Petersburg (56 page)

‘Yes, I got it, I got it … No – as I was saying, this
zero minus something
… What was that?’

Oh, Lord: still about the same thing!
…

‘You ought to read the Apocalypse …’

‘I have heard from you before the reproach that I am unfamiliar with the Apocalypse; but now I shall read it – I shall read it without fail; now that you have finally put my mind at rest about …
all this
, I feel an interest awakening within me in the circle of your reading; you know, I shall settle down at home, drink bromide and read the Apocalypse; I’m most enormously interested: something has remained from the night: everything is what it is – yet different … For example, look, here: the shop window … And in the shop window there are reflections: there is a gentleman in a bowler hat walking past – look – off he goes … It’s you and I, do you see?
And yet it’s – somehow strange …’

‘Yes, it is somehow strange,’ said Aleksandr Ivanovich, nodding his head in confirmation: Lord, but this fellow seemed to be a specialist in the field of ‘somehow strange’.

‘Or then again: objects … The devil only knows what they really
are: they’re what they are – and yet different … I perceived that from the tin: the tin was a tin; and yet – no, no: it wasn’t a tin, but a …’

‘Shh!’

‘A tin with dreadful contents!’

‘Well, you’d do best to throw the tin into the Neva; and everything will come right again; everything will return to its place …’

‘No, it won’t, it won’t, it won’t …’

He sadly dodged the rushing couples; sadly he sighed, because he knew: it would not come right again, it would not, would not – not ever, ever!

Aleksandr Ivanovich was astonished at the flood of garrulity that had gushed from Ableukhov’s lips; to be quite honest, he did not know what to do with such garrulity: whether to try to calm him down, to support him, or, on the contrary – to break off the conversation (Ableukhov’s presence was simply weighing him down).

‘Nikolai Apollonovich, it’s just your sensations that appear strange to you; it’s just that you’ve been sitting too long with Kant in an unaired room; you’ve been struck by a tornado – and you’ve started to notice things about yourself: you have listened carefully to the tornado; and you have heard yourself in it … Your states of mind have been described in a variety of forms; they are the subject of observations, of study …’

‘But where, where?’

‘In fiction, in poetry, in the
psychiatries
, in occult resarch.’

Aleksandr Ivanovich could not help smiling at the scandalous (from his point of view) illiteracy of this intellectually developed scholastic and, having smiled, continued seriously:

‘A psychiatrist …’

‘?’

‘Would call …’

‘Yes, yes, yes …’

‘All that …’

‘That
everything is what it is, and yet different
?’

‘Well, call it that if you will – for him the more usual term is: pseudo-hallucination …’

‘?’

‘That is, a kind of symbolic sensation that does not correspond to the stimulus of a sensation.’

‘Well, so what: saying that is equivalent to saying nothing!
…’

‘Yes, you’re right …’

‘No, it doesn’t satisfy me …’

‘Of course: a modernist would call this sensation the sensation of the abyss – that is to say, he would look for an image that corresponds to a symbolic sensation that is not normally experienced.’

‘So there’s an allegory here.’

‘Don’t confuse allegory with symbol; an allegory is a symbol that has become current usage; for example, the normal meaning of your “beside oneself”; while a symbol is your appeal to what you have experienced there – near the tin; an invitation to experience artificially something that you experienced
for real
… But a more suitable term would be a different one: the pulsation of the elemental body.
That is precisely how you experienced yourself; under the influence of a shock the elemental body within you gave a perfectly real shudder, for a moment became separated, unstuck from your physical body, and then you experienced all the things that you experienced there: trite verbal combinations like
bezdna
(abyss) –
bezdna
(without a bottom) or
vne … sebya
(beside (outside) … oneself) acquired depth, became a vital truth for you, a symbol; according to the doctrine of certain schools of mysticism, the experiences of one’s elemental body turn verbal meanings and allegories into real meanings, into symbols; and it’s because the works of the mystics abound in these symbols that now, after what you have experienced, I advise you to read those mystics …’

‘I told you that I will: and – I will …’

