Translated by Joanne Turnbull
From outside there came a soft
knock at the door: once. Pause. And again—a bit louder and bonier: twice.
Sutulin, without rising from his
bed, extended—as was his wont—a foot toward the knock, threaded a toe through
the door handle, and pulled. The door swung open. On the threshold, head
grazing the lintel, stood a tall, gray man the color of the dusk seeping in at
the window.
Before Sutulin could set his feet
on the floor the visitor stepped inside, wedged the door quietly back into its
frame, and jabbing first one wall, then another, with a briefcase dangling from
an apishly long arm, said, “Yes: a matchbox.”
“What?”
“Your room, I say: it’s a
matchbox. How many square feet?”
“Eighty-six and a bit.”
“Precisely. May I?”
And before Sutulin could open his
mouth, the visitor sat down on the edge of the bed and hurriedly unbuckled his
bulging briefcase. Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he went on. “I’m
here on business. You see, I, that is, we, are conducting, how shall I put
it…well, experiments, I suppose. Under wraps for now. I won’t hide the fact: a
well-known foreign firm has an interest in our concern. You want the
electric-light switch? No, don’t bother: I’ll only be a minute. So then: we
have discovered—this is a secret now—an agent for biggerizing rooms. Well,
won’t you try it?”
The stranger’s hand popped out of
the briefcase and proffered Sutulin a narrow dark tube, not unlike a tube of
paint, with a tightly screwed cap and a leaden seal. Sutulin fidgeted
bewilderedly with the slippery tube and, though it was nearly dark in the room,
made out on the label the clearly printed word: quadraturin. When he raised his
eyes, they came up against the fixed, unblinking stare of his interlocutor.
“So then, you’ll take it? The price?
Goodness, it’s gratis. Just for advertising. Now if you’ll”—the guest began
quickly leafing through a sort of ledger he had produced from the same
brief-case—“just sign this book (a short testimonial, so to say). A pencil?
Have mine. Where? Here: column three. That’s it.”
His ledger clapped shut, the
guest straightened up, wheeled around, stepped to the door… and a minute later
Sutulin, having snapped on the light, was considering with puzzledly raised
eyebrows the clearly embossed letters: quadraturin.
On closer inspection it turned
out that this zinc packet was tightly fitted—as is often done by the makers of
patented agents— with a thin transparent paper whose ends were expertly glued
together. Sutulin removed the paper sheath from the Quadraturin, unfurled the
rolled-up text, which showed through the paper’s transparent gloss, and read:
Directions
Dissolve one teaspoon of the
quadraturin essence in one cup of water. Wet a piece of cotton wool or simply a
clean rag with the solution; apply this to those of the room’s internal walls
designated for proliferspansion. This mixture leaves no stains, will not damage
wallpaper, and even contributes—incidentally—to the extermination of bedbugs.
Thus far Sutulin had been only
puzzled. Now his puzzlement was gradually overtaken by another feeling, strong
and disturbing. He stood up and tried to pace from corner to corner, but the
corners of this living cage were too close together: a walk amounted to almost
nothing but turns, from toe to heel and back again. Sutulin stopped short, sat
down, and closing his eyes, gave himself up to thoughts, which began: Why not…?
What if…? Suppose…? To his left, not three feet away from his ear, someone was
driving an iron spike into the wall. The hammer kept slipping, banging, and
aiming, it seemed, at Sutulin’s head. Rubbing his temples, he opened his eyes:
the black tube lay in the middle of the narrow table, which had managed somehow
to insinuate itself between the bed, the windowsill, and the wall. Sutulin tore
away the leaden seal, and the cap spun off in a spiral. From out of the round
aperture came a bitterish gingery smell. The smell made his nostrils flare
pleasantly.
“Hmm … Let’s try it. Although …”
And, having removed his jacket,
the possessor of Quadraturin proceeded to the experiment. Stool up against
door, bed into middle of room, table on top of bed. Nudging across the floor a
saucer of transparent liquid, its glassy surface gleaming with a slightly
yellowish tinge, Sutulin crawled along after it, systematically dipping a
handkerchief wound around a pencil into the Quadraturin and daubing the
floorboards and patterned wallpaper. The room really was, as that man today had
said, a matchbox. But Sutulin worked slowly and carefully, trying not to miss a
single corner. This was rather difficult since the liquid really did evaporate
in an instant or was absorbed (he couldn’t tell which) without leaving even the
slightest film; there was only its smell, increasingly pungent and spicy,
making his head spin, confounding his fingers, and causing his knees, pinned to
the floor, to tremble slightly. When he had finished with the floorboards and
the bottom of the walls, Sutulin rose to his strangely weak and heavy feet and
continued to work standing up. Now and then he had to add a little more of the
essence. The tube was gradually emptying. It was already night outside. In the
kitchen, to the right, a bolt came crashing down. The apartment was readying
for bed. Trying not to make any noise, the experimenter, clutching the last of
the essence, climbed up onto the bed and from the bed up onto the tottering
table: only the ceiling remained to be Quadraturinized. But just then someone
banged on the wall with his fist. “What’s going on? People are trying to sleep,
but he’s …”
Turning around at the sound,
Sutulin fumbled: the slippery tube spurted out of his hand and landed on the
floor. Balancing carefully, Sutulin got down with his already drying brush, but
it was too late. The tube was empty, and the rapidly fading spot around it
smelled stupefyingly sweet. Grasping at the wall in his exhaustion (to fresh
sounds of discontent from the left), he summoned his last bit of strength, put
the furniture back where it belonged, and without undressing, fell into bed. A
black sleep instantly descended on him from above: both tube and man were
empty.
