling his pushcart into the yard, Romantovski had provoked a mixture of irritation and curiosity in the two brothers. Their infallible flair let them sense that here was someone different from other people. Normally, one would not discern anything special in him at a casual glance, but the brothers did. For example, he walked differently: at every step he rose on a buoyant toe in a peculiar manner, stepping and flying up as if the mere act of treading allowed him a chance to perceive something uncommon over the common heads. He was what is termed a “slank,” very lean, with a pale sharp-nosed face and appallingly restless eyes. Out of the much too short sleeves of his double-breasted jacket his long wrists protruded with a kind of annoying and nonsensical obviousness (“here we are: what should we do?”). He went out and came home at unpredictable hours. On one of the first mornings Anton caught sight of him near a bookstand: he was pricing, or had actually bought something, because the vendor nimbly beat one dusty volume against another and carried them to his nook behind the stand. Additional eccentricities were noted: his light remained on practically until dawn; he was oddly unsociable.

We hear Anton’s voice: “That fine gentleman shows off. We should give him a closer look.”

“I’ll sell him the pipe,” said Gustav.

The misty origins of the pipe. Anna had brought it over one day, but the brothers recognized only cigarillos. An expensive pipe, not yet blackened. It had a little steel tube inserted in its stem. With it came a suede case.

“Who’s there? What do you want?” asked Romantovski through the door.

“Neighbors, neighbors,” answered Gustav in a deep voice.

And the neighbors entered, avidly looking around. A stump of sausage lay on the table next to an uneven pile of books; one of them was opened on a picture of ships with numerous sails and, flying above, in one corner, an infant with puffed-out cheeks.

“Let’s get acquainted,” rumbled the brothers. “Folks live side by side, one can say, but never meet somehow or other.”

The top of the commode was shared by an alcohol burner and an orange.

“Delighted,” said Romantovski softly. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and with bent forehead, its V-vein inflamed, started to lace his shoes.

“You were resting,” said Gustav with ominous courtesy. “We come at the wrong time?”

Not a word, not a word, did the lodger say in reply; instead he straightened up suddenly, turned to the window, raised his finger, and froze.

The brothers looked but found nothing unusual about that window; it framed a cloud, the tip of the poplar, and part of the brick wall.

“Why, don’t you see anything?” asked Romantovski.

Red sweater and gray went up to the window and actually leaned out, becoming identical twins. Nothing. And both had the sudden feeling that something was wrong, very wrong! They wheeled around. He stood near the chest of drawers in an odd attitude.

“I must have been mistaken,” said Romantovski, not looking at them. “Something seemed to have flown by. I saw once an airplane fall.”

“That happens,” assented Gustav. “Listen, we dropped in with a purpose. Would you care to buy this? Brand new. And there’s a nice sheath.”

“Sheath? Is that so? Only, you know, I smoke very seldom.”

“Well, you’ll smoke oftener. We sell it cheap. Three-fifty.”

“Three-fifty. I see.”

He fingered the pipe, biting his nether lip and pondering something. His eyes did not really look at the pipe, they moved to and fro.

Meanwhile the brothers began to swell, to grow, they filled up the whole room, the whole house, and then grew out of it. In comparison to them the young poplar was, by then, no bigger than one of those toy treelets, made of dyed cotton wool, that are so unstable on their round green supports. The dollhouse, a thing of dusty pasteboard with mica windowpanes, barely reached up to the brothers’ knees. Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with fecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ignoble fear. I don’t know why they push against me; I implore you, do leave me alone. I’m not touching you, so don’t you touch me either; I’ll give in, only do leave me alone.

“All right, but I don’t have enough change,” said Romantovski in a low voice. “Now if you can give me six-fifty—”

They could, and went away, grinning. Gustav examined the ten-mark bill against the light and put it away in an iron money box.

