Read Rex for Free Online Page B

bitterly.
    My surprise when I opened the door and, with a step back, let in a man who looked … Russian? No: a man whose looks and manner were completely Buryat, whom I pegged easily and immediately as a Buryat. I told him so, and his surprise was so great he almost turned and left on the spot. As if I’d seen through his disguise. It gave him doubts about hiring me, a person with such minute knowledge of your country, but something in me, the sincerity and goodness radiating from my eyes, the exquisite fluidity of my manners, made him reconsider, change his mind. My duties would consist of giving classes toan eleven-year-old boy. Basic subjects: Spanish, geography, physics in Spanish. How to imagine that those classes would become the magnificent thing they are now, Petya? Magnificent, isn’t that true? Or am I lying?
    What was my profession, he inquired, what had my studies been? I lied, just as I’ve always advised you to do in such a situation. I would be able to teach an eleven-year-old, prepare him to begin going to school six months later. I didn’t tell him, stopped myself from telling him, that a child didn’t need Spanish classes, that a child would learn the language in a few weeks by repeating obscenities, clumsily swearing on a school playground. What need did he have of a professor all his own? A tutor who wouldn’t even tell him what he most wanted to know, would avoid teaching him obscenities? Well, anyway. That’s how it happened, Petya.
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    Or, to put it another way: there is no point or portion of human experience that did not affect the Writer and is not reflected in the Book, complete, clear, understandable, humanly comprehensible, and stunningly beautiful. Passages that require no commentary because they overwhelm the soul with their pristine force, Petya. The motives a young man might have for remaining in a house like your parents’ house, after that first month. I might allege an explanation and convincing motive in my encounter with your mother one Monday at noon. I’d already seen and understood her to be a woman of overwhelming beauty, but then I watched her come into the living room that morning, her face illuminated by the stones of a necklace. Dressed as if to go out, though she never did, and for that reason I was doubly perplexed, trying to decipher where on earth, dressed like that, so beautifully attired, and with that string of stones at her neck. This time a cluster of immense diamonds, big as pigeon’s eggs, cut smooth and round (cabochons, your mother would later clarify), all the light of morning inside them.
    Everything is in the Book!
    Paralyzed, not taking my eyes off the necklace as her legs bore it across the room, until someone—Batyk, undoubtedly—made her go back upstairs and take it off.
    Without my being able to take a step or rather drop to the ground, return to earth, my feet a handsbreadth above the carpet, then falling slowly back down onto it, still plunged in my astonishment. All right:I’d noticed, I knew they were fabulously rich, but … that necklace! Diamonds, without a shadow of a doubt. Because if once in your life you’ve paid attention, if ever you’ve seen a diamond, you won’t mistake one for anything else, Petya. Just as it’s enough for me to read a single page by the Writer, a single paragraph: how it glows, how it scintillates! And I’m not the type to say—as I know some people would, affording themselves the pleasure of stupidly proclaiming: So what? Diamonds? What do I want diamonds for? Why would I pay for a diamond if it’s all the same—you know?—as a piece of cut crystal. I, a reader of the Book, was better prepared.
    Terrible, that necklace. How much was that necklace worth? A fortune. The pink diamond, a fortune, the blue diamond, two fortunes, the red one, four fortunes. And so on. Not a king in distant India could come up with enough wheat to place on