214
MARIA LEHMANN
I'd come across this Zerin only once (you might as well be–
lieve this, anyhow, you can't prove the contrary) when, at a meeting
of the Writers' Union, he made an exhibition of himself, voting
against a motion everybody else had voted for. I remember the in–
dignation, rising like steam. The motion was (you can check up on
this): "The Intolerable Must Not Be Tolerated." So this Zerin
squeaks in an artificial high voice and flaps his arms as if he were
a cock or something. How come, I remember asking myself, nobody
goes up to that jerk and shakes him up a bit, the way you shake
an old fur over the fire to make the fleas jump?
As
far as I knew,
all he had to
his
credit were a few poems (the usual robust, optimis–
tic stuff) included in anthologies, out of print these last thirty years
and as untraceable as their editors. (Chaps with names like Livshitz
or Slootski!) Anyway, even without the crowing, he was a lugubrious–
looking sort of fellow, unshaven, sallow, hollow cheeks, the lot. He
probably knew by then what was coming to him - we're all very
good at that. Aren't we?
His things had of course all gone by the time I moved into his
place but, rooting round the secondhand bookshop in the village, I
got hold of some dictionaries, glossaries, etc. (he must have made
his living from translations, always the last stop), each with the fly–
leaf cut at the identical spot and with the identical blunt scissors.
Maybe
it
was the handsome hard covers that made me buy the lot.
(It really won't do imputing to me, posthumously, so to speak, sinister
motives at that stage.) Anyway, "Zerin's bungalow" was made to
look a little less abandoned, a little less basic. But I was soon to
regret the whole business. I was sitting at my desk, smirking at the
weekly cleaner like a pasha - please remember, nobody, particularly
no female, had ever done anything for this poor orphan - when
I caught her giving Zerin's
books
a certain look. Of course! That
woman had done the cleaning after the Secret Police. So, the
books
would have to go. I knew even then that being linked, however
tenuously, with that crackpot Zerin, who, according to semiofficial
rumors, had just expired in the appropriate loonybin, would mean
trouble. And what had possessed me to think of that waddling, in–
terfering cleaning-woman as an unpaid wet nurse? Clearly, I was
beginning' to slip.
Even the most saintly idiot in our country knows: one can't
muck about with the Secret Police. "The truth tickles everybody's
