Petersburg (38 page)

Before her fleeted the love of this unhappy summer; and the love of the unhappy summer, like everything else, fell away from her memory; and again an impact resounded, shattering the stones.
Having fleeted past, they sank away: her springtime conversations with
Nicolas
Ableukhov; having fleeted past, they sank away: the years of her marriage, her wedding: some kind of void tore them off and devoured them, piece by piece.
And she could hear the blow of the metal, shattering the stones.
Her whole life fleeted past, and her whole life sank away, as though her life had never been, and as though she herself were a soul that had not been born into life.
Some kind of void began directly behind her back (for everything was falling into it, striking against some bottom); the void extended into the ages, and in the ages all one could hear was impact upon impact; those were the pieces of her lives falling as they plunged towards some bottom.
As though some metal horse, clopping resonantly on the stone, were trampling the past behind her back; as though there behind her back, clopping resonantly on the stone, a metal horseman was pursuing her.

And when she turned round, she was presented with a spectacle: the outline of the Mighty Horseman … There – two equine nostrils penetrated the fog, flaming, like a white-hot column.

Bronze-wreathed Death was overtaking her.

At this point Sofya Petrovna came to her senses: overtaking the carriage, an orderly flew past, holding a torch into the fog.
For an instant his heavy bronze helmet flashed by; and after him, rumbling, flaming, a fire brigade went hurtling into the fog.

‘What’s that over there – a fire?’ Sofya Petrovna asked, turning to the cab driver.

‘It seems to be: they were saying the islands are on fire.’

The cab driver announced this to her out of the fog: the carriage stood outside her entrance porch on the Moika.

Sofya Petrovna remembered everything: everything came floating out before her with a horribly prosaic quality; as though this hell, these dancing maskers and the Horseman had not existed.
Now the maskers seemed to her mere pranksters, who were probably acquaintances who visited
their
house, too; and the tall, sad figure – he was probably one of the
comrades
(she thanked him for seeing her to her cab).
Only now Sofya Petrovna bit her plump little lip in vexation:
how could she have made a mistake and mixed up an acquaintance with her husband?
And whispered into his ears confessions about some quite nonsensical guilt?
Why, now the unknown acquaintance (and she thanked him for seeing her to her cab) would tell everyone utter rubbish, saying she was afraid of her husband.
And gossip would start going round the town … Oh, Sergei Sergeich Likhutin: soon you will recompense me for this unnecessary disgrace!

She struck the entrance-porch door with her little foot in indignation; in indignation the entrance-porch door banged behind her lowered little head.
Darkness engulfed her, for a moment the inexpressible seized hold of her (thus it is, probably, in the first instant after death); but Sofya Petrovna Likhutina was not thinking about death at all: on the contrary – she was thinking about something very simple.
She was thinking about how in a moment she was going to tell Mavrushka to get the samovar ready for her; while the samovar was being got ready she would nag and lecture her husband (she was, after all, able to nag for more than four hours at a stretch); and when Mavrushka brought her the samovar, she and her husband would have a reconciliation.

Now Sofya Petrovna Likhutina rang the doorbell.
The loud ringing informed the nocturnal flat of her return.
In a moment or two she would hear Mavrushka’s hurried step near the vestibule.
But the hurried step was not heard.
Sofya Petrovna felt offended, and rang again.

Mavrushka was evidently asleep: she had only to go out of the house, and that silly woman fell on her bed … But her husband, Sergei Sergeich, was a fine one, too: he had, of course, been waiting for her with impatience for more than hour or two; and, of course, he had heard the doorbell, and had, of course, realized that the maid had fallen asleep.
And – he didn’t budge!
Oh!
Tell me, if you please!
He was still offended!

Well, then let him do without tea and reconciliation!
…

Sofya Petrovna began to ring the doorbell again: the doorbell tinkled – again and again … No one, nothing!
And she lowered her little head right down to the keyhole; and when she lowered her little head right down to the keyhole, then on the other side of the keyhole, just an inch or so away from her ear, she plainly heard: someone jerkily, heavily and noisily breathing through their nose,
and the striking of a match.
In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, who could be breathing like that in there?
And Sofya Petrovna stepped back from the door in amazement, having stretched forth her little head.

