Petersburg (7 page)

Otherwise my stranger’s behaviour would not have been comprehensible.

When the momentous stranger cautiously descended to the black exit door, a black cat that was near his feet spat and, tucking up its tail, cut across his path, dropping at the stranger’s feet a chicken entrail: my stranger’s face was distorted by a spasm; while his head jerked nervously back, displaying a soft neck.

These movements were peculiar to young ladies of the good old days when the young ladies of those days were beginning to experience a thirst: to confirm with an unusual action an interesting
pallor of face, imparted by the drinking of vinegar and the sucking of lemons.

And precisely these same movements sometimes distinguish those of our young contemporaries who are worn out by insomnia.
The stranger suffered from this kind of insomnia: the tobacco-smoke-filled nature of his abode hinted at that; and the bluish tint of the soft skin of his face bore witness to the same thing – such soft skin that had my stranger not been the possessor of a small moustache, I think you would probably have taken the stranger for a young lady in disguise.

And so there was the stranger – in the small courtyard, a quadrangle that had been entirely covered in asphalt and hemmed in on every side by the five storeys of a many-windowed colossus.
In the middle of the courtyard damp cords of aspen wood had been piled; and even from here one could see a piece of the Seventeenth Line, whistled round by the wind.

Lines!

Only in you has the memory of Petrine Petersburg remained.

The parallel lines in the marshes had once been drawn by Peter;
²⁷
those lines had become coated now with granite, now with stone enclosures, now with wooden ones.
Of Peter’s straight lines in Petersburg not a trace remained; Peter’s line had been converted into the line of a later era: the rounded line of Catherine, the Alexandrine formation of white stone colonnades.

Only here, amidst the colossi, the small Petrine houses had remained; there a house built of logs; there a green house; there a blue one, single-storeyed, with a bright red sign reading
Stolovaya
.
²⁸
It was exactly houses such as these that were scattered here in ancient times.
Here also, one’s nose was struck directly by various smells: there was a smell of salt, of herring, of hawsers, of leather jacket and pipe, and shore tarpaulin.

The Lines!

How they have changed: how these grim days have changed them!

The stranger remembered: in that window of that lustrous little house on a summer evening in June, an old woman chewed her lips; since August the window had been closed; in September a silk brocade coffin had been brought.

He reflected that life was going up in price and that soon the working people would have nothing to eat; that from there, from
the bridge, Petersburg came stabbing here with the arrows of its prospects and a band of stone giants; that band of giants would soon shamelessly and brazenly bury in their attics and basements the whole of the islands’ poor.

From the island my stranger had long hated Petersburg: there, from where Petersburg rose in a wave of clouds; and the buildings hovered there; there above the buildings someone malicious and dark seemed to hover, someone whose breathing firmly coated with the ice of granite and stone the once green and curly-headed islands; someone dark, terrible and cold, from there, from the warring chaos, fixedly with a stony gaze, beat in his mad hovering the wings of a bat; and lashed the islands’ poor with official words, standing out in the fog: skull and ears; thus not long ago had someone been depicted on the cover of a little journal.

The stranger thought this and clenched his fist in his pocket; he remembered the circular and remembered that the leaves were falling: my stranger knew it all by heart.
These fallen leaves were for many the last leaves: my stranger became a bluish shadow.

For our part, however, we shall say: O, Russian people, Russian people!
Do not let in the crowds of gliding shadows from the islands!
Fear the islanders!
They have a right to settle freely in the Empire: it is evidently for this purpose that black and grey bridges have been thrown over the waters of Lethe to the islands.
They ought to be pulled down …

Too late …

The police did not even think of raising the Nikolayevsky Bridge; dark shadows began to throng over the bridge; among those shadows the shadow of the stranger began to throng, too.
In its hand evenly swung a not exactly small, yet all the same not very large little bundle.

And, Having Caught Sight, Widened, Lit up, Flashed

In the greenish illumination of the Petersburg morning, in the saving ‘apparently’, a customary phenomenon also circulated in front of Senator Ableukhov: a manifestation of the atmosphere – a
human stream; here people grew mute; their streams, accumulating in an undular surf, thundered, growled; but the accustomed ear could in no way detect that that human surf was a thunderous surf.

Welded together by the mirage the stream was disintegrating within itself into the elements of a stream: element upon element flowed by; perceptibly to the mind each was withdrawing from each, like planetary system from planetary system; neighbour was here in the same approximate relation to neighbour as that of a pencil of rays from the celestial vault to the retina of the eye, conveying to the centre of the brain along the telegraph of the nerves a troubled, stellar, shimmering message.

The aged senator communicated with the crowd that flowed before him by means of wires (telegraph and telephone); and the shadowy stream was borne to his consciousness like tidings that calmly flowed beyond the distances of the world.
Apollon Apollonovich thought: about the stars, about the inarticulateness of the thunderous stream that was hurtling by; and, as he swayed on a black cushion, he calculated the intensity of the light that was perceptible from Saturn.

Suddenly … –

– his face winced and was distorted by a tic; his stony eyes, surrounded by blue, rolled convulsively; his wrists, clad in black suede, flew up to the level of his chest, as though he were defending himself with his hands.
And his torso leaned back, while his top hat, striking the wall, fell on to his knees below his bared head …

The uncontrolled quality of the senator’s movement was not subject to the customary interpretation; the senator’s code of rules had not foreseen anything of this kind …

As he contemplated the flowing silhouettes – the bowlers, feathers, service caps, service caps, service caps, feathers – Apollon Apollonovich likened them to points in the celestial vault; but one of those points, breaking loose from its orbit, rushed at him with dizzying speed, assuming the form of an enormous and crimson sphere, or rather, what I mean is:

– as he contemplated the flowing silhouettes (service caps, service caps, feathers), Apollon Apollonovich saw on the corner among the service caps, among the feathers, among the
bowlers, a pair of furious eyes: the eyes expressed a certain inadmissible quality; the eyes recognized the senator; and, having recognized, grew furious; perhaps the eyes had been waiting on the corner; and, having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed.

This furious stare was a stare consciously thrown and belonged to a
raznochinets
with a small black moustache, wearing a coat with a turned-up collar; subsequently going more deeply into the details of the circumstance, Apollon Apollonovich more concluded than remembered something else as well: in his right hand the
raznochinets
was holding a little bundle tied with a wet napkin.

The matter was so simple: squeezed by the stream of droshkys, the carriage had stopped at a crossroads (the policeman there was lifting his white baton); the stream of
raznochintsy
that was moving past, squeezed by the flight of the droshkys towards the stream of the ones that were racing perpendicularly, cutting across the Nevsky – this stream now simply pressed itself against the senator’s carriage, breaking the illusion that he, Apollon Apollonovich, as he flew along the Nevsky, was flying billions of versts away from the human myriapod that was trampling the very same prospect: rendered uneasy, Apollon Apollonovich moved close to the windows of the carriage, having seen that he was separated from the crowd by only a thin wall and a space of four inches; at this point he caught sight of the
raznochinets
; and began calmly to study him; there was something worthy of notice in the whole of that unprepossessing figure; and no doubt a physiognomist, encountering that figure in the street by chance, would have stopped in amazement: and then in the midst of his activities would have remembered that face he had seen; the peculiarity of that face consisted merely in the difficulty of classifying that face among any of the existing categories – no more than that …

This observation would have flickered through the senator’s head had this observation lasted a second or two longer; but last it did not.
The stranger raised his eyes and – on the other side of the mirror-like carriage window, removed from him by a space of four inches, he saw not a face, but … a skull in a top hat and an enormous pale green ear.

