FATIGUE OF THE SYNAPSES
25
modest, who in the thirty years of their marriage had never shown
herself to him in the nude. He knew her body like a blind man, only
by touch; its gentle curves, and the languid rhythm of her movements
in the dark had always appeared to him like an echo of the lilting
singsong of her voice. Just now he would have given anything to
hear her open the door behind him and say, with a resigned, absent–
minded sigh: Don't strain the pockets, Lyovochka.... He was sure
it would do the trick and enable him to finish the revised version of
his
speech.
It was almost seven; he had only an hour left.
If
he pretended
to be sick he would have to notify the Cultural Attache, and they
would at once send the Embassy doctor. A man could fake any emo–
tion or belief, but not a cold, not even an indigestion or a serious
headache. Which went to prove the correctness of a philosophy which
took only the body seriously and had destroyed the very notion of a
hypothetical mind. Though, if Gruber was to be believed, the mind
could nevertheless directly affect the body by producing the famous
fatigue of the synapses. At present he felt as if a whole drugstore of
poison were working at them-the accumulated toxins of thirty years.
Yet to pretend sickness would inevitably arouse suspicion-they had
a sixth sense for that kind of thing. He could of course get away with
it, but it would be entered as an item on the debit side of the book
and one could never know for certain what one's balance-sheet looked
like; how much credit one had left, where the overdraft began; it was
a peculiarity of the system that once one had overdrawn, one was
never given a chance to redress the balance. Besides, if he reported
sick, he could not go to Monsieur Anatole's reception. And the pros–
pect of visiting Monsieur Anatole again had been the one bright spot
in this whole trip. He felt an almost physical longing to see people
move about at a party without squinting over their shoulders at
invisible shadows; to hear them chattering frivolously, irreverently, ir–
responsibly-not for the record, not in the desperate hope of improving
the unknown balance-sheet, but for the sole purpose of exercising their
wits and vocal chords. He himself of course could take no part in all
that; he would have to pose, as always, for his own statue, looking
at them from under bushy eyebrows, the martial image of a Hero of
Culture. But he would nevertheless hear them talk and see them
move about, gossip, laugh and munch sandwiches at their ease. The
