The Beggar and Other Stories

by Gaito Gazdanov

  The conversation was stilted; moreover, Uralsky’s wife knew no Russian, and so Alexei Stepanovich had to muster his French, which he abhorred, for he would have to strain his attention and, against his wishes, utter things he had never thought and which he would never ordinarily have said, had the conversation taken place in Russian. As Uralsky was leaving, Alexei Stepanovich lost his temper and asked:

  “Wherever do you dig these people up?”

  Of late he had grown accustomed to speaking candidly with people, and what he would never before have let slip from his mouth now came out easily and naturally; now people could no longer take offence at him because, as Alexei Stepanovich knew perfectly well, it was not to their advantage. However harshly he spoke to them, his company would always turn it into a joke; and this was the first observation that caused him to wonder whether he had been mistaken his entire life in supposing that certain things were good and others bad, agreeable or disagreeable, offensive or inoffensive.

  He opened the newspaper, read several lines and lay it aside, continuing almost unconsciously to mull over those same questions that had entered his head several years ago and since which time had given him no rest. When he was poor, there had been no time to think about abstract things: he had to get money, roam the streets, beg, sit for hours, waiting for those people on whom his regular income of several hundred francs depended—and on this he expended all his time and energy. Later, however, once all this had stopped and when Alexei Stepanovich—after a chaotic month during which alternated, with hitherto unseen variety, impressions, sensations, people and business—was left alone for the first time in his new apartment, and when, it seemed, he really did have nothing to envy, he felt a sense of ennui and emptiness in his soul; and thereafter it never left him, and so too his numerous ailments, which had essentially existed prior to this, but which, from a lack of time and money, he had never much heeded. Now every one of his sensations acquired an explicit value—and just as earlier it had been immaterial that Alexei Stepanovich Semyonov, this portly and shabbily dressed man who lived in a cheap room, the rent of which, moreover, was in arrears, suffered from rheumatism, so now it was material and significant; and each ailment was attended by its own doctor, masseur and pharmacist, who sold Alexei Stepanovich a multitude of expensive and useless remedies. Previously, Alexei Stepanovich had not been overly concerned with the what and how of his thoughts; now that he had a great deal of free time, however, this leisure began to be filled with constant reflection on many things that appeared before him as though for the very first time.

  He looked at the portrait hanging on the wall; it was a portrait of Suslikov’s daughter, who had died several years previously. Alexei Stepanovich had known her and remembered all twelve years of her life; he remembered her with a dummy teat in her mouth, then as a young girl in a white frock, and then in Paris when she would come home from school with ink-stained fingers—as had her mother and father and even Alexei Stepanovich himself in their time. Then came a lengthy illness, and Alexei Stepanovich recalled this poor, frail body on top of the bed sheets, tossing and turning, probed by doctors, and her terrible eyes. Whenever he approached her, she would always reach out to him with a pathetic and trusting childish gesture that each time brought tears to his eyes. During the course of her long illness, everyone grew so accustomed to her that almost no one paid any attention to her groaning and quiet sobs; every once in a while her mother, in her brisk, indifferent voice, would utter a few words of tenderness to her, though they were incongruous with those offhand, familiar intonations. Only Alexei Stepanovich, who loved her more than everyone, was unwaveringly attentive to her slightest movement, which caused pain throughout her whole body.

  Then, in the last days of her illness, her eyes took on that opaque, leaden hue, which Andrei Stepanovich knew very well and whose significance there was no mistaking. In impotent and mortal despair, while looking into those dimming eyes, Alexei Stepanovich thought that he would give all his life’s meagre joy, as well as his life itself, in order to save her; but this willingness of his proved just as worthless as everything else. And soon enough the day came when her eyes were closed, and coins laid over then—and the frail body, after several hours of agonizing death throes, fell still. To Alexei Stepanovich it seemed then that he, too, was essentially dead to everything, and with such stillness and absurd terror all those familiar objects peered at him—the table, the bed, the easy chair—and had lost their former meaning, as had everything in existence. And so Alexei Stepanovich never recovered from this. After witnessing this most terrible sight, whose manifestation had destroyed everything and made senseless and hollow all the good he knew in life, he understood, not with his mind, but with something else infinitely more trustworthy, the terrible and incontrovertible truth, of which it was forbidden to speak and which plunged into an unceasing and fatal sorrow all this vainly existing world. Nothing could aid Alexei Stepanovich in this, and his omnipotent wealth here proved just as inconsequent and superfluous as everything else.

