Petersburg (6 page)

‘Are you from the peasantry?’

‘That’s right, sir!’

‘Well, so you – do you know – are a baron.’

‘?’

‘Do you have a
borona
,
¹⁶
a harrow?’

‘My father had one, sir.’

‘Well, there you are, you see, and yet you say …’

Apollon Apollonovich, taking his top hat, walked out through the open door.

A Carriage Flew into the Fog

A sleety drizzle was pouring down on the streets and prospects, the pavements and the roofs; it hurled itself down in cold jets from tinplated gutters.

A sleety drizzle was pouring down on the passers-by: rewarding them with grippes; together with the fine dust of rain the influenzas and grippes crawled under the raised collar: of gymnasiast, student, civil servant, officer, ordinary chap; and the ordinary chap (the man in the street, so to speak) looked around him in melancholy fashion; and looked at the prospect with a grey, washed-out face; he was circulating into the infinity of the prospects, crossing infinity, without the slightest murmur – in the infinite stream of others like himself – among the flight, the hubbub, the trembling, the droshkys, hearing from afar the melodic voice of the motor cars’ roulades and the increasing rumble of the yellow-and-red tramcars (a rumble that decreased again), and the incessant cry of the loud-voiced newspaper sellers.

From one infinity he fled into another; and then stumbled against the embankment; here everything came to an end: the melodic voice of the motor car roulade, the yellow-and-red tramcar and the man-in-the-street of every kind; here were both the end of the earth and the end of infinity.

And over there, over there: the depths, the greenish dregs; from far, far away, seemingly further than ought to have been the case, the islands
¹⁷
frightenedly sank and cowered; the estates cowered; and the buildings cowered; it seemed that the waters were going to descend, and that at that moment over them would rush: the depths, the greenish dregs; while in the fog above these greenish dregs rumbled and trembled, fleeing away over there, the black, black Nikolayevsky Bridge.

On this sullen Petersburg morning the heavy doors of a well-appointed yellow house
¹⁸
flew open: the windows of the yellow house looked on to the Neva.
A clean-shaven lackey with gold braid on his lapels rushed out from the entrance porch to give signals to the coachman.
The dappled horses started with a jerk towards the entrance; they drew up a carriage on which an old aristocratic coat of arms was depicted: a unicorn goring a knight.

A dashing non-commissioned officer of the police who was walking past the porchway looked foolish and stood to attention when Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, in a grey coat and a tall black top hat, with a face of stone that recalled a paperweight, swiftly ran out of the entrance porch and even more swiftly ran on to the footboard of the carriage, putting on a black suede glove as he did so.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov threw a momentary, confused glance at the police inspector, at the carriage, at the coachman, at the large black bridge, at the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were drawn so fadedly, and from where Vasily Island looked in fright.

The lackey in grey hurriedly slammed the carriage door.
The carriage flew swiftly into the fog; and the chance officer of the police, shaken by all he had seen, looked for a long, long time over his shoulder into the grimy fog – there, where the carriage had impetuously flown; and sighed, and walked on; soon this policeman’s shoulder, too, was concealed in the fog, as was every shoulder,
every back, every grey face and every black, wet umbrella.
In that direction, too, did the respected lackey look, looked to the right, to the left, at the bridge, at the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were drawn so fadedly, and from where Vasily Island looked in fright.

Here, right at the outset, I must break the thread of my narrative in order to present to the reader the place of action of a certain drama.
As a preliminary, an inaccuracy that has crept in ought to be corrected; the blame for it belongs not to the author, but to the author’s pen: at this time tramcars were not yet running in the city: this was 1905.
¹⁹

Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes

‘Hey!
Hey!
…’

That was the coachman shouting.

And the carriage sprayed mud to every side.

There, where only a foggy dampness hung suspended, first lustrelessly appeared in outline, then descended from heaven to earth – the grimy, blackish-grey St Isaac’s; appeared in outline and then completely took shape: the equestrian monument of the Emperor Nicholas;
²⁰
the metal emperor was dressed in the uniform of the Leib Guards; by its pedestal a Nicholas grenadier peeped out and withdrew back into the fog like a shaggy fur hat.

The carriage, meanwhile, was flying to Nevsky Prospect.

Apollon Apollonovich swayed on the satin cushions of the seat; he was separated from the street scum by four perpendicular walls; thus was he detached from the crowds of people flowing past, from the drearily sodden red wrappers of the cheap journals that were being sold at that crossroads over there.

Planned regularity and symmetry calmed the senator’s nerves, which were stimulated both by the roughness of domestic life and by the helpless circle of the revolution of our wheel of state.

By a harmonic simplicity were his tastes distinguished.

Most of all did he love the rectilinear prospect; this prospect reminded him of the flow of time between the two points of life; and of one other thing, too: all other cities are a wooden pile of
wretched little cottages, and Petersburg is strikingly different from them all.

The wet, slippery prospect: there the houses fused like cubes into a line of life in only one respect: this row had neither an end nor a beginning; here what for the wearer of diamond insignia was only the middle of life’s wanderings turned out for so many high officials to be the ending of life’s way.
²¹

The senator’s soul was seized by inspiration every time his lacquered cube cut across the line of the Nevsky like an arrow; there, outside the windows, the numeration of the houses was visible; and the traffic moved; there, from there – on clear days from far, far away, flashed blindingly: the gold needle,
²²
the clouds, the crimson ray of the sunset; there, from there, on foggy days – nothing, no one.

