The Beggar and Other Stories

by Gaito Gazdanov

  “Were you very afraid, my boy?”

  “Yes, Papa,” replied André, unexpectedly choking and beginning to weep.

  That same day the doctor, having summoned Madeleine, spoke with her for half an hour, concluding with assurances of a complete recovery of Dorin’s health. “But I’m afraid,” he added after a moment’s silence, “that he will remain blind for ever.”

  And so Henri Dorin was blind. At first he, like everyone around him, believed that his vision would return gradually, just as his hearing and his ability to move his arms and legs had done; but while his strength had long since been restored, his vision did not return. He continued to see nothing, and only slowly and nervously did he become accustomed to the constant darkness in which he now lived. What he couldn’t see was at first a great obstacle to his moving around; he found it difficult to walk about not because he was blind, but because the muscles in his legs felt weak. He lost his sense of balance; his movements were uncertain; and when he fell, it was always particularly unfortunate, for he wouldn’t manage to break the fall by reaching out his arms. It was as if some sort of spring had been extracted from him, one that previously made his body agile and created a natural resistance to all external jolts and collisions. Later he would develop a different manner of walking and moving and an unerring sense for obstacles that stood in his way, which he imagined as dark walls in front of closed eyes. He would no longer knock into stools, tables or armchairs; he would find the door with ease—since there was less of a draught by an open door than by the wall. Several weeks passed and already Dorin could make his way about the entire house with the assurance of a seeing person. Only then did everything, with astonishing speed, begin to change in his perception.

  Until now, Dorin had given almost no thought to the misfortune that had befallen him. It was terribly difficult for him; he knew that all that had happened was awful; but he considered his loss of vision a mere physical defect, distressing and lamentable, but nothing more. Like a child, he was gladdened by the thought that he had managed to do everything in life that was essential—like a man who, upon espying a threatening cloud before a tempest sets in, takes shelter in a safe place; he was safe, he had his beloved son and a wife—what did he have to fear?

  Yet with each passing day he noted that all this was changing, and that André and Madeleine were involuntarily becoming estranged from him. This first revealed itself on the day when Madeleine led him out for a walk. He falteringly made his way along the highway as she held his arm; it was an almost breezeless spring day.

  “What a breeze, Madeleine!” said Dorin.

  “You must be joking, Henri—there’s no breeze; in fact it’s quite astonishing. I was just about to mention it.”

  “You all…” Dorin suddenly began with exasperation, which Madeleine was quite unaccustomed to. “You all evidently think that if I’m blind, then it must mean that I’ve regressed into childhood or become an idiot. I can’t see anything, true enough, but I feel a strong breeze.”

  “But I assure you, Henri, that it’s all in your mind.”

  Dorin fell silent and did not initiate any further conversation. On returning home, he sat down on the divan and lapsed into thought for a long time. Everything was quiet at home. Dorin heard the springs in Madeleine’s armchair creak, heard her turn the pages of the book she was reading; he heard André writing in his room, and from the fact that his pen would frequently pause and then race across the paper Dorin understood that André was writing a story of some sort—a first draft. Below, automobiles passed along the highway: first there was a Bugatti, then a Hispano-Suiza; then came a 40-cv Renault, followed immediately by a Packard—Dorin identified them infallibly by the sounds of their engines.

  In addition to the fact that Dorin’s hearing and sense of touch had acutely sharpened—which was, in itself, not surprising—and that everything around him ceaselessly rustled and rang—the darkness before his eyes was full of sounds and saturated with motion that never let up for a single instant—in addition to all this, something new and inconceivable began to reveal itself to him.

