Petersburg (55 page)

But when he had listened more carefully to what the senator’s son was repeating, he realized that it was the bomb he was talking about.

‘Life must have stirred inside it when I set it in motion; it was all right, it was dead … I turned the key; even, yes: began to sob, I assure you, like a drunken body, half awake, when it’s shaken out of slumber …’

‘So you set it in motion?’

‘Yes, it started ticking …’

‘The hand?’

‘For twenty-four hours.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I put it, the tin, on the desk and looked at it, looked and looked; my fingers reached out for it of their own accord; and – it just happened: my fingers somehow turned the key of their own accord …’

‘What have you done?!
Throw it into the river immediately!?!’ – Aleksandr Ivanovich cried, throwing up his hands in unfeigned alarm; his neck twitched.

‘Do you understand, it made a face at me?
…’

‘The tin?’

‘As a matter of fact, I was seized by a very large number of constantly changing sensations as I stood over it: a very large number … Simply the devil knows what … I must confess I have never experienced anything like it in all my life … I was overcome by revulsion – and so much so that revulsion made me burst … All kinds of rubbish came crawling, and, I repeat – a terrible revulsion at
it
, the incredible, the incomprehensible: at the very shape of the tin, at the thought that sardines had, perhaps, once floated in it (I cannot stand the sight of them); a revulsion at it rose as at some enormous, hard insect that was chattering in my ears its incomprehensible insect chatter; do you understand – it had the effrontery to babble something at me?
… Eh?
…’

‘Hmm …’

‘A revulsion, as at an enormous insect whose shell gives off a savour of nauseating tin; there was something part-insect, part-unplated metal dish about it … Can you imagine – I was bursting, nauseated … I mean, it was as if I had … swallowed it …’

‘Swallowed it?
Ugh, how ghastly …’

‘Simply the devil knows what – I swallowed it; do you understand what that means?
Became a bomb walking on two legs with a repulsive ticking in my belly.’

‘Quiet, Nikolai Apollonovich – quiet: someone may hear us here!’

‘They won’t understand any of it: it’s impossible to understand it … This is what you have to do: keep it in your desk, stand and
listen to its ticking … In a word, you have to experience it all for yourself, in sensations …’

‘But you know,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich said, getting interested in what he was saying now – ‘I do understand you: the ticking … You hear the sound differently; if you only listen closely to the sound, you will hear in it – something that’s the same, and yet different … I once tried to frighten a neurasthenic; began to tap my finger on the table, with a hidden meaning, you know – in time to the conversation; well, so then he looked at me, turned pale, fell silent and when he asked: “Why are you doing that?” I replied to him: “For no reason,” and went on tapping the table.
Can you imagine – he had a fit: he was so offended that he wouldn’t return my greeting when I met him in the street … I understand that …’

‘No, no, no; it’s impossible to understand it … There was something that rose up, came back to my memory – some kind of delirious fantasies that were unfamiliar and yet familiar …’

‘You remembered your childhood – didn’t you?’

‘It was as though a bandage had been removed from all my sensations … There was a stirring above my head – you know?
My hair stood on end: I understand what that means; only it wasn’t that – not my hair, because one stands with one’s head exposed.
To have one’s hair stand on end
– I understood that expression last night; and it wasn’t my hair; it was my whole body, standing, like hair –
on end
: it was bristling with little hairs; and my legs and my arms and my chest – they were all as if made of invisible fur that was being tickled with straw; or like this, too: as if one were getting into a cold bath of Narzan mineral water and there were little bubbles of carbon dioxide on one’s skin – tickling, pulsating, racing – faster and faster, so that if one froze, the throbbing, pulsating and tickling would turn into some kind of powerful feeling, as though one were being torn to pieces, as though the limbs of one’s body were being pulled apart in contrary directions: as though in the front one’s heart was being torn out, while in the rear, in the rear, from one’s back, like a long branch from a wattle fence, one’s backbone was being torn out; as if one were being pulled up by one’s hair and down by one’s feet into the bowels of the earth … One moved – and everything froze, as though …’

