Despair Read Free Page A

last year in Saxony, not far from the frontier. Gardening. Best thing in the world! Later on I worked in a pastry shop. Every night after work, me and my friend used to cross the frontier for a pint of beer. Seven miles there and as many back. The Czech beer was cheaperthan ours and the wenches fatter. There was a time, too, when I played the fiddle and kept a white mouse.”
    Now let us glance from the side, but just in passing, without any physiognomizing; not too closely, please, gentlemen, or you might get the shock of your lives. Or perhaps you might not. Alas, after all that has happened I have come to know the partiality and fallaciousness of human eyesight. Anyhow, here is the picture: two men reclining on a patch of sickly grass; one, a smartly dressed fellow, slashing his knee with a yellow glove; the other, a vague-eyed vagabond, lying full length and voicing his grievances against life. Crisp rustle of neighboring thornbush. Flying clouds. A windy day in May with little shivers like those that run along the coat of a horse. Rattle of a motor lorry from the highroad. A lark’s small voice in the sky.
    The tramp had lapsed into silence; then spoke again, pausing to expectorate. One thing and another. On and on. Sighed sadly. Lying prone, bent his legs back till the calves touched his bottom, and then again stretched them out.
    “Look here, you,” I blurted. “Don’t you really
see
anything?”
    He rolled over and sat up.
    “What’s the idea?” he asked, a frown of suspicion darkening his face.
    I said: “You must be blind.”
    For some ten seconds we kept looking into each other’s eyes. Slowly I raised my right arm, but his left did not rise, as I had almost expected it to do. I closed my left eye, but both his eyes remained open. I showed him my tongue. He muttered again:
    “What’s up? What’s up?”
    I produced a pocket mirror. Even as he took it, he pawedat his face, then glanced at his palm, but found neither blood nor bird spat. He looked at himself in the sky-blue glass. Gave it back to me with a shrug.
    “You fool,” I cried. “Don’t you see that we two—don’t you see, you fool, that we are—Now listen—take a good look at me.…”
    I drew his head sideways to mine, so that our temples touched; in the glass two pairs of eyes danced and swam.
    When he spoke his tone was condescending:
    “A rich man never quite resembles a poor one, but I dare say you know better. Now I remember once seeing a pair of twins at a fair, in August 1926—or was it September? Now let me see. No. August. Well, that was really some likeness. Nobody could tell the one from the other. You were promised a hundred marks if you spotted the least difference. ‘All right,’ says Fritz (Big Carrot, we called him) and lands one twin a wallop on the ear. ‘There you are,’ he says, ‘one of them has a red ear, and the other hasn’t, so just hand over the money if you don’t mind.’ What a laugh we had!”
    His eyes sped over the dove-grey cloth of my suit; slid down the sleeve; tripped and pulled up at the gold watch on my wrist.
    “Couldn’t you find some work for me?” he asked, cocking his head.
    Note: it was he and not I who first perceived the masonic bond in our resemblance; and as the resemblance itself had been established by me, I stood toward him—according to his subconscious calculation—in a subtle state of dependence, as if I were the mimic and he the model. Naturally, one always prefers people to say: “He resembles you,” and not the other way round. In appealing to me for help this petty scoundrel was just feeling the ground in view of future demands.At the back of his muddled brain there lurked, maybe, the reflection that I ought to be thankful to him for his generously granting me, by the mere fact of his own existence, the occasion of looking like him. Our resemblance struck me as a freak bordering on the miraculous. What interested him was mainly my wishing to see any resemblance at