Even he himself didn’t know what he wanted, only how much there was that he didn’t want!
His head felt as if it were in a fog. He didn’t sleep, yet seemed to be unconscious. Depressing thoughts dragged through his head in an unending chain. What could entice him, he wondered. Enchanting hopes, freedom from care–no! He knew everything that lay ahead. Honor, striving for awards? Why, what did he want with them? Was it worth struggling for some twenty or thirty years like a fish against the ice? And does that warm the heart? Does it comfort the soul when several people bow deeply before you, but perhaps think to themselves: “The devil take you!”
Love? No, indeed! He knew it by heart, and he’d already lost the capacity to love. Yet his all too ready memory, as if to mock him, reminded him of Nadenka, but not of the innocent, naive Nadenka–he never recalled her–but unfailingly Nadenka the traitor with the entire setting, the trees, path, flowers, and in the midst of it all, that little snake with the familiar smile, with her blush of languor and shame… and always for the other man, not for him! With a groan he grasped for his heart.
“Friendship,” he thought, “is another stupidity! I know it all, there’s nothing new, the past won’t be repeated, but may it live!”
He didn’t believe anybody or in anything, and did not lose himself in pleasure; he consumed it, as a man with no appetite consumes a delicacy, coldly, aware that boredom will immediately set in, knowing it’s impossible to fill spiritual emptiness with anything. If you trust feeling, it will deceive you; it will only agitate the soul and add several wounds to the earlier ones. When he saw people bound together by love and beside themselves with exaltation, he would smile ironically and think, “Wait, you’ll come to your senses. After the first joys jealousy will begin, scenes of reconciliation, tears. Living together, you’ll bore each other to death, but if you separate, you’ll both begin to weep. Come together again–and it’s still worse. People are crazy! They quarrel constantly, sulk at each other, are jealous, then make it up for a minute, only to quarrel more violently. That’s their love and devotion! And they insist on calling it all happiness even while they’re foaming at the mouth or they have tears of despair in their eyes. You can keep your friendship… it’s like a bone you’d throw to your dogs!”
He was afraid to desire, knowing that often, just as you are about to obtain what you want, fate will snatch happiness out of your hands and offer something quite different which you didn’t want at all–some kind of trash. And if fate finally does grant your wish, it’s only after first torturing, exhausting, debasing you in your own eyes and then throwing it at you, as one throws a tidbit to a dog. First you make him crawl up to the tasty morsel, look at it, hold it on his nose, roll over in the dust, stand on his hind paws and then–catch!
The periodic tides of happiness and unhappiness in life also frightened him. He did not foresee any joys, but always without fail grief; it can’t be avoided–everyone is subject to the general law. To all is issued an equal portion of both happiness and unhappiness, it seemed to him. Happiness had ended for him, and what kind of happiness was it? Phantasmagoria, deception. Only grief was real, and it lay ahead. There would be illnesses and old age and various losses too, perhaps even poverty… As his aunt from the country would say, all these blows of fate lay waiting for him, and what comforts would there be? A lofty poetic destiny had deceived him. A heavy burden was being put upon him, and this was called duty! There were pitiful benefits–money, comfort, rank… You can have them! Oh, how sad to consider life, understand what it’s like and not understand why it is!
Such was his misery and he could not see any way out of the depths of these doubts. His experiences only exhausted him in vain and added no health to his life, did not cleanse the air, gave no light. He didn’t know what to do, turned from side to side on the sofa, began going through his friends in his mind–and grew still sadder. One was an excellent civil servant who enjoyed respect and was known as a good administrator. Another had surrounded himself with a family and preferred a quiet life to all the vain goods of this world, envying no one, desiring nothing. A third… yes, what? They all somehow had arranged their lives, settled down and were going their clear and predictable way. “Only I alone… yes, what sort am I?”
