The Mimic Men Read Online Free

Lieni’s room, sufficient to show, through the frosted glass, the clothes hanging on her door. I tried the knob; the door opened. A chaos of weak light and deep shadow: clothes and paper and boxes, wash-basin and crib and sewing machine and wardrobe. Lieni was in her bed, fast asleep.
    This was my first snow.

2
    H ow right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain.
    So quickly had London gone sour on me. The great city, centre of the world, in which, fleeing disorder, I had hoped to find the beginning of order. So much had been promised by the physical aspect. That marvel of light, soft, shadowless, always protective. They talk of the light of the tropics and Southern Spain. But there is no light like that of the temperate zone. It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects. To me, from the tropics, where night succeeded day abruptly, dusk was new and enchanting. I would sit in Lieni’s basement room, in the clutter, and study the light, not willing to risk losing any gradation in that change. Light was slowly withdrawn; a blueness remained, which deepened, so that before the electric lights began to make their effect the world seemed wholly aqueous, and we might have been at thebottom of the ocean. Then at night the sky was low; you walked as though under a canopy; and all the city’s artificial lights, their glow seemingly trapped, burned intensely; and sometimes the wet streets threw up their own glitter.
    Here was the city, the world. I waited for the flowering to come to me. The trams on the Embankment sparked blue. The river was edged and pierced with reflections of light, blue and red and yellow. Excitement! Its heart must have lain somewhere. But the god of the city was elusive. The tram was filled with individuals, each man returning to his own cell. The factories and warehouses, whose exterior lights decorated the river, were empty and fraudulent. I would play with famous names as I walked empty streets and stood on bridges. But the magic of names soon faded. Here was the river, here the bridge, there that famous building. But the god was veiled. My incantation of names remained unanswered. In the great city, so solid in its light, which gave colour even to unrendered concrete – to me as colourless as rotting wooden fences and new corrugated-iron roofs – in this solid city life was two-dimensional.
    At the lecture halls there was the young English student who, out of his own insecurity, had attached himself to me, an outsider. Shrouded in his college scarf now, he was doomed to later nonentity; but I listened. His ambition ever changed. It was poetry one week. He had a thing, he said, which he did not expect me to understand, about Nature and the English countryside; I remember that ‘the green of grass not grown’ was one of his lines. It was philosophy the next week. ‘Tell me, do I
look
like a Christian? I do? Aha! That’s what they
all
think.’ And the week after that: ‘Look at me. Do you think I will become Prime Minister?’ He was like me: he needed the guidance of other men’s eyes.
    From the lecture halls and canteen of the School to the boarding-house, where the Frenchman always typed, Lieni always chattered in her basement room, and Duminicu, alsofrom Malta, talked of escape. Duminicu was short and fat; he worked in a department store; he saved his money. Once a week he went to the cinema; the rest of the time he stayed in his room, stripped to vest and pants, reading newspapers and