Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Bely, Andrei

  To drop the candelabra … Squatting down, to shiver beside the hole in the October wind that was blowing through the hole (all the window-panes had been smashed by the noise); and – to shiver, to pull his nightshirt around him, until a compassionate lackey –

  – perhaps, the valet, the very man on whom soon afterwards it would be easiest to unload the blame (shadows would fall on him of their own accord) –

  – until the compassionate lackey dragged him into the adjacent room and forcibly poured cold water into his mouth …

  But, getting up from the floor, to see: –

  beneath his feet that same dark-red stickiness that had splashed here after the loud noise; it had splashed out of the hole with a shred of torn-off skin … (from which part of the body?). To lift his gaze – and see above him, sticking to the wall …

  Brr! … Then suddenly to faint.

  To play out the comedy to the end.

  Only twenty-four hours later, before the tightly nailed-up coffin (for there was nothing to bury) – before the coffin to rap out an Acathistus,4 leaning over a candle in a uniform jacket with a close-fitting waist.

  Only two days later, his freshly-shaven, marble, godlike countenance tucked away in the fur of his Nikolayevka, to pass to the hearse, outside in the street, with the air of an innocent angel; and to clutch his service cap in white kid-gloved fingers, proceed sorrowfully to the cemetery in the company of that whole exalted retinue … behind a heap of flowers (behind the coffin). Goldchested, white-trousered little old men would drag that heap of flowers up the staircase in their trembling hands – with swords and ribbons.

  The heap would be dragged by eight little bald old men!

  And – yes, yes!

  To give evidence at the inquest, but of a kind that … would all the same cast a shadow … on whomever it might be (not intentionally, of course) …; and a shadow must be cast – a shadow on whomever it might be; if not – the shadow would fall on him … How could it be otherwise?

  The shadow would be cast.

  Silly little simpleton

  Kolenka is dancing:

  He has put his dunce-cap on –

  On his horse he’s prancing.

  And it became clear to him: that very moment when Nikolai Apollonovich was heroically dooming himself to be the executioner of a death penalty – a death penalty in the name of an idea (so he thought), that moment, and nothing else, was the creator of such a plan, and not the grey prospect along which he had rushed all morning; action in the name of an idea was combined, however agitated he had been, with infernally cold-blooded dissembling and, perhaps, with slander: the slander of the most innocent persons (most convenient of all was the valet: after all, he received visits from his nephew, who was a pupil at a vocational school, and, it seemed, not a member of the Party, but … all the same …)

  There was none the less calculation in his cold-bloodedness. A lie had been added to parricide, and so had cowardice; but, above all, so had – baseness.

  Noble, slender, pale,

  Hair like flax has he;

  Rich in thought, in feeling poor

  N.A.A. – who can he be?

  He was a scoundrel …

  All that had happened during these past two days was facts, where the fact was a monster: a heap of facts, or rather, a pack of monsters; before these two days there had been no facts; and no monsters had pursued him. Nikolai Apollonovich had slept, read, eaten: had even lusted: after Sofya Petrovna; in a word: it had all flowed within bounds.

  But – but! …

  He had not eaten as others do, had not loved as others do; not as others do, had he experienced lust: his dreams had been heavy and obtuse; while his food had seemed to lack savour, the lust he had felt after the scene on the bridge had assumed a most absurd tinge – of mockery with the help of the domino; and besides: he hated his father. There was something that was dragging itself behind him, that cast a peculiar light on the working of all his functions (why did he keep shuddering, why did his arms dangle like lashes? And his smile had become – froglike); this something was not a fact, but a fact remained; this fact consisted of something.

  What was the something?

  A promise to the Party? He had not taken his promise back; and although he was not thinking … others were probably thinking (we know what Lippanchenko was thinking); and thus there it was: he ate in a strange way and slept in a strange way, lusted and hated in a strange way, too … His small figure also seemed strange – in the street; with the wing of his Nikolayevka flapping in the wind, and as if he were round-shouldered …

  And so, it was the promise that had emerged by the bridge – there, there: in a gust of Neva wind, when over his shoulder he had caught sight of a bowler hat, a cane, a moustache (the inhabitants of Petersburg are distinguished by – hm-hm – qualities! …)

  And beside, his standing by the bridge was merely a consequence of his having been driven to the bridge; and it was lust that had driven him; he had experienced the most passionate feelings somehow in the wrong way, he had burst into flame in the wrong way, not in a good way, coldly.