Nevertheless, they did not leave their room neighbor in peace. It just maddened them that despite their having got acquainted with him, a man should remain as inaccessible as before. He avoided running into them: one had to waylay and trap him in order to glance fleetingly into his evasive eyes. Having discovered the nocturnal life of Romantovski’s lamp, Anton could not bear it any longer. He crept up barefoot to the door (from under which showed a taut thread of golden light) and knocked.

Romantovski did not respond.

“Sleep, sleep,” said Anton, slapping the door with his palm.

The light peered silently through the chink. Anton shook the door handle. The golden thread snapped.

Thenceforth both brothers (but especially Anton, thanks to his lacking a job) established a watch over their neighbor’s insomnia. The enemy, however, was astute and endowed with a fine hearing. No matter how quietly one advanced toward his door, his light went out instantly, as if it never had been there; and only if one stood in the cold corridor for a goodish length of time, holding one’s breath, could one hope to see the return of the sensitive lamp beam. Thus beetles faint and recover.

The task of detection turned out to be most exhausting. Finally, the brothers chanced to catch him on the stairs and jostled him.

“Suppose it’s my habit to read at night. What business of yours is it? Let me pass, please.”

When he turned away, Gustav knocked off his hat in jest. Romantovski picked it up without a word.

A few days later, choosing a moment at nightfall—he was on his way back from the W.C. and failed to dart back into his room quickly enough—the brothers crowded around him. There were only two of them, yet they managed to form a crowd. They invited him to their room.

“There will be some beer,” said Gustav with a wink.

He tried to refuse.

“Oh, come along!” cried the brothers; they grabbed him under the arms and swept him off (while at it, they could feel how thin he was—that weakness, that slenderness below the shoulder offered an irresistible temptation—ah, to give a good squeeze so as to make him crunch, ah, hard to control oneself, let us, at least, dig into him on the move, just once, lightly …).

“You are hurting me,” said Romantovski. “Leave me alone, I can walk by myself.”

The promised beer, the large mouth of Gustav’s fiancée, a heavy smell in the room. They tried to make him drunk. Collarless, with a copper stud under his conspicuous and defenseless Adam’s apple, long-faced and pale, with quivering eyelashes, he sat in a complicated pose, partly doubled up, partly bent out, and when he got up from his chair he seemed to unwind like a spiral. However, they forced him to fold up again and, upon their suggestion, Anna sat in his lap. He kept glancing askance at the swell of her instep in the harness of a tight shoe, but mastered his dull anguish as best he could, not daring to get rid of the inert red-haired creature.

There was a minute when it seemed to them that he was broken, that he had become one of them. In fact, Gustav said, “You see, you were silly to look down on our company. We find offensive the way you have of keeping mum. What do you read all night?”

“Old, old tales,” replied Romantovski in such a tone of voice that the brothers suddenly felt very bored. The boredom was suffocating and grim, but drink prevented the storm from bursting out, and, on the contrary, weighed the eyelids down. Anna slipped off Romantovski’s knee, brushing the table with a drowsy hip; empty bottles swayed like ninepins, one collapsed. The brothers stooped, toppled, yawned, still looking through sleepy tears at their guest. He, vibrating and diffusing rays, stretched out, thinned, and gradually vanished.

This cannot go on. He poisons the life of honest folks. Why, it can well happen that he will move at the end of the month—intact, whole, never taken to pieces, proudly strutting about. It is not enough that he moves and breathes differently from other people; the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger upon the difference, cannot catch the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that cannot be palpated, measured, counted.

A series of trivial torments began. On Monday they managed to sprinkle his bedclothes with potato flour, which is said to provoke a maddening itch. On Tuesday they ambushed him at the corner of their street (he was carrying books hugged to his breast) and hustled him so neatly that his load landed in the puddle they had picked out for it. On Wednesday they painted the toilet seat with carpenter’s glue. By Thursday the brothers’ imagination was exhausted.

He said nothing, nothing whatever. On Friday, he overtook Anton, with his flying step, at the gate of the yard, and offered him an illustrated weekly—maybe you’d like to look at it? This unexpected courtesy perplexed the brothers and made them glow still hotter.

