96
JASCHA KESSLER
found he could not think. At first he saw before him a whirling
lion-rampant; his lion, Leo, which his wife repeatedly assured him
was the sign of protection in July, but then it dwindled, as though
sucked down a drain, and its place was immediately possessed by
Gruber's terrific sweating head, the sunglasses obscuring those
bleary, fuming eyes, that enormous mouth with its stained teeth and
the purple swollen tongue that lapped the wet cigar protruding
from it permanently. This image remained floating on the turbulent
black water of his mind, filling up the narrow space behind his
eyelids. Acker groaned low and put his hands to his poor skull,
pushing the soft heels of his palms against his empty, wretched
temples. What to do, what to do? Unable to stir foot or arm or
head, Mr. Acker, slumped on the thronelike chair, looked like a
man asleep, though actually he was awake, praying wordlessly,
his
disordered and feverish brain helpless in the rigor of the situation,
like a trussed pullet flung into a corner and waiting brighteyed for
the slaughterer's ritual knife, the knife so sharp and swift it
is
never even felt.
In the blackness to his left, the door to the basement steps
opened and shut again with a tiny click. Someone flitted by and
went up the stairs behind him. The air in the wake of this shadow
seemed tinged with ammonia, like the memory of the odor of a
moist-muzzled calf he had hugged once as a child in a green
country, long long ago. He did not move. In a little while, the
door opened again and shut. He lifted his lids just a crack
and
discerned white lowheeled shoes that appeared to glimmer against
the blotchy maroon ground of this moldy-smelling Mohawk 1m·
perial Persian carpeting: in the shoes, sharpboned and taut–
tendoned ankles, blackskinned, stepped springily by: he heard the
lightness of their passing, listened to their muffled pattering up the
stairs: he sniffed, and thought he apprehended the scent of new·
baked rye bread, weakly sour yet sweet, and what he could have
believed easily to be the breath of strong red wine. Still he did not
move. But when shortly afterward the same door opened and closed
with what was surely unusually mysterious deliberation, and he saw
two pairs of shoes go by him on tiptoe, again one white with dark·
skinned female legs in them, the other a pair of scuffed black men's
shoes, and listened to them skipping sllcretly up the staircase, and
