Passages from Short Fiction

The sound the earth makes when it has been at war too long.

How was it that we had not heard it before! From everywhere—the exact place could not be defined—a groan, unbroken and scraping, wonderfully calm in its breadth, and even indifferent, as it seemed, was borne upon us. We had heard many cries and groans, but this resembled none of those heard before. On the dim reddish surface our eyes could perceive nothing, and therefore the very earth and sky, lit up by a never-rising sun, seemed to be groaning.

A resurrected man walks toward the sunset and becomes a shadow.

And in the evening, when the sun, ruddy and swollen, was sinking in the west, sightless Lazarus slowly groped after it. He stumbled over stones and fell, fat and weak as he was, then he rose heavily and walked on. And against the crimson canvas of the sunset his dark form and outstretched arms gave him a monstrous resemblance to the cross.

A song too honest for the person paid to listen to it.

Having composed it to the best of my ability, I meant to sing it loudly, as good songs should be sung, but my jailer would not allow it. My jailer’s ear is overgrown with hair; it has a strait and a narrow channel: fit for words that are untruthful, sly, words that can crawl upon their bellies like reptiles. But my words walk erect, they have deep chests, broad backs—ah, how painfully they tore at the tender ear of the jailer which was overgrown with hair!

What a face is worth when it refuses to obey you.

Oh, if but for a moment I could have had a human face! I bit my lips, tears rolled over my heated face; but it—that idiotic mask, on which everything was in its right place, nose, eyes, and lips—looked with a complacency staidly horrible in its absurdity. And when I went out, swaying on my flowered feet, it was long before I got out of reach of that ringing laugh. It was as though a silvery stream of water were falling from an immense height, and breaking in cheerful song upon the hard rock.

The freedom in being arrested by people who fear your smile.

When they arrested me I laughed. And this seemed terrible and wild to those who seized me. Some of them turned away from me in disgust, and went aside; others advanced threateningly straight towards me, with condemnation on their lips, but when my bright, cheerful glance met their eyes, their faces blanched, and their feet became rooted to the ground.

A smile that looks like sunlight in stagnant water.

He smiled softly, opening his black, half-rotted teeth and over his austere, forbidding face the smile scattered into a thousand radiant wrinkles as though a ray of sunlight suddenly set a-sparkle a pool of deep and dark waters. And the great, grave thoughts fled away scared off by human gladness, and for a long time only gladness, only laughter remained, and the light of the sun and the gently slumbering downy little chick.

The world a child knows at knee-height, before it is named.

But best of all, he knew the earth in the yard, in the street and in the garden, with all its inexhaustible wealth of stones, of velvety grass, of hot sand and of that wonderfully varied, mysterious and delightful dust which grown people did not notice at all from the height of their enormous size. And in falling asleep, as the last bright image of the passing day, he took along to his dreams a bit of hot, rubbed off stone bathed in sunshine or a thick layer of tenderly tickling, burning dust.

A city grows, and its poorest dead get the newest ground.

The immense city grew still bigger, and there, where the broad fields had stretched, irrepressible new streets lengthened out, and on both sides of them stout, multicoloured stone houses crushed heavily the ground on which they stood. And to the seven cemeteries which had before existed in the city was added a new one, the eighth. In it there was no greenery at all, and meanwhile they buried in it only paupers.

The moment a small, bright thing makes a room forget itself.

“A-h-h!” sighed he once more as the little angel’s wings touched him. And at the shining of his face the absurdly decorated and insolently growing tree seemed to be extinguished, and the grey-haired, portly dame smiled with gladness, and the parchment-like face of the bald-headed gentleman twitched, and the children fell into a vivid silence as though touched by a breath of human happiness.