  Not only could he sense someone’s presence in the room, but he could also tell for certain whether the person beside him was calm or angry, happy or sad; every shade and nuance of his state of being suddenly became apparent to Dorin. It was as if a warm breeze emanated from every person, and from this Dorin could tell whether he was weak or strong, what state of mind he was in. One morning, when Madeleine came into the room after he had just finished dressing himself, he sensed her desire before she had managed to utter a single word; before, he had been able to tell by the expression on her face, or by the intonation in her voice, or by some movement of her body or her hands. Now he saw none of this; but Madeleine had not even the time to say anything to him, and before she could utter her usual “Bonjour, Henri”, he anticipated her and said:

  “Good morning, Madeleine. So, you haven’t stopped loving me, then?”

  “You can tell?”

  “I felt it. Only don’t cry.”

  Madeleine’s face, her cheeks moist with tears, appeared right beside Dorin’s.

  “Henri,” she said in a frightened whisper, “I’m afraid when you touch me. Your fingers are different—it feels like someone else’s hand is stroking my body. You have new hands, Henri,” she said with horror in eyes, which Henri heard in her voice.

  “Silly thing,” he said tenderly. “You forgot that I’m blind.”

  Myriad trifles vexed Dorin. Foremost—the inability to read, then the constant and insulting obligingness of all those around him, among whom only André understood that to be overly considerate of his father, and to treat him as one gravely ill, would be to underscore inadvertently his terrible defect. From some things that Dorin said, André realized that his father had correctly divined and appreciated his delicacy.

  When left alone, Dorin would begin to recollect. Before, he would rarely tax his memory; what had happened to him was sufficient to take up all his attention. Now, not yet having quite accustomed himself to living in the dark, in which so much had hitherto seemed hostile and alien, he picked over in his mind all his visual impressions and recalled his whole life.

  He recalled the cirrus clouds in the dawn sky on the morning when his first wife had died, the glint of automobile windows and their reflections of Madeleine’s reclined head, the glitter of the sea along whose bank his Chrysler raced, and André’s pale face with his deep-blue, almost feminine eyes; he recalled how, bouncing along, stones would go flying from the road, how scraps of paper would be blown along by the gust of wind; how night fell and in the far-off distance, almost as far as the darkness now, but incomparably more gentle, lights would appear in the air, now high up, now low down; how the beam of the headlights would glide along the dark highway; how, coming out of the final turn, vespertine Paris would reveal itself, all studded in lights, above its centre a red neon glow; how the water in the woods gleamed, how the trees were reflected in the river; how in the ocean there sailed multistorey liners with luminous portholes; how white the soft seaside sands glittered, when as a boy he would return from a swim—how the lighthouses shone, visible far out at sea. Thousands of insignificant and trivial details came rushing back to him: Jack’s odd, dancing gait as he bounded up to a St Bernard they met in Paris; the motion of the muscles under his sleek skin; how the reddish tail of a fox flashed when Jack lunged at it one day as they were taking a stroll somewhere in Normandy. Then he saw the streets of Paris, full of people—under the streaming, glistening rain; the flashing green and red lights at street corners; the far-distant, slow-moving sky above his head, the deep-blue ice of northern lakes—and the stifling yellow clouds of dust on France’s innumerable roads that year when the war broke out and he and his classmates had slowly journeyed to the front at night on a lorry with blacked-out headlights. “Where are they now?” Dorin wondered. “Mortier was killed in the August of sixteen. What about Bernard?” Dorin recalled how Bernard would s
peak with his gloomy appearance:

  “No, my friends, I know for a fact: I’ll be killed on the day the war ends.”

  He would say this every day and bored everyone with it so much that Mortier, letting fly, said to him one day:

  “Non, mais crève donc et que la guerre finisse!”**

  “How jittery Bernard was before he died,” Dorin continued to think. “When was it? A month before the armistice. Yes, Bernard was wrong about the date.”

  Again he imagined a long and happy life. There he was, returning home after the thunder of shelling, the trenches, machine-gun fire; he still dreamt of the war, but he now lay in a clean bed with cool sheets, in the knowledge that all these horrors, and death, and hunger were behind him, and in front of him was wealth, health, happiness and everything worth regretting later in old age.

