24
PARTISAN REVIEW
"We are both past the age where anything surprises us. Never–
theless I am surprised at something I have discovered about you.
You are, as I said, a pompous ass, a ham and a ruthless scoundrel.
But for all that you have a curious kind of innocence. . . . One
night during the great famine, in a town infested by hoardes of
waifs and strays, I stepped on a child sleeping rolled up in a doorway.
It was a girl of eight or nine; she woke up, mbbed her eyes, made
me a proposal in words which would make a corporal blush, and then
continued in the same sleepy voice: 'All right, uncle, if you don't want
to, you could at least tell me a fairy story' ... You have this same
naivete of a cormpt child."
They had talked on for a little while, then Gruber had left.
Leontiev could still see him waving good-by, his bald head stuck
out of the window of the big black limousine, agitating his dyed
eyebrows like a clown.
Leontiev tore the paper up with resignation, went back to the
window and looked down at the restful square, his fists jammed into
the pockets of his dressing-gown. It was a blue flannel dressing-gown
which Zina had given him on the tenth anniversary of their marriage,
nearly twenty years ago. He had worn it ever since at work, and it
had become such a habit that by now he felt himself quite unable to
write in any other attire. A classic example of conditioning, Gruber
would say. Also, for the last twenty years whenever Zina had come
into his study and seen him standing at the window- with his fists
jammed into the pockets of the dressing-gown, his legs apart and his
shoulders squared, he gave the impression of a Cossack headman gaz–
ing out into the steppe-she would invariably say, in her soft Ukrai–
nian singsong: "Don't strain the pockets so, Lyovochka, it makes
them bulge." At first this had made him furious; then it had become
an essential ritual of his working day-another conditioned reflex, in
Gruber's terms. The "study" had at first been a corner of their kitchen–
bed-sitting-room, partitioned off by a sheet; then a tiny, former
maid's room in a shared communal flat; finally a huge library in their
country house, complete with Bokhara carpets and goldfish bowls.
But the dressing-gown had remained the same, and Zina's soft inflec–
tion had remained the same, and for all he knew the soft curves of
her body too-for she was a Ukrainian peasant girl, passionate but
