Deceit by Yuri Felsen

Author:Yuri Felsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

July 5

MY “ACTIVE” LIFE continues, but it is not what I naïvely imagined it to be—it lacks the anticipated thrill of movement, of success, of being able to give orders and comfortably, without rushing, to discuss what really changes from suchlike discussions; it lacks those touching, thrilling, deliberately withheld delights that feelings and hints of feelings entail (whether they are happy or sad is unimportant): somehow or other I must see the day through to evening, trying to dodge the many tedious or irrelevant people, and those two women (without giving myself airs, there could be more of them), giving them the slip and dreaming up pretexts to avoid seeing them, to put off our latest assignation and to remain alone for a single, solitary hour more—I have not yet the strength to escape all this, to finish with it once and for all, or, rather, I have not yet decided anything: it will be easy for me to act on my decision, for I have not been drawn into this present, as it were, alien, life, and I am not inextricably bound by it to anyone. And yet it goes on, robbing me of my time, and there is nothing to take its place: what I dread more than anything is an empty, unallocated day.

I am, essentially, still tied up with Lyolya; everything to do with her, all those imaginary rebukes, slights, and hopes remain, but they are somehow muted, frozen by the cold and excessive tranquility of this internally static “active life,” devoid as it is of that ordinary irrepressible spirit, and often I must artificially muster the requisite indignation or tenderness to escape the tedium and ascertain whether I have not become too numbed. I often receive Lyolya’s sweet, considerate, solicitous letters—these pertain to my active, real, unimaginary relations—and, as before, I wait for them impatiently, but with a new, circumspect sangfroid: hence, if I myself compose a particularly touching or successful letter, I immediately envisage Lyolya’s grateful reaction, I long to know it with palpable accuracy, and in the interim—until I receive a response—I even prefer not to find a familiar white envelope on my desk.

Lyolya continues to have trouble with Sergei N., but still she hesitates to leave him. I, too, find my circumstances unchanged—as though jaded by both women, I wearily, sometimes with a predatory, instantly extinguished sense of anticipation, await now Zina, now Ida Ivanovna, and I am even accustomed—at the Wilczewskis’, when they are together—to their petty, acrimonious squabbling, to the never-ending barbs, the sudden, squalling half declarations—made out of spite—and to my own cowardly, neutral politeness as I continue to feign ignorance. Far too often, when the evening is nearly over—after the obligatory boring farewells—I unwittingly find myself at Ida Ivanovna’s. She is disillusioned with me and, in her naïveté, has revealed to me her original designs: “Every business needs a man, you know.” Having realized once and for all that I shall never be that man in her business, that

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