Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Bely, Andrei

  The small figure stopped, and beseechingly it stretched towards the phosphorescent intervals between the branches, that formed the body:

  ‘But wait, wait; it cannot be like this – by suspicion alone, without explanation …’

  Imperiously the hand pointed to the lighted window that shot rays through the black and gnashing boughs.

  Here the blackish little figure uttered a cry and ran off into empty space; while after it darted the black, many-boughed outline, forming itself on the sandy shore into that strange whole that could squeeze from itself monstrous, unutterable meanings that did not exist anywhere; the blackish little figure struck its chest against the trellis of some garden, climbed over the fence and now slipped soundlessly, its feet catching in the dewy grasses, – towards that grey little dacha, where it had been so recently, where now everything was not as it ought to be.

  Carefully it stole towards the terrace, put its hand on its chest; and soundlessly, in a leap and a bound, it ended up outside the door; there was no curtain on the door; then the little figure pressed itself to the window; there, through the windows, light expanded.

  There they sat … –

  – On the table stood a samovar; beneath the samovar stood a plate containing the remains of a cold cutlet; and a woman’s nose looked out with an unpleasant, disconcerted, slightly crushed appearance; her nose looked out timidly; and – timidly it hid: a nose – with a short pigtail; this pathetic head hung on a curved neck. Lippanchenko was leaning one elbow on the table; his other hand lay free on the back of the armchair; coarse – the palm of his hand opened and closed; one was struck by its breadth; one was struck by the shortness of its five fingers, that looked as though they had been lopped off, with hangnails and brown dye on the nails themselves … –

  – In a leap and a bound, the small figure flew away from the door; and – found itself in the bushes; it was seized by an impulse of indescribable pity; out of the tree-hollow a browless, large-headed lump rushed, beneath two branches, towards the little figure; the winds began to moan in the rotted bell-mouth of the bush.

  And the little figure began to whisper desperately near the bush:

  ‘Why, one cannot simply … How can one … Why, nothing has been proved yet …’

  A Swan Song

  Turning the whole of his body away from the sighing Zoya Zakharovna, Lippanchenko stretched out his hand – well, just imagine! – to a violin that hung on the wall there:

  ‘A man has all kinds of unpleasantnesses to deal with on the side … He comes home, to rest, and then – see what he gets …’

  He fetched the rosin: with what was quite simply a kind of ferocity, that exceeded all bounds, – he threw himself on the piece of rosin; with pleasure he took the piece of rosin between his fingers; with the guilty little grimace that was in no way appropriate either to his position in the Party, or to the conversation that had just taken place, he proceeded to rub his bow on the rosin; then he took the violin:

  ‘One could say – he is met with tears …’

  He pressed the violin against his stomach and bent over it, resting its broad end against his knees; the narrow end he pushed under his chin; with one hand, enjoying it, he began to tighten the strings, while with his other hand – he extracted a sound:

  ‘Plunk!’

  As he did this, his head bent and inclined to the side; with a questioning look that was not quite buffoonish and not quite sorrowful (childish, when all was said and done), he looked at Zoya Zakharovna and smacked his lips; it was as if he were asking:

  ‘You hear?’

  She sat down on a chair: with a questioning, half-tender, half-desperate expression she looked at Lippanchenko and Lippanchenko’s finger; the finger tried the strings; and the strings – tinkled.

  ‘That’s better!’

  And he smiled; she smiled; both nodded to each other; he – with rediscovered youthful ardour; she – with a hint of shyness that betrayed both a vague pride and her former adoration of him (of Lippanchenko?), – she exclaimed:

  ‘Oh, what a …’

  ‘Tinkle-tinkle …’

  ‘Incorrigible baby you are!’

  And at these words, in spite of the fact that Lippanchenko looked every bit like a rhinoceros, with a movement of his left wrist that was both swift and dexterous, Lippanchenko turned his violin around; its broad end moved with the speed of lightning into the angle between his enormous shoulder and his head that had inclined towards it; the narrow end remained in his fleeting fingers:

  ‘Here you are, then!’

  The hand with the bow flew up; and – weighed itself in the air: paused, and then touched a string with a most tender movement of the bow; the string moved across the strings; following the bow went – the whole arm; the arm was followed by the head; the head – by the fat body: they all went to one side.

  The little finger bent with a flourish: it did not touch the bow.

  The armchair creaked under Lippanchenko, who seemed to be straining in a single, intense, unmasterable, stubborn effort: to emit a tender sound; his rather hoarse and yet pleasant bass voice suddenly filled this room, drowning out both the snoring of the St Bernard and the rustling of a cockroach.

  ‘Do not te-e-e-mpt me,’ sang Lippanchenko.10

  ‘Meee – without neee-eee …’ the tender, quietly sighing strings chimed in.

