“Like Brehm” was the highest praise on his lips. He was always reading the Life of Animals, as a German Mennonite The Bible.

One day I asked him:

“Why do you call Popov—Popenko?”

“That is how I see him,” he replied. “Each man sees differently. Popov should be taller—and his arms longer too.”

Simonov had one trait or habit that aroused an unpleasant and suspicious feeling in me: at times, in the middle of a discussion, he suddenly seemed to drop into an abyss and this was very puzzling indeed. On his characterless face appeared a pompous but stupid grimace, the pupils of his eyes grew absurdly dilated, he looked at me with stern concentration, like a hypnotizer, but I felt he saw something else, something almost terrifying. At the same time he hid his hands under the table and moved them about there, giving me the impression that he was getting hold of a revolver to shoot me. These sudden fits of dumb meditation, disappearances into the unknown and unfathomable, were very frequent with him and I always felt uneasy when they happened.

Afterwards I began to think that something considerable, mysterious, was concealed in Simonov, so human that he was afraid of it. I waited for him to reveal it to me and my interest in him became tense and expectant.

There are various theories of goodness: the Scriptures, the Koran, the Talmud, various other books. There must also be a theory of meanness, of evil. There surely must be such a theory. Everything must be explained, everything, otherwise—how can one live?

Yesterday I wrote:

“Had I wanted it, I need not have done anything,” that is, that I need not have given away any of my friends. More than that. I might have easily been doing something useful for them. I did do so, but having done it, I felt that I had no need for it and that it changed nothing within me.

I gave them away. Why? I put that question to myself from the first day of my work with the police but I could find no answer. I was waiting all the time for a protest to stir within me, for my “conscience to speak,” but it remained silent. Only my curiosity was astir, it kept querying: “Well, what is going to happen next?”

I whipped myself up, trying to awaken a guilty reaction, which would declare resolutely: “You are a criminal.”

I realized with my brain that I was behaving in a low manner, but this realization was not confirmed by an appropriate feeling of self-chastisement, repugnance, remorse, nor even fear. No, I felt nothing of all that, nothing except curiosity, this curiosity became more and more corrosive and almost restless, bringing forward questions like: “Why is the passage from heroic gestures to meanness so easy?”

Was that little cad Popov right when he said: “If there is to be a struggle there should be heroes on both sides.” I had been a “hero” in the past, now I was merely a man forced, compelled, to solve a dark problem: why, in acting meanly, do I feel nothing repulsive about it? I put this question to myself from every possible angle.

Then it occurred to me: what if Simonov were right and life were just a matter concerning a wild beast, everything in it but a game, and I have been played havoc with by intellectuals, books? What if all these “teachers of life,” socialists, humanists, moralists, are lying, and there is no such thing as a social conscience, the link between people is a mere fallacy, and nothing exists but men trying to live at each other’s expense. And this will go on forever?