Ahead of All Parting (21 page)

Hot and furious, I rushed to the mirror and with difficulty watched, through the mask, the frantic movements of my hands. But the mirror had been waiting for just this. Its moment of revenge had come. While I, with a boundlessly growing anguish, kept trying to somehow squeeze out of my disguise, it forced me, I don’t know how, to look up, and dictated to me an image, no, a reality, a strange, incomprehensible, monstrous reality that permeated me against my will: for now it was the stronger one, and I was the mirror. I stared at this large, terrifying stranger in front of me, and felt appalled to be alone with him. But at the very moment I thought this, the worst thing happened: I lost all sense of myself, I simply ceased to exist. For one second, I felt an indescribable, piercing, futile longing for myself, then only he remained: there was nothing except him.

I began to run, but now it was he that was running. He knocked against everything, he didn’t know the house, had no idea where to go; he stumbled down a flight of stairs, he tripped over someone who screamed and struggled free. A door opened, people came out: Ah, what a relief it was to recognize them. Sieversen was there, with her kind face, and the chambermaid and the butler: now everything would be decided. But they didn’t rush forward to rescue me. They stood there, with infinite cruelty, and laughed; my God, they just stood there and laughed. I was crying, but the mask didn’t let the tears escape, they fell inside it, onto my face, and dried immediately, and fell again and dried. And finally I kneeled in front of them, as no one had ever kneeled before; I kneeled and lifted my hands toward them and begged: “Take me out, if you still can, save me,” but they didn’t hear; there was no voice left in me.

To the day of her death, Sieversen used to tell how I had collapsed onto the floor and how they had kept on laughing, thinking this was part of the game. They were used to that from me. But then I had continued to lie there and hadn’t answered. And the fright when they had finally discovered that I was unconscious and lay there like a piece of cloth among all those wrappings, yes, just like a piece of cloth.

There exists a creature that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly, like the pneumococci in dogs which gain entrance through the nose.

This creature is Your Neighbor.

Now ever since I have been drifting about on my own like this, I have had innumerable neighbors; neighbors above me and below me, neighbors on my right and on my left, sometimes all four kinds at once. I could simply write the history of my neighbors; that would take up a whole lifetime. Actually, it would be more of a history of the symptoms they have generated in me; because they share with all creatures of a similar nature the characteristic that their presence can be detected only through the disturbances they cause in certain tissues.

I have had unpredictable neighbors and others whose habits were extremely regular. I have sat for hours trying to discover the law of the former type; for I was convinced that even they were acting in accordance with some law. And when my punctual neighbors failed to come home at their usual time one evening, I have imagined the disasters that might have happened to them, and have kept my candle burning, and have been as anxious as a young wife. I have had neighbors who felt nothing but hatred, and neighbors who were involved in a passionate love affair; or I experienced the moment when one emotion abruptly turned into the other, in the middle of the night, and then, of course, sleep was unthinkable. In fact, this led me to observe that sleep is much less frequent than people generally suppose. My two neighbors in St. Petersburg, for example, attached very little importance to sleep. One of them stood and played the violin, and I’m sure that as he played he looked across into the too-awake houses that never stopped being brightly lit during those improbable August nights. As to my neighbor on the right, I know at least that he lay in bed; in my time, indeed, he no longer got up at all. He even kept his eyes closed; but you couldn’t say that he slept. He lay there and recited long poems, poems by Pushkin and Nekrasov, in the singsong tone that children
use when they are asked to recite a poem. And despite the music of my neighbor on the left, it was this fellow with his poems who wove a cocoon inside my head, and God knows what would have hatched out of it if the student who occasionally visited him hadn’t knocked on the wrong door one day. He told me the story of his friend, and it turned out to be more or less reassuring. At any rate, it was a simple, unambiguous story, which put an end to the swarming maggots of my conjectures.