  ‘–eed,’ – sang the sideways-bent Lippanchenko, who seemed to be straining a single, intense, unmasterable, stubborn effort: to emit a tender sound.

  In the years of their youth they had spent a long time singing this old romance, which is not sung today.

  ‘Shhh!’

  ‘Did you hear?’

  ‘The window?’

  ‘One ought to go: and take a look.’

  Dim shapes fleeted melancholically there in smoky green puffballs; the moon rose from behind a cloud; and everything that had stood there like dim shapes – distintegrated, fell apart; and the skeletons of the bushes showed black in empty space; and their shadows fell to the earth in shaggy tufts; the phosphorescent air revealed itself in the gaps between the boughs; all the airy blotches formed together – there it was, there it was: a body, burning with phosphorus; imperiously it stretched its arm towards the window; the little figure jumped towards the window; the window was not latched, and as it opened, it tinkled slightly; and the little figure leapt aside.

  In the windows shadows moved; someone passed with a candle – in the curtained windows; this – unlatched – window was also illumined; the curtain was pulled aside; a fat figure stood for a moment and looked out there – at the phosphorescent world; it seemed that a chin was looking out, because – a chin was protruding; the little eyes were not visible; in place of the little eyes two eye sockets showed darkly; two hairless eyebrows gleamed unnaturally beneath the moon. The curtain moved; someone enormous and fat went back behind the curtained windows; soon all was quiet. The tinkling of the violin and the voice again issued from the little dacha.

  The bush seethed. The large-headed, browless lump moved out into the moonlight in a single intense stubborn effort: to understand – come what may, at whatever cost; to understand, or – explode into pieces; from the small hollow tree trunk emerged this old, browless excrescence, overgrown with moss and scale; it stretched forth into the wind; it begged for mercy – come what may, at whatever cost. From the small hollow tree trunk the little figure detached itself a second time; and stole up to the window; retreat was cut off; one thing remained to it: to complete what had been begun. Now it hid itself … in Lippanchenko’s bedroom it waited impatiently for Lippanchenko to come – to his bedroom.

  Scoundrels, too, have a need to sing their swan song, after all.

  ‘To the dis-en … -cha-a-anted … are a-a-lien … all the cha-a-rms of former … da-a-ays … In assu-u-u-rances I trust no lo-o-onger …

  ‘I no mo-o-re … believe in lo-ove …’

  Did he know what he was singing? And – what he was playing?
Why he was sad? Why his throat was constricted – to the point of pain? … Because of the sounds? Lippanchenko did not understand this, as he did not understand the tender sounds he was drawing forth … No, the frontal bone could not understand: the forehead was small, covered in transverse wrinkles: it seemed to be weeping.

  Thus one October night did Lippanchenko sing his swan song.

  Perspective

  Well – so there!

  He had sung, played; putting the violin on the table, he wiped his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief; slowly heaved his indecent, spider-like, forty-five-year-old belly; at last, taking the candle, he set off for his bedroom; on the threshold he turned once more, indecisively, sighed, and reflected on something; Lippanchenko’s whole figure expressed a single vague, unutterable sadness.

  And – Lippanchenko collapsed in the murk.

  When the flame of the candle suddenly cut into the completely dark room (the blinds were lowered), the murk was cut apart; and – the pitch darkness exploded in yellow-crimson luminescences; along the periphery of the fierily dancing centre some pieces of darkness, in the form of shadows of all the objects, began to spin soundlessly in a circular movement; and in pursuit of the dark shoals, the shadows of objects, an enormous fat man, who burst out from under Lippanchenko’s heels, and with a bustling movement quickened his pace in a circle.

  The outrageous, soundless fat man was thrown between the wall, the table and the chair, broke against the shoals and exploded agonizingly, as though now he had experienced all the torments of purgatory.

  Thus, having cast out its body as ballast no longer required – thus, having cast out its body, the soul is caught up by the hurricanes of all its psychic movements: the hurricanes rush through the psychic expanses. Our bodies are wretched little vessels; and they race across the psychic ocean from spiritual continent to spiritual continent.

  ‘Yes … –’

  Imagine an infinitely long rope; and imagine that your body is bound at the waist by the rope; and then – the rope is wound round you; with frantic, with indescribable speed; tossed up, in expanding, ever growing circles, drawing spirals in space, you will fly into the atmosphere beyond the air with your head downwards, and your back advancing; and you will fly, a satellite of the earth, away from the earth into the immeasurabilities of the universe, overcoming the multi-millennial spaces – instantly, and becoming those spaces.

  That is the kind of hurricane by which you will instantly be caught up, when the soul casts out your body as ballast no longer required.