‘And as for what happened to you, I can only add one thing: sensations of that kind will be your first experience beyond the grave, as Plato describes it, adducing in evidence the assertions of the Bacchantes … There are schools of experience where these sensations are deliberately provoked – do you not believe me?
… There are: I can tell you that with certainty, because the only friend I have – and he is a close friend – is there, in those schools; the schools of experience transform your nightmare by means of hard work into a harmonious accord, studying its rhythms, movements
and pulsations, and introducing all the sobriety of consciousness into the sensation of expansion, for example … But why are we standing here?
We’ve talked for far too long … What you need to do is go home now and … throw the tin into the river; and stay at home, stay at home: don’t set foot anywhere (you are probably being followed); so stay at home, read the Apocalypse, drink bromide: you’re dreadfully exhausted … Though perhaps you’re better off without bromide: bromide dulls the consciousness; people who abuse bromide become incapable of doing anything … Well, and now I rush away, and – on a matter that concerns you.’

Having pressed Ableukhov’s hand, Aleksandr Ivanovich suddenly slipped away from him into the black stream of bowler hats, turned from that stream and shouted once more from there:

‘And throw the tin in the river!’

His shoulder adhered to the other shoulders; he was swiftly carried off by the headless myriapod.

Nikolai Apollonovich gave a shudder: life was bubbling in the little tin; the timing mechanism was working even now; he must go home quickly, quickly; in a moment he would hire a cab; when he got home, he would put the tin in his side pocket; and – into the Neva with it!

Nikolai Apollonovich again began to feel that he was expanding; at the same time, he felt: it was drizzling.

The Caryatid

There, opposite, the crossroads showed black; and there was the street; the caryatid of the entrance porch hung there stonily.

The
Institution
towered up from there; the
Institution
, where the person who dominated everything was Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov.

There is a limit to the autumn; to winter, too, there is a limit: the very periods of time themselves flow by in cyclic fashion.
And above these cycles hung the bearded caryatid of the entrance porch; giddily its stone hoof is crushed into the wall; it looks as though it might break loose in its entirety and spill into the street as stone.

And yet – it does not break away.

What it sees above it is, like life, mutable, inexplicable, inarticulate: clouds float there; a white, mackerel sky twines in inexplicability; or it drizzles; drizzles, as now: as it did yesterday, and the day before yesterday.

What it sees beneath its feet is, like itself, immutable: immutable is the flow of the human myriapod along the illumined paving; or: as now – in the gloomy dampness; the deathly pale rustling of moving legs; and the faces, eternally green; no, from them one cannot tell that events are already rumbling.

Observing the passage of the bowler hats, you would never say that events were rumbling, for example, in the little town of AkTyuk, where a workman at the railway station who had had an argument with a railway policeman, appropriated a credit bill
⁵
from the policeman, introducing it into his stomach with the aid of his oral orifice, for which reason the railway doctor introduced an emetic into that stomach; observing the passage of the bowler hats, no one would say that already in the theatre at Kutais the audience had exclaimed: ‘Citizens!
…’ No one would have said that a police superintendent in Tiflis had uncovered the manufacture of bombs, that the library in Odessa had been closed and that in ten of Russia’s universities mass meetings had been held, attended by many thousands of people – on the same day, at the same time; no one would have said that at that very same time thousands of staunch Bundists came flocking to a gathering, that the workers of Perm had shown themselves obstinate and that at that very same time, surrounded by Cossacks, the Reval iron foundry began to unfurl its red flags.

