Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Bely, Andrei

  And again he threw himself forward, and again the red reflections slipped forward.

  Now the zemstvo official, puffing and panting, began to retreat.

  Suddenly he waved his arm; and he turned; quickly he began, God knows why, to return whence he had come, where the azure electric light shone, where in the azure electric light the professor of statistics stood with his pulled-up frockcoat, showing mistily through the flocks of tobacco smoke; but the zemstvo official was nearly knocked off his feet by an onrushing swarm of young ladies: their ribbons fluttered, party forfeits fluttered in the air and knees rustled.

  This twittering swarm had come running out to look at the masker who had dropped by; but the twittering swarm stopped at the door, and its merry exclamations suddenly seemed to become a barely breathing rustle; at last this rustle grew silent; heavy was the silence. Suddenly behind the young ladies’ backs an insolent young cadet declaimed:

  Who art thou, art thou, guest forbidding,

  Fateful domino?

  Look now – swathed in cape of crimson

  He doth come and go.15

  And on the lacquers, on the lights and above the ripple of his own reflections the domino seemed to run dolefully to the side, and the wind from the open window whistled on the bright satin in an icy blast; poor domino: as if he had been exposed in the act of some offence – he kept leaning forward his outstretched silhouette; his red-rustling arm stretched forward, as though imploring them all not to drive him out of this house back into the Petersburg slush, imploring them not to drive him out of this house back into the cruel and damp fog.

  And the young cadet faltered.

  ‘Tell us, domino: are you the one who rushes about the prospects of Petersburg?’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, have you read today’s “Diary of Events”?’

  ‘What if we have?’

  ‘Oh, the red domino has been seen again …’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is foolishness.’

  The lonely domino continued to say nothing.

  Suddenly one of the young ladies at the front, the one who, with head inclined, had narrowed her eyes severely at the unexpected guest – began to whisper something expressively to her female friend.

  ‘Foolishness …’

  ‘No, no: I don’t feel quite myself …’

  ‘I suppose the cat has got the dear domino’s tongue: but he is a domino …’

  ‘There isn’t really anything we can do with him …’

  ‘But he is a domino!’

  The lonely domino continued to say nothing.

  ‘Would you like some tea and sandwiches?’

  ‘What about this, would you like this?’

  Having thus exclaimed, the young cadet, turning round, threw at the domino, over the motley-coloured heads of the young ladies, a rustling stream of confetti.16 In the air the arc of a paper streamer unwound for an instant; and when the end of it struck the masker with a dry crack, the arc of paper, coiling, lost momentum and sank to the floor; and to this amusing joke the domino made no reaction, merely stretched out his arms, imploring them not to drive him out of this house into the Petersburg street, imploring them not to drive him out of this house into the cruel and thick fog.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let us go back inside …’

  And the swarm of young ladies ran away.

  Only the one who had been standing closer than anyone else to the domino tarried for a moment; she measured the domino with a compassionate gaze; for some reason she sighed, then turned and went; and again turned round, and again said to herself:

  ‘All the same … It’s … it’s somehow not right.’

  A Dried-up Little Figure

  This was, of course, still him: Nikolai Apollonovich. He had come there today to say – to say what?

  He had himself forgotten; forgotten his own thoughts; and forgotten his hopes; had revelled in his own predestined role: a godlike, impassive creature had flown off somewhere; there remained a naked passion, and the passion had become a poison. The feverish poison penetrated his brain, pouring invisibly out of his eyes like a fiery cloud, entwining him in clinging, blood-red satin: it was as if he now looked at everything with a charred countenance out of the fires that baked his body, and the charred countenance turned into a black mask, while the fires that baked his body turned into red silk. He had now truly become a buffoon, an outrageous and red one (as she had once called him). Revengefully did this buffoon now violate some truth – was it his own, or hers? – perfidiously and keenly; yet again: did he love or hate?

