conjurer.” And suddenly, leaning on the table, more animated than I had ever seen him before, Simonov went on with his story in his hoarse little voice: “As a remarkable conjurer I see myself, I do. First I come out on the stage in tights—do you see? Like an acrobat. No pockets.” He smiled the smile of a happy man, gave me an absurd wink: “Suddenly there is a duck in my hands. I put it down on the floor, it walks about the stage, quacks and lays eggs. D’you see? It lays an egg and a sucking pig comes out of it, it lays another and it is a hare, another—an owl and so on, ten eggs. You can imagine the reaction of the audience, eh? They all stand up in their seats, rub their eyes, peer through their glasses—general amazement! They all feel like fools, the deputy governor especially—and do you think it’s any fun for the deputy governor to feel like a fool in front of all the others? Then suddenly—I grow a second head! I light a cigar—instantly there are two of them—but they let out no smoke, the smoke comes from under my toes—see? Meanwhile the hare jumps about, so does the pig, the owl stares at the audience with wide open eyes, dazzled by the footlights, the other animals dash about, they grow in number all the time—what a circus!” And opening wide his colorless eyes, the head of the Police Department, Piotr Filippovich Simonov, fighter against the revolution, said with deep conviction, almost with relish: “By Jove, how one can take in people! By Jove, one can.”

Listening to his absurd divagations, I felt like an idiot. He was not drunk; he drank a good deal, but was never intoxicated.

I asked him:

“So this is what you think of, when you seem to drop off to sleep amidst a discussion, as though vanishing somewhere?”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “It comes upon me quite suddenly. One day while making a report in the Police Department it suddenly occurred to me that I could write my name in characters of fire in the air. And what do you think? I began to write and it came off. Letters of fire burning in front of the Head of the Department: Simonov, Simonov.…I started at him and wondered: couldn’t he see them? And then he asked me: ‘What is the matter? Are you ill?’ Frightened, of course, he was.”

Mild insanity shone in Simonov’s eyes and his face acquired from that an importance, a significance. With a vague hope in my heart, I asked:

“Is that all you have to say?”

He asked me in return: “What do you mean?”

He died in a curious manner: we had been sitting talking for two hours, in the night, he was feeling perfectly well, and at four o’clock in the afternoon he died in a hainock in the garden.

Comrade Basov has been here and he brought with him a red-haired man with his head bandaged up. “You don’t recognize me, Karamora?” he asked. He proved to be one of the three men whose escape from prison I had organized. I did not remember him.

Basov asked whether I had been already serving in the police when I organized that escape? A stupid question. By the Police documents he should have known that I had been. They talked with me for half an hour in the tone of righteous judges—as one might have expected them to do—and went.

Possibly they will let me live. It is interesting to know what I shall do with my life. That is another question: is life given into a man’s power or is man given up to be consumed by life?—And whose idea is it anyway—life? A bad idea, on the whole.

Yes, working for the police I allowed myself the luxury of planning little pleasures for my comrades: escapes from prison, from exile, organizing printing offices and arranging for the storage of propaganda literature. But I played this double game not in order to give them up to the police after establishing myself in their