2
Two voices began in a whisper.
Then by degrees of sonority— from piano to mf, from mf to fff—they cut into
Sutulin’s sleep.
“Outrageous. I don’t want any new
tenants popping out from under that skirt of yours… Put up with all that
racket?!”
“Can’t just dump it in the
garbage…”
“I don’t want to hear about it.
You were told: no dogs, no cats, no children…” At which point there ensued such
fff that Sutulin was ripped once and for all from his sleep; unable to part
eyelids stitched together with exhaustion, he reached—as was his wont— for the
edge of the table on which stood the clock. Then it began. His hand groped for
a long time, grappling air: there was no clock and no table. Sutulin opened his
eyes at once. In an instant he was sitting up, looking dazedly around the room.
The table that usually stood right here, at the head of the bed, had moved off
into the middle of a faintly familiar, large, but ungainly room.
Everything was the same: the
skimpy, threadbare rug that had trailed after the table somewhere up ahead of
him, and the pho-tographs, and the stool, and the yellow patterns on the
wallpaper. But they were all strangely spread out inside the expanded room
cube.
“Quadraturin,” thought Sutulin,
“is terrific!”
And he immediately set about
rearranging the furniture to fit the new space. But nothing worked: the
abbreviated rug, when moved back beside the bed, exposed worn, bare floorboards;
the table and the stool, pushed by habit against the head of the bed, had
disencumbered an empty corner latticed with cobwebs and littered with shreds
and tatters, once artfully masked by the corner’s own crowdedness and the
shadow of the table. With a triumphant but slightly frightened smile, Sutulin
went all around his new, practically squared square, scrutinizing every detail.
He noted with displeasure that the room had grown more in some places than in
others: an external corner, the angle of which was now obtuse, had made the
wall askew; Quadraturin, apparently, did not work as well on internal corners;
carefully as Sutulin had applied the essence, the experiment had produced
somewhat uneven results.
The apartment was beginning to
stir. Out in the corridor, occupants shuffled to and fro. The bathroom door
kept banging. Sutulin walked up to the threshold and turned the key to the
right. Then, hands clasped behind his back, he tried pacing from corner to
corner: it worked. Sutulin laughed with joy. How about that! At last! But then
he thought: they may hear my footsteps— through the walls—on the right, on the
left, at the back. For a minute he stood stock-still. Then he quickly bent
down—his temples had suddenly begun to ache with yesterday’s sharp thin
pain—and, having removed his boots, gave himself up to the pleasure of a
stroll, moving soundlessly about in only his socks.
“May I come in?”
The voice of the landlady. He was
on the point of going to the door and unlocking it when he suddenly remembered:
he mustn’t. “I’m getting dressed. Wait a minute. I’ll be right out.”
“It’s all very well, but it
complicates things. Say I lock the door and take the key with me. What about
the keyhole? And then there’s the window: I’ll have to get curtains. Today.”
The pain in his temples had become thinner and more nagging. Sutulin gathered
up his papers in haste. It was time to go to the office. He dressed. Pushed the
pain under his cap. And listened at the door: no one there. He quickly opened
it. Quickly slipped out. Quickly turned the key. Now.
Waiting patiently in the entrance
hall was the landlady.
“I wanted to talk to you about
that girl, what’s her name. Can you believe it, she’s submitted an application
to the House Committee saying she’s—”
“I’ve heard. Go on.”
“It’s nothing to you. No one’s
going to take your eighty-six square feet away. But put yourself in my—”
“I’m in a hurry,” he nodded, put
on his cap, and flew down the stairs.
3
On his way home from the office,
Sutulin paused in front of the window of a furniture dealer: the long curve of
a couch, an extendable round table… it would be nice—but how could he carry
them in past the eyes and the questions? They would guess, they couldn’t help
but guess…
He had to limit himself to the
purchase of a yard of canary-yellow material (he did, after all, need a
curtain). He didn’t stop by the cafe: he had no appetite. He needed to get
home—it would be easier there: he could reflect, look around, and make
adjustments at leisure. Having unlocked the door to his room, Sutulin gazed
about to see if anyone was looking: they weren’t. He walked in. Then he
switched on the light and stood there for a long time, his arms spread flat
against the wall, his heart beating wildly: this he had not expected—not at
all.
