Free The Buddha's Return by Gaito Gazdánov

walls were decorated in dark-blue wallpaper. In the drawing room there was a piano. Pavel Alexandrovich seated himself at it, lightly stroked the keys and said:
    “Shall we, Lida?…”
    She began sotto voce, although it was immediately clear that she was musically gifted, that she was incapable of hitting a wrong note or missing a beat. After a minute she seemed to forget about us and began singing as if she were alone in the room—alone, or in front of a full auditorium. I was familiar with almost all her repertoire, as extensive as it was, which included French
chansons,
Gypsy romances and many other songs of the most variedand random origins. But until this evening I had never imagined that they could sound like this. To her performance, which could in no way be criticized in terms of its artistry or its musical sincerity, she brought a sustained, grave sensitivity, so often lacking in these works. In her voice, now lingering, now brief, now deep, in all its various timbres, there was always that same unrelenting insistency, which ended up overwhelming the piano, the singing, the sequence of rhyming words, until it became simply painful. There was an inexplicable auditory wantonness about it, and as I closed my eyes the white gulf of an imaginary bed appeared before me, and in it was Lida’s naked body with the vague silhouette of a man bending over her. However, the most unpleasant thing about it all was a sort of personal reminder—a reminder that no one in her audience was or could be entirely indifferent to this suffocating sensual world. And so even then, as I listened to her singing, I knew that perhaps all it would take to draw me irresistibly towards her was one random twist of fate, and neither my instinctual contempt for her nor the chronic psychological illness that kept dragging me into that cold abstract space from which there was no escape would be able to fight off this allure. As these thoughts went about in my mind, I suddenly felt infinitely sorry for Pavel Alexandrovich; one could only assume that in that world of which she was an irresistible living reminder he had been assigned the pitiful role ofher insipid companion—just as he could only be her accompanist in this auditory union of piano and voice. I paid close attention to Lida—to her red mouth, to her eyes, which occasionally took on a dreamy, misty expression, to the rhythmic swaying of her slender body, which accompanied her singing.
    A ray of sunlight passes through the bolted shutter,
    Again my head, like yesterday, begins to spin,
    I hear your laughter and our recent conversation,
    Your words ring out just like the sound of plucking strings.
    Suddenly I remembered her mother, Zina, with her aged, clumsily painted face, her toothless mouth and lifeless eyes, and her rheumatic feet in evening slippers. Then I returned my gaze to Lida; her features blurred and receded into the distance, and then, feeling a sudden chill run down my spine, I momentarily glimpsed the vanished similarity between Lida and her mother. Lida, however, had far to go before she would reach this stage—I could but muse how many times over, in the course of the long years ahead, Lida’s body would move in that swaying rhythm and how someone else’s eyes would look at her with the same avid attention with which I was watching her now. By the time she had finished singing I felt drunk; I left almost immediately, alluding to a need to prepare for an exam, and only outside did I once again feel free.
    A few days later I sought out a former acquaintance of mine, an old Russian marksman, someone I would have recognized even from afar, because it was impossible to mistake him for anyone else: his facial hair grew in patchy, isolated clumps. Two or three times I had seen him cleanly shaven, and only then did he begin to resemble other people. But when he was unshaven, which was most of the time, there was something almost botanical, something resembling patches of grey