Gustav ordered his fiancée to stir up Romantovski, which would give one the opportunity to pick a quarrel with him. You involuntarily tend to set a football rolling before kicking it. Frolicsome animals also prefer a mobile object. And though Anna, no doubt, greatly repelled Romantovski with those bug-brown freckles on her milky skin, the vacant look in her light eyes, and the little promontories of wet gums between her teeth, he found fit to conceal his distaste, fearing to infuriate Anna’s lover by spurning her.

Since he went all the same to the cinema once a week, he took her with him on Saturday in the hope that this attention would be enough. Unnoticed, at a discreet distance, both wearing new caps and orange-red shoes, the brothers stole after the pair, and on those dubious streets, in that dusty dusk, there were hundreds of their likes but only one Romantovski.

In the small elongated movie house, night had started to flicker, a self-manufactured lunar night, when the brothers, furtively hunching, seated themselves in the back row. They sensed the darkly delicious presence of Romantovski somewhere in front. On the way to the cinema, Anna failed to worm anything out of her disagreeable companion, nor did she quite understand what exactly Gustav wanted of him. As they walked, the mere sight of his lean figure and melancholy profile made her want to yawn. But once the picture started, she forgot about him, pressing an insensate shoulder against him. Specters conversed in trumpet tones on the newfangled speaking screen. The baron tasted his wine and carefully put his glass down—with the sound of a dropped cannonball.

And after a while the sleuths were pursuing the baron. Who would have recognized in him the master crook? He was hunted passionately, frenziedly. Automobiles sped with bursts of thunder. In a nightclub they fought with bottles, chairs, tables. A mother was putting an enchanting child to bed.

When it was all over, and Romantovski, with a little stumble, followed her out into the cool darkness, Anna exclaimed, “Oh, that was wonderful!”

He cleared his throat and said after a pause, “Let’s not exaggerate. In real life, it is all considerably duller.”

“It’s you who’s dull,” she retorted crossly, and presently chuckled softly as she recalled the pretty child.

Behind them, gliding along at the same distance as before, came the brothers. Both were gloomy. Both were pumping themselves up with gloomy violence. Gloomily, Anton said, “That’s not done, after all—going out walking with another’s bride.”

“And especially on Saturday night,” said Gustav.

A passerby, coming abreast of them, happened to glance at their faces—and could not help walking faster.

The night wind chased rustling rubbish along the fences. It was a dark and desolate part of Berlin. Far to the left of the road, above the canal, blinked scattered lights. On the right were vacant lots from which a few hastily silhouetted houses had turned their black backs away. After a little while the brothers accelerated their step.

“My mother and sister live in the country,” Anna was telling him in a rather cozy undertone amid the velvety night. “As soon as I get married, I hope to visit them with him. Last summer my sister—”

Romantovski suddenly looked back.

“—won a lottery prize,” continued Anna, mechanically looking back too.

Gustav emitted a sonorous whistle.

“Why, it’s them!” exclaimed Anna, and joyfully burst out laughing. “Ah, the rascals!”

“Good evening, good evening,” said Gustav hastily, in a panting voice. “What are you doing here, you ass, with my girl?”

“I’m not doing anything. We have just been—”

“Now, now,” said Anton and, drawing back his elbow, hit Romantovski crisply in the lower ribs.

“Please, don’t use your fists. You know perfectly well that—”

“Leave him alone, fellows,” said Anna with a soft snigger.

“Must teach him a lesson,” said Gustav, warming up and forefeeling with a poignant glow how he too would follow his brother’s example and feel those cartilages, that crumpy backbone.

“Apropos, a funny thing happened to me one day,” Romantovski started to say, talking fast, but here Gustav began to jam and twist the huge lumps of his knuckles into his victim’s side, causing utterly indescribable pain. In lurching back Romantovski slipped and nearly fell: to fall would have meant perishing then and there.

