Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Bely, Andrei

  The flow of time ceased to exist: for thousands of millions of years matter had ripened in the spirit; but he conceived a thirst to tear apart time itself; and now all was being destroyed.

  ‘Father!’

  ‘You wanted to blow me to pieces; and so all is being destroyed.’

  ‘Not you, but …’

  ‘Too late: birds, animals, people, history, the world – everything is tumbling down, collapsing on to Saturn …’

  Everything was falling on to Saturn; the atmosphere outside the windows was growing darker, blacker, everything had reverted to its ancient, incandescent state, expanding without limit, bodies ceased to be bodies; everything was whirling backwards – whirling horribly.

  ‘Cela … tourne …’ Nikolai Apollonovich began to roar in the most complete horror, having now finally lost his body, but without having noticed it …

  ‘No … Sa … tourne …’

  Having lost his body, he none the less felt his body: a certain invisible centre, which had previously been both consciousness and ‘I’, turned out to possess a semblance of that previous, incinerated past; the premisses of Nikolai Apollonovich’s logic were wrapped in bones; the syllogisms around these bones were suddenly wrapped in tough sinews; while the contents of logical activity were covered by both flesh and skin; thus Nikolai Apollonovich’s ‘I’ again displayed a corporeal image, even though it was not a body; and in this non-body (the exploded ‘I’) an alien ‘I’ was revealed: this ‘I’ had come racing from Saturn and had returned to Saturn.

  He sat facing his father (as he had been sitting earlier) – without a body, but in a body (there was a strange thing!): outside the windows of his study, in the most utter darkness, a loud muttering could be heard: ‘tourne – tourne – tourne’.

  The chronology of the years was running backwards.

  ‘And what sort of chronology do we have anyway?’

  But Saturn, Apollon Apollonovich, bursting into loud laughter, replied:

  ‘None, Kolenka, none: our chronology, my dear boy, is zero …’

  The dreadful contents of Nikolai Apollonovich’s soul whirled restlessly (in the place where his heart ought to be), like a humming top: swelled up and expanded; and it seemed: the dreadful contents of his soul – a round zero – were turning into an agonizing sphere; it seemed: here was the logic – his bones would be blown to pieces.

  It was the Last Judgement.

  ‘Ai, ai, ai: what then is “I am”?’

  ‘I am? Zero …’

  ‘Well, and zero?’

  ‘That, Kolenka, is a bomb …’

  Nikolai Apollonovich realized that he was only a bomb; and he burst with a bang: from the place where Nikolai Apollonovich’s likeness had just emerged from the armchair and where now some kind of wretched broken shell (like an eggshell) was visible, a lightning-bearing zigzag rushed, falling into the black waves of aeons …

  At this point Nikolai Apollonovich woke up from his dream; with a tremble he realized that his head was resting on the sardine tin.

  And leapt to his feet: a terrible dream … But what was it? He could not remember the dream; the nightmares of his childhood had returned: Pépp Péppovich Pépp, who swelled up from a little ball into a mighty colossus, had evidently decided to lie quiet for the time being – in the sardine tin; his old childish hallucinations were returning, because –

  – Pépp Péppovich Pépp, the little ball with dreadful contents, is quite simply a Party bomb: there it inaudibly chatters with its hands and second hand; Pépp Péppovich Pépp will grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And Pépp Péppovich Pépp is going to burst: everything is going to burst …

  ‘What, am I delirious?’

  In his head again with horrifying swiftness began to whirl: but what was he to do? There was quarter of an hour left: should he give the key another turn?

  He had already turned the small key twenty times; and twenty times something had hoarsely croaked in there, inside the little tin: for a short time his old hallucinations had gone away, so that morning could be morning, and afternoon could be afternoon, evening could be evening; at the end of the coming night, however, no movement of a key would be able to postpone anything: something would happen that would make the walls collapse, and the purple-illumined heavens blow into pieces, mingling with splattered blood into a single dim, primordial darkness.

