Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Andrei Bely

  There, in the moonlit little cupboard of a room, against the background of the window, the black contour was becoming ever thinner, more aerial, lighter; he looked like a sheet of dark, black paper, motionlessly stuck in the window frame; his resonant voice, outside him, resounded of itself in the midst of the square room: but most surprising of all was the fact that the very centre of the voice was moving in a most noticeable fashion – from the window – in Aleksandr Ivanovich’s direction; it was an independent, invisible centre, from which earsplitting sounds grew louder and louder:

  ‘And so, what was I saying? Yes … about the Papuan: the Papuan is, so to speak, an earthborn creature; the biology of the Papuan, though it is even somewhat primitive – is not alien to you, Aleksandr Ivanovich. In the end you will come to terms with the Papuan; well, even if it’s with the help of the spirituous liquor to which you have been rendering tribute all these recent days and which has created a most favourable atmosphere for our meeting; and moreover: in Papua, too, there exist some sort of institutes of legal foundation which have, perhaps, been approved by the Papuan parliament …’

  It passed through Aleksandr Ivanovich’s mind that the visitor’s behaviour was not proper at all, because the sound of the visitor’s voice was separated from the visitor in a most indecent manner; and indeed the visitor himself, who had frozen motionless on the windowsill – or did his eyes deceive him? – had plainly become a layer of soot on the moonlit pane, while his voice, becoming ever more resonant and acquiring the timbre of a gramophone screeching, resounded right above Aleksandr Ivanovich’s ear.

  ‘A shadow is not even a Papuan; the biology of shadows has not yet been studied; and so I tell you this – never come to terms with a shadow: you will not understand its demands; in Petersburg it will enter into you through the bacilli of all kinds of diseases that are swallowed in the very water that comes through the taps …’

  ‘And in vodka,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich interjected, and found himself thinking: ‘Why did I say that? Or have I bitten on fever? Have I been answering myself, echoing myself?’ He at once decided to dissociate himself once and for all from this balderdash; if he did not at once decompose this balderdash with his mind, then his mind would itself decompose in the balderdash.

  ‘No, sir: in vodka you will only introduce me into your mind … Not in vodka but in water do you swallow the bacilli, and I am not a bacillus; and – look here: since you do not have a proper passport, you are subject to all kinds of consequences: why, ever since the very first days of your sojourn in Petersburg your stomach has not been digesting properly; you have been threatened by cholerine … thereupon follow incidents from which neither petitions nor complaints to the Petersburg police will deliver you; your stomach does not digest properly? … But – what about Dr Inozemtsev’s drops?15 You are dispirited by depression, hallucinations, gloominess – all consequences of cholerine – then go to the Farce Theatre … Give yourself a bit of entertainment … Now tell me, Aleksandr Ivanovich, for friendship’s sake – you do suffer from hallucinations, don’t you?’

  ‘Why, he is simply mocking me,’ thought Aleksandr Ivanovich.

  ‘You suffer from hallucinations – it is not the constable but the psychiatrist who will tell me about them … In a word, your complaints, addressed to the visible world, will remain without result, like all complaints: after all, one must admit that we do not live in a visible world … The tragedy of our situation is that we are, like it or not, in an invisible world; in a word, complaints to the visible world will remain without result; and therefore it remains to you to make a respectful petition to the world of shadows.’

  ‘But is there such a thing?’ Aleksandr Ivanovich shrieked with defiance, preparing to leap out of the cupboard of a room and lock the visitor in, a visitor who was becoming ever more subtle: into this room came a thickset young man who possessed three dimensions; as he leaned against the window he became simply a contour (and, in addition: two-dimensional); moreover: he became a thin layer of black soot, like the one that falls out of a lamp if the lamp is badly trimmed; and now this black window soot, forming a human contour, grey all over, was smouldering to ash that gleamed in the moonlight; and already the ash had smouldered away: the contour was entirely covered in green blotches – openings into the spaces of the moon; in a word: there was no contour. The fact of it was plain – here the decomposition of matter itself was taking place; that matter had turned, all of it, without residue, into a substance of sound that jabbered deafeningly – only where? To Aleksandr Ivanovich it seemed that it was jabbering inside himself.

  ‘You, Mr Shishnarfne,’ said Aleksandr Ivanovich, addressing space (for after all, Shishnarfne was no longer there), ‘are perhaps an issuer of passports for the world beyond?’

