Free The Buddha's Return by Gaito Gazdánov Page B

earned did not last either, as Zina drank and the marksman gambled atthe races—and so he lost what Zina did not manage to drink. It was impossible to rely on Lida, as she stayed at home infrequently and had not long ago married a young Frenchman, whose parents had disowned him and who died soon thereafter, injecting himself with an overdose of morphine, following which Lida was arrested, but released a few days later. Then my acquaintance informed me that Lida was now living with Pasha Shcherbakov, about whom he also spoke in considerable detail, and what he said largely tallied with what I already knew. I could but marvel at how remarkably well informed this man was. He knew the life story of the mousey marksman, too, as well as the unfortunate incident with the motorcycle, which had been fabricated by Chernov, with whom he was also familiar. Regarding the mousey marksman, he said that back in Russia he had been an accountant, in Astrakhan, or maybe it was Arkhangelsk, who since the outbreak of war had served in the commissariat, and later arrived abroad with a certain amount of money, although he was soon ruined, losing most of it at Monte Carlo and the remainder at the races. He had even met Zina at a racecourse, the Auteuil, on that fateful day when he bet practically everything he had on the famous, incomparable Pharaoh III, the finest horse ever to race in France. The jockey, however, had been bribed by a jealous rival and, leading Pharaoh with “the stick”, threw the race at the finish line, so that no one would be any the wiser. As hetold me this, my acquaintance showed clear signs of excitement. Moreover, he had displayed such a knowledge of racing terminology as to leave me in no doubt regarding his expertise in this area—and so I fell to thinking that the causes leading people to Rue Simon le Franc were really rather few, and almost never varied. “It was in losing my fortune that I gained Zina,” the mousey marksman was reputed to have said in the days after the incident.
    “That was probably another of Chernov’s inventions,” I said without holding back.
    Thereupon we parted, and my companion left, expressing the hope that everything he had said would remain between the two of us. The phrase seemed unnecessary and automatic, devoid of all meaning, if for no other reason than the fact that he had said at the beginning of our conversation that the events he described were “known to everyone”. Naturally, I did not number among the ranks of this “everyone”, and there was something illicit and perhaps even vaguely hostile about my interest in this world. In any case, so it may have appeared to him. It was understandable to a degree, and were I in his shoes, I too, most likely, would have marked the brazenness and the impertinence of the fact that a well-heeled young man should suddenly intrude in an area that was divorced from him by this series of irrevocable falls—horses, alcohol, morphine, jail, syphilis, beggary—feeble depravity and filth, illness and physical frailty, the daily prospect of deathon the street, and the total absence of hope, or even the slightest illusion of attaining anything better. I think this is what he meant when he uttered that phrase, saying that our conversation would remain between the two of us. But he had no way of knowing, of course, that despite the difference in outward appearances my position was, perhaps, no less pitiful, albeit in a different way, than his.
    No one, not a single person in the entire world, apart from Catherine, knew that I was afflicted by this strange mental illness, the presence of which would so invariably depress me. Particularly excruciating was the consciousness of my own inequality and other people’s superiority over me. I knew that at any moment I could lose all grip of reality and be plunged into an excruciating delirium, stripped of my defences for its duration. Luckily, I would usually sense the onset of such an attack, but