  END OF THE FIFTH CHAPTER

  Chapter the Sixth

  in which the events of a rather grey little day are related

  Behind him always the Bronze Horseman came

  Galloping with heavy clatter.1

  A. Pushkin

  Once again the Thread of His Existence Was Found

  It was a dim Petersburg morning.

  Now let us return to Aleksandr Ivanovich; Aleksandr Ivanovich had woken up; Aleksandr Ivanovich half opened his stuck-together eyes: the events of the night fled – into the subconscious world; his nerves had come unstrung; the night for him was an event of gigantic proportions.

  The transitional state between waking and sleep was throwing him somewhere: as though he were jumping out of the window from the fifth floor; his sensations were opening a howling breach for him in this world; he was flying into this breach, shooting through into a teeming world of which it is insufficient to say that within it substances similar to furies launched attacks: the very fabric of the world appeared to him as a fabric of furies.

  Only when it was very nearly morning did Aleksandr Ivanovich begin to master this world; and then he landed in bliss; the awakening flung him rapidly down from there; he felt sorry about something, and as he did so his whole body both ached and throbbed.

  In the first moment after his awakening he noticed that he was shaking with a most intense ague; all night he had tossed about: something must have happened … Only, what was it?

  His delirious running through the misty prospects, or up and down the steps of a mysterious staircase, had lasted all the long night; or, more correctly, fever had done the running: through his veins; his memory was telling him something, but his memory was slipping away; and he was unable to connect anything with his memory.

  It was all – fever.

  Frightened in earnest now (in his loneliness Aleksandr Ivanovich was afraid of illnesses), he thought that it would do him no harm to stay at home.

  With this thought he began to drift off into oblivion; and, as he did so, he thought:

  ‘I ought to take some quinine.’

  He fell asleep.

  And waking up, added:

  ‘And strong tea …’

  And reflecting again, to this he added:

  ‘With dried raspberries …’

  He thought about the fact that he had passed all these recent days with a thoughtlessness that was impermissible in his situation; this thoughtlessness seemed all the more shameful to him because days of enormous and heavy import were approaching.

  In spite of himself, he sighed.

  ‘And I ought also to – strictly stay off the vodka … Not read the Revelations … Not go down and see the yardkeeper … And also those talks I’ve been having with Styopka who lives at the yardkeeper’s: I shouldn’t talk to Styopka …’

  At first these thoughts of raspberry tea, vodka, Styopka and the Revelations of St John calmed him, reducing the events of the night to the most utter nonsense.

  But, having washed in icy cold water from the tap with the help of a wretched scrap of soap and a yellow soapy slush, Aleksandr Ivanovich again felt an onrush of nonsense.

  He cast his gaze around his twenty-five rouble room (an attic lodging).

  What a miserable abode it was!

  The principal adornment of the miserable abode was the bed; the bed consisted of four cracked boards, put together any old how on a wooden trestle; conspicuous on the cracked surface of this trestle were nasty dried, dark red spots, which had probably been made by bedbugs, since Aleksandr Ivanovich had been stubbornly struggling with these dark red spots fo
r many months with the aid of insect powder.2

  The trestle was covered by a thin little mattress stuffed with bast; on top of the mattress, over one single dirty sheet, Aleksandr Ivanovich had carefully thrown a small knitted blanket which could hardly have been called striped: the meagre hints here of some blue and red stripes that had once existed were covered by deposits of grey, which had, however, appeared in all probability not as a result of dirt, but of many years of active use; with this gift from someone (his mother, perhaps) Aleksandr Ivanovich was still somehow loath to part; he was, perhaps, loath to part with it because of an absence of means (it had even been with him to the Yakutsk region and back).

  In addition to the bed … yes: here I must say: above the bed hung a small icon depicting Serafim of Sarov’s3 thousand nights of prayer amidst the pine trees, on a stone (here I must say – Aleksandr Ivanovich wore a small silver cross under his shirt).

