Petersburg (51 page)

And Nikolai Apollonovich remembered: he – the old Turanian
¹³
– had been reincarnated a great number of times; had been incarnated today, too: in the blood and the flesh of a pillar of the nobility of the Russian Empire, in order to fulfil a certain ancient, secret purpose: to shake loose all the foundations; in the tainted Aryan blood the Ancient Dragon was to flare up and devour everything in flame; the ancient Orient was showering our time with a hail of invisible bombs.
Nikolai Apollonovich – an old Turanian bomb – was now bursting with ecstasy, having seen his native land; on Nikolai Apollonovich’s face there now appeared a forgotten, Mongolian expression; now he looked like a mandarin of the Middle Empire, enveloped in a frock-coat for his arrival in the West (after all, he was here with a single and most secret mission).

‘Indeed, sir …

‘Indeed, sir …

‘Indeed, sir …

‘Very good, sir!’

It was a strange thing: how he suddenly reminded him of his father!

Thus the ancient Turanian, choking with ecstasy, enveloped for a time in a mortal Aryan shell, rushed towards the stack of old exercise books in which the theses of a system of metaphysics he had devised were sketched; both in embarrassment and in joy did he grasp at the exercise books: all the exercise books formed themselves before him into one enormous cause – the cause to which his entire life was devoted (they had come to resemble the sum total of Apollon Apollonovich’s deeds).
The cause to which his life was devoted turned out to be not simply a cause of life: the continuous, enormous, Mongol cause could be glimpsed everywhere in the notes under all the headings and all the paragraphs: a great mission that had been entrusted to him before his birth: the mission of a destroyer.

This visitor, the hallowed Turanian, stood motionless: the darkness
of his eyes, which were as dense as night, expanded; while his hands – his hands: rhythmically, melodically, smoothly they rose into the limitless heights; and his garments swished; their sound was like the trembling of passing wings; the smoky field of the background cleared, deepened and became a piece of distant sky, gazing through the torn air of this little study: that dark-sapphire crevice – how had it come to be in this bookcase-lined room?
Into it flew the small dragons that were embroidered on the iridescent robe (indeed, the robe had become a crevice); in its depths small stars gleamed … And the olden days infused with the sky and the stars: and from there washed an indigo air, infused with stars.

Nikolai Apollonovich rushed towards the visitor – Turanian to Turanian (subordinate to superior) with a pile of exercise books in his hand:

‘Paragraph One: Kant (proof that he, too, was a Turanian).

‘Paragraph Two: value, conceived as no one and nothing.

‘Paragraph Three: social relations based on value.

‘Paragraph Four: the destruction of the Aryan world by a system of values.

‘Conclusion: the ancient Mongol cause.’

But the Turanian replied:

‘The task has not been understood: instead of Kant, it ought to be: The Prospect.

‘Instead of value it should be numeration: by houses, floors and rooms, for time everlasting.

‘Instead of a new order: the circulation of the citizens of The Prospect – regular, and in a straight line.

‘Not Europe’s destruction, but its unalterability …

‘That is what the Mongol cause is …’

To Nikolai Apollonovich it seemed that he was condemned; and the bundle of exercise books in his hands disintegrated into a small pile of ash; while the wrinkled countenance, horribly familiar, leaned right up against him: at this point he looked at an ear, and understood, understood everything: the old Turanian, who had once instructed him in all the precepts of wisdom, was Apollon
Apollonovich; it was against him that, having misunderstood science, he had raised his hand.

It was the Last Judgement.

‘But how can this be?
But who is this?’

‘Who is it?
Your father …’

‘But who is my father?’

‘Saturn …’
¹⁴

‘But how is this possible?’

‘Nothing is impossible!
…’

The Last Judgement commenced.

Here indeed were some kind of dreams from the past; here indeed the planetary cycles rushed in a wave of billions of years: there was no Earth, no Venus, no Mars, only three nebulous rays revolving around the Sun; a fourth had just burst, and enormous Jupiter was preparing to become a world; only ancient Saturn was raising, from its fiery centre, black waves of aeons: nebulae raced; and now with Saturn, his parent, Nikolai Apollonovich was thrown into immensity; and only distances flowed all around.