Observing the passage of the bowler hats, no one would have said that ‘the new life’ was welling up, that Potapenko
⁶
was finishing the play that bore that same title, that the strike on the Moscow – Kazan railway had already begun; panes of glass had been smashed at the stations, warehouses had been broken into, work had been stopped on the Kursk, Windau, Nizhny Novgorod and Murom railways; and tens of thousands of coaches and wagons, stunned, came to a standstill in the multivarious expanses; communication froze dead.
Observing the passage of the bowler hats, no one would have said that in Petersburg events were already rumbling, that the typesetters from almost every printing works had elected delegates and gathered in swarms; and – factories were on strike: the ship-yards,
the Aleksandrovsky Factory, and others; that the suburbs of Petersburg were teeming with Manchurian hats; observing the passage of the bowler hats, no one would have said that the passers-by were
those
people, and not
those
people; that they did not simply stride along, but strode, concealing an unease within themselves, feeling that their heads were the heads of idiots, with sinciputs that had not grown together, cut by sabres, smashed by plain old wooden stakes; if they had put their ears to the ground, they would have heard someone’s kindly rustling: the rustling of incessant revolver fire – from Arkhangelsk to Kolkhida and from Libava to Blagoveshchensk.

But the circulation was not broken: monotonous, sluggish, deathly, the bowler hats still flowed beneath the feet of the caryatid.

The grey caryatid leaned over and looked beneath its feet: at the same crowd; there was no limit to the contempt in the old stone of its eyes; there was no limit to its satiety; and no limit to its despair.

And oh, if only it had the strength!

Its muscular arms would straighten on elbows that flew up above its stone head; and its chiselled sinciput would jerk frenziedly; its mouth would tear open in a thunderous roar, in a protracted, desperate roar; you would say: ‘That is the roar of a hurricane’ (thus did the black thousands of peaked caps of the city thugs roar in the pogroms); as from the whistle of a locomotive, steam would pour over the street; the cornice of the balcony itself would leap up above the street, broken away from the wall; and disintegrate into heavy, loudly rumbling stones (very soon afterwards the windows of the
zemstvo
councils and the provincial
zemstvo
assemblies were smashed with stones); this old statue would break off into the street in a hail of stone, describing a swift and blinding arc in the darkening air; and, growing bloody with the splinters, it would settle on top of the frightened bowler hats that were passing here – deathly, monotonous, sluggish …

On this rather grey little Petersburg day a heavy, sumptuous door flew open; a clean-shaven lackey in grey with gold braid on
his lapels rushed out from the vestibule to give directions to the coachman; the horses hurled themselves to the entrance porch and pulled up the lacquered carriage; the clean-shaven lackey in grey looked stupid and drew himself straight to attention, as Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, somewhat stooped, bent, unshaven, with a painfully swollen face and a drooping lip touched the edge of his top hat (the colour of a raven’s wing) with his gloves (the colour of a raven’s wing).

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov cast a momentary glance filled with indifference at the erect lackey, at the carriage, the coachman, the great black bridge, the indifferent expanses of the Neva, where the misty, many-chimneyed distances were so wanly outlined, and where ashen rose the indistinct Vasily Island with its striking tens of thousands.

The erect lackey slammed the carriage door, on which an old aristocratic coat of arms was depicted: a unicorn goring a knight; the carriage swiftly flew into the grimy fog – past the lustrelessly looming blackish cathedral, St Isaac’s, past the equestrian monument to the Emperor Nicholas – to the Nevsky, where a crowd was swarming, where, breaking loose from the wooden pole, tearing the air with their crests, where they fluttered and snatched, flew the gently whistling blades of a red calico banner; the black outline of the carriage, the silhouette of the lackey’s three-cornered hat and the wings of his overcoat flying in the wind suddenly cut into the thick, shaggy mass, where Manchurian hats, cap bands, and service caps, swarming together, broke against the panes of the carriage in a distinct singing.

The carriage came to a standstill in the crowd.

Down, Tom!

‘Mais j’espère …’

‘You hope?’

‘Mais j’espère que oui …’
the voice of a foreigner jangled from behind the door.

Aleksandr Ivanovich’s footsteps tapped against the boards of the little terrace with deliberate firmness; Aleksandr Ivanovich did not
like eavesdropping.
The door that led into the apartment was half open.

It was getting dark: it was getting dark blue.

No one heard his footsteps.
Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin decided not to eavesdrop; and so he stepped across the threshold of the doorway.

In the room there was a heavy fragrance; a mixture of perfumery and some kind of astringent sourness: that of medicaments.