“Let him go,” said Anna.

He turned and, holding his side, walked off along the dark rustling fences. The brothers followed, all but treading upon his heels. Gustav rumbled in the anguish of blood lust, and that rumble might turn any moment into a pounce.

Far away before him a bright twinkle promised safety; it meant a lighted street, and although what could be seen was probably one lone lamp, that slit in the blackness seemed a marvelous festive blaze, a blissful region of radiance, full of rescued men. He knew that if he started to run it would be the end, since he could not get there sufficiently fast; he should go at a quiet and smooth walk, then he might cover that distance, keeping silent the while and trying not to press his hand against his burning ribs. So he strode on, with his usual springy step, and the impression was that he did so on purpose, to mock nonflyers, and that next moment he might take off.

Anna’s voice: “Gustav, don’t tangle with him. You know quite well you won’t be able to stop. Remember what you did once to that bricklayer.”

“Hold your tongue, old bitch, don’t teach him what must be done.” (That’s Anton’s voice.)

Now at last, the region of light—where one could distinguish a chestnut’s foliage, and what looked like a Morris pillar, and farther still, to the left, a bridge—that breathlessly waiting imploring light, at last, at last, was not so very remote.… And still one should not run. And though he knew he was making a fatal mistake, all at once, beyond the control of his will, he flew up and, with a sob, dashed forward.

He ran and seemed, as he ran, to be laughing exultingly. Gustav overtook him in a couple of leaps. Both fell, and amid the fierce rasping and crunching there occurred a special sound—smooth and moist, once, and a second time, up to the hilt—and then Anna instantly fled into the darkness, holding her hat in her hand.

Gustav stood up. Romantovski was lying on the ground and speaking in Polish. Abruptly his voice broke off.

“And now let’s be gone,” said Gustav. “I stuck him.”

“Take it out,” said Anton, “take it out of him.”

“I did,” said Gustav. “God, how I stuck him.”

They scurried off, though not toward the light, but across dark vacant lots. After skirting the cemetery they reached a back alley, exchanged glances, and slowed down to a normal walk.

Upon coming home, they immediately fell asleep. Anton dreamed he was sitting on the grass and watching a barge drift by. Gustav did not dream of anything.

Early next morning police agents arrived; they searched the murdered man’s room and briefly questioned Anton, who had come out into the passage. Gustav stayed in bed, replete and somnolent, his face the color of Westphalian ham, in contrast to the whitish tufts of his eyebrows.

Presently, the police left and Anton returned. He was in an unusual state of elation, choking with laughter, flexing his knees, noiselessly hitting his palm with his fist.

“What fun!” he said. “Do you know who the fellow was? A leonardo!”

In their lingo a leonardo (from the name of the painter) meant a maker of counterfeit bills. And Anton related what he had managed to find out: the fellow, it appeared, belonged to a gang and had just got out of jail. Before that he had been designing fake paper money; an accomplice had knifed him, no doubt.

Gustav shook with mirth too, but then his expression changed suddenly.

“He slipped us his slither, the rogue!” cried Gustav and ran, naked, to the wardrobe where he kept his money box.

“Doesn’t matter, we’ll pass it,” said his brother. “A nonexpert won’t see the difference.”

“Yes, but what a rogue!” Gustav kept repeating.

My poor Romantovski! And I who believed with them that you were indeed someone exceptional. I believed, let me confess, that you were a remarkable poet whom poverty obliged to dwell in that sinister district. I believed, on the strength of certain indices, that every night, by working on a line of verse or nursing a growing idea, you celebrated an invulnerable victory over the brothers. My poor Romantovski! It is all over now. Alas, the objects I had assembled wander away. The young poplar dims and takes off—to return where it had been fetched from. The brick wall dissolves. The house draws in its little balconies one by one, then turns, and floats away. Everything floats away. Harmony and meaning vanish. The world irks me again with its variegated void.