The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) Read Free Page B

its
center came opposite where she stood. Her little red traveling-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.
“Where 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.
“Lord, 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 tracks 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.
    “My 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 read, 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.
    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, remembering how he had struggled through the longer
words by breaking them up into their individual syllables so that one difficult
word became two easier ones. Ever since then books had been his constant
companions. He had, perhaps, sacrificed real friendships to these simulacra,
because there were days when he had avoided his chums after school or ignored
their knocking on his front door when his parents’ house was otherwise empty,
taking an alternative route home or staying away from the windows so that he
could be sure that no football