50
PARTISAN REVIEW
prop up their existence. Are you actually getting ready to jog? Take
me with you."
We started off running together-evenly and rhythmically, with
the intoxicating smell of wine from her puffs of breath. But when I
later glanced to my side, I no longer found her next to me. I turned
completely around and, in the distance that was growing more
blurry with each step, caught sight of a truck vending beer. Painters
and the film people had gathered around it. Arabella, with her
palms extended outwards, was encouraging our dotty citizens to
prop up their existence.
That evening ash began to fall on Pompeii. A lackluster moon
lit up the crest of the mountain range, above which there floated a
rose-pink luminescence. Here and there, serpentines of fire crept
along the wooded slopes.
Foreign radio stations were reporting Pompeii's destruction
loud and clear. Our capital calmly but forcefully denied the rumors
as slander.
That night I finished work on my monograph and set off for the
hairdressing salon. For some reason I had a sudden urge to alter my
appearance radically: maybe, to have them trim a bit off the temples
or give my moustache a new twirl. In short, willy-nilly, my legs car–
ried me off to the hairdresser's.
Picture me that evening: an enormous strapping redhead with a
glint in his eyes! Good intentions forgotten. Forgotten, too, and
thoroughly ventilated from my mind-the well-turned phrases in
"Repercussions." Clearly realizing that Pompeii had "sucked me
in" this time, I moved cheerfully towards the vortex of the "suc–
tion"-the hairdresser's. Flakes of ash flittered gracefully, swooped
towards the lamplights of early evening and fell on the crowd of bar–
barians who, as always, were yearning for
kaiJ.
A Greek liner had docked hard along Shoreline Road. Music
drifted from that direction. They were playing the new hit record
"Love Machine" over and over again. A teeming crowd milled
around at dockside. Everyone except the most arrant lazybones was
trafficking on the black market: young pioneers, pensioners, musi–
cians, and even centurions in uniform. And just between us, there
were even centurions in civilian clothes.
It
even seemed that the ulti–
mate purpose of black marketeering had already been lost sight of;
the primary goal of making money had been forgotten. Now it was
