“Just don’t turn back, just don’t turn back.”
“Very well,” he replied, “but I haven’t any more strength.”
“You have,” said the voice; and Dorin immediately felt lighter. Still, he swam for a long time until he reached the other shore and sat down on the green grass. Everything around him sparkled in the sunlight. He turned his head and saw someone’s laughing, uncommonly familiar and uncommonly joyful eyes: “Who is it?” he asked and awoke. It was already evening. Dorin walked over to the window; the darkness standing before him became gentle and tender, a warm evening air surrounded him. From the dining room he could hear Madeleine’s deep voice saying to André:
“André, don’t you think we ought to wake your father?”
André’s voice replied without its usual cloaked enmity:
“Yes, it’s probably time.”
“I’m not asleep,” said Dorin from his window. “How fine everything is,” he managed to think. “But why? Just moments ago I understood it all quite differently. What has changed? A single dream? No, it can’t be.” And, with a smile on his blind face, he went through to the dining room. At dinner he began for the first time to joke with André and laugh—and he felt everything come to life around him. Sombre André began to laugh, Madeleine’s voice detached itself from her and surrounded Dorin, and in it resounded those same intonations that there had been that evening when Madeleine had received guests; however, Dorin did not recall this.
Madeleine left him in the early hours of the morning with an abrupt, heavy gait. Henri Dorin was left alone. “What else have I understood?” he enquired of himself. “Right enough, I hadn’t heard of or known many sorrowful things and I was happy. But now that I do know them, am I truly any less happy? No, only one must endure this,” he thought, almost falling asleep. “One must understand,” he forcefully told himself, “that it’s all immaterial: catastrophe, betrayal; yes, André was wrong; I’ll tell him about this tomorrow. What’s important is that I’m alive, that I think and do everything I please—and there, from afar, some cloud of happiness reaches me, one that since childhood has soared behind me—and it envelops me and those dear to me; and against its happy mists everything is impotent, and everything is comic and superfluous; while what I have is infinite and joyous, and nothing is capable of taking that away from me. I’ll have to tell André about this, I just mustn’t forget it,” he said after one final effort—then he drifted off. The dawn was already breaking, the stars had already paled; and there was both light and darkness, ever separate and ever present.
* “Not to be read at night, please.”
† “Well, my boy… Let’s get acquainted, little one.”
‡ “Delighted to meet you, madam.”
§ “Get out.”
¶ “Why, look, it’s André Dorin.”
|| “Mathilde believed she had happiness in her sight. This prospect, irresistible to courageous souls possessed of a superior intellect, had to struggle long and hard against dignity and every sentiment of common duty.”
** “Well, die, then, and let the war be over!”
DELIVERANCE
(1936)
Deux verbes expriment toutes les formes que prennent ces deux causes de mort: Vouloir et Pouvoir… Vouloir nous brûle et Pouvoir nous détruit…*
HONORÉ DE BALZAC,
LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN
ALEXEI STEPANOVICH SEMYONOV, an engineer and a man of most impressive means, passed, as usual, a half-sleepless night, woke definitively around eleven o’clock in the morning and again, with disgust, thought that these moments of awakening were the most wretched of his life. His head was heavy, there was a bitterness in his mouth, his nose was blocked, and Alexei Stepanovich sensed the taste of the air change as he swallowed it down and then exhaled it poisoned. His eyes ached and itched, his breathing was laboured, and he was tormented by heartburn, which had begun many months ago and only rarely eased off for a few hours at a time.
He cast off the bed sheets, lowered from the bed his bloated white feet with their sporadic distended veins and cold sallow soles, inspected the hairy paunch hanging over his thighs, ran his hand along the sides of his head, where just above his ears grew a light fluff, stood up, fumbled around for his slippers and immediately felt that familiar dull ache in his groin. Having made several movements, he began to sweat, like a man coming out of the water, then made his way to the bathroom.
