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passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil. Five hackney droshkies stood on the avenue alongside the huge drumlike shape of a street pissoir : five sleepy, warm, gray worlds in coachman’s livery; and five other worlds on aching hooves, asleep and dreaming of nothing but oats streaming out of a sack with a soft crackly sound.
    It is at moments like this that everything grows fabulous, unfathomably profound, when life seems terrifying and death even worse. And then, as one swiftly strides through the nighttime city, looking at the lights through one’s tears and searching in them for a glorious, dazzling recollection of past happiness—a woman’s face, resurgent after many years of humdrum oblivion—all of a sudden, in one’s mad progress, one is politely stopped by a foot passenger and asked how to get to such and such a street; asked in an ordinary voice, but a voice which one will never hear again.

four
    Waking late on Tuesday morning, he felt some ache in his calves and, leaning his elbow on his pillow, he sighed once or twice, startled and amazed with the delight of it as he remembered what had happened that night.
    The morning was a gentle, smoky white. The windowpanes shook with a businesslike rumble.
    With a determined sweep he jumped out of bed and started shaving. Today this gave him a particular pleasure. People who shave grow a day younger every morning. Ganin felt that today he had become exactly nine years younger. Softened by flakes of lather, the bristles on his taut skin steadily crepitated as they fell to the little steel ploughshare of his safety razor. As he shaved Ganin moved his eyebrows and then, as he stood in the bathtub and doused his body in cold water from a jug, smiled with joy. He brushed his damp black hair, dressed quickly and went out.
    None of the other lodgers spent their mornings in the pension except for the dancers, who usually did not get up until lunchtime. Alfyorov was away to see a friend with whom he was starting up some business, Podtyagin had gone to the police station to try and obtain his exit visa, while Klara, already late for work, was waiting for a tramcar on the corner, clutching to her chest a paper bag of oranges.
    Very calmly Ganin climbed up to the second floor of afamiliar house and pulled the bell-ring. Opening the door but without removing the chain, a maid peeped out and said that Fräulein Rubanski was still asleep.
    “I don’t care, I must see her,” said Ganin, and, pushing his hand into the gap, he unlatched the chain himself.
    The maid, a pallid thickset girl, muttered indignantly, but Ganin elbowed her aside with the same firmness, marched into the semiobscurity of the corridor and knocked on a door.
    “Who’s there?” came Lyudmila’s slightly hoarse morning voice.
    “It’s me. Open.”
    She pattered across the floor on bare feet, turned the key and, before looking at Ganin, ran to the bed and jumped back under the bedclothes. From the tip of her ear it was obvious that she was smiling, waiting for Ganin’s approach.
    But he stayed in the middle of the room and stood there for some time, clinking the small change in his mackintosh pockets.
    Lyudmila suddenly turned onto her back and, laughing, opened her thin, bare arms. Morning did not suit her; her face was pale and puffy and her yellow hair stood on end.
    “Well, come here,” she pleaded and closed her eyes. Ganin stopped clinking his money.
    “Look, Lyudmila,” he said quietly. She sat up, her eyes open wide.
    “Has something happened?”
    Ganin stared hard at her and replied, “Yes. It seems I’m in love with somebody else. I’ve come to say goodbye.”
    She blinked her sleep-clogged eyelashes and bit her lip.
    “That’s all, really,” said Ganin. “I’m very sorry, but it can’t be helped. Let’s say goodbye now. I think it will be better like that.”
    Lyudmila covered her face and fell back again face downward on the pillow. Her