  In addition to the bed one could observe a small, smoothly planed table that was deprived of all ornament: tables precisely such as this figure in the aspect of stands for wash-bowls – in cheap country dachas; tables precisely such as this are sold everywhere at markets on Sundays; this table served Aleksandr Ivanovich in his abode at once as a writing desk and as a bedside table; while the wash-bowl was altogether absent; in performing his toilet Aleksandr Ivanovich took advantage of the services of a water tap, a sink and a sardine tin that contained a scrap of Kazan soap floating in its own slime; there was also a clothes-rack: with trousers; the tip of a worn-down shoe gazed out from under the bed with its perforated toe (Aleksandr Ivanovich had dreamed that this perforated shoe was a living creature: a domestic creature, perhaps, like a dog or a cat; it shuffled around independently, creeping about the room and rustling in the corners; when Aleksandr Ivanovich was about to feed it a piece of white bread he had chewed in his mouth, the shuffling creature had bitten him on the finger with its perforated opening, and then he had woken up).

  There was also a brown suitcase that had long ago altered its original shape, and contained objects of the most dreadful contents.

  All the furnishings of the room, if such it may be called, faded into the background before the colour of the wallpaper, unpleasant and brazen, neither quite dark yellow nor quite dark brown, showing enormous stains of damp: in the evenings a woodlouse crawled now over this stain, now over another. All the furnishings of the room were shrouded in bands of tobacco smoke. One had to smoke for at least twelve hours non-stop in order to turn the colourless atmosphere into a dark grey, dark blue one.

  Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin surveyed his abode, and was again (as had previously happened) seized by a yearning to get out of the smoke-steeped room – away: yearned for the street, for the grimy fog, in order to adhere, to be glued, to be fused with shoulders, with backs, with greenish faces on a Petersburg prospect and to show his solid, enormous, grey face and shoulder.

  Swarms of the October mists were greenly clinging to the window of his room; Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin felt an uncontainable desire to be permeated by the fog, to permeate his thoughts in it in order to drown in it the nonsense that chattered in his brain, to extinguish it by flashes of delirium that emerged in fiery spheres (the spheres later burst), extinguish it by means of a gymnastics of striding legs; he had to stride – to stride again, again and again; from prospect to prospect, from street to street; to stride until his brain grew completely numb, until he flopped down at the table of an eating-house and scorched himself inside with vodka. Only in this aimless wandering through the streets and crooked lanes – under the street lamps, the fences, the chimneys – can the thoughts that oppress the soul be extinguished.

  As he put on his wretched little coat, Aleksandr Ivanovich felt his ague; and with melancholy he thought:

  ‘Oh, now I could do with some quinine!’

  But where would he get quinine …

  And, as he went down the staircase, he again thought with melancholy:

  ‘Oh, now I could do with some strong tea with dried raspberries! …’

  The Staircase

  The staircase!

  Threatening, shadowy, damp – it had pitilessly echoed his shuffling step: threatening, shadowy, damp! That had been last night. Here Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin for the first time remembered that he really had passed this way yesterday: it had happened. But what had happened?

  What?

  Yes: from every door – a disastrous silence was expanding at him; it enlarged without measure and kept forming some kind of rustlings; and without measure, without cease the unknown cretin there swallowed his own spittle with viscous distinctness (that had not been in a dream, either); there were terrible, unfamiliar sounds, all woven from the hollow groanings of the ages; from above, through the narrow windows, one could see – and he did see it – how the gloom there from time to time swept past, whipped up into ragged outlines, and how everything was illumined, when a pale, dim turquoise spread itself at his feet without a single sound, in order to lie untrembling and dead.

  There – to there: there the moon was gazing.

  But the swarms kept rushing: swarm after swarm – shaggy-maned, transparent and smoky, thunder-bringing – all the swarms hurled themselves at the moon: the pale, dim turquoise grew dark; from all sides shadow burst out, shadow kept covering everything.