  Once, when Madeleine came into his room, he could tell by her quick and moreover indecisive step that she wanted to ask him about something of which she was not quite sure he would approve. Madeleine sat down beside him and talked of domestic things; then she asked:

  “André, would you have anything against my inviting some guests round?”

  Dorin suddenly felt extraordinarily sad. He recalled how, as a child, he would be left at home as a punishment—everyone would go out and he would be left alone in that enormous apartment, scarcely holding back the tears. Yet he replied:

  “Of course, Madeleine, of course. Only I won’t come down to meet the guests, I’ll stay in my room: you can tell them that I’ve gone away. All right?”

  “No, no,” Madeleine protested, “you should be there with us.”

  “That’s impossible,” Dorin insisted. “I won’t. But you must invite the guests, otherwise I’ll be hurt.”

  “As you wish,” Madeleine said with a sigh.

  And so in the evening the guests arrived. Dorin sat on a chaise longue by the window; the setting sun shone on his blind face, then its warm light slowly declined ever lower—and ultimately darkness fell. Dorin stayed by the window and remained seated on the chaise longue. He could hear—for the window in the dining room was open—the guests discussing him, asking Madeline about his health, her replies. On a sudden, the sound of her voice struck him; he began to listen more attentively. But Madeleine’s subsequent rejoinder was made not to the man in conversation with whom her intonation had so struck Dorin. He waited for her again to speak to this man. Five minutes later a male voice asked:

  “And how is Henri getting on?”

  “Thank you,” replied Madeleine, “very well. He’s in Paris today.”

  It was that same intonation: there was no mistaking it. In an instant, Dorin felt as though he were suffocating. But he recovered his senses: having slowly moved the chaise longue away from the window, he migrated to the divan, lay back on the cushion and did not stir again the entire evening. Still he listened—almost mechanically, almost unconsciously—as Madeleine played the piano, as somebody talked loudly about Clemenceau, but now nothing for him existed, apart from her distorted voice. Dorin could not be mistaken in the meaning of this alteration. What he might earlier have ascribed to his imagination was now so clear to him, as if he were seeing everything with his own eyes. Madeleine had spoken in that tone of voice only with him—and only in moments of physical intimacy. How well he knew that voice of hers—with its sudden slight huskiness and uneven breathing! “And yet I’m blind,” thought Dorin and vacantly repeated the phrase: “Yes, and yet I’m blind.”

  Late that same evening—although the guests had not yet departed—the main door opened below and in came André, who went directly up to his room. Dorin heard André approach the window—then retreat, make several quick steps about the room and sit down in the easy chair, but immediately stand back up and again begin to pace around quickly. Half an hour later, he lay down in bed and seemingly fell asleep, for not a sound now emanated from his room.

  Until recently, Dorin had spared no thought for whether life was good or bad in broad terms; he would only discuss this in his debates with André. He would say that in life there was more happiness than sorrow, since he himself had experienced happiness more often than sorrow; yet when he was forced to provide proof of his views—and since he was unable to say, “Look here, I live happily, and that is proof enough of what I say”—he resorted to examples drawn from all that he knew or had read. That life was good, however, was, to him, self-evident, without the need for any examples. He was forever grieved, listening to André, and would even say so to Madeleine.

  “What a pity,” he would say, “that André doesn’t take after me. The child is much too morbid, he thinks and reads too much—it’s bad for him, Madeleine, don’t you think?”

  Madeleine would agree with him; André had always remained a stranger to her. She did not know or understand the world of eternally dynamic thoughts, images and revelations that André inhabited; for this she was too healthy and too much a woman. Henri Dorin’s happiness was not blind, he was not like Madeleine; within him was some happy combination of physical and spiritual faculties that allowed him to understand both André and Madeleine simultaneously.

  “They are both right,” thought Dorin, “but when all’s said and done, I am more right than they.”

  And so now the question of who was more right presented itself to him with extraordinary force. In going blind he had been deprived of half the riches he possessed; yet on that evening, when Madeleine had received the guests, he lost something important and very precious—only André remained. Nothing, it seemed, however, could re-establish or replace the feeling that had been destroyed by those few intonations—and this was infinitely sad.