  He was left sans desire. Food nauseated him, reading bored him, card games were dull, he had no one to love; and despite the fact that the fates of dozens of people depended indirectly on him, not one of them was interested in his private life. He even had no one to talk to, and he spent increasing periods of time in the easy chair, alone with his wretched feelings. One day he went to Marya Matveyevna, with whom in former days he had felt so happy and at ease; she understood him implicitly, and together they would occupy themselves with what she termed “lyrical journeys”. Thus would they discuss everything—happiness, death, wealth, fame, and the only feeling that was possessed of a furious and inexhaustible wealth of thoughts and sensations.

  He arrived at her apartment in the afternoon, entered and slumped himself down in an uncomfortable armchair.

  “Well, tell me, Alyosha, dear,” she said. “Do you recall how you and I would talk back then in Russia and in those first years in Paris?”

  “A millennium ago?”

  “Yes, a millennium ago. Things were better back then. Tell me, how are you getting on? I hardly ever see you.”

  And so Marya Matveyevna began to recite. With unmoving eyes, Alexei Stepanovich watched her. He mused that she would begin to talk of the past, of what may yet come to pass, how her life had changed and how now there seemed to be no space in it for those things that had previously been so important. Yet she said none of this. At great length she complained to Alexei Stepanovich about the maid, the soaring prices, and related the protracted tale of why she had been forced to give up the services of Russian dressmakers and turn instead to French ones.

  “You see, if you need not even a chic, but just a nice après-midi dress—I’m not talking about evening dress—then remember, you need only go to a French dressmaker.”

  “I have no need of a good dress,” said Alexei Stepanovich in astonishment, which pertained to the matter of the dress, and partly to the thought that Marya Matveyevna should speak of such trifles when he had anticipated something quite different.

  “No, you misunderstand me.”

  “Indeed…”

  “The point is that they still have ambition, they’re all the wives of generals. What does it matter to me that at the close of the nineteenth century one of her husbands commanded some brigade or other? What relation does this fact—pray tell, Alyosha—bear to my present-day dress? How you do stare,” she said, suddenly losing her temper, having finally noticed Alexei Stepanovich’s steady, piercing gaze.

  “You’ve become somehow more vulgar,” he slowly pronounced. “But that isn’t the issue: there’s something else I want to say to you. Here you are, having lived a rather long life; you had a husband, a lover, children, a daughter who died; you knew years of privation and misery. Can you really now talk to me only of dressmakers and the maid? Is there truly nothing more interesting?”

  “No,” she replied. “You want to philosophize. No, I’ve had quite enough of that, I’m n
ot twenty.”

  “So that’s it…”

  “So that’s it,” she repeated. “That’s why there are few opportunities and such little time left.”