In the apartment, as always, it was quiet. Everything was pristine, everything glittered—the parquet, the lacquered table in the hallway, the mirror affixed to the wall; the bathtub sparkled just as much as everything else. In the hallway there were great white flowers, the name of which was unknown to Alexei Stepanovich; he did not care for flowers and was unable to distinguish them. “An unnecessary business,” he muttered as he passed.
Then began his lengthy toilette. First he would clean his teeth with two brushes—one of Indian rubber, the other ordinary—then he shaved, taking an endless time soaping his cheeks and wincing from the razor’s touch on his face, and then, finally, took a bath, after which he would begin to freeze and shiver every time; the shaggy dressing gown in which he would wrap himself up would quickly become damp and disagreeably cold. Alexei Stepanovich would remove it and don another. And so, in his dressing gown, he made his way towards the parlour, sat down in an easy chair with a morbid sigh, reached out his hand to a little side table and rang. That very moment the maid came in, bringing coffee. He took a sip and asked:
“What is the weather like today?”
“I’m afraid it’s raining again, sir.”
“Marvellous,” said Alexei Stepanovich.
This meant that today, as yesterday and the day before, he would again be soaked during the daily walk that the doctor had prescribed him. “You must, Alexei Stepanovich,” the doctor would say, “otherwise, you know, at our age… one has to take one’s health seriously… our body requires… you know, there are certain, as it were, physical requirements…” Alexei Stepanovich disliked that the doctor was talking of their age—he was ten years Alexei Stepanovich’s junior and enjoyed enviable good health. Alexei Stepanovich had long known by heart everything the doctor was saying. Only he could not fathom what benefit there could possibly be in his walking, squelching through cold, muddy filth, for half an hour each morning; yet he did this obediently, and it was not without a certain malign joy that he noted no improvement whatsoever as a result.
What was most galling, however, was that Alexei Stepanovich was, essentially, not at all ill. Several doctors, having reached a consensus, explained to him that he had no malady in the strict sense of the word, but that the vital functions of his body lacked sufficient intensity; this could be explained, in the first instance, by fatty deposits taxing his heart and, in the second, by his age and general fatigue. However, losing weight was also out of the question, for the means of losing weight also caused a weakening of cardiac function. It was also observed that he had a less than impeccable liver function and a slowing of the blood’s circulation, but none of this posed even the slightest danger to his life for the time being, just as the most agonizing sciatica or the at times absolutely unbearable rheumatic pains did not, for example, pose any danger to his life. “But it is beyond question that you must take good care of yourself.” Taking good care of oneself meant going to bed early, not drinking, not eating too much, lest there arise some malady in the strict sense of the word—that is, a process that would lead first to a weakening of the body, then to death. Alexei Stepanovich had no fear of death per se; yet the prospect of a slow demise and of the long agonies accompanying it horrified him. With time, however, everything became easier and easier to bear: he now found drink loathsome, his appetite had nearly vanished, and in the early hours of the evening he began to incline towards sleep, though well he knew that were he to lie down, surrendering to this deceitful desire, sleep would elude him all the same.
Having dressed, he went. A fine winter drizzle wa
s falling, there was a wind, and on the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne there were very few pedestrians. Two identically dressed, broad-shouldered men, neither wearing a hat—athletes to all appearances—walked past Alexei Stepanovich. He watched them go, took several quick steps, but immediately again the pain in his groin and in the small of his back started, and he stopped in his tracks before slowly continuing on. A cold spray hit his face. Having upturned his collar and pulled down his hat, he reached the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, then turned back and began the ascent home. Through his spectacles, bespattered with rainwater, he vaguely caught sight of his secretary’s small, dark-blue automobile, which had drawn up to his apartment a few moments before him.