In that same quarter of a second the senator saw in the stranger’s eyes – that same immensity of chaos from which by the nature of
things the foggy, many-chimneyed distance and Vasily Island surveyed the senator’s house.

It was precisely at that moment that the stranger’s eyes widened, lit up, flashed: and it was precisely at that moment that, separated by a space of four inches and the carriage wall, quickly on the other side of the window hands were thrown up, covering eyes.

The carriage flew past; with it, into those damp spaces, flew Apollon Apollonovich; to where from where – on clear days rose splendidly – the golden needle, the clouds and the crimson sunset; to where from where today came swarms of grimy clouds.

There in the swarms of grimy smoke, as he leaned back against the wall of the carriage, in his eyes he still saw the same thing: the swarms of grimy smoke; his heart began to thump; and expanded, expanded, expanded; in his breast there came into being the sensation of a growing, crimson sphere that was about to explode and shatter into pieces.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov suffered from dilatation of the heart.

All this lasted an instant.

Apollon Apollonovich, automatically putting on his top hat and pressing a black suede hand to his galloping heart, again devoted himself to his beloved contemplation of cubes, in order to give himself a calm and sensible account of what had taken place.

Apollon Apollonovich again looked out of the carriage: what he saw now blotted out what had gone before: a wet, slippery prospect; wet, slippery flagstones shining feverishly in the miserable September day!

The horses stopped.
A policeman saluted.
Behind the glass of the entrance porch, behind a bearded caryatid that supported the stones of a small balcony, Apollon Apollonovich saw the same spectacle as usual: a heavy-headed bronze mace gleamed there; the dark triangle of the doorman had subsided on an octogenarian shoulder there.
The octogenarian doorman was falling asleep over the
Stock Exchange Gazette
.
Thus had he fallen asleep yesterday, and the day before yesterday.
Thus had he slept for the past fateful five years
²⁹
… Thus would he sleep for the next five years to come.

Five years had now passed since Apollon Apollonovich rolled up to the Institution as the junior head of the Institution: over five years had passed since that time!
And there had been events: China had been in a state of ferment and Port Arthur had fallen.
³⁰
But the vision of the years is immutable: an octogenarian shoulder, gold braid, a beard.

The door flew open: the bronze mace banged.
Apollon Apollonovich carried his stony gaze into the wide open entrance porch.
And the door closed.

Apollon Apollonovich stood and breathed.

‘Your excellency … Please sit down, sir … Look at you, how you’re panting …’

‘You’re forever running as though you were a little boy …’

‘Please sit down, your excellency: get your breath back …’

‘There now, that’s it, sir …’

‘Perhaps … a little water?’

But the face of the distinguished man of state brightened up, became childish, senile; it dissolved entirely in wrinkles:

‘But tell me, please: what is the husband of a countess, a
grafinya
?’

‘A countess, sir?
… But which one, may I be allowed to ask?’

‘Oh, just any old
grafinya
.’

‘The husband of a
grafinya
is a
grafin
, a decanter!’

‘Hee-hee-hee, sir …’

And the heart that was disobedient to the mind trembled and thumped; and because of this, everything all around it was the same and not the same …

Of Two Poorly Dressed
Coursistes
…
³¹

Among the slowly flowing crowds the stranger was flowing, too; and more precisely, he was flowing away, in complete confusion,
from that crossroads where by the stream of people he had been squeezed against the black carriage, from whence had stared at him: a skull, an ear, a top hat.

That ear and that skull!

Remembering them, the stranger hurled himself into flight.

Couple after couple flowed past: threesomes, foursomes flowed past; from each one to the sky rose a smoky pillar of conversation, interweaving, fusing with smoky, contiguously moving pillar; intersecting the pillars of conversation, my stranger caught fragments of them; from those fragments both phrases and sentences formed.

The gossip of the Nevsky began to plait itself.

‘Do you know?’ came from somewhere to the right and expired in the accumulating rumble.

And then to the surface again came:

‘They’re going to …’