Was it Mavrushka?
No, it was not Mavrushka … Was it Sergei Sergeich Likhutin?
Yes, it was he.
But why was he so silent in there, why did he not open the door, why had he put his head to the keyhole, breathing so jerkily?

In anticipation of something unpleasant, Sofya Petrovna began to hammer desperately at the prickly felt of the door.
In anticipation of something unpleasant Sofya Petrovna exclaimed:

‘Open up, I say!’

But whoever it was went on standing behind the door, saying nothing and breathing so frightenedly, so horribly jerkily.

‘Sergei Sergeich!
That’s enough of this …’

Silence.

‘Is that you?
What’s wrong with you in there?’

Tap, tap, tap – whoever it was stepped away from the door.

‘But what is this?
Oh, Lord: I’m afraid, I’m afraid … Open up, dear!’

Something began to howl loudly behind the door and then ran as fast as its legs would carry it into the rooms at the back, first with a scuffling and then with a moving of chairs; it seemed to her that a lamp tinkled loudly in the drawing-room; from somewhere in the distance a table thundered as it was moved.
Then all was quiet for a moment.

And then there was a horrific rumbling, as though the ceiling had fallen in and as though slaked lime were showering down from above; in this rumbling Sofya Petrovna Likhutina was struck by one sound only: the muffled falling from somewhere above of a heavy human body.

The Alarm

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, to put it trivially, could not stand any kind of social visits that took him out of the house; as far as he was concerned, the only sensible visit was to the Institution or
to take a report to the minister.
Thus had the director of the Ministry of Justice once jestingly observed to him.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, to put it candidly, could not stand direct conversations that involved looking the other person in the face: conversation by means of the telephonic wire got rid of the inconvenience.
From Apollon Apollonovich’s desk telephone wires ran to every department.
Apollon Apollonovich listened to the hooting of the telephone with satisfaction.

Only once had some prankster, in response to Apollon Apollonovich’s query as to which department he was from, struck the palm of his hand on the telephone mouthpiece with all his might, from which Apollon Apollonovich received the impression that someone had given him a slap on the cheek.

In Apollon Apollonovich’s opinion, every exchange of words had a manifest purpose that was as straight as a line.
Everything else he categorized as tea-drinking and the smoking of cigarette ends: Apollon Apollonovich unflinchingly called all cigarettes cigarette ends: and his assumption was that Russians were good-for-nothing tea-drinkers, drunkards and nicotine addicts (he had several times proposed a tax increase on products of the latter substance); it was because of this that by the age of forty-five the Russian, in Apollon Apollonovich’s opinion, gave himself away by his indecent paunch and his blood-red nose; Apollon Apollonovich rushed like a bull at anything red (even a nose).

Apollon Apollonovich was himself the owner of a deathly-grey little nose and a slender little waist – you would have sworn it was the waist of a young girl of sixteen – and was proud of it.

None the less, Apollon Apollonovich had a peculiarly deft explanation for the visits of guests:
jours fixes
were for most of them a place where they could drink tea and smoke cigarette ends together, as long as the visitor did not plan to acquire a post in an idle department and would therefore attempt to ingratiate himself in the house he was visiting, and as long as he did not plan to procure his son a post in that department, or to marry that son to the daughter of the head of that department (there was one such idle department).
With that department Apollon Apollonovich waged a dogged struggle.

Apollon Apollonovich had gone to the Tsukatovs’ with one
single end in view: to strike a blow at the department.
The department had begun to flirt with a certain party which, though doubtless a moderate one, was suspicious not for its rejection of order but for its wish to very slightly change that order.
Apollon Apollonovich despised compromises, despised the party’s representatives and, above all, the department.
He wanted to show the department’s representative and the party’s representative what his future conduct was going to be like with regard to the department in the lofty post that had only just been offered him.

That was why Apollon Apollonovich with displeasure considered himself obliged to spend an evening at the Tsukatovs’, where he had under his nose a most unpleasant object of contemplation: the convulsions of dancing legs and the blood-red, unpleasantly rustling folds of harlequin costumes; he had seen these red rags somewhere before: yes, on the square in front of the Kazan Cathedral; there these red rags had been called banners.

