Read Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) for Free Online

sweaty neck and the inside of his hat, donned the hat, put the handkerchief in his pocket and stepped up onto the platform.
    The invalid was waiting only for him (it was getting very dark): he stirred obligingly and made a hurried stomp with his wooden leg, put on his thread-reinforced glasses and weighed Dom Kuzma with what might have been due reverence. By all appearances, Dom Kuzma was a good regular customer who had long since earned the man’s full confidence. The question of confidence was key here.
    The patient whose life depends on testimony from a common weighing machine is likely to have little confidence in a commercial device (which was after all invented for the purpose of deceiving), and even less in its master. He is suspicious and thinks everyone is out to con him, to do him out of several precious decagrams, of the last thing supporting his life—his very life, my friend!
    Dom Kuzma waited anxiously for the fateful amount which meant
to be or not to be.
He actually fiddled with the arms of the scale and had some words with the invalid, brushing the latter’s hand away impatiently, but calmed down eventually and made his peace with the scale, collected his ticket and went away, worried.
    It seemed to Melkior that he was witnessing a crafty rite designed to test the grace of God, if not His actual existence. With intellectual embarrassment, as if he were extending his palm to be read by a palm-reading neighbor, he stepped onto the platform with an anxious heart. Apatin is a town on the Danube, he thought, or the brand name of an anti-apathy drug. …
    “How much?” he asked the invalid, faking a casual tone.
    “Sixty-one kilos, seven hundred and eighty grams.”
    “It can’t be!” he cried in alarm.
    “Oh yes it can,” replied the invalid with self-confidence. He was used to the bickering of skinny clients.
    “What? Why, I’m …”
    “You’re skinny enough to weigh that much,” said the invalid with a doctor-like cynicism. “My machine does not steal,” he added for the sake of his reputation. “Don’t worry, we earn our bread fair and square.”
    “I’m not worrying about it stealing,” he used a smile to explain his meaning. “What I’d like to know is, does it give a little?”
    “Neither. The true weight whatever the freight.”
    “And that … that priest fellow … how did he fare?”
    “Same as this morning.”
    “You mean he was here this morning as well to …?”
    “Oh yes. Twice a day he shows up.” The invalid had visibly had enough of the pointless conversation; he was finding Melkior’s curiosity a bit suspicious: “This fellow’s too nosey by half …”
    “Could it be a case, then, of mortification of the flesh?” insisted Melkior. “He may be trying to become a saint for all you know.”
    “I don’t know what saints you have in mind, but he’s a subscriber, if you must know. Pays in advance by the month, he does. Third year running.”
    “Third year? And he weighed more then—three years ago, I mean—than he does now, didn’t he?”
    “Not up to anything funny, are you?” the invalid shot a glance at the newspaper in Melkior’s hand. “He tipped them at eighty-plus to begin with. He was so strong his eyes flashed. Now he barely makes fifty-six. And that’s with my help.”
    “Your help?” Melkior felt fear at the technical term. So the scrawny neck did not come of the cellar and penance at Monte Cassino? To the invalid he said hypocritically, “Well, there you are, it’s like I said: he’s bound for sainthood.”
    “Ahh,” the invalid waved his hand compassionately, “he’s bound for Mother Earth, that’s where he’s bound. He’s got this wasting disease, poor man, and every single gram he’s lost has been registered by me—and my old gal,” and he gave the machine’s iron neck a chummy slap. “The twenty-six kilos he’s lost so far, that’s nothing. He never noticed how I slashed them, I did it all little by little. He knows I