The secretary was the son of an old classmate, whom Alexei Stepanovich recalled as a boy in shorts and who now lived in Paris and concerned himself solely with the matter of where he might acquire money for wine. Over the last decade, Alexei Stepanovich had seen his friend sober only once, at his daughter’s funeral; even then, directly after the service, he, having broken away from the others, stopped off at a café, and when five minutes later he caught up with Alexei Stepanovich, who was leading his wife by the arm, he found he was again drunk, as always. All these years he had lived, never marking or understanding anything, in a ceaseless drunken haze; he would tell, regardless of whether anyone was listening to him, endless tales about himself in the third person, which in recent times were becoming less and less substantive—as his reason waned—and consisted all the more in exclamations. “Alyosha, do you recall?… Colonel Suslikov”—his surname was Suslikov—“would ride out… There was no other mount like it, Alyosha! Colonel Suslikov would ride out. Yes… There was no other mount like it! Fellows! Do you recall, Alyosha?… Yes, if I’m to tell the whole thing, Alyosha, you know… You know me, Alyosha…” Yet from his tale, which could go on for a whole hour, the only clear point was that Suslikov had been a colonel and that at some point he had ridden a horse—no more. His wife, Marya Matveyevna, who for many years during those difficult and hungry times had been Alexei Stepanovich’s lover, and her son tried to stay somewhat aloof from him, long having lost hope of reforming him—and so he was left alone and yet still persisted in telling himself his drunken and nonsensical tale. He had spent years on the battlefield, had been a brave and a fine officer; however, having found himself abroad, he immediately took to drink from despair; he would give it up and set to work, but then he would succumb to it once again. They had lived in terrific, incredible poverty, and Alexei Stepanovich had been unable to help them, for he himself got by only with the greatest of efforts—that is, until one day he grew rich, as in a fairy tale or a dream. However, he did not like discussing the source of his wealth, though there was nothing dishonest about it. He had invented an automatic device for a special system used in railway-carriage latrines, which had enjoyed extraordinary success and brought him millions. In those first days, he simply could not accustom himself to wealth, gave away much of his money, helped dozens of people who later dubbed him an imbecile on account of this, which he heard on perfectly good authority from others who were yet to receive any money from him and in every possible way tried to besmirch those who had succeeded in this better and earlier than they. It was then that the Suslikov family began to live well and their boy started attending the best lycée; but Alexei Stepanovich gradually felt more and more uncomfortable in their home, for, despite his close relationship with Marya Matveyevna, he was conscious that everything had changed; and the reason for these changes, which were not supposed to have taken place, consisted in his wealth. These changes had been so unexpected and grave that on occasion Alexei Stepanovich was given to musing that, perhaps, it would have been worth renouncing his wealth or being blind to it. He recalled how one day, only a few months before his sudden enrichment, he had entered the Suslikovs’ apartment and saw Marya Matveyevna with a rag, mopping up a stain on the floor from a spilt cup of tea; having made a false move, she fell—awkwardly, heavily and painfully. He dashed over to help her up, but she just sat there on the floor and cried. He was kneeling beside her in the uncomfortable, intermediate pose of a man who ought to help someone up and doesn’t. “Alyosha,” she said, “why all these torments? What crime have I committed?” He had tears in his eyes, he said nothing, and he stroked her hand and looked at the coarsened skin of her fingers, now red from the cold water. From the neighbouring room came the sound of her husband’s murmuring—only individual words and short phrases were discernible: “No, Your Excellency, forgive me… I won’t allow… I respect… Fellows!”
“There’s no bread at home, he sent the boy out this morning to get wine on credit,” said Marya Matveyevna, sobbing. Alexei Stepanovich had six francs; he gave them to her, forgoing cigarettes, and half an hour later, when they were taking tea, she said, quite calm now: “Well there you have it, Alyosha, when you become rich, we’ll start living the good life. You won’t forget us, will you?”
