Night Music Read Free Page B

order to salve his conscience). He flipped through the pages until he found Chapter XXXI, which began with the words “A bell sounded . . .” From there he read on quickly but carefully, traveling with Anna past Piotr in his livery and top-boots, past the saucy conductor and the woman deformed, past the dirty hunchback muzhik until finally he came to this passage:
    She was going to throw herself under the first car as its center came opposite where she stood. Her little red travelling-bag caused her to lose the moment; she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul a whole series of memories of her youth and childhood; and suddenly the darkness which hid everything from her was torn asunder. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her. But she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the center, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. For a second she was horror-struck at what she was doing.
    â€œWhere am I? What am I doing? Why?”
    She tried to get up, to draw back; but something monstrous, inflexible, struck her head, and threw her on her back.
    â€œLord, forgive me all!” she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.
    A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
    And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.
    Mr. Berger read the passage twice, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was all there, right down to the detail of the little red bag, the bag that the woman on the track had cast aside before the express had hit her, just as Anna had thrown away her bag before she was struck. The woman’s gestures in her final moments had also been similar to Anna’s: she, too, had drawn her head between her shoulders and stretched out her arms, as though the death to come was to take the form of crucifixion rather than iron and wheels. Why, even Mr. Berger’s own memory of the incident had been couched in similar phrases.
    â€œMy God,” said Mr. Berger to the listening books, “perhaps the inspector was right, and I have been spending too much time alone with only novels for company. There can be no other excuse for a man believing that he has seen the climactic scene of Anna Karenina reenacted on the Exeter to Plymouth railway.”
    He placed the volume on the arm of the chair and went to the kitchen. He was briefly tempted to reach for the brandy again, but no particular good had come of their previous shared moments, and so he opted for the routine of making a big pot of tea. When all was in place, he took a seat at the kitchen table and drank cup after cup until he had drained the pot dry. For once he did not reach for a book, nor did he distract himself with the Times ’ crossword, still left untried at this late stage of the morning. He simply stared at the clouds, and listened to birdsong, and wondered if he was not, after all, going gently insane.
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    Mr. Berger did not read anything else that day. His two examinations of Chapter XXXI of Anna Karenina remained his sole contact with the world of literature. He could not recall a day when he had read less. He lived for books. They had consumed every spare moment since the revelation in childhood that he could tackle a novel alone without his mother having to read it to him. He recalled his first halting encounters with the Biggles stories of W. E. Johns,