To her astonishment the General’s envoy came that night.
He rang the bell three times, as the letter promised, but he must have known she was in her apartment – must have watched her enter, and the lights go on – for all she heard was a snap of the letter-box, a snap much louder than it normally made, and when she went to the door she saw the piece of torn postcard lying on the mat, the same mat she had looked at so often when she was longing for word of her daughter Alexandra. Picking it up, she ran to the bedroom for her Bible, where her own half already lay, and yes, the pieces matched, God was on her side, St Joseph had interceded for her. (But what a needless piece of nonsense, all the same! ) And when she opened the door to him, he slipped past her like a shadow : a little hobgoblin of a fellow, in a black overcoat with velvet tabs on the collar, giving him an air of operatic conspiracy. They have sent me a midget to catch a giant, was her first thought. He had arched eyebrows and a grooved face and flicked-up horns of black hair above his pointed ears, which he prinked with his little palms before the hall mirror as he took off his hat – so bright and comic that on a different occasion Ostrakova would have laughed out loud at all the life and humour and irreverence in him.
But not tonight.
Tonight he had a gravity that she sensed immediately was not his normal way. Tonight, like a busy salesman who had just stepped off an aeroplane – she had the feeling also about him that he was brand new in town : his cleanliness, his air of travelling light – tonight he wished only to do business.
‘You received my letter safely, madame?’ He spoke Russian swiftly, with an Estonian accent.
‘I had thought it was the General’s letter,’ she replied, affecting – she could not save herself – a certain sternness with him.
‘It is I who brought it for him,’ he said gravely. He was delving in an inside pocket and she had a dreadful feeling that, like the big Russian, he was going to produce a sleek black notebook. But he drew out instead a photograph, and one look was quite enough : the pallid, glossy features, the expression that despised all womanhood, not just her own; the suggestion of longing, but not daring to take.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is the stranger.’
Seeing his happiness increase, she knew immediately that he was what Glikman and his friends called ‘one of us’ – not a Jew necessarily, but a man with heart and meat to him. From that moment on she called him in her mind ‘the magician’. She thought of his pockets as being full of clever tricks, and of his merry eyes as containing a dash of magic.
For half the night, with an intensity she hadn’t experienced since Glikman, she and the magician talked. First, she told it all again, reliving it exactly, secretly surprised to discover how much she had left out of her letter, which the magician seemed to know by heart. She explained her feelings to him, and her tears, her terrible inner turmoil; she described the crudeness of her perspiring tormentor. He was so inept – she kept repeating, in wonder – as if it were his first time, she said – he had no finesse, no assurance. So odd to think of the Devil as a fumbler! She told about the ham omelette and the frites and the Alsatian beer and he laughed; about her feeling that he was a man of dangerous timidity and inhibition – not a woman’s man at all – to most of which the little magician agreed with her cordially, as if he and the gingery man were already well acquainted. She trusted the magician entirely, as the General had told her to; she was sick and tired of suspicion. She talked, she thought afterwards, as frankly as she once had talked to Ostrakov when they were young lovers in her own home town, on the nights they thought they might never meet again, clutching each other under siege, whispering to the sound of approaching guns; or to Glikman, while they waited for the hammering on the door that would take him back to prison yet again. She talked to his alert and understanding gaze, to the laughter in him, to the suffering which she sensed immediately was the better side of his unorthodox and perhaps anti-social nature. And gradually, as she went on talking, her woman’s instinct told her that she was feeding a passion in him – not a love this time, but a sharp and particular hatred that gave thrust and sensibility to every little question he asked. What or whom it was that he hated, exactly, she could not say, but she feared for any man, whether the gingery stranger or anybody else, who had attracted this tiny magician’s fire. Glikman’s passion, she recalled, had been a general, sleepless passion against injustice, fixing itself almost at random upon a range of symptoms, small or large. But the magician’s was a single beam, fixed upon a spot she could not see.