Oh, how lucky I was to have him: my guardian angel, the great and invulnerable Tatchuk! Ever since that train on the way to Moscow, when my bag was stolen with all my money and my passport. I was devastated. I wouldn’t be able to register or sign up for classes. And then he came back (he’d left the compartment to throw out some garbage) and handed me my wallet. He had found it miraculously, in a trash can, with no money left in it, but my passport still inside. “What would you do without me?” he said. “I return you your name, your identity, and your future; don’t take it for granted.”
And so it went. Then there was the editing job at
I went back to the room.
“Haven’t you had enough of pounding those keys?” he asked, nodding at my ancient computer. “I need a new story too, you know. I already have a great name for it: ‘The Point of No Return.’ What do you think?”
“What is it about?”
“I still don’t have it all planned out yet. Basically, it’s going to be about two friends living in Venice. One is an aristocrat, although no longer wealthy. He works as a model for the leading fashion designers and writes brilliant poetry. The other is Gorlum. He is but a pale shadow, wracked with envy for the unending successes of his friend.”
So that’s what’s going on, I thought. Our companionship, which had seemed not so long ago to be at least a kind of symbiosis, was now a glaring case of vampirism. Poor fool that I was, I had thought he had no ulterior motives for sharing his unending supply of good luck with me, that he did so with the same sunny generosity of all demigods. O the wretchedness of my soul and its innate servitude! I felt like the lowly lackey allowed to sit at his master’s table, only to be thrust back in his place when the meal was over.
“So one day Gorlum decides to kill his friend. He thinks that by killing the first character, let’s call him Martin, he’ll solve all of his own problems, and at last fortune will come his way. But when the cunning plan is enacted and the murder has taken place, Gorlum realizes that his life has lost its meaning after Martin’s death. Gorlum goes crazy. He starts seeing features of the master he so cruelly betrayed in different people walking by on the street. He starts running up to them, calling them by his friend’s name. He begins to believe that Martin is still alive, and punishing him through his absence. It ends with madness … What do you think of the story line?”
So you think that my only purpose on this earth is to be your monkey, a mere dwarf in your court, Martin dearest?
“I feel I’ve heard this somewhere before,” I said automatically.
“You’re always doing that!” he exploded. “And when it concerns your own writing, you go hoarse defending the originality of your ideas. Have you ever thought that maybe the reason your work doesn’t get printed is because you aren’t capable of generating any original ideas of your own?”
“What about your work, why hasn’t it been printed?”
“You’re a lazy, ungrateful loser.”
Like a greyhound on a leash, I began to quiver in anticipation of a fight. Now, finally, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see fear in his eyes. But it wasn’t so much fear as doubt that I was hoping for. I wanted to see him doubt his absolute right to demand and receive whatever came into his head.
“Listen,” I said, lighting a cigarette and trembling with the suspicion that had so suddenly awakened in me, “your plot is all right, but it seems sort of unrealistic to me. I suggest you make a few changes.”
“Don’t smoke around me, you slob, have you forgotten? Put it out this instant!”
“In my opinion,” I continued, inhaling, “talent seems to be distributed unfairly between your two characters. As a matter of fact, the story just doesn’t seem believable or lifelike. One character is blessed so generously—as handsome as a god and as brilliant as Dante … Of course that happens in real life, but in a book it would appear too contrived.”
“I said put it out!” He lunged at me, but began coughing, then snatched his inhaler, biting into it with whitened lips.