  It must be the cold that was at the root of it all.

  The cold had fallen while he was still only a child, when he, Kolenka, had been called, not Kolenka, but – his father’s spawn! He had felt ashamed. Later on, the meaning of the word ‘spawn’ had been revealed to him in its entirety (through the observation of shameful goings-on in the life of domestic animals), and, he remembered – Kolenka had cried: he had transferred the shame of his engendering on to the culprit of his shame: his father.

  For hours on end he had stood in front of the mirror, watching his ears grow: they grew.

  Only then did Kolenka understand that all living things in the world are ‘spawn’, that there are no human beings, because they are ‘engenderings’; that is, an unpleasant sum total of blood, skin and flesh – unpleasant because the skin sweats, and flesh goes rotten in the warmth; while blood gives off a smell that is not that of May violets.

  Thus his psychic warmth was identified with boundless stretches of ice, with the Antarctic; while he – a Pirie, a Nansen, an Amundsen – went round and round in the ice; or his warmth became a bloody slush (man, as is well known, is slush sewn up in skin).

  So the soul did not exist.

  He hated his own, native flesh; and lusted for that of others. Thus from very earliest childhood he had nurtured within him the larvae of monsters: and when they matured, they crawled out within twenty-four hours and stood around – like facts with horrible contents. Nikolai Apollonovich had been eaten alive; had flowed into monsters.

  In a word, he himself had become the monsters.

  ‘Little frog!’

  ‘Freak!’

  ‘Red buffoon!’

  Indeed: in his presence they had joked about blood, called him ‘spawn’; and he had begun to joke about his own blood – a ‘buffoon’, the ‘buffoon’ was not a mask, the mask was ‘Nikolai Apollonovich’ …

  The blood in him had prematurely decomposed.

  It had prematurely decomposed: that was evidently why he aroused revulsion; that was why his little figure seemed strange in the street.

  This decrepit earthen vessel must be blown to pieces: and it was being blown to pieces …

  The Institution

  The Institution …

  Someone instituted it; since that time it has existed; while before that time there was nothing but the days of yore. Thus does the ‘Archive’ inform us.

  The Institution.

  Someone instituted it, before it existed there was darkness, someone moved above the darkness; there was darkness and there was light – circular number one, at the foot of the circular of the last five years was the signature: ‘Apollon Ableukhov’; in the year 1905 Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was the soul of circulars.

  The light shines in darkness. Darkness has not embraced it.

  The Institution …

  And – the torso of a goat-f
ooted caryatid. Since the time when a carriage drawn by a pair of lathered black horses flew up to its front steps, since the time when a court lackey in a tricorne hat donned obliquely on his head and a winged greatcoat opened wide, for the first time the lacquered, embossed flank and, with a click, the door threw aside its coat of arms adorned with crown (a unicorn goring a knight); since the time when out of the funereal cushions of the carriage a parchment-faced statue placed its shoe on the entrance-porch granite; since the time when, for the first time, returning bows, a hand invested in the leather of a glove touched the brim of a top hat: – since that time the Institution that cast over Russia its mighty power had weighed down with a power even mightier.

  Section marks5 that had been buried in dust arose.

  I am struck by the very outline of a section mark: on to the paper fall two coupled hooks, – reams of paper are destroyed; the section mark is a devourer of papers, that is, a paper phylloxera; the section mark bites into the tyranny of the obscure abyss like a tick, – and truly: there is something mystical in it: it is the thirteenth sign of the zodiac.

  Above an enormous portion of Russia a headless frock-coat was multiplying like a section mark; and a section mark swollen like a senator’s head was rising – above starched neck-linen; through the white-columned, unheated halls and upon the stairs of red cloth a headless circulation passed, and that circulation was directed by Apollon Apollonovich.