  She got up and made for the door, then turned back and with a sharp, quick movement, which was typical of her—and Alexei Stepanovich immediately recognized it, and it reminded him at once of a great many tender and ostensibly forgotten things—placed her hands on his shoulders and sat on his knee; his legs immediately began to ache under the weight of her body. She said nothing and only looked for a moment into his eyes; and he understood in this slightly frightened and repentant look more than she could have said. He understood that in her life everything had been almost as hopeless as in his—with the difference that she still wanted to live and attached a value to certain things that provoked only sadness and disgust in him, and that the matter of dressmakers and the maid interested her only because it stopped her pondering what she ought not to ponder, lest she cry or become upset. But this gaze of hers returned, only for as long it lasted, the possibility of an equal understanding of things, made of her for this moment a fellow traveller of Alexei Stepanovich’s in his sorrowful, final journey. But then, heavily and clumsily, she slid off his knee; her skirt hitched up, baring her ample legs, the mere sight of which in former times would have been enough to rob Alexei Stepanovich of several hours’ sleep, and which he now regarded as he would any other object—with a dash, perhaps, of a certain, almost imperceptible regret, in which it was possible to discern, under very close scrutiny, traces of a long-extinguished and impotent desire. Immediately thereafter, once she had left the room, he sensed that she would not return to those things that for an instant had come to life in her accidental gaze and disappeared, this time for good.

  *

  He believed in nothing. Once Anatoly, while showing him a Russian newspaper that had recently come into existence and was foredoomed to a swift closure because of insufficient capital, was talking about an article condemning the Revolution, which had been composed in energetic and the most uncompromising language. “You know, Uncle,” he said, “so long as there are people like this in the world…” “Like what?” “Well, convinced…” “Do you want me to prove to you that you’re a fool?” “How will you do that?” “Wait and see.” This entertained him for a certain time; he telephoned, arranged meetings, discussed things, and a week later, when Anatoly came to visit, he showed him the typescript of an article. Anatoly read it through. The article was consecrated to giving proof that without revolution and revolt, creativity, art, “proud and free thought”, and even the prospect of a different, better humanity, were impossible. The article was signed with that same name, so familiar to Anatoly.

  “What’s all this?” said Anatoly.

  “Dear Tolya, it’s very simple. It cost me”—he extracted a notebook—“seven hundred and forty-six francs all told.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Curiosity killed the cat…”

  Alexei Stepanovich did not tell Anatoly that he had rung up the author of the article, arranged a meeting, then over lunch in a restaurant said that he was planning to publish a leftist newspaper and that among the regular contributors he, naturally… He said that he was collating material for the first issue, which promised to be a particular success, and would pay a fee up front, at an inflated rate for this issue, and after several days he received the article about art and revolution.

  He admittedly knew in advance that everything would be just as he had envisaged, but nevertheless he had not imagined that it would be so easy and inexpensive. And if before the days of his wealth he had not much liked people in general and mistrusted them, then now they incited in him disgust and repugnance. He had always known theoretically that money changes human relationships; yet this had been an abstract knowledge, from which it was possible to draw abstract conclusions about the value of such relationships in general, but which he would discuss as one would any psychological problem. Now he possessed a long experience that was impossible to contradict. He even knew that if Marya Matveyevna were not certain that he would never refuse her—she had merited this through long years of self-sacrifice—she would be just as kind to him as the rest and would not allow herself any sharp rejoinders, though her emotions would not have corresponded to her actions. Yet she might have allowed herself everything; for too long she had shared with Alexei Stepanovich her frugal dinners, her paltry sums of money, with which they sometimes took themselves to a cheap cinema, shared with him her few joys and her body—all that she had. Alexei Stepanovich was amazed to notice that he felt no gratitude towards her whatsoever and that he was even essentially indifferent to her fate, though he knew that he ought to be grateful and that he ought to do everything he could for her—and, indeed, this he did with cool, indifferent readiness.

  Contemplating and recalling all this for the hundredth time, he sought, as he always did, the solution to these questions, the possibility of some escape. But there was no escape. What he had known before, long ago—the turbulent joy of physical existence—had now disappeared, and all his life’s current sensations were but an unceasing succession of pain, malaise and a peculiar physical disgust, which he had hitherto not known. From time to time, when people, wishing to receive from him a subsidy for the publication of a radical newspaper, would talk to him of social reform, and when he reflected on the necessity of these reforms, he would reply to them that he had but one life—and a wretched one at that—that he had more important things to think about than other people and that even if he were to abandon all this, no social reforms would change anything; that, at best, come even revolution, there would be a redistribution of wealth and yesterday’s proprietors would land in the position of the proletariat; but neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie would benefit or become happier from this. The principal changes would be so insignificant that it was not worth undertaking anything for their sake: the publication of a radical newspaper less so than anything else.