Here he began to probe within: could he be an administrator, some kind of squadron commander? Could he content himself with family life? And he realized that neither one, nor the other, nor the third would content him. Some little devil kept wriggling in him, whispering to him, that this was too petty for him, that he must fly higher… but where and how–he couldn’t decide. He’d been mistaken about being an author. “What am I to do, what should I begin?” he asked himself and didn’t know what to answer. So vexation gnawed at him. But, after all, to be an administrator or a squadron commander… Not really; the time had passed; you have to begin from the start.
Despair squeezed tears from his eyes–tears of vexation, envy, ill-will toward everyone, the most tormenting tears. He bitterly regretted that he had not listened to his mother and had fled the provinces.
“In her heart dear Mama sensed the distant grief,” he thought. “There these unquiet impulses would have had an undisturbed sleep. There the stormy agitation of this complicated life would not have existed. In due course all the human feelings and passions would have touched me, self-love and pride and ambition–all would have touched my heart in small measure within the narrow limits of our district and all would have been fulfilled. I would have been first in the province! Yes, everything is relative! The godly spark of heavenly fire which burns more or less in all of us would have flashed unnoticed in me and quickly have gone out in the idle life there, or it would have begun burning in my attachment to my wife and children. My existence would not have been poisoned. I would have lived out my destiny proudly. My path in life would have been quiet and seemed to me both simple and comprehensible. My life would have been within my strength; I would have endured the struggle with it… And love? It would have bloomed luxuriously and filled my whole life. Sophie would have loved me in tranquillity. I would not have lost my belief in anything, I’d have plucked only roses without encountering thorns or even experiencing jealousy–for lack of competition! Why should I have been drawn so strongly and blindly into the distance, the fog, the unequal and unknown struggle with fate? And how wonderfully I understood both life and people then, as I might still have understood them even now, though now I understand nothing. I expected so much then of life and not having considered it carefully, would still be expecting something from it even now. I discovered so many treasures in my soul; and where did they go? I peddled them about the world, offered the sincerity of my heart, my first ardent passion–and what did I receive? Bitter disillusionment. I learned that all is deception, nothing is permanent, that it is impossible to rely either on yourself or others–and I began to fear both others and myself… In the midst of this analysis I could not recognize the little things of life and be content with them, like Uncle and many others… And now here I am!”
Now he wanted but one thing, to forget the past, to enjoy peace and the sleep of the soul. He grew ever colder toward life and regarded everything with sleepy eyes. In crowds of people, in the noise of gatherings he found boredom; he fled them, but boredom followed.
He was surprised at how people can enjoy themselves, be constantly busy with something or other, get excited every day over new interests. He found it strange others were not walking about sleepily, that they didn’t weep or talk about pangs and mutual sufferings, when not chatting about the weather, and if they did talk, it was about pangs in the legs or another place, about rheumatism or hemorrhoids. Only the body caused them concern, and they didn’t even mention the soul! “Empty, worthless people, animals!” he thought. And sometimes he would then fall into deep meditation. “There are so many of them, these worthless people,” he told himself, worried, “while I am only one. Can it be… they are all… empty… wrong… while I?…”
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Here it seemed to him that everyone except him alone was to blame, and he grew even more unhappy because of this.
He stopped seeing old friends, and the idea of drawing close to anyone new chilled him. After talking to his uncle he sank deeper into sleepy apathy. His soul was plunged in complete drowsiness. He surrendered to a kind of indifference, lived in idleness, stubbornly turned away from everything that recalled the educated world even a little.
“However you get through life, just get through it!” he would say. “Everyone is free to understand life as he will, and, then, after you die…”
He sought out conversations with people who were mean and bitterminded, with cruel hearts, and he spoke openly only when he heard fate being viciously ridiculed. Or he spent time with people beneath him in intellect and upbringing, most of all with the old man Kostyakov, to whom Zayezzhalov wanted to introduce Pyotr Ivanych.
Kostyakov lived in a part of St. Petersburg called Peski, and he would walk along the street there wearing a glossy leather cap and a robe belted with a bandana. He shared his room with a cook, with whom he played the card game “Trumps” in the evening. If there was a fire, he was the first at the scene and the last to go. When he passed a church in which there was a funeral service, he pushed his way through the crowd to look the dead man in the face and then accompanied him to the cemetery. In general, he was a passionate worshipper of ceremony of any kind, whether merry or sad. He also liked being present at unusual events of whatever kind: fights, fatal accidents, the cave-in of a ceiling, and so on, and read the newspaper accounts of such cases with special pleasure. In addition, he also read medical books, “so as to know what’s inside a person,” he said. In the winter Alexander played checkers with him and in the summer went fishing outside the city. The old man chatted about this and that. On their way to the fields, he talked about the grain and the sowing; when they walked along the bank, about the fish and the river boats, and going along the street he made remarks about the houses, their construction, materials and the income from them… He never talked about abstractions. He looked at life as something good if you had money, and if not, the other way round. Such a person was not dangerous to Alexander and could not awaken any spiritual agitation in him.
Alexander was trying to stifle the spiritual in himself as diligently as hermits try to mortify the flesh. He was silent at the office; if he met acquaintances, he got rid of them with two or three words, saying he had no time, and ran off. Yet he spent time with Kostyakov every day. Sometimes the old man would sit all day at Alexander’s, other times invite him to his house to eat cabbage. He had already taught Alexander to make homemade liquor, solyanka soup and meat balls. Then they would set off together to a nearby village–to open country. Kostyakov had a lot of acquaintances everywhere. He talked with the peasants about how they were getting on, he joked with the women–he was, indeed, the jester Zayezzhalov had praised. Alexander allowed him full freedom of speech but remained silent himself for the most part.
He already felt that ideas of the world he’d left behind pursued him ever less often, churned less rapidly in his head, and as they found neither reinforcement nor opposition in the environment, they went unexpressed and died without multiplying. Within him his soul was as untended and empty as a neglected garden. Not much more was needed to make it a total wilderness. A few months more–and farewell! But here’s what happened.
One day Alexander was fishing with Kostyakov. Dressed in a belted tunic and his leather cap, Kostyakov had set up on the bank a few rods of different sizes–rods for deep water, rods with cork floats, and rods with small and larger bells. He smoked a short pipe as he watched this battery of rods, Aduyev’s among them, without daring to wink an eye, while Alexander stood leaning against a tree and looked in the other direction. For a long time they stood this way in silence.
“You have a bite, look, Alexander Fyodorych!” Kostyakov suddenly said in a whisper.
Aduyev looked at the water and again turned away. “No, it seemed so to you because of the ripple,” he said.
“Look, look!” cried Kostyakov, “a bite, really, a bite! Oh, oh! Pull, pull! Hold on!”
Indeed, the float dove down in the water, the line quickly played out after it, and after the line even the rod began crawling out from the bush. Alexander reached for the rod, then for the line.
“Not so hard, lightly, not that way… what are you doing?” cried Kostyakov, skillfully intercepting the line. “Goodness! What a weight! Don’t jerk–lead, lead, otherwise it’ll break. Like this, to the right, to the left, this way, toward the shore. Move away! Keep on; now pull, pull, only not suddenly, that’s right, that’s right…”
On the surface of the water an enormous pike showed up. It quickly started to circle, flashing its silver scales and whipping with its tail to the right, then to the left, splashing them both with spray. Kostyakov turned pale.
“What a pike!” he cried, almost frightened, and stretched out over the water, fell, stumbled against his hooks and grabbed with both hands for the pike as it twisted above the water. “Now to the shore, to the shore, that way, keep on! It’ll be ours there, however it twists. See how it slides, like a devil! Oh, what a fish!”
“Oh, my!” someone repeated from behind.