  It was as though he had been casting a spell on her all these last days, stretching cold hands out of the windows of the yellow house, stretching cold hands from the granite into the fog of the Neva. He wanted to seize, while loving, the mental image he had summoned up, he wanted, while taking revenge on her, to strangle the silhouette that fluttered somewhere; that was why all these days cold hands had stretched out of space into space, that was why all these days some kind of unearthly confessions had whispered out of space into her ears, some kind of whistling invocations of disaster and some kind of wheezing passions; that was why incoherent whistlings sounded in her ears, while the crimson of the leaves chased beneath her feet the rustling alluvial deposits of words.

  That was why he had just come to that house: but she, the traitress, was not there; and in a corner he reflected. In the fog it was as if he saw the surprised, venerable zemstvo official; as if somewhere in the distance, in the labyrinth of mirrors, before him the figures of the laughing young ladies floated past like unsteady blobs; and when out of this labyrinth from the cold, greenish surface the distant echoes of questions with a paper serpent of confetti assailed him, he was surprised in the way that people marvel in dreams: was surprised at the emergence into the bright world before him of a reflection that was not real; but at the same time as he looked on them all as vacillating reflections that raced about in a dream, those reflections evidently took him for an apparition from the other world; and as an apparition from the other world, he drove them all away.

  Then once again distant echoes drifted to him, and he turned slowly: both vaguely and dimly – somewhere over there, somewhere over there – a dried-up little figure, without hair, without whiskers, without eyebrows, quickly traversed the ballroom. Nikolai Apollonovich could with difficulty make out the details of the little figure that had flown into the ballroom – the strain to his vision through the slits of the mask gave him a pain in his eyes (apart from everything else, he suffered from short-sightedness), and only the contours of the greenish ears stood out – somewhere over there, somewhere over there. There was in all this something familiar, something near and alive, and Nikolai Apollonovich jerkily, in oblivion, rushed over to the little figure in order to see it at close quarters; but the little figure jerked back, seemed even to clutch at its heart, ran away, and was now looking at him. Great was Nikolai Apollonovich’s amazement: right there before him stood a kindred face; it seemed to him covered in wrinkles that had eaten away at cheeks, forehead, chin and nose; from a distance one might have taken that face for the face of a Skopets, more young than old; but close to this was a feeble, sickly old man, conspicuous by his barely noticeable side-whiskers; in a word – under his nose Nikolai Apollonovich saw his father. Apollon Apollonovich, fingering the rings of his watch chain, fixed his eyes in poorly concealed fear at the satin domino who had so unexpectedly assailed him. In these blue eyes flickered something like a surmise; Nikolai Apollonovich felt an unpleasant shiver, for it was uncanny to look brazenly from behind the mask at that impassive gaze before which at ordinary times he lowered his eyes with incomprehensible diffidence; yes, it was uncanny now in that gaze to read fear, and a kind of helpless, sickly senility; and the surmise, quickly flickering past, was read as the answer to a riddle: Nikolai Apollonovich thought he had been recognized. This was not the case: Apollon Apollonovich simply thought that some clumsy prankster was terrorizing him, the courtier, wi
th the symbolic colour of his brilliant cape.

  All the same, he began to feel his own pulse. Nikolai Apollonovich had on several occasions recently noticed this gesture of the senatorial fingers, which was made in stealth (the senator’s heart was evidently growing tired of functioning). Seeing this same gesture now, he felt something that resembled pity; and involuntarily he stretched his red-rustling arms to his father; as if he were imploring his father not to run away from him gasping in a bout of palpitations of the heart, as if he were imploring his father to forgive him for all his past sins. But Apollon Apollonovich had continued to feel his pulse with his trembling fingers and was now running away in the throes of palpitations – somewhere over there, somewhere over there …

  Suddenly the doorbell rang: the whole room was filled with maskers; a black row of Capuchins burst in, the black Capuchins quickly formed a chain around their red confrère and began to dance some kind of dance around him; their satin skirts fluttered and coiled; the tops of their hoods flew up and fell uproariously back again; but on the chest of each a skull and crossbones was embroidered; and the skulls danced in time.