  Dorin said nothing to Madeleine; yet from that day on, he felt as if the air that he had so loved, when he had been sighted and happy, the air of his apartment, which constantly surrounded him everywhere he happened to be, like a recurring reminder or a powerful smell of the same perfume—that this air was saturated with alarming and sorrowful things of whose existence Dorin had previously known nothing.

  One day he heard downstairs, in the courtyard, a loud squeak—he was told that it was a rat being caught in a trap: Dorin imagined its squashed stomach and he began to feel ill. Another time he could hear the frenzied clucking and squawking of a chicken that Joseph was slaughtering; Dorin heard the beating of its wings as it, now beheaded, ran a few steps about the courtyard; and all this, to which Dorin would have paid no attention previously, weighed uncommonly heavy on him now and made his situation even more oppressive. Each day it became more and more sorrowful for him to think that dusk was falling—as if the setting sun left him in even greater darkness than that in which he now found himself. The far-off sound of a bell, the horn of a passing and retreating automobile, the wind before a storm, the chiming of the clock, and those unfathomable nocturnal sounds whose meaning, no matter how much he tried, he could never understand—all this seemed to him a new and sorrowful revelation. “So everything I knew before was just an optical illusion?” thought Dorin. It seemed strange to him that he had seen Madeleine’s eyes, embraced her body, and yet, in those same seconds, had not been able to hear beside him in the air the ringing, the moving, the creeping, the dying away of all these sorrowful sounds, all this final, fatal melody, which continuously sounded around him—and which absolved everything; which was so dreadful that in comparison with it blindness, sickness and betrayal were incidental and nothing more. “What of my happy life?” he continued thinking. He was astonished that he had neither known nor seen this before. “Surely I was no more foolish than others and no less sharp than they; why should it be that what André knew, unable to prove it, but unerringly intuiting it—and his mother knew it too—why should this have remained obscure to me?”

  All of a sudden he recalled his conversation with André about the catastrophe. “Yes, then I was saying that after the catastrophe the world would appear altered and full of new delights.” Where were they, these new delights?

  Fro
m that point on, Dorin became grave and taciturn; and Madeleine told one of his friends that Henri had evidently only now fathomed the entire sense of his misfortune.

  After Dorin started to consider his new perception of the world, he involuntarily began to avoid André. His fatherly affection had not altered, but those long conversations with André had now come to an end. He unconsciously steered clear of André, because he no longer held that firm and happy conviction that everything was all right, the one with which he previously had been able to counter all André’s pessimistic arguments; he would have been compelled to agree with his son, which was utterly inadmissible for a variety of reasons. First, he was the father; secondly, if Dorin were to concede that his son was right, the happiness that André found in the calm, constant certitude of his father would vanish. For André, everything was turning out wrong and dismal—but there was one spot that remained unscathed and was situated beyond misfortune, upset and sorrow—his father. What would have become of André if he had been deprived of this too? Thus thought Dorin—while André was distressed and could not understand why his father was avoiding him.

  One day Dorin, overcome by a strange drowsiness, fell asleep after luncheon and dreamt. He dreamt of a river. Infinitely wide, covered in foaming waves, it was barring his way: in the distance he espied its opposing shore, full of vibrantly green trees. “I’ve recovered,” Dorin thought in his dream. “How clearly I can see the water and these trees. I simply have to swim.” He stepped into the river; the bottom immediately retreated from under his feet, and he began slowly swimming towards the other bank; a strong current kept dragging him down. In the middle of the river, his strength began to desert him. He looked up—high above was an infinite sky, and in it were stars, although all this was happening during the day. “How strange that I can see stars,” Dorin told himself, then thinking that his vision must have come back to him acutely sharpened and that was why he could see even stars by day. Still he swam, yet he was growing more and more tired. He wanted to turn back, but somebody’s voice said to him: