Chapter 18 first quarter

The king, his father, in a very white T-shirt and a very black blazer, sat before a large desk, the reflection of his upper body reflected on the bare surface, making him It is very similar to the "king" of playing cards.The portraits of the ancestors hung on the wood-panelled walls of the big house, a large black expanse.Otherwise, the room resembled what he imagined to be the headmaster's study at St. Barth's School, on the Atlantic coast, three thousand miles west of the palace.Strong spring thunderstorms beat against the French windows, and outside the windows all the buds of the young green leaves quivered and dripped.It seemed that only the torrential rain isolated the royal palace from the revolution that shook the city for many days and protected it... In fact, Victor's father was just a eccentric doctor in exile, The kids didn't like him at all, and hadn't seen him for almost two years.

The king, his more eloquent father, decided not to abdicate.Newspapers have ceased publication.The Orient train full of passing passengers was stuck at a station in the suburbs. Many peasants in fancy clothes stood on the platform, their figures reflected in the pool, staring dumbfounded at the curtained windows of this long series of mysterious trains.The royal palace with its terraced gardens, the city at the foot of the majestic mountains, the great square where, no matter how bad the weather, crowds gather to demand the abdication of the king and dance folk dances, all at a crossroads The center, from which branch roads branch off, as indicated in Rand McNarat's Simple Atlas of the World, ending in Trieste, Graz, Budapest, and Zagreb.Right in the center of this center sat the king, pale and calm, and on the whole exactly like his son, who imagined himself to be at forty.The King, pale and still, with a cup of coffee in his hand, with his back to the green and gray window, was being reported by a masked courier, a fat, The old aristocrat, who just managed to get out of the besieged parliament building, passed through the rebel crowd, and came to this isolated palace in heavy rain.

"Abdicate! It's still a long way from that!" The king mocked indifferently with a little accent. "The answer is that it cannot be done. I would rather take the pending step of exile." The king was a widower, said he, looking at a picture of a dead pretty woman on the table (it was a painted picture not fit for a king, but that didn't matter much), Look at her big blue eyes and bright red lips.Outside the window, the lilacs suddenly bloomed early, like some masked people who were not allowed to meet, frantically knocking on the dripping pane.Bowing, the old courier staggered out of the deserted study, thinking to himself whether it would be wisest to leave history behind and flee to Vienna, where he still had some property... Of course, Victor's relatives Ma wasn't dead, she had left his mediocre father (who now lived in South America), Dr. Eric Wind, and was planning to marry a man named Church in Buffalo.

Victor was in the cold small room where he lived, he could hear all kinds of noises in the dormitory, and he was immersed in this kind of whimsical reverie every night, trying his best to make himself fall asleep.He did not usually imagine that fateful escape interlude: the lonely king - solus rex (as the planners of the chess game called the troubled king) - on the sands of Cape Storm on the coast of Bohemia Pacing up and down, waiting for a high-spirited American adventurer, Pershwell Blake, who promised to rescue him in a high-powered motorboat.Indeed, Victor tried not to immediately think of this thrilling yet soothing episode, delaying its allure until, as usual, in the climax of recurring fantasies, thus constituting the main hypnotic effect.

An Italian film shot in Berlin for American audiences, in which a multidimensional agent chases a rampaging lad in ruffled shorts through back alleys, ruins, and a brothel or two; neighboring Santa Maria Shakers College recently staged a play based on the novel "Purple"; Mr. Pennant, a melancholy Englishman with ulterior motives, read aloud in the classroom an anonymous writer's cidevant vanguard A Kafkaesque story published in a papier-mâché; and, not unimportantly, the sporadic case of the escape of Russian intellectuals from Lenin's regime thirty-five years ago, which several families often alluded to— —these were clearly sources of material for Victor's fantasies, and it was probable that they had been moving for a time, and had now apparently become as effective as a convenient and pleasant narcotic.