  Then the red domino, defending himself, ran out of the ballroom; the black flock of Capuchins chased after him with loud laughter; thus did they fly along the wide corridor and into the dining-room; all who sat at the table began to bang their plates in welcome.

  ‘Capuchins, maskers, clowns.’

  Flocks of mother-of-pearl pink and heliotrope young ladies leapt up from their seats, and so did hussars, law students, students. Nikolai Petrovich Tsukatov jumped up on the spot with a goblet of Rhine wine, bellowing out his thunderous vivat in honour of the strange company.

  And then someone observed:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is too much …’

  But he was hauled off to dance.

  In the ballroom the pianist, arching his spine, had begun to set his fluffed-up quiff of hair dancing over his fingers that raced over the keys, pouring out runs; the treble danced all over the place and the bass sluggishly ground into motion.

  And looking with an innocent smile at a black Capuchin who whirled his satin cape with an especially brazen movement, an angel-like creature in a little violet skirt suddenly leaned over the opening of his hood (a mask stared her in the face); and with her hand the creature seized hold of the hump of a striped clown, one of whose legs (it was blue) flew into the air, while the other (it was red) bent down to the parquetry; but the creature was not afraid; she gathered up her hem, and from thence thrust forth a little silvery dancing shoe.

  And off they went – one, two, three …

  And after them went the Spanish lasses, the monks and the devils; the harlequins, the pelisses, the fans, the exposed backs, the scarves of silver laminae; above them all, swaying, danced a lanky palm tree.

  Only over there, solitary, leaning against the window-sill, between the lowered greenish curtains, Apollon Apollonovich gasped in a paroxysm of his heart trouble, the extent of which not a single person knew.

  Pompadour

  Angel Peri stood in front of the dim oval mirror that was ever so slightly deflected: everything disappeared down into there and grew dim down there: the ceiling, the walls and the floor; and she herself disappeared down there, into the depth, the greenish dimness; and there, there – out of the fountain of objects and the muslin – lace foam there was now emerging a beautiful woman with luxuriantly fluffed hair and a beauty-spot on her cheek: Madame Pompadour!

  Her hair, which curled in ringlets and was only just held together by a ribbon, was grey as snow, and the powder-puff was frozen above the powder-box in such slender little fingers; her tautly drawn-in, pale azure waist bent just so slightly to the left with a black mask in her hand; from her tightly cut corsage, like living pearls, breathing, her breasts showed mistily, while from her tight, rustling sleeves Valenciennes lace surged quietly in airy folds; and everywhere, everywhere around her décolletage, below the décolletage, surged that lace; beneath her corsage the flounces of the panniered skirt, which looked as though it had risen above the languorous breathing of zephyrs, rocked and played, and it shone with a garland of silver grasses in the form of airy festoons; below that were those same little dancing shoes; and on each of the little shoes a pompon showed silver. But it was strange: in this attire she seemed suddenly older and less attractive; instead of small rosy lips, she had indecently red ones that pouted, and they spoiled her little face, those too-heavy lips; and when she looked askance, for a moment there was something witch-like about Madame Pompadour: at that moment she hid the letter in the slit of her corsage.

  At this same moment Mavrushka came running into the room holding a staff of light-coloured wood with a gold handle, from which ribbons fluttered: but when Madame Pompadour stretched out her little hand in order to take this staff, what proved to be in her hand was a note from her husband; it said: ‘If you go out this evening, you will never return to my house again. Sergei Sergeyevich Likhutin.’

  That note related not to her, Madame Pompadour, of course, but to Sofya Petrovna Likhutina, and Madame Pompadour smiled at the note contemptuously; she looked fixedly at the mirror, at the depth, the greenish dimness: there far, far away a gentle ripple seemed to rush; suddenly out of that depth and greenish dimness some sort of waxen face seemed to thrust itself into the crimson light of the vermilion lampshade; and she turned round.

