When she left Brunner turned his head to one side against the hard pillow, still half upright, and let his thoughts and feeling sink down like stirred silt in a stream. NILEMUD AND CROCODILES. He remembered the phrase from "Portrait." What the hell did Nilemud have to do with anything? And why was Joyce always writing about himself? Did he imagine he was the only one who suffered? And why call Ireland a sow that eats its fodder? Like murdering a sick patient.
Joyce. That was the Colonel's name as well. He wondered if they were related, or how a Joyce had come to settle in Leningrad. THE Leningrad. He compared his perceptions of the two.
Thus his mind vomited what his body could not, passing time in words, until he started to feel dizzy again and another rush of anguish folded over him. He endured it, and with almost unselfish reserve except for the thought, again, that it was too much. Any one of the things he had felt in the past months, heightened now by nearness, might have been bearable singly, or even in bunches of two and three. But all at once and one after another was like an endless trap, with no escape from the steady flow of consciousness. But for sleep, which of late had become a fickle and untrustworthy ally.
Unbroken flow of consciousness. Perhaps that was what Joyce had been after (he suspected the thought was not original). Certainly his self-endowed character Stephen had been trapped, feeling rare moments of freedom and longing for the sky, but always coming back to himself in a dirty world. More trapped in the human shell than in Dublin. Did he ever truly fly? Certainly the rambling phrases were incoherent…..
And so at long length his thoughts become more natural and sleep came back to him, and shutting his eyesmind and heart, he passed through a thick black night without dream.
*
The next morning after some time alone and a second examination, he returned to his rooms. Someone had extinguished the candle for him but it was still there, the igniter beside it. He resisted the urge to contact Mandlik and ask him how many hours, or had they yet been discovered. There was no reason, he knew, to go looking for a fight. It would come to him. He had had time to work things through, and believed he now possessed a clearer understanding.
The first few moments in that place were difficult, for all his renewed spirit of resolve. To be left here in this state, weakened and sick….. He still feared for the future, which he knew stalked him inexorably. At stake, no more and no less than his spiritual life and death. It was no use trying to prepare himself against all contingencies. If his wife was not there, or was dead or unaccounted-for, a part of himself would die forever, and the tiny flame of faith to which he clung would be lost beyond recall. Even now it flickered feebly in that dark place, shivered by the cold winds of doubt.
He mastered his trepid nature as best he could, and stayed there. He lay down and read for many hours, somewhat heartened by his mind's endurance, and by the sudden turn from hopelessness he perceived in Joyce's work. 'Exiles.' It filled all his mind with true thought and carried him for a time from himself, and he loved in those moments both the medium and the man, so beyond his understanding.
Moved as it were to make some account of himself he rose, wrapped the robe about him, went to the desk-table and, without looking at the verses he had scrawled the day before, wrote a simple, passionate poem to his wife.