Yet after the passage of only several months, Marya Matveyevna was unrecognizable. The expression in her eyes had changed, having become alarmingly tender, the skin on her hands had paled, by a miracle the wrinkles on her face had vanished, and later still Alexei Stepanovich met her in the street completely by chance in the company of some doubtful specimen of middling years, who was holding her by the waist.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Alexei Stepanovich later asked. She regarded him for a long time and replied:
“It means, my dear friend Alyosha, that I am thirty-nine years old and want to live. Now do you understand what it means?”
“Do you think this is fair?”
“Je m’en f—,”† she replied in French. “What do I have? A drunken madman, and you, of whom I no longer have any need, you come once a month. I have money, your money. Who has the right to forbid me anything? You know I’ve paid heavily enough for the pleasures I can now claim.”
“You know best, of course,” said Alexei Stepanovich. “I make no accusation; I truly have no right to do so. Forgive me.”
They sat in her apartment; the grandfather clock ticked away, while at its base lay a black marble leopard—and on the monies that were very likely paid for this clock the family could have lived, in former times, for two months. Alexei Stepanovich sighed, kissed Marya Matveyevna’s hand and left.
Marya Matveyevna’s son had graduated from the lycée and was studying at university; he would sometimes visit Alexei Stepanovich, who would be amazed by how much this young man of frail aspect could eat. He later decided that Anatoly ought to do something besides his university studies and appointed him as his secretary; but all this was merely a pretext, and Alexei Stepanovich’s real aim was to see Anatoly as often as possible. Several times a week Anatoly would come by automobile, which, according to Alexei Stepanovich’s wishes, had been placed at his disposal for matters of business, and he would tell him about the letters he received in various languages and which almost always contained some appeal for help. Anatoly was the only person whom Alexei Stepanovich still loved. It was uncertain whose son he was—Suslikov’s or Alexei Stepanovich’s. Marya Matveyevna, in various periods of her life and depending upon her mood, would now tell Alexei Stepanovich, “Don’t forget you have a son,” and now remind him, “Remember that this child bears no relation to you whatsoever.” Anatoly had been born in Russia, and now there was no way to recall or clarify the matter. But even this was immaterial. Wealth had no effect on Anatoly. He loved books, libraries and music, and nothing else interested him; he was a little naive, honest and forthright. Only with Anatoly would Alexei Stepanovich still joke and feel at ease, escaping for a few hours that feeling of unvanquishable disgust for everything that filled his life and about which neither he nor the doctors ever spoke a word, although it was precisely this question that was most essential and most dreadful.
Alexei Stepanovich chatted with Anatoly for half an hour, suggested that he stay to lunch, joked, and it seemed that the dark mood that had possessed
him since morning had lifted somewhat. After lunch, however, it gained ground when an engineer by the name of Uralsky showed up with his latest wife.
The engineer Uralsky was a man of around forty, plump and full of joie de vivre, a glutton and a cheery conversationalist. Whenever he stopped joking and spoke in all earnestness, it became apparent that he was well educated, very understanding and no fool. He was, however, distinguished by an excess of affection, was forever marrying and divorcing—for the fourth time already in as many years—and in each of his wives there was something strange, something that united them despite their difference in age, hair colour, height and dimensions, the smack of some cheap and undoubtedly foreign demi-monde—so that an outsider would have the impression that these were all the same woman, possessed of a great, though not inexhaustible, gift for transfiguration. Yet the most astonishing and lamentable thing of all was something else—namely, that in the presence of a beloved woman Uralsky would turn into a complete fool, and to elicit a positive response apropos of any business matter would be impossible. He would mumble, smile inanely, gaze at his beloved woman; he would lose all his wit and acumen and make of himself a pitiful and repugnant spectacle.
He had brought his new wife in order to introduce her to Alexei Stepanovich. She had a rather wide posterior, great black eyes, unnaturally devoid of human expression, bright-red lips and copper hair. Alexei Stepanovich kept trying to recall where he had seen such eyes before; he made a supreme effort and remembered that it was in the Berlin zoological garden, by the railing of that grotesque species of antelope that bears the name “gnu”.
The Beggar and Other Stories Page 7
