From
A Ceiling with Lizards:

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     "Much obliged," I thanked her for the supper, pleasantly weakened by whisky and hors d'oeuvres and ready for intimate conversation. For conversation, which would lead to knowing each other better, to growing trust, to a spark of feeling, perhaps even to fireworks.

     "Pleasant dreams," she wished and substituted her departing legs for everything that could have happened.

     I'd like to be honest with you, Miss Kay. I'd like to be open. I had just enough to drink. You are standard, like a new bestseller, like a McDonald's, like a barbecue with a chat about kids and weather. I don't know why you need India, but you live here, like in Iowa-predictably, not romantically. I submit that our entire life is a tiring road, with women and men resembling little towns on the way. We stop in them for one night, for several days, for a month, even till death-and yet we don't stop there for eternity. So why shouldn't we use this eternally non-eternal moment to the fullest? Why should we, in a given situation, behave in a boring and banal way? Isn't this an extraordinary plot: India, the night, tropical downpour, a bungalow of an English colonist, fate throws two people into it, both of them are young, handsome, educated, smart, from great and very different countries-tell me what else is needed to become really interested in each other?

     Her white legs were leaving, killing a good plot. They did not understand my ideas. Maybe I shouldn't have thought in Russian, I should have thought in English. But even though I was disappointed, my eyes did not leave her legs, but, like a true gentleman, followed them while their whiteness was still visible; and even after the legs vanished, my eyes accompanied them, in imagination, up to her bed, under her sheets. Under the sheets I lost my breath, comforted my throat with a glass of whisky, and went to my room.

     Squinting at a low-hanging and bare light-bulb, I looked at about ten motionless lizards on the ceiling, frozen like ten unfulfilled hopes. I cringed, seeing how large moths and a hungry flock of mosquitoes were dying to get from the outside through the window screen; they sensed the emptiness in my disappointed soul and tried to fill it.

     It's not her fault that we misunderstood each other. It was my fault that, as many times before, I did not have the courage to express my feelings to a woman honestly and directly, and in a sadly familiar way these feelings froze, just like those slippery-cold lizards. At night, one after another, they'll keep getting unglued from the ceiling, they'll keep falling on my bed, and they'll keep running over my body with their tiny and prickly feet.

       And that's all for today. Now it's time to pretend that this new bed is more precious than everything else in the world. In my imagination, I dressed the bed in white, while in reality, on the contrary, I undressed completely. I turned off the light and lay on the bed like on an unloved bride. In the carnival revelry of the downpour I recognized with disgust one insignificantly tiny sound. Buzzing. Today I won't be able to fall asleep. Without a mosquito net this one sound will turn into a biting million. I kept looking into an invisible corner at an invisible mosquito. . . .

     Early at dawn I'll be awakened by singing of birds and by the sound of gardeners' hoes. I'll remember that I am a colonist, and with a cigar in my teeth I'll walk out to my garden. The flowers will wipe their wet faces with my spacious nightgown from Bukhara. The head servant will offer me a glass of juice and bend his head questioningly. "Horse!" I'll give him an order, jump in the saddle, and with a mighty squeeze of my calves force the horse from the spot into a gallop. The fresh morning will hit my face and the horse will carry me to the top of a hill. I'll see squares of water as far as the horizon. Over the surface of the squares, rippling the pale sky, slowly wades a flock of cranes taught to line up-bony people on skinny legs. Under their bloated stomachs, my rice ripens silently, but surely. It is harvested twice a year and it transforms miraculously: it acquires the most delicate colors of the dawn, it develops the ability to look as if it shone through the early dewy fog. In other words, having exchanged the rice for pearls, I am sending it to Europe and there, for a good reward, I strew it about female necks, drop it, but not completely, from naked tiny ears, carefully place it, lest it may roll off, on their genuinely weak fingers.

     What is Miss Kay doing now? Is she sleeping, reading a book, thinking about something? Or, having found herself in Bombay and having mounted a cork board, she kicks her maddening legs in the ocean waters of the swimming pool and in the hearts of all the officers who hand her from the shore fruit cocktails and little notes. She looks at the notes and throws them away. Rocking in the tiny waves stirred by her kicking legs, the carelessly rejected admirers absorb water, become heavier, and land on the bottoms of glasses filled with strong British drinks. What a pity the girl from Iowa is not a daughter of an English colonist.

       Through the walls I saw her white legs sticking out from under the sliding sheet cover. Trying not to bump into the things, driven insane from their longevity, I crossed the dimly lit hall, got to the corridor, and stopped. The light bulb was shining from the veranda through the glass. It was shining to allow the shadows of water drops to roll in blurs down the grey walls, and to make scorched shadows of the moths toss about and pulse. I stole up to her door. I was successfully preserving the silence, but it was treacherously broken by one darned floorboard.

     "Go to sleep," the door advised.

     Oh, how many hours of my life did I spend with beating heart next to their doors, only to hear this advice. Sometimes I dejectedly assumed I heard it more often than other men did, but I knew how to cheer myself up by a comforting thought that, apparently, I took more chances with women than other men did. But I have to explain; I kept hanging around the doors not only because of women's sweet bodies. A crazy and strange pitiless force often drowned me in the tender and melting depths of women's beautiful eyes, as if the meaning of life could be found there.

     "Miss Kay, I see that you also cannot sleep. So what? Why should our insomnia torment us? I could sit on your bed, on its very edge. . . . We could have a great conversation."

     The door was silent for a long time.

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