‘In a word, Nikolai Apollonovich, you were like Dionysus being torn to pieces … But, joking apart: now you are speaking quite a different language; I do not recognize you … You are not speaking in Kantian terms any longer … I haven’t heard this language from you before …’

‘But I just told you: it’s as though a bandage had fallen – from all my sensations … Not in Kantian terms – that’s true, what you said … Kant is out of it completely!
… There everything is different …’

‘There, Nikolai Apollonovich, logic has been introduced into the blood, or rather, the sensations of the brain in the blood or – dead stagnation; and so now you have received a real shock from life, and the blood has rushed to your brain; that is why in your words one can hear the pulsation of real blood …’

‘You know, when I stand above
it
, and – tell me, please: it seems to me – yes, but what was I talking about?’

‘It “seems” to you, you said,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich confirmed …

‘It seems to me – that I swell up all over, that I’ve been swelling up for a long time: perhaps for hundreds of years; and that I’m walking around, without noticing – like a swollen monster … It really is dreadful.’

‘It all comes from your sensations …’

‘But tell me, I’m … not …’

Aleksandr Ivanovich smiled sympathetically:

‘On the contrary, you’ve grown thinner: your cheeks are drawn and you have circles under your eyes.’

‘I stood there, over
it
… But it wasn’t “me” standing there – not me, not me, but … some, so to speak, giant with the most enormous idiot’s head and a sinciput that had not grown together; and at the same time – my body was pulsating; on absolutely every part of my skin I felt little needles: they were stabbing and pricking me; and I plainly felt the pricking – at a distance of at least a quarter of an arshin from my body, outside my body!
… Eh?
… Just think about it!
Then a second, and a third: a huge number of jabs in a completely physical sensation – outside, beside my body … While the jabs, the throbbings, the pulsations – you understand!
– outlined my own contours – beyond the limits of my body, outside my skin: my skin was inside my sensations.
Was that it?
Or had I been turned
inside out, with my skin facing inwards, or had my brain jumped out?’

‘You were simply beside yourself …’

‘It’s all very well for you to say “beside yourself”; everyone says “beside yourself”; that expression is just an allegory, supported not by physical sensations, but at best merely by emotion.
But I felt
beside myself
in a completely physical, physiological sense, and not at all in an emotional one … Of course, in addition, I was also
beside
myself in your sense: that is, I was shocked.
But the main thing wasn’t that, but the fact that the sensations of my organs flowed around me, suddenly expanded, dilated and exploded into space: I exploded, like a bo – ’

‘Sh-hh!’

‘Into pieces!
…’

‘Someone might hear …’

‘But who was it standing there, experiencing – me, or someone else?
It happened to me, inside me, outside me … You see what verbiage results?
…’

‘Remember, earlier, when I visited you, with the little bundle, I asked you why
I
was
I
.
You didn’t understand me at all at the time …’

‘But now I understand it all: but it’s dreadful, really dreadful …’

‘No, it isn’t dreadful – it’s the genuine experience of Dionysus: not verbal, not literary, of course … The experience of the dying Dionysus …’

‘Simply the devil knows what!’

‘Now calm down, Nikolai Apollonovich, you’re dreadfully tired; and no wonder: to go through so much in the course of a single night … It would knock anyone off his feet.’ Aleksandr Ivanovich put his hand on Nikolai Apollonovich’s shoulder; the shoulder was at the level of his chest; and that shoulder was trembling; Aleksandr Ivanovich now experienced quite plainly and simply a need to get away from Nikolai Apollonovich, who was trembling nervously before him, in order to give himself a clear and calm account of what had happened.

‘But I am calm, completely calm; you know, I wouldn’t mind having a drink now; a bit of courage and uplift … I mean, can you tell me for certain that the commission is an illusion?’

Aleksandr Ivanovich could do nothing of the kind; none the less, with unusual fervency, Aleksandr Ivanovich merely snapped out:

‘I guarantee it …’

A Revelation

At last he managed to get away.

Now he must start striding; keep striding, and again striding – until his brain was completely stupefied, in order to collapse at a table in the eating-house – to reflect, and drink vodka.

