Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Read Free

never …
    He interrupted me without smiling: —That is what I am thanking you for. You never imposed unwanted formulas of neighborliness on me.
    â€”Well, thank you, then, Mr. Plotnikov, but I’m sure, to paraphrase a more famous American humorist than me, that you greatly exaggerate the news of your death.
    â€”You can never tell, Gospodin Hull, because my condition is the following …
    I had stopped rocking and fanning. I didn’t know whether to give in to my first inclination, which was to laugh, or surrender to the deeper feeling engendered by the sight of this man—so protected by his clothes and yet so mercilessly exposed by a sun that allowed him no more shade than the bony ridges over his eyes and the wrinkles of his aged skin—which was to take his words seriously indeed.
    â€”Yes, sir?
    â€”Gospodin Hull: you will come to visit me only on the day of your own death, to let me know, as I have done today with mine. That is my condition.
    â€”But you will be dead then—I began, logically, almost happily, although I quickly abandoned that tack—I mean, the day I die you will no longer be living …
    â€”Don’t be so sure of that—now he opened the umbrella with nervous haste and shaded himself with it—and respect my last wish. Please. I am so tired.
    As I relate this, I recall many of our chance meetings at the corner of Drayton Street and Wright Square, in the cemetery, or in the mall. We never exchanged many words (except the afternoon of the pistachio ice cream), but we were neighbors, and without ever paying each other a formal visit, we passed along snatches of information, like the pieces of a puzzle. What did I know about him, really, on that day when he predicted his death in such a strange manner? What did I know about him? Two or three vague facts: he was a theater actor in Russia, although he really wanted to be a set designer and stop acting. It was the era of Stalinist terror, life was difficult for everyone, as bad for those who submitted as for those who resisted the madness of personal power posing as collective power. Who didn’t suffer? Even the executioners, Mr. Plotnikov said one day, they, too, breathe, and their breath was like a forest felled. He left Russia and found asylum in the United States, which offered it to so many refugees from a Europe convulsed by ideology, in those generous years when America was America; he smiled at me, recalling some Jews, some Spaniards, who couldn’t get through the doors of our democratic refuge. But what could you do; we received so many more, Germans, Poles, Russians, Czechs, French … Politics is the art of limits. Art is the limit of politics.
    â€”Respect my last wish. Do not come to my wake tonight or accompany my funeral procession tomorrow. No. Visit me in my house on the day of your death, Gospodin Hull. Our well-being depends on it. Please. I am very tired.
    What could I say, seeing him there on that street-scene stage, with the garbage beginning to distract us from the colonial grandeur of Savannah; what could I tell him, that the day of his funeral I was going to be in Atlanta taking care of patients less lucid, more impatient than he? What could I tell him, to show my respect for something that I understood, I appreciated, I was grateful for, that this was perhaps his final performance, the final act of a career brutally interrupted—I deduced—by political adversity and never taken up again outside Russia.
    â€”I needed—he explained to me one day, or I imagined or dreamed, I’m no longer sure of the truth—the Russian language, Russian applause, to read the reviews in Russian, but above all I needed the test of the Russian heart in order to present myself in public, acting; I couldn’t communicate as an actor apart from the Russian language, space, applause, time, testimony, intent. Did I understand that, in my country of wild