  ‘Original,’ jabbered Aleksandr Ivanovich, replying to himself – or more correctly, something jabbered out of Aleksandr Ivanovich … ‘Petersburg possesses not three dimensions, but four; the fourth is subject to obscurity and is not marked on maps at all, except as a dot, for a dot is the place where the plane of this existence touches against the spherical surface of the immense astral cosmos; so any dot of Petersburg space is capable in the twinkling of an eye of throwing up an inhabitant of that dimension, from which a wall is no salvation; so you see, a moment ago I was there – in the dots that are on the windowsill, and now I have appeared …’

  ‘Where?’ Aleksandr Ivanovich wanted to exclaim, but could not, because his throat exclaimed:

  ‘I have appeared … out of a dot in your larynx …’

  Aleksandr Ivanovich looked around him in bewilderment as his throat, automatically, ceasing to obey him, hurled out deafeningly:

  ‘One needs a passport here … As a matter of fact, you are registered with us there: all you have to do now is to complete a final passport application; this passport is made out inside you; you will sign it inside yourself by means of some extravagant little action, for example … Oh yes, the little action will come to you: you will perform it yourself; that kind of signing is acknowledged among us as the best kind …’

  Had my panic-stricken hero been able to take a look at himself from the side at that moment, he would have been horrified: in the greenish, moonlit little cupboard of a room he would have seen himself clutching at his stomach and bawling with effort into the absolute emptiness in front of him; his head was thrown right back, and the enormous opening of his yelling mouth would have seemed to him a black abyss of non-existence; but Aleksandr Ivanovich could not jump out of himself: and he did not see himself; the voice that was thunderously booming out of him seemed to him like an alien automaton.

  ‘But when was I registered with you there?’ lurched through his brain (the balderdash had vanquished his mind).

  ‘Oh, then: after the act,’ his mouth deafeningly ripped itself apart; and, having ripped itself apart, closed.

  At this point before Aleksandr Ivanovich a veil was suddenly rent: he remembered everything clearly … That dream in Helsingfors, when they had whirled him through some kind of … yes … spaces that were connected with our spaces in their mathematical point of contact, so that while remaining fixed to space he had none the less truly been able to sail off into spaces – well, and so: when they had whirled him through different spaces …

  He had done it.

  By doing it he had united himself with them, and Lippanchenko was merely an image that alluded to this; he had done it; and with it strength had entered him; racing from organ to organ and seeking the soul in the body, this strength was gradually taking hold of him entirely (he had become a drunkard, sensual passion had begun to play naughty tricks, et cetera).

  And while it was happening to him, he had thought that they were looking for him; but they were inside him.

  And while he thought this, out of him came roarings that were like the roarings of motor-car horns:

  ‘Our spaces are not like yours; there everything flows backwards … And there Ivanov is some kind of Japanese, f
or that name, read backwards, is Japanese: Vonavi.’

  ‘So your name, too, has to be read back to front,’ lurched through his brain.

  And he grasped it: ‘Shishnarfne, Shishnar-fne …’ That was a familiar word, which he had uttered as he had performed the act; only that drowsily familiar word had to be turned back to front.

  And in a fit of involuntary terror, he made an effort to shriek out:

  ‘Enfranshish.’

  And from the depths of himself, starting near his heart, but really through the apparatus of his larynx came the reply:

  ‘You summoned me … Well – here I am …’

  Now Enfranshish16 itself had come for his soul.

  With a monkey-like hop Aleksandr Ivanovich leapt out of his own room: the key turned in the lock; he was stupid – he ought to have jumped out of his body, not his room; perhaps the room was his body, and he was merely a shadow? That must be the case, because from the other side of the locked door menacingly boomed the voice that had just boomed out of his own throat:

  ‘Yes, yes, yes … It is I … I annihilate irrevocably …’

  Suddenly the moon lit up the steps of the staircase: in the most total darkness emerged, barely perceptible, grey, whitish, pale and then also phosphorescently burning blotches.

  The Loft

  By a chance piece of negligence, the loft was not locked; and Dudkin rushed inside.

  He banged the door shut behind him.

  It is strange at night in a loft; its floor is strewn with earth; you walk smoothly over a soft surface; suddenly: a thick beam flies under your feet and lands you on all fours. Brightly the moon’s transverse rays stretch like white rafters: you walk through them.

  Suddenly … –

  A transverse beam confers a wallop on your nose with all its might; you risk being left for ever with a broken nose.

  The motionless white blotches – of long underwear, towels and sheets … A puff of wind flutters by – and the white blotches stretch: long underwear, towels and sheets.

  Everything is deserted.

  Aleksandr Ivanovich somehow ended up in the loft all at once; and, having ended up in the loft, was surprised that the loft was unlocked; the house laundress, completely immersed in thoughts of her intended, probably had left the door open after her. When Aleksandr Ivanovich slipped through this door he felt reassured, kept quiet: sighed with relief; behind him there were neither running footsteps, nor the gramophone screeching of the abracadabra; nor even a banging door.

  But through the broken panes of the window a song could be heard from far away:

  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 t
he 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.