This petty bureaucrat next door had one Sunday decided to solve a strange problem. He assumed that he would live for quite a long time, say another fifty years. The generosity he thus showed toward himself put him in a radiantly good mood. But now he wanted to outdo himself. It occurred to him that these years could be changed into days, hours, minutes, even (if you could stand it) into seconds; and he multiplied and multiplied, and a grand total appeared such as he had never seen before. It made him giddy. He had to recover for a while. Time was valuable, he had always heard, and he was astonished that a man who possessed such a vast quantity of time didn’t have a guard beside him at every moment. How easy it would be to rob him! But then his good, almost exuberant humor came back again; he put on his fur coat, to appear a little broader and more imposing, and gave himself the whole of this fabulous capital, addressing himself in a slightly condescending manner:

“Nikolai Kuzmitch,” he said benevolently, and imagined himself also sitting without the fur coat, thin and shabby on the horsehair sofa; “I do hope, Nikolai Kuzmitch,” he said, “that you won’t get a swelled head from your new fortune. You must always bear in mind that wealth isn’t the main thing; there are poor people who are thoroughly respectable; there are even impoverished noblemen and generals’ daughters who go around peddling things on the sidewalk.” And the benefactor cited a few more examples that were well known throughout the city.

The other Nikolai Kuzmitch, the one on the horsehair sofa, the recipient of this gift, didn’t look the slightest bit puffed up; you might safely assume that he was going to be reasonable. In fact he didn’t make any changes in his modest, regular way of life, and he now spent his Sundays putting his accounts in order. But after a few weeks it became obvious that he was spending an incredible amount. I will have
to economize, he thought. He got up earlier, he washed his face less thoroughly, he drank his tea standing up, he ran to the office and arrived much too early. He saved a little time everywhere. But when Sunday came around, there was nothing left of all this saving. Then he realized that he had been duped. I should never have gotten change, he said to himself. How long a fine, unbroken year would have lasted! But these damned small coins—they keep disappearing, God knows how. And one ugly afternoon, he sat down in a corner of the sofa, waiting for the gentleman in the fur coat, from whom he meant to demand his time back. He would bolt the door and not let him out until he had forked over the whole amount. “In bills,” he would say, “of ten years, if you don’t mind.” Four bills of ten and one of five, and the rest he could keep and go to hell with. Yes, he was prepared to give him the rest, as long as there were no difficulties. Exasperated, he sat on the horsehair sofa and waited; but the gentleman never came. And he, Nikolai Kuzmitch, who just a few weeks before had so easily seen himself sitting there, was unable, now that he really sat there, to picture the other Nikolai Kuzmitch, the one in the fur coat, the benefactor. What had become of him, only heaven knew; probably his embezzlements had been traced, and he was behind bars somewhere. Certainly there must have been many others whose lives he had ruined. Swindlers like that always work on a large scale.

It occurred to him that there had to be some public agency, a kind of Time Bank, where he could change at least some part of his miserable seconds. After all, they
were
genuine. He had never heard of an institution like this, but he would certainly be able to find something of the sort in the directory, under T, or perhaps it was called “Bank of Time”; he could easily look under B. If necessary he might also check under the letter I, for presumably it was an imperial institution; that would be in keeping with its importance.

Later, Nikolai Kuzmitch always used to give his word of honor that, although he was understandably in a very depressed mood that Sunday evening, he hadn’t had a thing to drink. He was therefore perfectly sober when the following incident occurred, as far as one can tell what actually happened. Perhaps he had dozed off for a few minutes in the corner of the sofa; he might easily have done that. At first this little nap gave him the greatest relief. I have been meddling with numbers, he said to himself. All right, I don’t understand the first thing about
numbers. But it’s obvious that they shouldn’t be granted too much importance; they are, after all, just a kind of arrangement created by the government for the sake of public order. No one had ever seen them anywhere but on paper. It was impossible, for instance, to meet a Seven or a Twenty-five at a party. There simply weren’t any there. And so this slight confusion had taken place, out of pure absent-mindedness: time and money, as if there were no difference between the two. Nikolai Kuzmitch almost laughed. It was really wonderful to have found the mistake, and in good time, that was the important thing, in good time. Now it would be different. Time was certainly a great embarrassment. But was he the only one this had happened to? Didn’t time pass for other people, just as he had discovered, in seconds, even if they weren’t aware of it?