The Quadraturin was still
working. during the eight or nine hours Sutulin had been out, it had pushed the
walls at least another seven feet apart; the floorboards, stretched by
invisible rods, rang out at his first step—like organ pipes. The entire room,
distended and monstrously misshapen, was beginning to frighten and torment him.
Without taking off his coat, Sutulin sat down on the stool and surveyed his
spacious and at the same time oppressive coffin-shaped living box, trying to
understand what had caused this unexpected effect. Then he remembered: he
hadn’t done the ceiling—the essence had run out. His living box was spreading
only sideways, without rising even an inch upward.
“Stop. I have to stop this
Quadraturinizing thing. Or I’ll…” He pressed his palms to his temples and
listened: the corrosive pain, lodged under his skull since morning, was still
drilling away. Though the windows in the house opposite were dark, Sutulin took
cover behind the yellow length of curtain. His head would not stop aching. He
quietly undressed, snapped out the light, and got into bed. At first he slept,
then he was awoken by a feeling of awkwardness. Wrapping the covers more
tightly about him, Sutulin again dropped off, and once more an unpleasant sense
of mooringlessness interfered with his sleep. He raised himself up on one palm
and felt all around him with his free hand: the wall was gone. He struck a
match. Um-hmm: he blew out the flame and hugged his knees till his elbows
cracked. “It’s growing, damn it, it’s still growing.” Clenching his teeth,
Sutulin crawled out of bed and, trying not to make any noise, gently edged
first the front legs, then the back legs of the bed toward the receding wall.
He felt a little shivery. Without turning the light on again, he went to look
for his coat on that nail in the corner so as to wrap himself up more warmly.
But there was no hook on the wall where it had been yesterday, and he had to
feel around for several seconds before his hands chanced upon fur. twice more
during a night that was long and as nagging as the pain in his temples, Sutulin
pressed his head and knees to the wall as he was falling asleep and, when he
awoke, fiddled about with the legs of the bed again. In doing
this—mechanically, meekly, lifelessly—he tried, though it was still dark
outside, not to open his eyes: it was better that way.
4
Toward dusk the next evening,
having served out his day, Sutulin was approaching the door to his room: he did
not quicken his step and, upon entering, felt neither consternation nor horror.
When the dim, sixteen-candle-power bulb lit up somewhere in the distance
beneath the long low vault, its yellow rays struggling to reach the dark,
ever-receding corners of the vast and dead, yet empty barrack, which only
recently, before Quadraturin, had been a cramped but cozy, warm, and lived-in
cubbyhole, he walked resignedly toward the yellow square of the window, now
diminished by perspective; he tried to count his steps. From there, from a bed
squeezed pitifully and fearfully in the corner by the window, he stared dully
and wearily through deep-boring pain at the swaying shadows nestled against the
floorboards, and at the smooth low overhang of the ceiling. “So, something
forces its way out of a tube and can’t stop squaring: a square squared, a
square of squares squared. I’ve got to think faster than it: if I don’t
outthink it, it will outgrow me and…” And suddenly someone was hammering on the
door, “Citizen Sutulin, are you in there?”
From the same faraway place came
the muffled and barely audible voice of the landlady. “He’s in there. Must be
asleep.”
Sutulin broke into a sweat: “What
if I don’t get there in time, and they go ahead and…” And, trying not to make a
sound (let them think he was asleep), he slowly made his way through the
darkness to the door. There.
“Who is it?”
“Oh, open up! Why’s the door
locked? Remeasuring Commission. We’ll remeasure and leave.”
Sutulin stood with his ear
pressed to the door. Through the thin panel he could hear the clump of heavy
boots. Figures were being mentioned, and room numbers.
“This room next. Open up!”
With one hand Sutulin gripped the
knob of the electric-light switch and tried to twist it, as one might twist the
head of a bird: the switch spattered light, then crackled, spun feebly around,
and drooped down. Again someone hammered on the door: “Well!”
Sutulin turned the key to the
left. A broad black shape squeezed itself into the doorway.
“Turn on the light.”
“It’s burned out.”
Clutching at the door handle with
his left hand and the bundle of wire with his right, he tried to hide the
extended space from view. The black mass took a step back.
“Who’s got a match? Give me that
box. We’ll have a look anyway. Do things right.”