  Apollon Apollonovich is the most popular government official in Russia with the exception of … Konshin6 (whose unfailing signature you bear on credit bills).

  And so: –

  The Institution exists. In it is Apollon Apollonovich: more correctly, was, because he is dead … –

  – I recently visited the grave: above a heavy black marble slab rises a black marble eight-pointed cross; beneath the cross is a distinct haut-relief that carves out an enormous head that bores into you loweringly with the emptiness of its eyes; a demonic, Mephistophelean mouth! At the bottom – the modest inscription: ‘Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov – Senator’ … The year of his birth, the year of his death … A god-forsaken grave! … –

  – Apollon Apollonovich exists: he exists in the director’s office: he is in it every day, except for the days when he has haemorrhoids.

  There exist, moreover, in the Institution offices … of reflection.

  And there exist simply rooms; mostly – halls; desks in each hall. At the desks there are clerks; at each desk there are a pair of them; before each: a quill and ink and a respectable pile of papers; the clerk scratches across the paper, turns over the leaves, rustles a leaf and makes his quill squeal (I think that the sinister plant ‘heather’, veresk, derives from ‘squealing’, vereshchanie); like the adversarial autumn wind, which the winds work up – through forests, through ravines; like the rustle of sand – in vacant lots, in the expanses of the salt-marshes – of Orenburg, Samara, Saratov; –

  – the same rustling persisted above the grave: the sad rustling of the birches; their catkins, their young leaves were falling on the black marble, eight-pointed cross, and – peace to his ashes! –

  In a word: the Institution exists.

  It is not lovely Proserpina rushing away through the land to the kingdom of Pluto, where the Cocytus boils with white foam; each day it is the senator, abducted by Charon, rushing away to Tartarus on tangled, lathered, black-maned steeds; above the gates of melancholy Tartarus hangs Pluto’s bearded caryatid. The waves of Phlegethon splash: papers.

  In his director’s office, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov sits each day with a tensed vein at his temple, one leg crossed on the other, and a vein-covered hand – at the lapel of his frock-coat; the logs crackle in the fireplace, the sixty-eight-year-old man breathes the bacillus of the section mark, that is to say, the coupling of hooks; and this breathing spreads all over the enormous expanse of Russia; every day a tenth of our motherland is covered by the bat’s wing of the clouds. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, struck by a happy thought, one leg crossed on the other, a hand at the lapel of his frock-coat, then inflates his cheeks like a bladder; then he seems to blow (such is his habit); little blasts of chill air blow through the unheated rooms; tornado-like funnels of multivarious papers begin to wind about; from Petersburg a wind begins, somewhere on the outskirts a hurricane breaks out.

  Apollon Apollonovich sits in his study … and blows.

  And the backs of the clerks bend; and the leaves of paper rustle; thus do the winds race – about the stern, pine-covered summits … Then he draws in his cheeks; and everything – rustles: a dry flock of papers, like a fateful fall of leaves, gathers speed from Petersburg … to the Sea of Okhotsk.

  The cold pandemonium spreads – over fields, over forests, over villages, in order to hoot, to attack, to roar with laughter, in order to sting with hail, rain and black ice the paws and hands – of birds, animals, wayfarers, to overturn on him the striped posts of the toll-bars – to leap out from the canal on to the high road like a striped milestone, to lord it like a grinning cipher, to uncover the homelessness and endlessness of the road and to stretch out gloomy nets from streaming darkness …

  North, familiar north! …

  Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov – a man of the city and a fully well-bred gentleman: sits in his office while his shadow, piercing through the stone of the wall … pounces on passers-by in the fields: with a mettlesome, buccaneer whistling it carouses through the expanses – of Samara, Tambov, Saratov – in gullies and in yellow sands, thistles, wormwood, or in the wild tatarnik, exposing the sandy bald patches, tearing the high-topped haystacks, fans a suspicious flame in the barn; the red village cockerel is born from it; the native, spring-water well is blocked up by it; woodlice will appear; when it falls on the crops with harmful dews the crops grow thin; the cattle rots …

  Multiplies the number of ravines and digs them.