These red rags now, at a simple little soirée and in the presence of the head of the aforesaid Institution struck him as an inappropriate, unworthy and downright disgraceful practical joke; while the convulsions of the dancing legs put him in mind of a certain regrettable (though unavoidable) measure for the prevention of state crimes.

With hostility Apollon Apollonovich looked askance at his hospitable hosts, and became disagreeable.

For him, the dancing of the red clowns turned into dancing of a different, bloody sort; this dancing, like all dancing, as a matter of fact, began in the street; this dancing, like all dancing, continued beneath the crossbeam of two not unfamiliar pillars.
Apollon Apollonovich thought: if one permits this apparently innocent dancing here, it will of course continue in the street; and the dancing will, of course, end – there, there.

Apollon Apollonovich had, as a matter of fact, danced in his youth: the polka-mazurka, probably, and, perhaps, the lancers.

One circumstance made the high-ranking personage’s melancholy mood doubly worse: that absurd domino was disagreeable to him in the extreme, having given him a serious attack of pectoral angina (whether it really was pectoral angina, Apollon Apollonovich was doubtful; and it was a strange thing: the true nature of angina was decidedly known to all who had to turn, even a little, the wheels of
such imposing mechanisms as, for example, the Institution).
So there it was: the absurd domino, a ridiculous buffoon, had met him in the most insolent manner upon his appearance in the ballroom; upon his entrance to the ballroom the absurd domino (a ridiculous buffoon) had come running up to him with grimaces.

Apollon Apollonovich vainly tried to remember where he had seen the grimaces: and could not remember.

With undisguised boredom, with barely mastered revulsion Apollon Apollonovich had sat solemnly in state, like a stick, erect, with a tiny porcelain cup in his most miniature hands; perpendicularly on the multicoloured Bokhara rug rested his thin little legs with their sinewy calves, forming lower parts which below his kneecaps made ninety-degree angles with the upper parts; perpendicularly to his chest his thin hands stretched out towards the little porcelain cup of tea.
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a person of the first class, looked like the small figure of the Egyptian that was depicted on the rug – angular, broad-shouldered, defying all the laws of anatomy (for Apollon Apollonovich had no muscles: Apollon Apollonovich consisted of bones, sinews and veins).

It was with this angularity, which seemed as though elevated by him to a habit, that Apollon Apollonovich, the Egyptian, was expounding a most wise system of prohibitions to the professor of statistical information who had come to this soirée – the leader of a newly-formed party, a party of
moderate
governmental change, though
change none the less
; and with the same dry angularity, which seemed as though elevated by him to a habit, was doctorially expounding a system of the wisest counsels to the editor of the conservative newspaper, who was the son of a liberal priest.

With neither of them did Apollon Apollonovich, a personage of the first class, have anything in common: they both had fat, so to speak, bellies (from intemperance in the matter of tea); they were both, incidentally, red-nosed (from immoderate consumption of alcoholic beverages).
One of them was, in addition, the son of a priest, and where the sons of priests were concerned, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov had an understandable weakness, one that he had, moreover, inherited from his forefathers: that of not being able to endure them.
When Apollon Apollonovich conversed in the course of his duties with country, town and consistorial priests,
priests’ sons and grandsons, he quite plainly sensed a bad smell from their feet; after all, one could not help noticing that country priests, town priests … even consistorial priests with their sons and grandsons, quite plainly, had dirty, unwashed necks and yellow fingernails.

Suddenly Apollon Apollonovich grew decidedly flustered between the two pot-bellied frock-coats that belonged to the priest’s son and the moderate traitor, as though his sense of smell had quite plainly detected a bad odour from their feet; but the eminent man of state’s agitation did not in the slightest proceed from an irritation of his olfactory centres; his agitation proceeded from a sudden shock to his sensitive aural membrane: just then the ballroom pianist again let his fingers fall on the grand piano, and Apollon Apollonovich’s auditory apparatus heard all the consonances and melodic passages through a mesh of harmonic dissonances, like the aimless scraping of at least a dozen fingernails over glass.