Petersburg (8 page)

‘What?’

‘Throw …’

There was a whispering from the rear.

The stranger with the small black moustache, turning round, saw: a bowler hat, a walking stick, a coat; ears, a moustache and a nose …

‘Who at?’

‘Who, who,’ came an echoed whisper from afar; and then the dark suit spoke.

‘Abl …’

And, having spoken, the suit moved on.

‘Ableukhov?’

‘At Ableukhov?’

But the suit finished what it was saying somewhere over there …

‘Abl … oody wish you’d try to splash me with a … cid … just you try …’

And the suit hiccuped.

But the stranger stood still, shaken by all he had heard:

‘They’re going to?
…’

‘Throw?
…’

‘At Abl …’

‘Oh no: they’re not going to …’

While all round the whisper began:

‘Soon …’

And then again from the rear:

‘It’s time …’

And having disappeared round the crossroads, there came from another crossroads:

‘It’s time …
pravo
, indeed it is …’

The stranger heard not
pravo
(indeed) but
provo
- and himself completed the word:

‘Provo-cation?!’

Provocation began to go on a spree along the Nevsky.
Provocation altered the sense of all the words that had been heard: with provocation did it endow the innocent ‘indeed’; while it turned ‘I bloody wish’ into the devil knew what:

‘At Abl …’

And the stranger thought:

‘At Ableukhov.’

He had simply of his own accord attached the preposition ‘at’: by the appendage of
the letter a and the letter t
an innocent verbal fragment had been changed into a fragment of dreadful content; and what was most important: it was the stranger who had attached the preposition.

The provocation, consequently, lay in him; and he was running away from it: running away – from himself.
He was his own shadow.

O Russian people, Russian people!

Do not admit the crowds of flickering shadows from the island: stealthily those shadows penetrate into your corporeal abodes; they penetrate from there into the nooks and crannies of your souls: you become the shadows of the wreathed, flying mists: those mists have been flying from time immemorial out of the end of the earth: out of the leaden spaces of the wave-seething Baltic; into the fog from time immemorial the crushing mouths of the cannons have stared.

At twelve o’clock, in accordance with tradition, a hollow cannon
shot solemnly filled Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire: all the mists were broken and all the shadows were scattered.

Only my shadow – the elusive young man – was not shaken and was not diffused by the shot, completing his run to the Neva without hindrance.
Suddenly my stranger’s sensitive ear heard behind his back an ecstatic whisper:

‘It’s the Elusive One!’

‘Look – it’s the Elusive One!’

‘How brave he is!
…’

And when, unmasked, he turned his island face, he saw steadily fixed on him the little eyes of two poorly dressed coursistes …

Oh, You Be Quiet!
…

‘
Býby
…
byby
…’

Thus did the man at the small table thunder: a man of enormous dimensions; he was stuffing a piece of yellow salmon into his mouth and, as he choked, shouting out incomprehensible words.
He seemed to be shouting:

‘
Vy – by
… (You should …)’

But what was heard was:

‘
Bý
–
by
…’

And a company of emaciated men in lounge-suits was beginning to squeal:

‘A-
ah
-ha-ha,
ah
-ha-ha!
…’

A Petersburg street in autumn permeates the whole organism: chills the marrow and tickles the shuddering backbone; but as soon as you come from it into some warm premises, the Petersburg street runs in your veins like a fever.
The quality of this street was experienced now by the stranger as he entered a rather dirty hallway, stuffed tight: with black, blue, grey and yellow coats, devil-may-care caps, lop-eared ones, dock-tailed ones and every possible kind of galosh.
One felt a warm dampness; in the air hung a white vapour: the vapour of pancake smell.

Having received the numbered metal tag for his overcoat, a tag
that burned the palm of his hand, the
raznochinets
with the pair of moustaches at last entered the hall …

‘A-a-a …’

At first the voices deafened him.

‘Cra-aa-yfish … aaa …
ah
-ha-ha …’

‘You see, you see, you see …’

‘You’re not saying …’

‘Em-em-em …’

‘And vodka …’

‘But for goodness’ sake … But come now … But there must be something wrong …’

All this threw itself in his face, while behind his back, from the Nevsky, behind him in pursuit ran:

‘It’s time … indeed …’

‘What do you mean indeed?’

‘Cation – acacia – cassation …’

‘Bl …’

‘And vodka …’

The restaurant’s premises consisted of a small, rather dirty room: the floor had been rubbed with polish; the walls had been decorated by the hand of a painter, depicting over there the remnants of a Swedish flotilla, from the elevation of which Peter was pointing into space; and from there flew spaces with the blue of white-maned rollers; but through the stranger’s head flew a carriage surrounded by a swarm …

‘It’s time …’

‘They’re going to throw …’

‘At Abl …’

‘Indee …’

Oh, idle thoughts!
…

On the wall there was a splendid display of curly spinach, depicting in zigzags the
plaisirs
of Peterhof’s nature
³²
with spaces,
clouds and a sugar Easter cake in the form of a small, stylish pavilion.

‘Do you want picon
³³
in it?’

The podgy landlord addressed our stranger from behind the vodka counter.

‘No, I don’t want picon in it.’

But wondered all the while: why there had been a frightened gaze – behind the carriage window: why the eyes had bulged, turned to stone and then closed; why a dead, shaven head had reeled and vanished; why from the hand – a black suede one – the cruel whip of a government circular had not dealt him a blow on the back; why the black suede hand had trembled there, impotently; why it had not been a hand but …
a wretched little handie
…

He looked: on the counter the snacks were turning dry, under glass bells some kind of limp little leaves were going rancid, along with a pile of overdone meatballs from the day before yesterday.

‘Another glass …’

There in the distance sat an idly sweating man with a most enormous coachman’s beard, in a blue jacket and blacked boots on top of grey trousers of military colour.
The idly sweating man was knocking back glasses; the idly sweating man was summoning the mop-headed waiter:

‘What are you yelling for?’

‘I want something …’

‘Melon, sir?’

‘To the devil: your melon is soap with sugar …’

‘A banana, sir?’

‘An indecent sort of fruit …’

‘Astrakhan grapes, sir?’

Thrice did my stranger swallow the astringent, colourlessly shining poison, the effect of which recalls the effect of the street: the oesophagus and the stomach lick its vengeful fires with a dry
tongue, while the consciousness, detaching itself from the body, like the handle on the lever of a machine, starts to revolve around the whole organism, making everything incredibly clear … for one instant only.

And the stranger’s consciousness cleared for an instant: and he remembered: jobless people were going hungry over there: jobless people were begging him there; and he had promised them; and taken from them – yes?
Where was his little bundle?
Here it was, here – beside him, here … Taken the bundle from them.

Indeed: that encounter on the Nevsky had knocked out his memory.

‘Some watermelon, sir?’

‘To the devil with your watermelon: it just sticks in your teeth, and there’s nothing in your mouth …’

‘Well, some vodka then …’

But the bearded man suddenly fired off:

‘I’ll tell you what I want: crayfish …’

The stranger with the small black moustache settled down at the small table to wait for that person who …

‘Won’t you have a glass?’

The idly sweating bearded man merrily winked.

‘Thank you, but …’

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Well, I’ve already been drinking …’

‘You ought to drink some more: in my company …’

My stranger put two and two together: suspiciously he gave the bearded man a look, grabbed hold of the soggy little bundle, grabbed hold of a torn sheet of paper (newspaper); and with it, as if casually, covered the little bundle.

‘Are you from Tula?’

The stranger tore himself away from his thought with displeasure and said with sufficient rudeness – said in a falsetto voice:

‘I’m certainly not from Tula …’

‘Where are you from, then?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I just do …’

‘Well: I’m from Moscow …’

And with a shrug of his shoulders he angrily turned away.