Nikolai Kuzmitch was not entirely free from enjoying other people’s misfortune. “Let it nevertheless …,” he was just about to think, when something bizarre happened. He suddenly felt a breath on his face; it moved past his ears; it was on his hands now. He opened his eyes wide. The window was definitely closed. And as he sat there in the dark room, with eyes wide open, he began to realize that what he was feeling now was
real
time, as it passed by. He recognized, with absolute clarity, all these tiny seconds, all equally tepid, each one exactly like the others, but fast, but fast. What else they were planning, only God knew. Why was this happening to him, of all people, who experienced every kind of draft as an insult? Now he would sit there, and the breeze would go past him like this, ceaselessly, his whole life long. He foresaw all the attacks of neuralgia that would result from this; he was beside himself with rage. He jumped up, but the surprises were not yet over. Beneath his feet too there was something moving; not just one motion, but several, which strangely shook in and against one another. He stiffened with terror: could that be the earth? Of course it was. The earth did, after all, move. He had heard about that in school; but it was passed over rather quickly, and later on was completely hushed up; it was considered not a proper subject for discussion. But now that he had become more sensitive, he was able to feel this too. Did the others feel it? Perhaps, but you couldn’t really tell. Probably it didn’t bother them, good sailers as they were. But it was in precisely this respect that Nikolai Kuzmitch was so delicate; he avoided even the streetcars. He staggered around in his room as if he
were on the deck of a ship and had to reach out left and right for support. Unfortunately he then remembered something else, about the oblique position of the earth’s axis. No, he couldn’t endure all these motions. He felt sick. Lying down and keeping quiet were the best remedy, he had once read somewhere. And since that day Nikolai Kuzmitch had been lying in bed.

He lay there and kept his eyes closed. And there were times, during the less shaken days, so to speak, when it was quite bearable. And then he had devised this routine with the poems. It was unbelievable how much that helped. When you recited a poem slowly, with a regular emphasis on the rhyme words, then something more or less stable existed, which you could keep a steady gaze on, inwardly of course. It was lucky that he knew all these poems by heart. But he had always been particularly interested in literature. He didn’t complain about his situation, said the student, who had known him for many years. But in the course of time an exaggerated admiration had developed in him for those who, like the student, managed to walk around and endured the motion of the earth.

I remember this story in such detail because it was extraordinarily reassuring to me. I can even say that I have never again had such a pleasant neighbor as this Nikolai Kuzmitch, who certainly would also have admired me.

How well I understand those strange pictures in which Things meant for limited and ordinary uses stretch out and stroke one another, lewd and curious, quivering in the random lechery of distraction. Those kettles that walk around steaming, those pistons that start to think, and the indolent funnel that squeezes into a hole for its pleasure. And already, tossed up by the jealous void, and among them, there are arms and legs, and faces that warmly vomit onto them, and windy buttocks that offer them satisfaction.

And the saint writhes and pulls back into himself; yet in his eyes there was still a look which thought this was possible: he had glimpsed it. And already his senses are precipitating out of the clear solution of his soul. His prayer is already losing its leaves and stands up out of his mouth like a withered shrub. His heart has fallen over and poured out into the muck. His whip strikes him as weakly as a tail flicking away flies. His sex is once again in one place only, and when a woman comes toward him, upright through the huddle, with her naked bosom full of breasts, it points at her like a finger.

There was a time when I considered these pictures obsolete. Not that I doubted their reality. I could imagine that long ago such things had happened to saints, those overhasty zealots, who wanted to begin with God, right away, whatever the cost. We no longer make such demands on ourselves. We suspect that he is too difficult for us, that we must postpone him, so that we can slowly do the long work that separates us from him. Now, however, I know that this work leads to combats just as dangerous as the combats of the saint; that such difficulties appear around everyone who is solitary for the sake of that work, as they took form around God’s solitaries in their caves and empty shelters, long ago.