  Here for the first time Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin remembered how yesterday he had run up this staircase, exerting his last fading energies and without any hope (what hope?) of overcoming – what, precisely? While some kind of black outline (was this really real?) kept running for all it was worth – at his heels, on his track.

  And was annihilating him irrevocably.

  The staircase!

  On a grey weekday it is peaceful, everyday; down at the bottom a hollow banging reverberates: that is someone chopping cabbage – the tenant in flat number four has set up in the cabbage trade for the winter; on an ordinary day this is what it looks like – railings, doors, stairs; on the railings: a cat-smelling, half-torn, worn-through carpet – from flat number four; a floor-polisher with a swollen cheek was beating it with a carpet-beater; and some blonde hussy or other, sneezing into her apron from the dust, as she comes out of the door; between the floor-polisher and the hussy, of their own accord, words emerge:

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Give us a hand, then, dearie …’

  ‘Stepanida Markovna … What else have you brought out here …’

  ‘All right, all right …’

  ‘And what sort of …’

  ‘Now it’s “brought out here”, and in there it’s “having your tea” …’

  ‘And what sort of – I say – work is it …’

  ‘At the meeting you wouldn’t loaf about: the work would go swimmingly …’

  ‘Don’t you say bad things about the meeting. You’ll be grateful to them later on!’

  ‘Then give this feather mattress a beating, oh, you – knight in armour!’

  The doors!

  That one, there; and that one there … The oilcloth has been ripped off that one; the horsehair bulges shaggily out of the holes; while on this door a card has been fixed with a pin; and on it is written ‘Zakatalkin’ … Who Zakatalkin is, what his first name, what his patronymic, what profession he practises – I leave it to the curious to judge: ‘Zakatalkin’ – and that is all.

  From behind the door the bow of a violin diligently saws out a familiar little tune. And a voice is heard:

  ‘To the beloved fatherland …’

  I suppose Zakatalkin is a violinist employed in service: a violinist from the little orchestra of some restaurant.

  That is all that can be noticed from an observation of the doors … Yes – one more thing: in former years a tub was placed near the door, which gave off a rancid smell: for filling with water from the water cart: with the installation of water the water carts have gone out of use in the cities.

  The stairs?

  They are strewn with cucumber rinds, sp
lashes of street dirt and eggshells …

  And, Tearing Himself Free, Broke into a Run

  Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin cast his gaze about the staircase, the floor-polisher and the hussy, who was trudging out of the doorway with another feather mattress; and – it was a strange thing: the everyday simplicity of this staircase did not dispel what had been experienced here the night before; and now, in broad daylight, amidst the stairs, the eggshells, the floor-polisher and the cat, which was devouring a chicken entrail on the window sill, to Aleksandr Ivanovich returned the sense of fear he had once experienced before: all that had happened to him during the past night really happened; and tonight what had really happened would return: he would return at night: the staircase would be shadowing and threatening; some kind of black outline would again dog his heels behind the door with the card that read ‘Zakatalkin’ there would again be the cretin’s swallowing of spittle (perhaps – of spittle, but perhaps – of blood) …

  And the familiar, impossible words would resound with utter distinctness:

  ‘Yes, yes, yes … It is I … I annihilate irrevocably …’

  Where had he heard that?

  Out of here! To the street! …

  He must start striding again, keep striding, striding away: until his strength was completely exhausted, until his brain was completely numb and then flop down at the table of an eating-house, so that he should not dream of murky phantoms; and then resume his old activity: trudging through Petersburg, losing himself in the damp reeds, in the hanging mists of the seashore, to turn his back on everything in torpor and to regain consciousness amidst the damp lights of the Petersburg suburbs.

  Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin was about to go trotting off down the many-staired stone staircase; but suddenly stopped; he had noticed that some strange fellow in a black Italian cloak and a similarly fantastically turned-down hat, striding three steps at a time, was hurtling towards him, his head bowed low, and desperately twirling a heavy cane in his hand.