At the end of the Fourth Kingdom he was on the earth, the sword of Saturn hung suspended like an unfinished thunderstorm; the continent of Atlantis collapsed; Nikolai Apollonovich, an Atlantean, was a depraved monster (the earth would not support him – had sunk beneath the waves); after that he was in China: Apollon Apollonovich, the
bogdykhan
,
¹⁵
ordered Nikolai Apollonovich to slaughter many thousands (the order was carried out); and in comparatively recent times, when thousands of Tamerlane’s horsemen descended on Rus, Nikolai Apollonovich had come galloping into this Rus on his swift horse of the steppes; after that he was incarnated in the blood of a Russian nobleman; and resumed his old habits: and just as he had formerly slaughtered thousands there, now today did he want to tear and destroy: to throw a bomb at his father: to throw the bomb in the most swiftly passing interval of time.
But his father was – Saturn, the circle of time made one turn, and closed; the Kingdom of Saturn returned (here his heart burst with sweetness).

The flow of time ceased to exist: for thousands of millions of years matter had ripened in the spirit; but he conceived a thirst to tear apart time itself; and now all was being destroyed.

‘Father!’

‘You wanted to blow me to pieces; and so all is being destroyed.’

‘Not you, but …’

‘Too late: birds, animals, people, history, the world – everything is tumbling down, collapsing on to Saturn …’

Everything was falling on to Saturn; the atmosphere outside the windows was growing darker, blacker, everything had reverted to its ancient, incandescent state, expanding without limit, bodies ceased to be bodies; everything was whirling backwards – whirling horribly.

‘
Cela … tourne
…’ Nikolai Apollonovich began to roar in the most complete horror, having now finally lost his body, but without having noticed it …

‘No …
Sa … tourne
…’

Having lost his body, he none the less felt his body: a certain invisible centre, which had previously been both consciousness and ‘I’, turned out to possess a semblance of that previous, incinerated past; the premisses of Nikolai Apollonovich’s logic were wrapped in bones; the syllogisms around these bones were suddenly wrapped in tough sinews; while the contents of logical activity were covered by both flesh and skin; thus Nikolai Apollonovich’s ‘I’ again displayed a corporeal image, even though it was not a body; and in this
non-body
(the exploded ‘I’) an alien ‘I’ was revealed: this ‘I’ had come racing from Saturn and had returned to Saturn.

He sat facing his father (as he had been sitting earlier) – without a body, but in a body (there was a strange thing!): outside the windows of his study, in the most utter darkness, a loud muttering could be heard: ‘tourne – tourne – tourne’.

The chronology of the years was running backwards.

‘And what sort of chronology do we have anyway?’

But Saturn, Apollon Apollonovich, bursting into loud laughter, replied:

‘None, Kolenka, none: our chronology, my dear boy, is zero …’

The dreadful contents of Nikolai Apollonovich’s soul whirled restlessly (in the place where his heart ought to be), like a humming top: swelled up and expanded; and it seemed: the dreadful contents of his soul – a round zero – were turning into an agonizing sphere; it seemed: here was the logic – his bones would be blown to pieces.

It was the Last Judgement.

‘Ai, ai, ai: what then is “I am”?’

‘I am?
Zero …’

‘Well, and zero?’

‘That, Kolenka, is a bomb …’

Nikolai Apollonovich realized that he was only a bomb; and he burst with a bang: from the place where Nikolai Apollonovich’s likeness had just emerged from the armchair and where now some kind of wretched broken shell (like an eggshell) was visible, a lightning-bearing zigzag rushed, falling into the black waves of aeons …

At this point Nikolai Apollonovich woke up from his dream; with a tremble he realized that his head was resting on the sardine tin.

And leapt to his feet: a terrible dream … But what was it?
He could not remember the dream; the nightmares of his childhood had returned: Pépp Péppovich Pépp, who swelled up from a little ball into a mighty colossus, had evidently decided to lie quiet for the time being – in the sardine tin; his old childish hallucinations were returning, because –

– Pépp Péppovich Pépp, the little ball with dreadful contents, is quite simply a Party bomb: there it inaudibly chatters with its hands and second hand; Pépp Péppovich Pépp will grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And Pépp Péppovich Pépp is going to burst: everything is going to burst …

‘What, am I delirious?’

