Invitation to a Beheading Read Online Free Page A

the pencil started to roll, one book began sliding upon another. Cincinnatus lifted the bucking chair onto the table. Finally he climbed up himself. But of course he could see nothing, only the hot sky with a few white hairs thinly combed back—the remnants of clouds that could not tolerate the blueness. Cincinnatus could barely stretch as far as the bars beyond which rose the window tunnel with more bars at the end, and their shadowed repetition on the peeling walls of the stone incline. There, on the side, written in the sameneat, contemptuous hand as one of the half-erased sentences he had read before, was the inscription: “You cannot see anything. I tried it too.”
    Cincinnatus was standing on tiptoe, holding the iron bars with his small hands, which were all white from the strain, and half of his face was covered with a sunny grating, and the gold of his left mustache shone, and there was a tiny golden cage in each of his mirrorlike pupils, while below, from behind, his heels rose out of the too-large slippers.
    “A little more and you’ll have a fall,” said Rodion, who had been standing nearby for a full half minute and now firmly clenched the leg of the trembling chair. “It’s all right, it’s all right. You can climb down now.”
    Rodion had cornflower-blue eyes and, as always, his splendid red beard. This attractive Russian countenance was turned upwards toward Cincinnatus, who stepped on it with his naked sole—that is, his double stepped on it, while Cincinnatus himself had already descended from the chair to the table. Rodion, embracing him like a baby, carefully took him down, after which he moved the table with a violinlike sound to its previous place and sat on the edge, dangling the foot that was in the air, and bracing the other against the floor, having assumed the imitation-jaunty pose of operatic rakes in the tavern scene, while Cincinnatus picked at the sash of his dressing gown, and did his best not to cry.
    Rodion was singing in his bass-baritone, rolling his eyes, brandishing the empty mug. Marthe used to sing that same dashing song once. Tears gushed from the eyes of Cincinnatus. On a climactic note Rodion sent the mug crashing against the floor and slid off the table. His song went onin chorus, even though he was alone. Suddenly he raised both arms and went out.
    Sitting on the floor, Cincinnatus looked upward through his tears; the shadow of the bars had already moved. He tried—for the hundredth time—to move the table, but, alas, the legs had been bolted down for ages. He ate a pressed fig and began again to walk about the cell.
    Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. At twenty-two he was transferred to a kindergarten as a teacher in division F, and at that time he married Marthe. Almost immediately after he had assumed his new duties (consisting of keeping busy little children who were lame, hunchbacked or crosseyed) an important personage made a second-degree complaint against him. Cautiously, in the form of a conjecture, there was expressed the suggestion of Cincinnatus’s basic illegality. Together with this memorandum the city fathers also examined the old complaints that had been made from time to time by the more perceptive of his colleagues at the workshop. The chairman of the education committee and certain other official figures took turns locking themselves up with him and making on him the tests prescribed by law. For several days in a row he was not allowed to sleep, and was compelled to keep up rapid senseless small talk until it bordered on delirium, to write letters to various objects and natural phenomena, enact everyday scenes, and to imitate various animals, trades and maladies. All of this he performed, all of this he passed, because he was young, resourceful, fresh, yearning to live, to live for a while with Marthe. Reluctantly they released him, allowing him to continue working with children of the lowest category, who were expendable, in order to see what would come of