Aleksandr Ivanovich remembered: the letter, the letter!
He was supposed to have delivered the letter himself – on the instructions of
a certain person
: delivered it to Ableukhov.

How he had forgotten it all!
He had taken the letter with him when he had set off then for Ableukhov’s – with the little bundle; he had forgotten to deliver the letter; had delivered it soon after to Varvara Yevgrafovna, who had told him that she was going to meet Ableukhov.
That letter might have proved to be the fateful one.

But no, and no!

It was not that one;
that
one, the
fateful
one had, according to Ableukhov, been delivered at the ball; and – by some kind of masker … The masker, the ball and – Varvara Yevgrafovna Solovyova.

No, and no!

Aleksandr Ivanovich calmed down: so
that
letter was certainly not
this
one, the one that had been delivered by Solovyova and sent to him by Lippanchenko; so he, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, was not implicated in this matter; but – and this was the main thing: the dreadful commission could not have proceeded from the
person
; this was the principal trump card in his hands: a trump card that vanquished his delirium and all his delirious suspicions (those suspicions had rushed through his head when he had promised, vouched for the Party – for Lippanchenko, because Lippanchenko was his organ of communication with the Party); had he not had this trump card in his hands, if, that was to say, the letter had come from the Party, from Lippanchenko, then the
person
, Lippanchenko,
would have been a suspicious person, and he, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, would have been associated with a suspicious personality.

And the delirious dreams would have arisen.

Hardly had he put all this together and was already preparing to cut across the flood of carriages in order to jump into a horse-car that was speeding towards him (there were, after all, no trams yet), than a voice hailed him:

‘Aleksandr Ivanovich, wait … Wait a moment …’

He turned round and saw that Nikolai Apollonovich, whom he had left an instant before, was running after him, panting, through the crowd – trembling and sweaty all over; with a feverish light in his eyes he was waving his stick over the heads of the astonished passers-by …

‘Wait a moment …’

Oh, good Lord!

‘Wait: I can’t just let you go like that, Aleksandr Ivanovich … Look, there’s something else I want to tell you …’ He took him by the arm and guided him to the nearest shop window.

‘Something else has been revealed to me … Was it a revelation I had perhaps – there, as I stood over the little tin?
…’

‘Listen, Nikolai Apollonovich, I have to go now; and I have to go in connection with a matter that involves you …’

‘Yes, yes, yes: I won’t take a moment … Just a second, a third …’

‘Well – all right then: I am listening …’

Now Nikolai Apollonovich displayed in his appearance something that was quite simply inspiration; in his joy he had evidently forgotten that not everything had been untangled for him yet, and that – above all:
the tin was still ticking, tirelessly traversing the twenty-four hours.

‘It was as though I had a revelation that I was growing; I was growing, if you know what I mean, into immeasurability, traversing space; I assure you that this was real: and all the objects were growing with me; the room, and the view over the Neva, and the spire of Peter and Paul; they were all swelling up, growing; and then the growing stopped (there was simply no more room left for growth anywhere, into anything); but in this fact, that it was ending, in the end, in the conclusion – there, it seemed to me, was
some kind of another beginning for me: a post-terminal one, perhaps … Somehow it seemed extremely preposterous, unpleasant and deranged, – deranged – that was the principal thing; deranged, perhaps, because I didn’t possess an organ that would have been able to make sense of this meaning, which was, so to speak, post-terminal; instead of my sense organs I had a “zero” sense; and I perceived something that was not zero, and not one, but less than one.
The whole absurdity was, perhaps, only that the sensation was a sensation of
zero minus something
– five, for example.’

‘Listen,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich interrupted, ‘I had rather you told me this: did you receive the letter through Varvara Yevgrafovna Solovyova?
You did, didn’t you?
…’

‘The letter …’

‘Not the
little note
… the letter that came through Varvara Yevgrafovna …’

‘Oh, you mean the one about that poem with the inscription “A Fiery Soul”?’

‘Well, I don’t know anything about that: in a word, the letter that came through Varvara Yevgrafovna …’