In his head again with horrifying swiftness began to whirl: but what was he to do?
There was quarter of an hour left: should he give the key another turn?

He had already turned the small key twenty
times; and twenty times something had hoarsely croaked in there, inside the little tin: for a short time his old hallucinations had gone away, so that morning could be morning, and afternoon could be afternoon, evening could be evening; at the end of the coming night, however, no movement of a key would be able to postpone anything: something would happen that would make the walls collapse, and the purple-illumined heavens blow into pieces, mingling with splattered blood into a single dim, primordial darkness.

END OF THE FIFTH CHAPTER

Chapter the Sixth

in which the events of a rather grey little day are related

Behind him always the Bronze Horseman came

Galloping with heavy clatter.
¹

A.
Pushkin

Once again the Thread of His Existence Was Found

It was a dim Petersburg morning.

Now let us return to Aleksandr Ivanovich; Aleksandr Ivanovich had woken up; Aleksandr Ivanovich half opened his stuck-together eyes: the events of the night fled – into the subconscious world; his nerves had come unstrung; the night for him was an event of gigantic proportions.

The transitional state between waking and sleep was throwing him somewhere: as though he were jumping out of the window from the fifth floor; his sensations were opening a howling breach for him in this world; he was flying into this breach, shooting through into a teeming world of which it is insufficient to say that within it substances similar to furies launched attacks: the very fabric of the world appeared to him as a fabric of furies.

Only when it was very nearly morning did Aleksandr Ivanovich begin to master this world; and then he landed in bliss; the awakening flung him rapidly down from there; he felt sorry about something, and as he did so his whole body both ached and throbbed.

In the first moment after his awakening he noticed that he was shaking with a most intense ague; all night he had tossed about: something must have happened … Only, what was it?

His delirious running through the misty prospects, or up and down the steps of a mysterious staircase, had lasted all the long night; or, more correctly, fever had done the running: through his
veins; his memory was telling him something, but his memory was slipping away; and he was unable to connect anything with his memory.

It was all – fever.

Frightened in earnest now (in his loneliness Aleksandr Ivanovich was afraid of illnesses), he thought that it would do him no harm to stay at home.

With this thought he began to drift off into oblivion; and, as he did so, he thought:

‘I ought to take some quinine.’

He fell asleep.

And waking up, added:

‘And strong tea …’

And reflecting again, to this he added:

‘With dried raspberries …’

He thought about the fact that he had passed all these recent days with a thoughtlessness that was impermissible in his situation; this thoughtlessness seemed all the more shameful to him because days of enormous and heavy import were approaching.

In spite of himself, he sighed.

‘And I ought also to – strictly stay off the vodka … Not read the Revelations … Not go down and see the yardkeeper … And also those talks I’ve been having with Styopka who lives at the yardkeeper’s: I shouldn’t talk to Styopka …’

At first these thoughts of raspberry tea, vodka, Styopka and the Revelations of St John calmed him, reducing the events of the night to the most utter nonsense.

But, having washed in icy cold water from the tap with the help of a wretched scrap of soap and a yellow soapy slush, Aleksandr Ivanovich again felt an onrush of nonsense.

He cast his gaze around his twenty-five rouble room (an attic lodging).

What a miserable abode it was!

The principal adornment of the miserable abode was the bed; the bed consisted of four cracked boards, put together any old how on a wooden trestle; conspicuous on the cracked surface of this trestle were nasty dried, dark red spots, which had probably been made by bedbugs, since Aleksandr Ivanovich had been stubbornly struggling
with these dark red spots for many months with the aid of insect powder.
²

The trestle was covered by a thin little mattress stuffed with bast; on top of the mattress, over one single dirty sheet, Aleksandr Ivanovich had carefully thrown a small knitted blanket which could hardly have been called striped: the meagre hints here of some blue and red stripes that had once existed were covered by deposits of grey, which had, however, appeared in all probability not as a result of dirt, but of many years of active use; with this gift from someone (his mother, perhaps) Aleksandr Ivanovich was still somehow loath to part; he was, perhaps, loath to part with it because of an absence of means (it had even been with him to the Yakutsk region and back).