  Wags would probably say: not Apollon Apollonovich, but … Akvilon Apollonovich.

  The multiplication of the quantity of paper that has flown before a clerk within the space of a day, blown out of the doors of the Institution, the multiplication of that paper by the paper of the rushing clerks forms a production, or rather a manufacture of paper that must be carried out not in carts, but by Furies.

  At the foot of each paper is the signature: Apollon Ableukhov.

  That paper rushes along the railway branches from the railway centre: Saint Petersburg; and – to the principal town of the province; having fluttered his flock about the corresponding centres, Apollon Apollonovich creates in those centres new breeding grounds of paper production.

  Normally a paper with (X’s) signature circulates as far as the offices of the provincial administration; the paper is received by all the civil servants (they are councillors, I think): the Chichibabins, the Sverchkovs, the Shestkovs, the Teterkos, the Ivanchi-Ivanchevskys; from the principal town of the province Ivanchi-Ivanchevsky correspondingly sends papers to the towns of: Mukhoyedinsk, Likhov, Gladov, Morovetrinsk and Pupinsk (all district towns); Kozlorodov, the assessor, also receives the paper.

  The whole picture changes.

  Kozlorodov, the assessor, having received the paper, ought at once himself to get into a britzka, a cabriolet or a jolting droshky, in order to go dancing over the potholes – through fields, through forests, through villages, through mire, – and slowly get bogged down in clay or brown sand, submitting himself to the assault of striped, raised milestones and striped toll-bars (in the wilderness Apollon Apollonovich assaults the wayfarers); but instead of this, Kozlorodov simply stuffs Ivanchi-Ivanchevsky’s inquiry into his side pocket.

  And just goes off to his club.

  Apollon Apollonovich is lonely: and so already he is reproducing himself a thousandfold in the milestones; and he will not get there on his own; neither will Ivanchi-Ivanchevsky get there. There are thousands of Kozlorodovs; behind them stands the ordinary man in the street, of whom Ableukhov is afraid.

  That is why Apollon Apollon
ovich smashes only the boundary marks of his horizon: and of their places are deprived – the Ivanchevskys, the Teterkos, the Sverchkovs.

  Kozlorodov is permanent.

  Existing beyond reach – beyond the ravines, beyond the potholes, beyond the forests – he goes out and plays vint7 in Pupinsk.

  It is also good that he is playing vint for the meantime.

  He Has Stopped Playing Vint

  Apollon Apollonovich is lonely.

  He is not getting there. And the arrow of his circulars does not penetrate the districts: it breaks. Only here and there, pierced by an arrow, does an Ivanchevsky fly down; and the Kozlorodovs organize a round-up of the Sverchkovs. From Saint Petersburg, the Palmyra of the North, Apollon Apollonovich bursts out with a paper cannonade, – and (of late) misses.

  Ordinary men in the street long ago christened these arrows with a name: soap bubbles.

  The hurler of arrows, – in vain did he send down the toothed lightning of Apollo; history has changed; no one believes in the ancient myths any more; Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov is not the god Apollo: he is Apollon Apollonovich, a Petersburg civil servant. And in vain did he shoot at the Ivanchevskys.

  The circulation of papers has been diminishing these past few days; a countervailing wind has blown: paper that smells of typographic print has begun to undermine the Institution – in the form of petitions, accusations, unlawful threats, and complaints; and so on, and so forth: with that kind of treachery.

  Well, and what kind of loathsome behaviour towards the authorities was circulating among the ordinary men in the street? A proclamatory tone had appeared.

  And – what did this mean?

  A very great deal: the impenetrable, unreachable Kozlorodov, the assessor, had, somewhere out there, turned insolent; and had set out from the provinces against the Ivanchi-Ivanchevskys: at one point in space the crowd had torn a wooden palisade into its separate stakes, and … Kozlorodov was absent; at another point the windows of the Tax Institution proved to have been smashed out, and Kozlorodov – was absent again.