«Is that one of your friend's paintings?» I asked, as he switched on the light and a huge vomit of yellowish green bile leaped out from the wall.

«That's one of his early things,» said Kronski. «He keeps it for sentimental reasons. I've put his best things away in storage. But here's a little one that gives you some idea of what he can do.» He looked at it with pride, as if it were the work of his own off-spring. «It's marvelous, isn't it?»

«Terrible,» I said. «He has a shit complex; he must have been born in the gutter, in a pool of stale horse piss on a sullen day in February near a gas house.»

«You would say that,» said Kronski vengefully. «You don't know an honest painter when you see one. You admire the revolutionaries of yesterday. You're a Romantic.»

«Your friend may be revolutionary but he's no painter,» I insisted. «He hasn't any love in him; he just hates, and what's more he can't even paint what he hates. He's fog-eyed. You say he's a consumptive: I say he's bilious. He stinks, your friend, and so does his place. Why don't you open the windows? It smells as though a dog had died here.»

«Guinea pigs, you mean. I've been using the place as a laboratory, that's why it stinks a bit. Your nose is too sensitive, Mister Miller. You're an aesthete.»

«Is there anything to drink here?» I asked.

There wasn't, of course, but Kronski offered to run out and get something. «Bring something strong,» I said, «this place makes you retch. No wonder the poor bastard got consumptive.»

Kronski trotted off rather sheepishly, I looked at Mara. «What do you think? Will we wait for him or shall we beat it?»

«You're very unkind. No, let's wait. I'd like to hear him talk some more—he's interesting. And he really thinks a lot of you. I can see that by the way he looks at you.»

«He's only interesting the first time,» I said. «Frankly, he bores me stiff. I've been listening to this stuff for years. It's sheer crap. He may be intelligent but he's got a screw loose somewhere. He'll commit suicide one day, mark my words. Besides, he brings bad luck. Whenever I meet that guy things turn out wrong. He carries death around with him, don't you feel that? If he isn't croaking he's gibbering like an ape. How can you be friends with a guy like that? He wants you to be a friend of his sorrow. What's eating him I don't know. He's worried about the world. I don't give a shit about the world. I can't make the world right, neither can he... neither can anybody. Why doesn't he try to live? The world mightn't be so bad if we tried to enjoy ourselves a little more. No, he riles me.»

Kronski came back with some vile liquor he claimed was all he could find at that hour. He seldom drank more than a thimbleful himself so it didn't make much difference to him whether we poisoned ourselves or not. He hoped it would poison us, he said. He was depressed. He seemed to have settled in for an all-night depression. Mara, like an idiot, felt sorry for him. He stretched out on the sofa and lay his head in her lap. He began another line, a weird one—the impersonal sorrow of the world. It was not argument and invective as before but a chant, a dictaphone chant addressed to the millions of unhappy creatures throughout the world. Dr. Kronski always played this tune in the dark, his head on some woman's lap, his hand dragging the carpet.

His head nestling in her lap like a swollen viper, the words sieved through Kronski's mouth like gas escaping through a half-opened cock. It was the weird of the irreducible human atom, the sub-soul wandering in the cellar of collective misery. Dr. Kronski ceased to exist: only the pain and torment remained, functioning as positive and negative electrons in the vast atomic vacuum of a lost personality. In this state of abeyance not even the miraculous Sovietization of the world could rouse a spark of enthusiasm in him. What spoke were the nerves, the ductless glands, the spleen, the liver, the kidneys, the little blood vessels lying close to the surface of the skin. The skin itself was just a bag in which were loosely collected a rather messy outfit of bones, muscles, sinews, blood, fat, lymph, bile, urine, dung, and so on. Germs were stewing around in this stinking bag of guts; the germs would win out no matter how brilliantly that cage of dull gray matter called the brain functioned. The body was in hostage to Death, and Dr. Kronski, so vital in the X-ray world of statistics, was just a louse to be cracked under a dirty nail when it came time to surrender his shell. It never occurred to Dr. Kronski, in these fits of genito-urinary depression, that there might be a view of the universe in which death assumed another aspect. He had disembowelled, dissected and chopped to bits so many corpses that death had come to mean something very concrete—a piece of cold meat lying on the mortuary slab, so to say. The light went out and the machine stopped, and after a time it would stink. Voila, it was as plain and simple as that. In death the loveliest creature imaginable was just another piece of extraordinary cold plumbing. He had looked at his wife, just after the gangrene had set in; she might have been a codfish, he intimated, for all the attractiveness she displayed. The thought of the pain she was suffering was overruled by the knowledge of what was going on inside that body. Death had already made his entry and his work was fascinating to behold. Death is always present, he asserted. Death lurks in dark corners, waiting for the opportune moment to raise his head and strike. That is the only real bond we have, he said—the constant presence of death in all of us always.

Mara was quite taken in by all this. She stroked his hair and purred softly as the steady stream, of singing gas parted from his thick bloodless lips. I was more annoyed by her evident sympathy for the sufferer than by the monotony of his weird. The image of Kronski huddled up like a sick goat struck me as distinctly comical. He had swallowed too many empty tin cans. He had nourished himself on discarded automobile parts. He was a walking cemetery of facts and figures. He was dying of statistical indigestion.

«Do you know what you ought to do?» I said quietly. «You ought to kill yourself—now, tonight. You haven't anything to live for—why kid yourself? We'll leave you in a little while and you just do away with yourself. You're a smart alec, you must know a way to do it without making too much of a mess. Really, I think you owe it to the world. As it is, you're only making a nuisance of yourself.»

These words had an almost electrical effect upon the suffering Dr. Kronski. He actually bounded to his feet in one porpoise-like movement. He clapped his hands and danced a few steps with the grave of a spavined pachyderm. He was ecstatic, in the way that a sewer digger becomes ecstatic when he learns that his wife has given birth to another brat.

«So you want me to get rid of myself, Mister Miller, that's it, eh? What's the great hurry? You're jealous of me, are you? Well, I'm going to disappoint you this time. I'm going to stay alive and make you miserable. I'm going to torture you. One day you're going to come to me and beg me to give you something to put you out of harm's way. You're going to beg me on your knees and I'm going to refuse you.»

«You're crazy,» I said, stroking him under the chin.

«Oh no I'm not!» he answered, patting my bald knob. «I'm just a neurotic, like all Jews. I won't ever kill myself, don't fool yourself. I'll be at your funeral and I'll be laughing at you. Maybe you won't have a funeral. Maybe you'll be so in debt to me that you'll have to will me your body when you die. Mister Miller, when I start carving you up there won't be a crumb left over.»

He reached for a paper knife on the piano and placed the point of it on my diaphragm. He traced an imaginary line of incision and flourished the knife before my eyes.