  Behind her shoulders motionlessly stood her husband, the officer; but again she laughed contemptuously, and raising her panniered skirt slightly by the festoons, she floated smoothly away from him in curtsies; a quietly flowing zephyr carried her away from him, and her crinoline rustled, swaying like a bell in the zephyr’s sweet currents; and when she was in the doorway, she turned to face him, and with her hand, on which a satin mask dangled, she thumbed her nose at the officer, smiling slyly as she did so; then outside the door a peal of laughter resounded and the innocent exclamation:

  ‘Mavrushka, my coat!’

  Then Sergei Sergeich Likhutin, second lieutenant in His Majesty’s Gregorian Regiment, white as death, completely calm, ironically smiling, skipped along after the graceful mask and then, with a click of his spurs, stood deferentially with the fur coat in his hand; with even greater deference did he throw the coat about her shoulders, opened wide the door and courteously pointed outside – into the dark-coloured dark; and when, rustling, she passed into that darkness, turning up her little face at such a humble service, the humble servant, with a click of his spurs, made her another low bow. The dark-coloured darkness surged over her – surged from all sides: it flooded her rustling outlines; for a long time something went on rustling and rustling, out there on the steps of the staircase. The outer door banged shut; then Sergei Sergeich Likhutin, still with the same abrupt gestures, began to walk about everywhere and everywhere put out the electric lights.

  A Fateful Event

  The ballroom pianist elegantly broke off his musical dance with a thunderous stab in the bass, while with his other hand he turned a page of music with an expert movement; but at that moment Nikolai Petrovich Tsukatov suddenly thrust his smoothly shaven chin out of his raging side-whiskers, swiftly rushing out in front of the couples over the highlights of the parquetry, impetuously drawing after him a helpless creature:

  ‘Pas-de-quatre, s’il vous plaît! …’

  ‘Come with me,’ said some kind of Madame Pompadour to Nikolai Apollonovich importunately, and Nikolai Apollonovich, who had not recognized Madame Pompadour, reluctantly gave her his hand; and, glancing with a barely visible smile at her red cavalier, with a peculiarly fierce movement of her upturned mask, Madame Pompadour stretched her hand forward and helplessly placed it on the domino’s hand; while with her other hand, with its quivering fan and covering of kid glove, Madame Pompadour gathered up her hem of azure mists, and from it, with a rustle, a silvery dancing shoe was thrust the merest way.

  And off they went, off they went.

  One, two, three – and the g
esture of a foot beneath a backward-flexed waist.

  ‘Do you recognize me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you still looking for someone?’

  One, two, three – and again a flexing, and again a little shoe was thrust forth.

  ‘I have a letter for you.’

  And behind the first couple – the domino and the marquise – came harlequins, Spanish girls, young ladies as pale as mother-of-pearl, law students, hussars and helpless muslin creatures; fans, bare shoulders, silvery backs and scarves.

  Suddenly one of the red domino’s hands seized hold of her slender, azure waist, and his other hand, taking her hand, felt a letter in it: at that same moment the dark green, black and cloth-covered arms of all the couples, and the red arms of the hussars seized all the slender waists of the heliotrope, gris-de-perle, rustling female partners, in order again, again and again to whirl in some turns of the waltz.

  Flying out in front of them all, the grey-haired host bellowed at the couples:

  ‘A vos places!’

  And after him flew a helpless adolescent.

  Apollon Apollonovich

  Apollon Apollonovich had recovered from his palpitations; Apollon Apollonovich looked into the depths of the enfilade of rooms; hidden in the dark curtains, he stood unnoticed by anyone; he was trying to get away from the curtains in such a way that his appearance in the drawing-room would not betray the strange behaviour of a government official. Apollon Apollonovich tried to conceal the paroxysm of his heart trouble from everyone; but it would have been even more unpleasant for him to admit that this evening’s attack had been caused by the appearance before him of the red domino: the colour red was, of course, an emblem of the chaos that was leading Russia to ruin; but he did not want to admit that the domino’s preposterous desire to frighten him had any political tinge.

  And Apollon Apollonovich was ashamed of his fear.