He remembered having the reputation of being a very good and generous man, one who helped everyone who appealed to him for aid. However, that, too, was false: he was, essentially, neither good nor generous. He truly did refuse no one, yet he acted thus because he was vexed by those who would tell him in dreary words of their penurious lives, which held no interest for him in the slightest. He always hastened to terminate these conversations and would gladly give whatever sum they asked for. What was more, he genuinely did not begrudge the money, though not because he was generous, but rather because he could never understand how people could attribute to it such a value that it did not have. He needed money only for the sake of other people—his wife, his children, the employees of his firm, others still, but not for himself.
In the distance, around a bend in the long corridor, the last train rumbled past. Verdier removed from his spot, walked slowly up the stairs and exited onto the Elysian Fields. The watery sleet had now stopped, but there was an icy wind. Dragging his feet along the cold slabs of the pavement, he again began his long peregrination across the city, to that spot where, near the Porte d’Italie, the illuminated places ended, and where the wasteland in which his crate stood loomed black. He walked the familiar road, without looking about him, and continued to ponder those things that had seemingly so long ago been buried and forgotten irretrievably, but which now rose up before him once again. When he was around fifty, and when everything he was obliged to do wearied and vexed him, when even the little that had previously given him a certain satisfaction had vanished—a particular note in the taste of the wine at a restaurant, the feeling of the soft bed he would lie in late at night, that beatific state whenever he felt he was about to fall asleep—it was during this time that he began again to read. Until then, over the course of many years, he would read only newspapers. Now he took to books, those same ones that he had read once upon a time at university and whose contents had then so captivated him. Now they had all changed beyond recognition. Rather, it was not what was in these books that had changed. No, it was far more tragic. The more he read various authors, the more he became convinced that he had lost the ability to comprehend the motivations and emotions that compelled the characters of these works to act in one way or another. Why was it necessary to sacrifice everything in one’s life for the sake of wealth or power? For money had no value, and power engendered tedious obligation. Why wage war? For every war was senseless. Why did Hamlet have to kill Polonius? Why did people go in for privations and death, especially death, which would come all the same, sooner or later, and which it was pointless to precipitate?
Why spend sleepless nights thinking that your beloved has left you for another, and why try to prevent her, for, even if you were to succeed, her presence would no longer carry any value? Why envy and, more importantly, what to envy? This was the only period in his life when his existence had been shattered by something well and truly tragic—for it was then that he sensed everything was over. He would think about this—back then, all those years ago—from dawn till dusk and could not wait for the moment to come when he would be left alone, late in the evening, in his room. When this moment finally did arrive, he lay down on his bed—and suddenly he realized what it was that separated him from the characters of the books he read and from the people around him. He subconsciously compared himself to a tree, of which the trunk remains but the inside of which is rotten, decayed and dead. It seemed to him that his present existence contained something, as if within its essence he carried his own death. To live meant to have desire, to strive for something, to defend something. He had none of this. And yet, he did retain one desire—freedom. But this, too, was worthless. He did not require freedom to do something that was otherwise prohibited or out of reach. What had seemed to him back then a striving for freedom was simply the renunciation of all the many obligations that rested on him, the renunciation of the world in which he lived and in which he found nothing to justify his presence in it or somehow to atone for it.
He had heard and read many times that people would begin life over again, a sort of second, new life. Yet he lacked the strength for this, and what was more, he simply failed to see to what end, to what purpose it was worth beginning something new—that is, those same exertions and obligations all over again. He recalled—for the thousandth time—those factors that impel people to work or great exploits: conceit, aspiration for riches or power, love for a woman, love for one’s country and the desire to benefit it, and, lastly, love for one’s neighbour and the desire to help him or to lighten his burden. Of all these, the only one that seemed worthy to him was love for one’s neighbour. Yet it was impossible to engender this artificially. On the other hand, it was also impossible to continue the life he was leading, in which among the great many obligations the most onerous was that of lying to everyone around him and to everyone in general whom he met. Lying meant pretending that he was the same sort of man as they were, that he was prepared to play his role to the bitter end. It was not easy for him to take that decision that nobody ever understood. He did not know how his life would subsequently turn out. But he did know that he could no longer remain in the world he had inhabited until then.
So now, crossing Paris at night and heading towards his crate, he thought about all this. He found it difficult to walk; there was a ringing in his ears and his legs ached. Amid the cold, clear air of the winter’s night, the lamps appeared to him as hazy, luminous dots. He sat down on a bench and immediately fell asleep. He dreamt that he was walking across a snowy field, through a blizzard, that he felt very cold and that someone’s mocking voice was telling him things that, try as he might, he could not understand, while these sounds and words drew nearer and nearer to him and, at the last second, someone demanded that he repeat the words. He made an effort to take himself in hand and eventually repeated them, forgetting them again in an instant. He awoke and then fell asleep once more. Then he awoke for a second time, got up from the bench and walked on, almost blindly, in the direction he knew so well. He sensed his legs failing him, just as if their bones had become soft; he sensed the ground slip away from under them, but still he kept walking, by dint of a terrific and unconscious fiat of will. Whole hours seemed to go by, until at last he arrived at his crate and collapsed onto the mattress.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that daylight was shining in through the chinks in the boards. He got up, sensing in astonishment that his fatigue of the previous night had passed. Having taken a draught of the cloudy water that was left in the pail, he went outside. The day was grey, warmer than on the previous evening. Everything he had thought of came back to him with phenomenal clarity, and the only thing remaining was to draw some definitive conclusions. But this was the most difficult thing of all. Despite appearances, despite that great distance separating him as he was now from the person he had been before, it was clear that all his life—both then and now—still, in spite of it all, retained some meaning and was marked by a definite pattern. In what he had done, having forsaken his house and become a vagrant, chance, about which he often thought, had played no role whatsoever. “Ruins, corpses and pregnant women.” No, not only those. Apart from them there would still be people—those like him; those who shared none of the common passions, common aspirations that define human life—that is, those who never dream of becoming a general, a marshal, a bishop, a deputy, a banker, an accountant, a Don Juan, a hero, the bearers of unwanted status, those in whom that pale and dying flame that can be extinguished at any moment barely flickers. Here, in essence, is what ought to be said about him and those like him. He was born poor, with no status—that which his father had left him—nor any circumstances—those in which he had lived for so long—could alter this. If there was anything accidental in his life, it was not what was now, but what had come before it: Verdier et fils.
He reached the entrance to the Métro on the Elysian Fields, descended the staircase, took up his usual place and again heard the Boléro. What meaning
did his life have? For the first time it was clear to him: he had fulfilled his purpose on earth. Someone’s higher will—if one were to grant the existence of such a thing, which, of course, could be considered a hypothesis that was in no way proven, though on the other hand, it was just as impossible to prove otherwise—had determined his fate: to elude temptation and passion and to live out on earth his allotted time, like an animal or a plant, until the moment when this life reached its end. “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” Suddenly he saw before him a painting he remembered. He had seen it in Bonn. It showed the Day of Judgement: from a jagged crevice the naked bodies of people emerged into the light, revealed to their waists, while for others the only thing visible was their hands, which they were using to move away the earth covering their graves.
He stood in his usual spot, in the corridor of the Métro, and silently laughed—for the first time in many years. Did they mean to make a respectable citizen of him, a knight of the Legion of Honour? a captain of industry? perhaps a deputy? perhaps even a minister? Not one of them could fathom such a simple truth, that he had once been so infinitely removed from all this, and that this, in whose name people suffered, performed great deeds and committed crimes or plain villainy—that for him all this had ceased to exist. He belonged to another world. He was unlike those around him, and herein lay the meaning of his life. He had asked no one for this life. He had demanded nothing from anyone—neither from that higher will about which he had begun to think in recent days, nor from other people. Yet the world, such as he ought to accept it, and as did the people around him, who found in it some closure and justice—this world was simultaneously hostile and alien to him. He had always felt that there was no room for him there and that there was nothing for him to do among these people. He had been given life, but in it he found nothing that was worth fighting for or that ought to be resisted, nothing that justified any effort. He was content to exist, for there was no other way, and, what was more, no one ever questioned him about this. Yet to press this existence into those confines in which it should have passed—this he could not and would not do.
Never had everything seemed so clear to him as it did now. And with that same clarity he felt the life slowly departing him. It became difficult to breathe, the outlines of objects lost their definition, the colour of the neon tubes in the Métro tunnel began to look grey. Yet he felt no fear, no pity: there was nothing to fear and, of course, nothing at all to regret. In this slow return to non-being there was even some allure, the delight of the unstoppable approach of eternity—of what he had pondered as a child, but had been unable then to imagine. Again night fell, again he left the Métro in order to begin his long journey across Paris anew—perhaps one of his last, he mused. Yet having taken several steps, he once again felt the iron band squeeze his chest with a more merciless force than he had ever before experienced. He wanted to cry out but could not; then everything slipped away and vanished. He did not notice how they lifted him up, how they placed him in the ambulance, how they drove him to the hospital.
For several days he was delirious, since it turned out that, quite beside everything else, he had pneumonia, accompanied by a high temperature. Strains of the Boléro hazily came to him, broken suddenly by powerful trumpet calls whose significance he could not comprehend. The doctor who approached his bed the following morning stopped and listened in amazement: the old beggar, who yesterday had been lifted up off the street, was talking as though he were arguing with an imaginary acquaintance. Yet he was speaking in a very pure and correct English. When he recovered his senses, on the third day, the doctor asked him:
“How is it that you know English?”
Verdier looked at him with his inexpressive, extinguished eyes and replied that he had graduated from university in England.
“In England,” said the doctor. “So that’s it.”
In the dead of night, Verdier, registered as number forty-four, awoke because he thought that somebody’s commanding voice was calling him. The patient got up from his bed, stood on the stone floor in his bare feet, took several steps, collapsed and died.
However, in those intervening twenty-four hours that separated the morning of the day when the doctor had asked the patient how it was that he had come by his knowledge of English and the subsequent morning, a colossal administrative machine had been set in motion, and what no one had suspected until now became known. In one of the evening papers an article was printed in which everything was explained: Verdier’s nervous attack, which had been accompanied by a loss of memory, and his sudden disappearance. It was suggested that he had spent many years abroad and had returned to France only after the sudden remembrance of everything that had foregone his mental illness.
Thereafter, Verdier’s body was claimed by his heirs. A solemn funeral took place, and Verdier was laid to rest in the family crypt. His name was written in gold letters on a duskily glittering slab of dark-grey marble. The consummation of his life was externally exactly as it ought to be, and this was, ultimately, a victory for the world he had renounced a quarter of a century previously. It could be termed a victory for that world—but only if one were to concede that the meaning of the word “victory” outgrows the boundaries of human life, penetrating where there are no boundaries, no life, no meaning, no words.
IVANOV’S LETTERS
(1963)
WHENEVER I MET Nikolai Franzevich, which happened every two or three weeks, I would always have the impression that this man, judging by his nature, by his manner of speaking, by the way he dressed and by his whole demeanour, was a living anachronism, though in the most positive sense of the word. It appeared that he, having been born and raised during the days of the Russian Empire, had remained just as he was back then, and the fact that imperial Russia had long since receded into the past did not in any way tell on him. In terms of his convictions, however, he was no conservative; he avoided speaking of politics, read contemporary authors, attended exhibitions of contemporary painting, listened to music by contemporary composers, though his views on all this were distinguished by a rather emphatic academicism. Of course, there could be nothing more primitive at first sight than some works of so-called abstract painting, but in their own right these searches for a new form in art were an entirely natural thing. The same also applies to contemporary music, which not infrequently sets our teeth on edge. Perhaps we are witnesses to the rebirth of taste, a change of tempo, some, if you will, biological shock whose manifestation sometimes takes on a form that seems controversial to us, or even downright inadmissible. Yet the interchange of styles from a historical perspective is ultimately not only an inevitable phenomenon, but also a rightful one.
Nikolai Franzevich arose in my memory as a character from some unwritten book, as a figment, blatantly the product of someone’s imagination, depicted in some detail, but in whom the unknown author had not succeeded in imbuing a real life, which was why this protagonist seemed somewhat artificial, hypothetical and unfinished in the sense that he lacked that day-to-day credibility that any washerwoman or accountant had. I cannot say what explained this impression I was unable to shake, all the more so since there was nothing so far-fetched about Nikolai Franzevich. I had the feeling that he never told the whole story, or else was hiding something, although he seemingly had nothing to hide. Never has the word “seemingly” been so used in relation to a person as it was to him. He was seemingly from some province in the north. He had seemingly once lived in the Near East. He was married, seemingly. He had seemingly been a man of great wealth in his day. He seemingly wrote articles on economic matters. He had seemingly completed his education abroad.
The Beggar and Other Stories Page 12
