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out, there was the sound of a scampering off in the dark, and the lamp was later found in the hall, right by the front door. Weinstock used to say that, alas, real “power” had not been granted him, that his nerves were as slack as old suspenders, while a medium’s nerves were practically like the strings of a harp. He did not, however, believe in materialization, and it was only as a curiosity that he preserved a snapshot given him by a spiritualist that showed a pale, pudgy woman with closed eyes disgorging a flowing, cloud-like mass.
    He was fond of Edgar Poe and Barbey d’Aurevilly, adventures, unmaskings, prophetic dreams, and secret societies. The presence of Masonic lodges, suicides’ clubs, Black Masses,and especially Soviet agents dispatched from “over there” (and how eloquent and awesome was the intonation of that “over there”!) to shadow some poor little
émigré
man, transformed Weinstock’s Berlin into a city of wonders amid which he felt perfectly at home. He would hint that he was a member of a large organization, supposedly dedicated to the unraveling and rending of the delicate webs spun by a certain bright-scarlet spider, which Weinstock had had reproduced on a dreadfully garish signet ring giving an exotic something to his hairy hand.
    “They are everywhere,” he would say with quiet significance. “Everywhere. If I come to a party where there are five, ten, perhaps twenty people, among them, you can be quite sure, oh yes, quite sure, there is at least one agent. I am talking, say, with Ivan Ivanovich, and who can swear that Ivan Ivanovich is to be trusted? Or, say, I have a man working for me in my office—any kind of office, not necessarily this bookstore (I want to keep all personalities out of this, you understand me)—well, how can I know that he is not an agent? They are everywhere, I repeat, everywhere … It is such subtle espionage … I come to a party, all the guests know each other, and yet there is noguarantee that this very same modest and polite Ivan Ivanovich is not actually …” and Weinstock would nod meaningfully.
    I soon began to suspect that Weinstock, albeit very guardedly, was alluding to a definite person. Generally speaking, whoever had a chat with him would come away with the impression that Weinstock’s target was either Weinstock’s interlocutor or a common friend. Most remarkable of all was that once—and Weinstock recalled this occasion with pride—his flair had not deceived him: a person he knew fairly well, a friendly, easygoing, “honest-as-God fellow” (Weinstock’s expression), really turned out to be a venomous Soviet sneak. It is my impression that he would be less sorry to let a spy slip away than to miss the chance to hint to the spy that he, Weinstock, had found him out.
    Even if Smurov did exhale a certain air of mystery, even if his past did seem rather hazy, was it possible that he …? I see him, for example, behind the counter in his neat black suit, hair combed smooth, with his clean-cut, pale face. When a customer enters, he carefully props his unconsumed cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and, rubbing his slender hands, carefully attends to the needs of thebuyer. Sometimes—particularly if the latter is a lady—he smiles faintly, to express either condescension toward books in general, or perhaps raillery at himself in the role of ordinary salesman, and gives valuable advice—this is worth reading, while that is a bit too heavy; here the eternal struggle of the sexes is most entertainingly described, and this novel is not profound but very sparkling, very heady, you know, like champagne. And the lady who has bought the book, the red-lipped lady in the black fur coat, takes away with her a fascinating image: those delicate hands, a little awkwardly picking up the books, that subdued voice, that flitting smile, those admirable manners. At the Khrushchovs’, however, Smurov was already beginning to make a somewhat different