314
MAX FRISCH
not a Russian, he's a Swiss
conducteur,
a young and rosy fellow with
a red pouch that dangles about his knees, not an unfriendly person,
but he has no time either the way people once did in Russian trains
when they listened .to half an epic, and after he's left the compart–
ment, the traveler says: "But does it really interest you?" A while ago,
he was in the dining car; the people there look at their plates or past
one another, and when they've paid the check they may nod, but
by then it's too late to say: "I'm a sick man ... a bad person....
A repulsive person. I think I have liver trouble." Who wants to
know? "God knows I had already lifted the small ax, and Natasha
sat before me, I wanted to split her apart like a log. I didn't want
to of course, but the ax wanted to, the small ax,. Fyodor. Ivanovitch,
in my hand." You don't say this in a dining car, nor in a compart–
ment after a gentleman has come in, barely saying good afternoon
and wanting to read his newspaper. His name may .be Hubacher
or Vogelsanger, a Swiss gentleman, and the horrible thing had
happened in Grisons, not in Russia. "Do you know the area around
Bivio?" A thing like that he can say, even if the other man is sur–
prised and says : "Why?" There's no samovar humming, only his
Charatan pipe is sputtering. "A nice pipe," he says, "isn't it?" The
man sitting out of view b :::hind his open paper is surely not a bad
person; his coat is a good coat with fine lining. "I am a sick man,
which I may not be at all, I am a ridiculous man," he says outside
in the corridor : "By the way, I lied before, Fyodor Ivanovitch. Per–
haps you noticed. I didn't leave my wife and children for her sake.
That's nonsense. I left them for my sake! - after all, I left Natasha
too, later on - and Yassa -. Now you think I'm unscrupulous,
Fyodor Ivanovitch, but that's not true at all. She was too good for
me, I mean my first wife. I never beat her, as God is my witness,
but it was a blessing for her that I left her. Now, everyone admits
it. They were always too good for me, and some day I would have
had to 'realize that they were suffering, you understand, sooner or
later. There was gossip every time, the same gossip. That's why I
traveled so much. Today I know: It's the other way around. What
are scruples ! On the contrary, women were always happier when
I left them, or at least no unhappier - there weren't that many any–
way, Fyodor Ivanovitch, in case you think so.. .. Now we're in Biel,
I believe," he says, and corrects himself, using the French form:
