The Beggar and Other Stories

by Gaito Gazdanov

  Maître Rueil sat down in an armchair, lit his pipe and made an effort to forget the alarming, piercing feeling that had so recently set in, and which might be likened to the foreboding of some misfortune, were this not the first time in all his life that such a feeling had befallen the maître. However, despite a certain abstraction, the maître, as was his wont, still managed to mark those little details that seemed most distinctive upon a superficial examination of the passengers: the Russian’s fat wallet (the businessman had moved it from one pocket to another while rummaging for some newspaper clipping), the Greek’s roving eyes, the complex web of red veins on the priest’s face and the darned elbows of the boxer’s jacket. “He’s short on cash,” thought the maître. “Then again, it’s possible that this is his travelling suit and that he’s just thrifty.” “Unlikely,” the maître answered himself, and here for the first time noticed that the ship was beginning to pitch. “Unlikely: he isn’t shrewd enough for that.”

  By now the lights of Marseilles had disappeared. The maître was sitting with his eyes half shut; his head was slightly buzzing, although he had had nothing to drink. He was no longer observing his fellow passengers, although a little earlier his attention had been attracted by the actress and the boxer: the boxer because he was a marvellous specimen of the athletic form, and the actress because a recollection of her forced the maître to stretch for a moment and to move and tense the muscles in his body. And suddenly it seemed to the maître as if he had sailed on board this ship and seen these people all before, as if long, long ago he had sailed the sea just like this and felt that same strange ennui, and that afterwards for a long while he had languished half-conscious in the dark, and when he had opened his eyes again, he had already forgotten everything. The ship pitched more and more violently. The actress instantly began to feel seasick; for some reason or other, with a frightened look, her companion dashed into their cabin. The actress’s body convulsed; the skin on her face turned ashen. The maître drew his eyes away from her and saw the boxer, whose enormous figure was bent double: he was groaning and shaking his head. The priest’s gaze, directed heavenward, seemed surprisingly nonsensical to the maître. The young Greek, who was not suffering from the pitching, slapped the priest on the back; the latter turned around to point out to the Greek the impropriety of his behaviour, but he only looked at him and sighed, and was unable to utter a single word.

  Maître Rueil retired to his cabin. It was almost eleven o’clock in the evening. The maître detected in his throat the unpalatable aftertaste of the macaroni that had been served at dinner; the thrifty cook must have prepared it using rancid butter. The maître lay on his berth and closed his eyes, thinking that any minute now he would fall asleep, as usual. But sleep escaped him. The pitching grew ever more exaggerated: his cabin slid away and then righted itself—now from right to left, now up and down. Diving and surfacing thus on his berth, Maître Rueil followed the erratic shadows on the floor, which followed in time with the motion of the shuddering and revolving lamp. The macaroni’s unpleasant taste intensified, as did the slight ringing in his ears and head. “I’m ill,” thought Maître Rueil for the first time. The door to his cabin seemed to be slowly opening. He looked more carefully; the door was still. But sitting in the maître’s chair was the boxer, who—it was unclear when or how—had entered his cabin. “What do you want?” asked the maître. But the boxer made no reply; and so the maître decided to leave him in peace. “Just how did he get in here?” wondered the maître, then instantly forgot about the question. The ship continued to pitch. Maître Rueil watched the boxer and with each roll of the cabin seemed to draw closer to him; yet the armchair invariably imitated the motion of the cabin and remained forever out of reach. The sea’s heavy tumult merged with the ringing in his ears, and when Maître Rueil tried speaking aloud he was unable to hear his own voice. The maître fell silent; he remained in this unfamiliar world of images and sounds; their alarming immateriality never ceased its torment.

  “The boxer,” thought the maître with an effort, and his berth slowly floated towards the armchair. “The boxer travels and makes his money with his fists. Then he’ll return to his Buenos Aires and learn something nasty: for instance, that his wife has a lover. It’s bound to be unpleasant.”

  The ship was being tossed from side to side. The maître, eyes fixed on the boxer, went on thinking:

  “Yes, but then those wonderful muscles will become soft, and no woman…” He couldn’t remember what “no woman” would do. “Yes, no woman will want to belong to him… Unless, of course, he pays for it. But then he won’t have any need of women. And all that will be left are death and memories.”

  Strange and unexpected, Maître Rueil recalled a young Italian. It was when the maître was living in Milan and thanks to his efforts the Italian police uncovered an anarchist plot. The youth the maître recalled was one of the party activists and Rueil’s closest comrade. During the interrogation, having found out that the maître was a Frenchman and a provocateur, he shouted in his face:

  “On te rappelera ça un jour!”†

  “Vous êtes un comédien,”‡ the maître had replied.

  “Now he’s in prison,” thought the maître. “Of course, the actor was me, not him. What will happen when he’s released and bumps into me?… I’m not afraid of him. But what will I say to him? I’m ill,” said the maître, coming to his senses.

  The agitation eased at once. The maître’s former clarity of thought returned to him for a time. “It’s all stuff and nonsense,” he said. “It’s just a rare variety of seasickness.” Yet still sleep eluded him, and for a long while he tossed and turned on his berth. An old nursery rhyme suddenly floated into his thoughts, and he immediately recalled even its simple melody:

  Quand j’étais petit

  Je n’étais pas grand,

  J’allais à l’école

  Comme les petits enfants.§

  The maître smiled with the satisfaction of having remembered the melody and began quietly to sing, and, as he did, he thought that this children’s tune was the best thing there had been in his life. “All the rest,” he told himself with a smile, “was business, money, women and restaurants—all that was sordid and superfluous. But this is good:

  Quand j’étais petit

  Je n’étais pas grand…”

  He glanced at the chair and saw that the boxer was gone. So much the better. Immediately there came a knock; the door opened and in came the Russian actress: she wore a light dressing gown and slippers. However, Maître Rueil, smiling, looked at her, saw her barely covered, simmering body—and just lay there. “Monsieur,” said the actress, and the maître smiled politely and wistfully, almost not hearing her. “Monsieur,” she repeated deliriously, “voulez-vous tromper mon amant avec moi?”¶

  The maître wanted to laugh. “Could she really comprehend,” he thought with a jolly expression on his face, “that all this is entirely superfluous and inconsequential?”

  “Non, madame,” he said, barely able to contain his laughter. “Non, madame, je n’en ai aucune envie.”||

  Thereupon the actress left at once, slamming the door—and Maître Rueil stopped laughing. “What did I do?” he said; and all the terrible senselessness of his action became clear to him. “Did I refuse her? Two days ago I would have paid serious money for that. I’m ill!” he shouted. “I’m ill! I’m ill!”

  He fidgeted around on the berth; an almighty headache was impeding his thought. He stretched out and, at last, fell asleep.

  The ship was on the approach to Constantinople. Over the bright waters of the Bosphorus flew innumerable white specks of seagulls, resembling from afar fleecy, moving clouds that scattered on contact with the sea and then soared up again, hovering in the limpid air. All the passengers had come out on deck, and the Greek, standing beside the boxer, explained to him:

  “There is Pera, over there Galata, and there Stamboul.”

  They sailed along the coast; white and yellow vi
llas rose up from the water, the peaks of minarets glittered: the sun was shining brightly, and it was warm. From the quayside there came a shrill, unbroken clamour; heavy little boats with rowing Turks, standing with their backs aft-facing and plunging the oars deep into the water, crossed the Bosphorus in all directions. At the bridge connecting Stamboul with the European part of the city there thronged a multitude of people, and the maître recalled that when he had arrived into Constantinople for the first time and seen this great assemblage of humanity in one place, he had thought there must have been some catastrophe. The ship meanwhile went slower and slower and, finally, came to a halt on the roads; rowing boats immediately swarmed around it. Ferrymen, interrupting one another, offered their boats, and the maître heard a high-pitched but clearly masculine voice, shouting in Russian:

  “No, I won’t go! He’ll drown us!”

  The boat, however, was already getting under way, and the Turk was rowing with contemptuous composure, paying no heed whatever to the cries of his passenger; in the bay there was a considerably strong swell. The Catholic priest spent a long time haggling, but at last he too reached an agreement and got into a boat, absorbed in his red missal.

  Maître Rueil hired a ferryman without haggling. The Turk, astonished by his generosity, rowed with great zeal and, after a short while, overtook both of the other boats that had set off earlier. The maître bowed to the actress, who in reply shrugged her shoulders scornfully. Then her companion stood up and beamed at the maître, but immediately fell, having lost his foothold.

  The two days that Maître Rueil spent in Constantinople were passed in that same unaccountable sense of anguish and alarm. At night he slept terribly, having the most unusual dreams: rivers covered by ice, exceedingly like crêpe paper, an abbot who was for some reason riding a bicycle, and an anarchist youth who sidled up to him and said:

  “Il y a quelque chose qui ne marche pas, mon cher maître?”**

  The maître awoke, smoked half a pipe and fell asleep again. Towards morning he awoke for the fourth or fifth time. “I must go for a walk outside, I need some fresh air,” he thought hazily. He dressed and left the hotel. It was very early; weedy little old men were carrying heavy crates with oil and vegetables; Turks selling bubliks were trudging around in the morning mist. Somewhere nearby an invisible donkey was braying. The maître walked through Pera, heading towards the Galata steps; a couple of drowsy sailors caught his eye. Suddenly he saw something very odd: the tall building he was walking past began slowly and silently to tilt; the figure of the Russian actress appeared on the second floor and floated down, gripping the window frame. The maître paused—and caught the boxer’s hoarse voice, which said in a tone of friendly caution:

  “You ought to be more careful, dear maître, such journeys might lead you to no good.”

  The maître turned around. That moment a sharp crack rang out; a woman’s soft arms enfolded the maître, and the building’s dark wall suddenly came to rest above his head.

  Later it gradually began to grow light, objects became more discernible, and Maître Rueil assured himself that he was in bed in his hotel room. Over coffee, while talking with his neighbour, who was reading Le Matin and bitterly upbraiding the French judicial system, which enabled the repeated acquittal of “green-eyed, gun-toting women”, as he put it, the maître forgot all about his dream. He learnt that the first ship bound for Sebastopol was to set sail only the following morning—that is why that evening, after dark, he resolved to set out on a stroll about the city, declining the services of the guide they would try to foist upon him.

  He sauntered through Pera, saw that nothing new had appeared there, and decided to head for the part of town he didn’t know. He selected at random one of the narrow little side streets running to the right of Pera, and walked down it at length, cut across the large Turkish cemetery with the crooked marble pillars of its monuments, and wound up in Kasımpaşa. He went farther and farther on, turning several times and never worrying about where the road would lead him—and when the desire to return finally did seize him, he meandered in vain for half an hour and found his way back to a place where he had already been and to which he had no intention of returning. For some time he wandered the empty narrow streets, between wooden houses with grilles over the windows, and realized that without the help of someone he would find it difficult getting out of this labyrinth. There was darkness all around: a pitiful kerosene lamp was all there was to illuminate the dry stones of the uneven pavement and the layer of grey dust coating the steps of the nearest house. The maître stood there for about ten minutes. There was no one to be seen. Then a tall, angular Turk in a turban walked past, but he made no reply when the maître asked whether he could show him the way to Pera. When the maître, bristling now, tried to approach the Turk, the latter suddenly broke into a run. Aware of the absurdity of a pursuit, the maître nevertheless ran after him and, of course, would have caught up with him; however, the Turk dived into some back alley, and the maître was left standing in the street. Shrugging his shoulders and cursing every Turk on the earth, the maître steeled himself to walk briskly and tried just not to err from the direction he had decided on. Half an hour later he was in Galata, in a little restaurant; the Greek proprietor was arguing heatedly with some exotic sailor attired in a hussar’s jacket; in the corner a blind old man was playing a pandura while his young guide sat quietly beside him, his sunburnt legs, bare below the knees and covered in golden down, placed under him. A dark-haired girl in a vermilion jacket and a grey chequered skirt took a seat next to the maître and said to him in English, almost incidentally: “I love you, darling.”

  The maître looked at her and said nothing.

  “I love you, my dear compatriot,” she said in Russian.

  The maître again said nothing. But the girl was not at all put off by this. She placed her hands to her heart, cracked her fingers and said, with perfect French pronunciation:

  “Je vous aime, mon chéri.”

  “J’aurai voulu vous répondre de la meme façon,”†† said the maître sharply at last. But the girl didn’t understand his response, for she knew only one phrase in French. She began to curse, mixing Turkish, Hebrew and Greek words, and the maître gave her a lira so that she would be quiet. For this he received a sticky kiss; she embraced him, his eyes darkened, and he recalled his latest dream. “Why is it that I only chance upon what I already know?” he muttered, getting to his feet; the Greek proprietor, smiling and setting in motion all the flesh on his face, saw him to the door. The maître walked to his hotel without paying attention to anything and without seeing the lights on the Bosphorus, the curling grapevines on the ancient walls, the nearby white buildings of Nişantaşı looming amid the dusky air, or the squat little stone eagles on the German consulate building.

  A day later the maître was in Sebastopol.

  He was sitting on a bench in the Primorsky Boulevard, smoking. Beside him sat Smirnov, one of the Sûreté Générale’s Russian agents, well known in those circles, a very energetic and lively fellow—and an old classmate of the maître’s from the Sorbonne, to boot. Smirnov was telling the maître, peppering his rapid speech all the while with complex tenses—“Il avait fallu que je lui donnasse quelque chose”‡‡—what he thought ought to be done.

  “I’m very glad they assigned this to you: Fortune favours you. Without luck you couldn’t do a thing there; you wouldn’t manage to sniff out this scoundrel even with hounds. They offered the case to me, but I refused: I’d be recognized there immediately, even if I wore Turkish trousers and a chokha. But I must warn you that you’re dealing with serious people here.”

  He paused.

  “Ils n’ont pas froid aux yeux,”§§ he said, continuing to think of those people whom the maître would encounter. “But truly, only in danger is there pleasure and allure.”

  The maître didn’t reply at once. “Don’t you think?” asked Smirnov.

  Before their eyes stood several trees; beyond the t
rees they glimpsed the smooth, glittering sea. In the distance the outline of the Mikhailovsky Fortress rose out of the deep-blue water; to the right the leaden mountains towered up. Somehow it felt very empty; a wind was blowing, bells were ringing in the town; the sparkling of the sea, the sombre gleam of the lilac clay on the bank, the lugubrious peal of the bell and the still, bright air inexplicably—but unmistakably for the maître—accentuated his terrible impotence and loneliness. The ennui that had seized only one part of his consciousness at the journey’s outset had now taken possession of him irrevocably.

  “What? Yes, of course,” he said distractedly. “Only it’s all meaningless and futile.”

  “What is meaningless?” asked Smirnov, not comprehending. Maître Rueil was astonished that Smirnov had failed to grasp such a simple and self-evident observation, that political affairs and the allure of danger were but trivial, foolish things. However, he wanted neither to argue nor to share his feelings with Smirnov.

  “Yes, you’re right, naturally,” he said. “I only meant that there’s no point wasting time waiting.” With an effort the maître produced this unconvincing explanation.

  “The waiting always comes to an end,” replied Smirnov. “But I haven’t yet told you all that I must.” And so at length Smirnov told the maître of the people whose acquaintance might be of some use to him. Those were: Monsieur Jean, a Russian rentier,¶¶ as Smirnov described him; Madame Rose, the owner of a private institution in Moscow, a very dear lady and, what’s more, a Parisian; and the student Corot: he was a strongman so this was only in the case of a ruckus. “And, of course, the main man, on meeting whom hangs the success of your mission.” He described a young man of twenty-three, a bon vivant and a gambler, a cunning, wary and dangerous adversary. The maître to all appearances seemed to be following Smirnov’s rapid French patter, but in fact he was scarcely listening to him. He was thinking of entirely inconsequential things: whether Smirnov was married, whether he had old flames, whether indeed he had loved anyone. These thoughts, so unusual for the maître, surprised even him. “Who is Smirnov?” he asked himself. “A man who has done various things all his life and, essentially, never known why he has done them—perhaps he doesn’t need to know. What was it all for? Anyway, it’s all nonsense in the final reckoning.”