  After such conversations, however, he would notice that the semi-unconscious conception of the world that he had previously possessed and that consisted in an almost inexhaustible wealth of images that unfolded as he contemplated various things had now become scant and impoverished; nothing remained, bar a dozen pessimistic convictions, a large quantity of physically morbid sensations and something very akin to a never-ending pyrosis of the soul. In vain would he convince himself that the world could not be like this, that there was love, self-sacrifice and the inconceivable beauty of sights and sounds; yet all this was inaccessible to his senses and, consequently, did not exist.

  It was then that he realized all the unbearable horror of his life.

  *

  He took his meal alone in the enormous dining room, flooded with light, at a table around which twenty people could be seated; he ate several morsels of fish, which gave off some tangy and unfamiliar smell, three spoonfuls of very hot soup, a little meat, from which the reddish juice of anaemic blood unappetizingly trickled out unappetizingly, and a mandarin. Coffee and tea were forbidden him.

  He rose from the table and retired to his study. The rooms were vast, bright and desolate. Silence reigned in the apartment. The thought flashed through his mind that here he was, an elderly man, unneeded by anyone, living alone in a grand apartment, while thousands of people in that same city slept in the streets and under the bridges. Yet the thought was familiar to him and had long since lost its sentimental association, and for that reason represented the purest abstraction.

  Passing through the rooms, he flicked the light switches, turning off the electricity everywhere; and after a while everything was bathed in a deceptive light coming from the street lamps. There was absolute silence. Alexei Stepanovich slowly walked back, from his study into the dining room, in a deathly ennui that seemed inseparable from this pale light, silence and desolation.

  He switched on the wireless and heard a voice announcing that a transmission of a Toscanini c
oncert from the Opéra was about to begin. He sat down in the easy chair, closed his eyes and imperceptibly dozed off; when he awoke, the room was filled with sounds, amid the unforgettable movement of which he immediately recognized the Pastoral Symphony nearing its end. Then the speaker’s voice announced the Danse macabre. Alexei Stepanovich winced and switched off the apparatus; but he regretted it and switched it back on. The piece was all too familiar to him and he did not care for it. He began listening and with incredulity and amazement noted that in Toscanini’s interpretation it sounded totally different, revealing to him things that he had never before known and that now, listening to the Danse macabre for the hundredth time, he understood and perceived anew. When the applause broke out, he hurriedly turned off the radio and, staring fixedly in front of him, thought of Toscanini’s futile genius, the wondrousness of which he now understood just as abstractly and impartially as everything else—and, as with everything else, it was powerless to animate even the slightest part of his soul.

  He again took to wandering about the apartment. From far away, in the street, the occasional sound of automobile horns came to him, as though from the sea. He contemplated this, then with somewhat brightened eyes rang twice. A moment later there was a knock on the study door.

  “Prepare the car,” said Alexei Stepanovich. “I’m leaving for Le Havre in a quarter of an hour.”

  The night was cold and dry. Lying in the quiet vehicle and watching the immobile—as though atop a statue—cap of the chauffeur behind the wheel, Alexei Stepanovich was transported between dream and waking.

  Only at dawn, led by the boy in the hotel to a very well-heated room, did he lie down in bed with disagreeably cold sheets and, awaking every half-hour, lay there until midday; then he went out onto the embankment, watched the tall, cold waves for around half an hour, listened to the hissing of their foam and the noise vanishing amid the water’s infinite surface, froze through, returned to the hotel, summoned the chauffeur again and was back in Paris by evening, in his apartment, where everything had remained just as unalterable, bright and utterly hopeless.