Petersburg (64 page)

Mamma buy me for a dress

Some silk that’s blue …

The dully banging door resolved itself into the beating of his heart; and the shadow that was falling downstairs merely into a shadow over the moon; the rest was a hallucination; he must undergo a cure – that was all.

Aleksandr Ivanovich listened closely.
And – what could he hear?
What he could hear you already know: the quite distinct sound of a cracking rafter; and – a dense silence: that is – a mesh woven of nothing but rustlings; among them, firstly – in the corner there were shushes and hushes; secondly – a tension of the atmosphere caused by the inaudible impact of footsteps; and – the sound of some kind of idiot swallowing his saliva.

In a word – just ordinary, domestic sounds: and there was no reason to be afraid of them.

At this point Aleksandr Ivanovich regained control of himself; and he could have returned: in his room – he knew this now for certain – there was no one, nothing (the attack of illness had passed).
But all the same he did not feel like leaving the loft: carefully, amidst the long underwear, towels and sheets, he walked over to the window with its autumn cobwebs and stuck his head through the splinters of glass: what he saw now breathed towards him with reassurance and peace-instilling sadness.

Beneath his feet he saw clearly – and with distinct and dazzling simplicity: the well-marked square of the courtyard, that from here looked toylike, the silvery cords of ash wood, from which he had so recently looked up in unfeigned alarm at the windows of his room; but also, and this was the main thing: in the yardkeeper’s lodge they were still making merry; a hoarse little song was coming from the
lodge; the door block rattled; and two small figures appeared; one of them burst out bawling:

I see, O Lord, my own unrighteousness:

Falsehood has deceived me to my face,

Falsehood has blinded my eyes …

I was sorry to lose my white body,

I was sorry to lose my coloured raiment,

Sweet victuals,

Intoxicating drink –

I, Pontius, feared the archpriests,

I, Pilate, went in dread of the Pharisees.

Washed my hands – washed away my conscience!

An innocent did I consign to crucifixion …

This was sung by: Voronkov the police station clerk and Bessmertny the basement shoemaker.
Aleksandr Ivanovich thought: ‘Should I go down and join them?’ And would have gone down … had it not been for – the staircase.

The staircase frightened him.

The sky had cleared.
The turquoise island roof that was somewhere there, below him, to the side – the turquoise island roof whimsically traced its silvery scales, and then those silvery scales merged entirely with the living tremor of the Neva’s waters.

And the Neva seethed.

And cried there despairingly in the whistle of a small, late-passing steamboat, of which all that could be seen was the receding eye of a red lantern.
Further away, on the other side of the Neva, stretched the Embankment; above the boxes of yellow, grey and brown houses, above the columns of grey and brown-red palaces, rococo and baroque, rose the dark walls of an enormous temple made by hand of man, its golden dome stuck sharply up into the world of the moon – from stone walls black-grey, cylindrical and slightly raised in form, surrounded by a colonnade: St Isaac’s …

And, scarcely visible, the golden Admiralty soared into the sky like an arrow.

The voice sang:

Have mercy, Lord!

Forgive, Christ!
…

To the tsar my rank I will return – I pine for my soul,

Will sell my house – give to the poor,

dismiss my wife – seek out God …

Have mercy, Lord!

Forgive, Christ!

Probably at one o’clock in the morning – there, on the square, the little old grenadier was snoring, supporting himself on his bayonet; his shaggy cap rested against the bayonet, and the grenadier’s shadow lay motionless on the patterned interweavings of the railings.

The entire square was deserted.

At this midnight hour the metal hooves fell and clanged on the rock; the horse snorted through its nostrils into the white-hot fog; the Horseman’s bronze outline now detached itself from the horse’s croup, and a jingling spur impatiently grazed the horse’s flank, to make the horse fly down from the rock.

And the horse flew down from the rock.

Over the stones raced a
heavily resonant
^*
clatter – across the bridge: to the Islands.
The Bronze Horseman flew on into the fog; in his eyes was a greenish depth; the muscles of his metal hands straightened, tautened; and the bronze sinciput darted; the horse’s hooves fell on the cobblestones, on the swift and blinding arcs; the horse’s mouth split apart in a deafening neighing, reminiscent of the whistlings of a locomotive; the thick steam from its nostrils splashed the street with luminous boiling water; horses that were coming the other way snorted and shied in horror; and passers-by, in horror, closed their eyes.