Alexander turned around. Two steps away from them stood an old man and, arm in arm with him, a pretty young girl, tall, bareheaded, and with an umbrella in her hands. Her brows drew slightly together in a frown. She bent forward a little and much involved, followed Kostyakov’s movement with her eyes. She didn’t even notice Alexander.
This unexpected apparition confused Aduyev. He let go the rod. The pike bounced back into the water, gracefully swished its tail and whirled into the deep water, pulling the line after it. All this happened in a single moment.
“Alexander Fyodorych! How could you?” cried Kostyakov like a madman and began getting hold of the line. He seized it and dragged out only the end, but without the hook and without the pike.
Quite pale, he turned to Alexander, showing him the end of the line and looked at him with rage for a whole minute in silence, then spit.
“If ever I go fishing with you, may I be accursed!” he declared and went back to his rods.
At this point the girl noticed Alexander was looking at her, blushed and retreated. The old man, apparently her father, bowed to Aduyev. Aduyev gloomily returned the bow, threw away his fishing rod and sat down on a bench under a tree about ten steps away.
“Even here there’s no peace!” he thought. “Here’s some Oedipus with his Antigone. Again a woman! There’s no place to escape! Heavens, there are masses of them everywhere!”
“Alas! you fishermen!” said Kostyakov meanwhile, arranging his rods and angrily glancing at Alexander from time to time. “What’s the use of your catching fish–you’d better catch mice, sitting at home there on your sofa! What’s the point of fishing if the fish slips out of your hands? It was almost in your mouth, all but fried! It’s a wonder it didn’t walk off your plate!”
“Are you getting bites?” asked the old man.
“Yes, but you see,” answered Kostyakov. “Though I’ve got six rods over here, just one cussed little perch came nibbling so as to mock me. But over there at the same time, what should turn up–you should have seen the big rod, that one with the cork: a pike, maybe ten pounds, and we let it get away! Well, they say the beast runs at the hunter! However that may be, if he’d broken loose from me, I would have gotten him in the water. But here the pike climbs in our teeth by himself, and we’re asleep… and we still call ourselves fishermen! What kind of a fisherman is that! Are there fishermen like that? No, a real fisherman wouldn’t blink an eye, even if a cannon were fired beside him. And this is a fisherman? What do you go fishing for?”
The girl had managed to see meanwhile that Alexander was a quite different sort from Kostyakov. Alexander was not dressed like Kostyakov; his height, years, manners, indeed everything about him was different. S
he quickly noticed signs of upbringing in him and read ideas on his face; even the shadow of sorrow did not escape her.
“But, look, he ran away!” she thought. “Strange, it seems I’m not the kind to run away from…”
The girl straightened up proudly, let her lashes fall and then raised them again and gave Alexander an unfavorable glance.
She indeed felt vexed. She drew her father’s attention away and majestically walked past Aduyev.
The old man again exchanged bows with Alexander as they parted, but his daughter did not deign to give him even a glance.
“Let him realize that people aren’t paying him any attention at all!” she thought, glancing on the side to see if Aduyev was looking.
Though Alexander indeed didn’t look at her, still he involuntarily assumed a more picturesque pose.
“Look at him! He doesn’t even cast a glance!” thought the girl. “What arrogance!”
The next day Kostyakov lured Alexander to go fishing again, and thus was cursed by his own oath.
For two days nothing disturbed their solitude. At first Alexander looked around, as if afraid, but not seeing anyone, regained his composure. The second day he pulled out an enormous perch. Kostyakov halfway made peace with him.
“Still, that’s not a pike!” he said with a sigh. “We had happiness in our hands but didn’t know how to make use of it; that doesn’t happen twice! And again nothing for me! Nothing on six rods.”
“Just ring your little bells!” said some peasant who stopped in passing to have a look at the success of their fishing. “Maybe the fish will come to hear the good news…”
Kostyakov gave him an angry look. “Shut up, you ignorant ninny!” he said, “peasant!”
An Ordinary Story Page 29
