44
PARTISAN REVIEW
A dark puddle began to collect.
Shoreline Road burst into a babble of shouts: "He did it for his
broad, his broad, his own wife!"
Some brave individuals tore through the door leading to the
balcony. The murderer, still bathed in a dazzling smile, scrambled
across the railing, and his body flew head over heels, struck against
the second-floor balcony, and plummeted like a sack down to the
asphalt right beside the first victim; immediately a second dark pud–
dle began to collect.
As in Bizet's opera, over a woman, a whore-the hairdresser
Svetka-and out of jealousy, two skilled workmen perished in broad
daylight. They hadn't even had a lot to drink.
From the crowd of vacationers under the surveillance of the vol–
untary militia came a steady hum of voices. The appropriate vehicle
drove up and individuals designated for such tasks removed the
corpses. Slowly, the vehicle moved away.
The person responsible for what had happened dashed out of
the hairdressing salon on Shoreline Road. The dazzling bright poly–
ester-clad body under her white work smock, now flung wide open,
glistened with the delightful chimera of unruly flesh.
It's been reported that they had even had two kids, and some
people used the past tense in reference to them because they
assumed that Svetka's kids vanished together with their fathers.
The hairdresser lunged at the ambulance car with her hands;
shocks of tufted red hair seemed to bounce across the roof of the
vehicle. Her hands left black marks. And it's with hands like this
that they shave us!
Later, I had the impression that the destruction of Pompeii
began precisely from this moment. It was as if that fatal incident ini–
tiated the collapse of the resort town and all its sanatoriums, restau–
rants, and monuments to workers and to Historic Titan. As if the
painter with the brick had given a signal to the volcano. As if only
then the whiffs of smoke had begun to appear above the rocky spur
suspended in the golden sky.
In actual fact, however, if there was any link between the two
occurrences, it was more likely to have been the other way around:
puffs of smoke began to appear much earlier. No one noticed it for a
long time because, strange though it seems, the residents and tour-