Line after Line flew past: as did a piece of the left bank – with quays, steamer funnels and a dirty heap of sacks stuffed with hemp; as did vacant lots, barges, fences, tarpaulins and numerous small houses.
While from the seashore, from the outskirts of the city, a side gleamed out of the fog: the side of a turbulent little drinking-house.

The very oldest Dutchman, clad in black leather, leaned forward, away from the mildewed threshold – into a cold pandemonium (the
moon had fled behind a cloud); and a lantern quivered in his fingers under his bluish face in its black leather hood: evidently, from there the Dutchman’s sensitive ear had heard the horse’s heavy clattering and locomotive-like neighing, because the Dutchman had abandoned the other seamen like himself, whose glasses chimed from morning to morning.

He evidently knew that here the furious, drunken feast would drag on all the way until the dim morning; he evidently knew that when the clock struck long after midnight, the sturdy Guest would come flying to the hollow chiming of the glasses: to knock back the fiery Allasch; to shake more than one hawser-rubbed hand, which from the captain’s bridge would turn the heavy steamship wheel outside the very forts of Kronstadt; and in pursuit of the foam-seething stern that had not replied to the signal, a cannon’s iron muzzle would cast its roar.

But the vessel would not be overtaken: it would enter the cloud that had settled over the sea; would fuse with it, would move with it – into the clear blue of the hours before dawn.

All this the very oldest Dutchman knew, clad in black leather and craning forward into the fog from the mildewy steps: now he could discern the outline of the flying Horseman … The clattering could already be heard over there; and – the nostrils snorted, penetrating the fog, as they flamed, like a luminous white-hot pillar.

Aleksandr Ivanovich walked away from the window, reassured, pacified, shivering (a cold breeze was blowing at him through the glass splinters); while towards him the white blotches began to sway – long underwear, towels and sheets; the breeze fluttered by …

And the blotches moved.

Timidly he opened the loft door; he had decided to go back to his little cupboard-like room.

How Could It Have Happened …

Illumined, covered in phosphorescent blotches, he was now sitting on the dirty bed, resting from his attacks of terror; the visitor had just been – here; and here – a dirty woodlouse was crawling: the
visitor had gone.
These attacks of terror!
During the night there had been three, four, five of them; the hallucination had been followed by a clearing of his consciousness.

He sat inside the clearing like the moon that was shining far away – in front of fleeing clouds; and like the moon, his consciousness shone, illumining his soul as the moon illumines the labyrinths of the prospects.
Far in front and behind, his consciousness lit up the cosmic ages and the cosmic expanses.

In those expanses there was no soul: neither person nor shadow.

And – the expanses were deserted.

Amidst his four mutually perpendicular walls he seemed to himself a prisoner captured in expanses, if, that was, a captured prisoner did not sense freedom more than anyone else, and if this narrow little interval between walls was not equal in volume to the whole of outer space.

Outer space was deserted!
His deserted room!
… Outer space was the final attainment to which wealth could aspire … Monotonous outer space!
… His room had always been characterized by monotony … A beggar’s abode would seem excessively luxurious compared to the wretched furnishings of outer space.
If he really had moved away from the world, the world’s luxurious splendour would seem wretched compared to these dark yellow walls …

Aleksandr Ivanovich, resting from the attacks of delirium, began to dream of how he had risen high above the world’s sensual mirage.

A mocking voice retorted:

‘The vodka?’

‘The smoking?’

‘The lustful feelings?’

So was he really raised above the world’s mirage?

His head sagged; that was where the illnesses and the terrors and the persecution came from – from insomnia, cigarettes, and the abuse of spirituous liquors.

He felt a most violent stab of pain in a diseased molar tooth; he clutched at his cheek with his hand.