And there there were – the lines: the Neva, the islands.
Probably in those far-off days, when from the mossy marshes rose the high roofs and the masts and the spires that pierced with their merlons the dank, greenish fog –

– on his shadowy sails the Flying Dutchman
²³
flew towards St Petersburg from there, from the leaden expanses of the Baltic and German
²⁴
Seas, in order here to erect by illusion his misty estates and to give the wave of amassing clouds the name of islands; from here the Dutchman lit the hellish lights of the drinking dens for two hundred years, and the Orthodox folk flocked and flocked into these hellish drinking dens, carrying a foul infection …

The dark shadows floated off a little.
But the hellish drinking dens remained.
For long years the Orthodox folk caroused here with a ghost: a mongrel race arrived from the islands – neither human beings nor shadows, – settling on the boundary between two worlds that were alien to each other.

Apollon Apollonovich did not like the islands: the population there was industrial, coarse; a human swarm of many thousands plodded its way in the mornings to the many-chimneyed factories; and now he knew that the Browning circulated there; and a few other things as well.
Apollon Apollonovich thought: the inhabitants
of the islands are numbered among the population of the Russian Empire; the general census has been introduced among them, too; they have numbered houses, police stations, fiscal institutions; the island resident is a lawyer, a writer, a worker, a police clerk; he considers himself a citizen of Petersburg, but he, a denizen of chaos, threatens the capital of the Empire in a gathering cloud …

Apollon Apollonovich did not want to reflect any further: the restless islands must be crushed, crushed!
They must be riveted to the ground with the iron of the enormous bridge and transfixed in every direction by the arrows of the prospects …

And now, as he looked pensively into that boundlessness of mists, the man of state suddenly expanded out of the black cube in all directions and soared above it; and he desired that the carriage should fly forward, that the prospects should fly towards him – prospect after prospect, that the whole spherical surface of the planet should be gripped by the blackish-grey cubes of the houses as by serpentine coils; that the whole of the earth squeezed by prospects should intersect the immensity in linear cosmic flight with a rectilinear law; that the mesh of parallel prospects, intersected by a mesh of prospects, should expand into the abysses of outer space with the planes of squares and cubes: one square per man-in-the-street, that, that …

After the line of all the symmetries it was the figure of the square that brought him the most calm.

He was in the habit of giving himself up for long periods of time to the insouciant contemplation of: pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, trapezoids.
He was seized by anxiety only when he contemplated the truncated cone.

As for the zigzag line, he could not endure it.

Here, in the carriage, Apollon Apollonovich took pleasure for a long time without thought in the quadrangular walls, residing at the centre of the black, perfect and satin-covered cube: Apollon Apollonovich had been born for solitary confinement; only a love for the planimetry of state clothed him in the polyhedrality of a responsible post.

The wet, slippery prospect was intersected by a wet prospect at a right angle of ninety degrees; at the point where the lines intersected, a policeman stood …

And exactly the same houses loomed there, and the same grey human streams moved past there, and there was the same green-yellow fog.
Concentratedly did the faces move there; the pavements whispered and shuffled; were rubbed briskly by galoshes; the nose of the man in the street sailed solemnly on.
Noses
²⁵
flowed past in large numbers: aquiline, duck-like, cockerel-like, greenish, white: here also flowed the absence of any nose at all.
Here flowed ones, and twos, and threes-and-fours; and bowler hat after bowler hat: bowlers, feathers, service caps; service caps, service caps, feathers; a cocked hat, a top hat, a service cap; a kerchief, an umbrella, a feather.

But parallel with the racing prospect was a fleeting prospect with the same row of boxes, numeration, clouds; and the same civil servant.

There is an infinity of prospects racing in infinity with an infinity of intersecting shadows racing into infinity.
All Petersburg is the infinity of a prospect raised to the power of n.

While beyond Petersburg there is – nothing.

The Inhabitants of the Islands Strike You

The inhabitants of the islands strike you with the vaguely thievish ways they have; their faces are greener and paler than those of any earth-born beings; the islander will get through the keyhole – some kind of
raznochinets
:
²⁶
he will have a small moustache, perhaps; and I fear he will try to get some money out of you – for the arming of the factory and mill workers; your room will begin to mutter, to whisper, to giggle: you will give; and then you will be unable to sleep at nights any more: he, the inhabitant of the island, will be a stranger with a small black moustache, elusive, invisible, there will be no trace of him; he will already be out in the province; and if you look – the rural distances will be muttering, whispering there, in the expanse; there, booming and muttering in the rural distances will be – Russia.

It was the last day of September.

On Vasily Island, in the depths of the Seventeenth Line, out of the fog looked a house enormous and grey; from the small courtyard
a black, rather dirty staircase led away into the house: there were doors and doors; one of them opened.

The stranger with the small black moustache appeared on its threshold.

Then, having closed the door, the stranger slowly began to descend; he came down from a height of five storeys, cautiously treading the staircase; in his hand there evenly swung a not exactly small, yet not very large little bundle tied up with a dirty napkin with red borders that showed discoloured pheasants.

My stranger behaved with exemplary caution in his treatment of the little bundle.

The staircase was, needless to say, black, strewn with cucumber rinds and a cabbage leaf that had been repeatedly crushed by a foot.
The stranger with the small black moustache slipped on it.

With one hand then he gripped the staircase railing, while his other hand (with the bundle) confusedly described in the air a nervous zigzag; but the description of zigzag actually applied to his elbow: my stranger evidently wanted to protect the bundle from a vexatious accident – its precipitate fall on to the stone step, because in the movement of his elbow there truly was manifested the skilful stunt of an acrobat: the delicate cunning of the movement was prompted by a certain instinct.

And then in his meeting with the yardkeeper, who was coming up the stairs with an armful of aspen wood slung over his shoulder, the stranger with the black moustache again concentratedly began to display a delicate care about the fate of his bundle, which might catch on a log; the objects contained in the bundle must have been objects especially fragile.