And he thought: no, he did not think – the thoughts thought themselves, expanding and revealing a picture: tarpaulins, hawsers, herring; and sacks stuffed full of something: the immensity of the sacks; among the sacks, with a bluish hand, a workman dressed in black leather was shouldering a sack, standing out clearly against the fog, against the flying watery surfaces; and the sack fell dully: from his back into a barge that was laden with girders; while the workman (a workman he knew) stood above the sacks and pulled out a pipe with his clothes dancing most absurdly in the wind like a wing.

‘You here on business?’

(Oh, Lord!)

‘No, just – here …’

And he said to himself:

‘A police spy …’

‘Is that so: well, I’m a coachman …’

‘My brother-in-law’s a coachman for Konstantin Konstantinovich …’
³⁴

‘Well, and what of it?’

‘What of it: nothing – no strangers here …’

Obviously a police spy: wish the
person
would come soon.

Meanwhile the bearded man fell into hapless reflection over a plate of uneaten crayfish, crossing his mouth, and giving a prolonged yawn.

‘Oh, Lord, Lord!
…’

Of what were his thoughts?
Of Vasily Island?
The sacks and the workman?
Yes – of course: life was going up in price, the workman had nothing to eat.

Why?
Because:
over the black bridge Petersburg comes lunging here
;
over the bridge and the arrows of the prospects – in order to crush the poor under heaps of stone coffins; he hated Petersburg; above the accursed regiments of buildings that rose up from the opposite bank out of a wave of clouds – someone small soared out of the chaos and floated there like a black point: there was a constant screeching and weeping from there:

‘The islands must be crushed!
…’

Only now did he realize what had happened on Nevsky Prospect, whose green ear had looked at him from a distance of four inches – behind the carriage wall; the small, trembling, dead little fellow had been that same bat which, as it soared – tormentingly, menacingly and coldly, threatened, screeched …

Suddenly –

But of ‘suddenly’ we shall speak – in what follows.

The Writing Desk Stood There

Apollon Apollonovich was taking aim at the current working day; in the twinkling of an eye there arose before him: reports from yesterday; he envisaged clearly the folded documents on his desk, their sequence, and on those documents the markings he had made, the form of the letters of those markings, the pencil with which carelessly in the margins had been entered: a blue ‘set in motion’, with a little tail on the final
n
; a red ‘inquiry’ with a flourish on the
y
.

In a brief moment, Apollon Apollonovich transferred the centre of his consciousness by willpower from the departmental staircase to the doors of his office; all his cerebral games retreated to the edge of his field of vision, as did those whitish patterns over there on the white background of the wallpaper: a little heap of parallel-placed dossiers was transferred to the centre of that field, as was that portrait that had just fallen into the centre.

And – the portrait?
That is: –

And he is not – and Rus he has abandoned …
³⁵

Who is ‘he’?
The senator?
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov?
But no: Vyacheslav Konstantinovich …
³⁶
But what about him, Apollon Apollonovich?

And it now seems – my turn has come,

My Delvig dear doth summon me …
³⁷

Order – order: by turn –

And o’er the earth new thunderclouds have gathered

And the hurricane them …
³⁸

An idle cerebral game!

The little heap of papers leapt up to the surface: Apollon Apollonovich, having taken aim at the current working day, addressed the clerk:

‘German Germanovich, please be so good as to prepare a dossier for me – that one, what is it called?
…’

‘The dossier on deacon Zrakov with the enclosure of material evidence in the form of a tuft of beard?’

‘No, not that one …’

‘The one on the landowner Puzov and the hotel room?
…’

‘No: the dossier about the potholes of Ukhtomsk …’

No sooner was he about to open the door to his office than he remembered (he had almost completely forgotten): yes, yes – the eyes: they widened, were astonished, grew enraged – the eyes of the
raznochinets
… And why, why had there been that zigzag of his hand?
… It had been most unpleasant.
And he thought he had seen the
raznochinets
– somewhere, at some time: perhaps nowhere, never …