It struck me that I ought to acquire a detailed knowledge of the family estate, which until now I had left entirely in my uncle’s hands, and that otherwise I could not face my deceased parents. As he himself always claimed to be a busy man, my uncle did not sleep under the same roof every night. He would spend two days at home, then three days living in the city, going back and forth between the two, passing each day with a restless look on his face. And he used the word “busy” as if it were a habitual tic. When I had no reason to suspect him, I truly thought he must be busy. Later, I came to interpret it with irony: that unless one made a show of being busy, one was not of the modern age. But once I had formed the intention of discussing the drawn-out matter of the estate, and looked at this display of busyness through those eyes, it could no longer be taken as anything but a pretext to avoid me. I found few chances to catch hold of my uncle.
I heard a rumor that my uncle kept a mistress in the city. I heard it from a friend who had been my classmate in middle school. For this uncle, keeping a mistress was hardly anything to wonder at, yet I was shocked, for I had no memory of ever hearing such talk while my father was alive. My friend told me various other rumors about my uncle as well. One was that, though others had thought for a time he was on the verge of ruin through failed ventures, in the last two or three years he had suddenly bounced back. And that only served to stain my suspicions deeper.
At last I opened a confrontation with my uncle. “Confrontation” may be an unfit word, but given how matters unfolded, the natural tone fell into a place where no other word would serve. My uncle treated me as a child to the very end. I, for my part, faced him from the start with suspicious eyes. There was no way it could end peacefully.
Regrettably, I am in too great a hurry to write here in full the course of that confrontation. To tell the truth, I have something even more important waiting beyond this. My pen has been longing to reach that point since early on, and I am only just barely holding it back. Having lost forever the chance to sit quietly and speak with you, not only am I unaccustomed to taking up the pen, but out of regard for precious time, I must also omit what I would wish to write.
You will perhaps still remember: once I said to you that there are no made-to-order villains in this world. That many good men, when the moment comes, suddenly turn into villains, and so one must never let one’s guard down. At the time, you warned me I was agitated. And you asked, in what sort of case does a good man change into a villain? When I answered in a single word—money—you looked dissatisfied. I remember well your dissatisfied face. I will confess before you now: at that time, I was thinking of this uncle. As an example of an ordinary man who, at the sight of money, suddenly becomes a villain; as an example that nothing in this world can be trusted—with loathing I thought of this uncle. My answer may have been unsatisfying to you, who sought to press on into the depths of the world of thought; it may have been trite. But to me, that was a living answer. Was I not, in fact, agitated then? I believe it is more alive to state an ordinary theory with a heated tongue than to utter something new with a cold head. Because the body moves by the force of blood. Because words do not merely send ripples through the air, but can act upon stronger things with stronger force.