His attack of acute insanity was illuminated for him in a new
way; now he knew the truth of acute insanity; insanity itself, in essence, stood before him like a report by his diseased organs of sense – to his self-conscious ‘I’; while Shishnarfne, the Persian subject, symbolized an anagram; it was not, in essence, he who was trying to overtake, pursue and track down his ‘I’ – no, the overtaking and attacking was being done by the organs of his body, which had grown heavier; and, as it fled away from them, his ‘I’ was becoming a ‘not-I’, because through the organs of sense – not from the organs of sense – his ‘I’ was returning to itself; the alcohol, the smoking, the insomnia were gnawing at his body’s feeble constitution; the constitution of our bodies is closely connected to space; and when he had begun to disintegrate, all the spaces had cracked; now bacilli had begun to crawl into the cracks in his sensations, while in the spaces that enclosed his body spectres had begun to hover … So: who was Shishnarfne?
With his reverse – the abracadabra-like dream, Enfranshish; but that dream was undoubtedly caused by the vodka.
The intoxication, Enfranshish, Shishnarfne were only stages of alcohol.

‘I’d do better not to smoke, not to drink: then my organs of sense will serve me again!’

He – gave a shudder.

Today he had been guilty of betrayal.
How had he failed to realize that?
For he had undoubtedly been guilty of betrayal: out of fear, he had let Nikolai Apollonovich fall into Lippanchenko’s hands: he distinctly remembered the outrageous buying and selling.
He, without believing, had believed, and in this there was treachery.
Lippanchenko was even more of a traitor; that Lippanchenko was betraying them, Aleksandr Ivanovich knew; but had hidden his knowledge from himself (Lippanchenko had an inexplicable power over his soul); in this was the root of the illness: in this terrible knowledge that Lippanchenko was a traitor; the alcohol, the smoking, the depravity were only consequences; the hallucinations must only be the final links in the chain that Lippanchenko had deliberately begun to forge for him.
Why?
Because Lippanchenko knew that he
knew
; and precisely by virtue of this knowledge Lippanchenko would not let go.

Lippanchenko had enslaved his will; the enslavement of his will had come about because the dreadful suspicion would have given everything away; because he kept wanting to dispel the dreadful
suspicion; he drove the dreadful suspicion away by constantly keeping company with Lippanchenko; and, suspecting his suspicion, Lippanchenko would not let him move one step out of his sight; thus each had become bound to the other; he poured mysticism into Lippanchenko; and the latter poured alcohol into him.

Aleksandr Ivanovich now clearly remembered the scene in Lippanchenko’s study; the brazen cynic, the scoundrel had outmanoeuvred him on this occasion, too; he remembered Lippanchenko’s fatty and loathsome neck with its fatty, loathsome fold; as though the fold had been insolently laughing in there, until Lippanchenko turned round, caught his gaze on his neck; catching that gaze, Lippanchenko had understood everything.

That was why he had started trying to frighten him: had stunned him with an attack and mixed up all the cards; insulted him to death with suspicion and then offered him a sole way out: to pretend that he believed in Ableukhov’s treachery.

And he, the Elusive One, had believed in it.

Aleksandr Ivanovich leapt to his feet; and in helpless fury he shook his fists; the deed was done; had been achieved!

That was what the nightmare had been about.

Aleksandr Ivanovich had now quite clearly translated the inexpressible nightmare into the language of his feelings; the staircase, the little room, the loft were Aleksandr Ivanovich’s abominably neglected body; the rushing inhabitant of those mournful spaces, whom
they
were attacking, who was running away from
them,
was his self-conscious ‘I’, which was ponderously dragging away from itself the organs that had fallen off; while Enfranshish was a foreign substance that had entered the abode of his spirit, his body – with vodka; developing like a bacillus, Enfranshish raced from organ to organ; it was it that was causing all the sensations of persecution, so that later, striking at the brain, it could cause a severe irritation within it.

He remembered his first meeting with Lippanchenko; the impression had not been a pleasant one; Nikolai Stepanovich had, to tell the truth, displayed curiosity concerning the human weaknesses of
the people who entered into association with him; an
agent provocateur
of superior type could easily possess that clumsy outward appearance, that pair of senselessly blinking eyes.