Suddenly the landlady began
whining, “Oh, what is there to look at? Eighty-six square feet for the
eighty-sixth time. Measuring the room won’t make it any bigger. He’s a quiet
man, home from a long day at the office—and you won’t let him rest: have to
measure and remeasure. Whereas other people, who have no right to the space,
but—”
“Ain’t that the truth,” the black
mass muttered and, rocking from boot to boot, gently and even almost
affectionately drew the door to the light. Sutulin was left alone on wobbling,
cottony legs in the middle of the four-cornered, inexorably growing, and
proliferating darkness.
5
He waited until their steps had
died away, then quickly dressed and went out. They’d be back, to remeasure or
check they hadn’t under-measured or whatever. He could finish thinking better
here—from crossroad to crossroad. Toward night a wind came up: it rattled the
bare frozen branches on the trees, shook the shadows loose, droned in the
wires, and beat against walls, as if trying to knock them down. Hiding the
needlelike pain in his temples from the wind’s buffets, Sutulin went on, now
diving into the shadows, now plunging into the lamplight. Suddenly, through the
wind’s rough thrusts, something softly and tenderly brushed against his elbow.
He turned around. Beneath feathers batting against a black brim, a familiar
face with provocatively half-closed eyes. And barely audible through the
moaning air: “You know you know me. And you look right past me. You ought to
bow. That’s it.”
Her slight figure, tossed back by
the wind, perched on tenacious stiletto heels, was all insubordination and
readiness for battle .
Sutulin tipped his hat. “But you
were supposed to be going away. And you’re still here? Then something must have
prevented—”
“That’s right—this.”
And he felt a chamois finger
touch his chest then dart back into the muff. He sought out the narrow pupils
of her eyes beneath the dancing black feathers, and it seemed that one more
look, one more touch, one more shock to his hot temples, and it would all come
unthought, undone, and fall away. Meanwhile she, her face nearing his, said,
“Let’s go to your place. Like last time. Remember?”
With that, everything stopped.
“That’s impossible.”
She sought out the arm that had
been pulled back and clung to it with tenacious chamois fingers.
“My place… Isn’t fit.” He looked
away, having again with-drawn both his arms and the pupils of his eyes.
“You mean to say it’s cramped. My
god, how silly you are. The more cramped it is…” The wind tore away the end of
her phrase. Sutulin did not reply. “Or, perhaps you don’t …”
When he reached the turning, he
looked back: the woman was still standing there, pressing her muff to her
bosom, like a shield; her narrow shoulders were shivering with cold; the wind
cynically flicked her skirt and lifted up the lapels of her coat.
“Tomorrow. Everything tomorrow.
But now…” And, quickening his pace, Sutulin turned resolutely back.
“Right now: while everyone’s
asleep. Collect my things (only the necessaries) and go. Run away. Leave the
door wide open: let them. Why should I be the only one? Why not let them?”
The apartment was indeed sleepy
and dark. Sutulin walked down the corridor, straight and to the right, opened
the door with resolve, and as always, wanted to turn the light switch, but it
spun feebly in his fingers, reminding him that the circuit had been broken.
This was an annoying obstacle. But it couldn’t be helped. Sutulin rummaged in
his pockets and found a box of matches: it was almost empty. Good for three or
four flares— that’s all. He would have to husband both light and time. When he
reached the coat pegs, he struck the first match: light crept in yellow
radiuses through the black air. Sutulin purposely, overcoming temptation, concentrated
on the illuminated scrap of wall and the coats and jackets hanging from hooks.
He knew that there, behind his back, the dead, Quadraturinized space with its
black corners was still spreading. He knew and did not look around. The match
smoldered in his left hand, his right pulled things off hooks and flung them on
the floor. He needed another flare; looking at the floor, he started toward the
corner—if it was still a corner and if it was still there—where, by his
calculations, the bed should have fetched up, but he accidentally held the
flame under his breath—and again the black wilderness closed in. One last match
remained: he struck it over and over: it would not light. One more time—and its
crackling head fell off and slipped through his fingers. Then, having turned
around, afraid to go any farther into the depths, he started back toward the
bundle he had abandoned under the hooks. But he had made the turn, apparently,
inexactly. He walked—heel to toe, heel to toe—holding his fingers out in front of
him, and found nothing: neither the bundle, nor the hooks, nor even the walls.
“I’ll get there in the end. I must get there.” His body was sticky with cold
and sweat. His legs wobbled oddly. He squatted down, palms on the floorboards:
“I shouldn’t have come back. Now here I am alone, nowhere to turn.” And
suddenly it struck him: “I’m waiting here, but it’s growing, I’m waiting, but
it’s…”
In their sleep and in their fear,
the occupants of the quadratures adjacent to citizen Sutulin’s eighty-six
square feet couldn’t make head or tail of the timbre and intonation of the cry
that woke them in the middle of the night and compelled them to rush to the
threshold of the Sutulin cell: for a man who is lost and dying in the
wilderness to cry out is both futile and belated: but if even so—against all
sense—he does cry out, then, most likely, thus.