  And let us also imagine that each point of the body experiences a mad urge to expand without measure, to expand to the point of horror (for example, to occupy a space equal in diameter to the orbit of Saturn); and let us also imagine that we consciously sense not simply one point, but all the points of the body, that they have all swelled up – cut apart, white-hot – and go through the stages of the expansion of bodies: from a solid condition to one that is gaseous, that the planets and suns circulate quite freely in the interstices of the body’s molecules; and let us also imagine that we have completely lost the sense of centripetal gravity; and in our urge to expand bodily without measure we explode into pieces, and that the only whole thing that remains is our consciousness: the consciousness of our exploded sensations.

  What would we feel?

  We would feel that our disjointed organs, flying and burning, no longer bound integrally together, are separated from one another by billions of versts; but our consciousness binds that crying outrage together – in a simultaneous futility; and while in our backbone, lacerated to the point of emptiness, we sense the seething of Saturn’s masses, the stars of the constellations furiously eat into our brain; while in the centre of the seething heart we feel the incoherent, diseased joltings – of a heart so enormous that the solar streams of fire, flying out from the sun, would not reach that heart’s surface if the sun were to move into that fiery, incoherently beating centre.

  If we were able to imagine all this to ourselves bodily, before us would arise a picture of the first stages of the soul’s life, which has thrown off the body; the sensations would be the more powerful, the more violently before us were our bodily constitution to disintegrate …

  Cockroaches

  Lippanchenko stopped in the middle of the dark room with the candle in his hand; the shadowy shoals stopped together with him; the enormous shadowy fat man, Lippanchenko’s soul, hung head down from the ceiling; neither for the shadows of all the objects nor for his own shadow did Lippanchenko feel any interest; rather he was interested in a rustling – one familiar and altogether unmysterious.

  He felt a sense of disgusted revulsion at the cockroach; and now – he saw – dozens of these creatures; they fled, rustling, into their dark corners, caught by the light of the candle. And – Lippanchenko was angry:

  ‘Accursed things …’

  And he thudded over to the corner to fetch the floor brush, which was a very long stick with a bristly mop on the end:

  ‘Think you can get away? Just you wait! …’

  He placed the candle on the floor; with the floor brush in his hand he clambered up on a chair; now his heavy, puffing body stuck out over the chair; his vessels were bursting with exertion, his muscles were tensed; and his hair was tousled; he pursued the creeping handfuls with the bristly end of the mop; one, two, three! and – cracking sounds came from under the mop: on the ceiling, on the wall; even – in the corner of the étagère.

  ‘Eight … Ten … Eleven’ – rustled the threatening whisper; and with cracking sounds, blotches fell to the floor.

  Every evening before he slept he squashed cockroaches. Having squashed a good pile of them, he set off for bed.

  At last, barging into his little bedroom, he locked the door with its key; and further: he looked under the bed (for some time now this strange custom had formed an indispensable part of his undressing), and before him he placed the guttering candle.

  Now he undressed.

  Now he sat on the bed, hairy and naked, with his legs apart; female-like rounded shapes were clearly marked on his shaggy chest.

  Lippanchenko slept naked.

  Obliquely across from the candle, between the window wall and the little wardrobe, in a dark, shadowy niche, an intricate outline emerged: of a pair of trousers that hung here; and formed the likeness of – someone looking out from there; Lippanchenko was for ever hanging his trousers in different places; and the result was always: the likeness – of someone looking out from there.

  He saw this likeness now.

  And when he blew out the candle, the outline trembled and emerged more clearly; Lippanchenko reached out his hand to the curtain on the window; the curtain was tugged aside: the receding calico rustled; the room shone with a greenish radiance of copper; there, from there: out of the white pewter of the clouds a flaming disc crashed across the room; and … –

  Against the background of the completely green and as if vitriol-coloured wall – there! – stood a little figure in a wretched coat, with a frozen, chalk-white face: it looked like a clown, and its white lips were smiling. Lippanchenko went thudding in his bare feet in the direction of the door, but went, belly and breasts, smack into the door (he had forgotten he had locked it); at this point he was pulled backwards; a hot stream of boiling water splashed his bare back from shoulder-blades to buttocks; falling on to the bed, he realized that someone had cut open his back; cut it open as the hairless skin of a cold sucking-pig with horseradish sauce is cut; and no sooner had he realized this than he felt that stream of boiling water – under his navel.

  And from there something hissed mockingly; and somewhere inside him he thought it was gases, because his belly had been sliced open; inclining his head over his heaving belly, staring senselessly into space, he slumped down in utter drowsiness, probing the flowing liquid with his fingers – on his belly and on the sheet.

  This was his last conscious impression of ordinary reality; now his consci
ousness expanded; its monstrous periphery sucked the planets into itself; and sensed them as organs that had been disjointed from one another; the sun floated in the expansions of his heart; his backbone was made incandescent by the touch of Saturn’s masses; in his belly a volcano opened.

  All this time the body sat senseless with its head sagging on to its chest and its eyes staring at its cleft belly; suddenly it tumbled down – belly first into the sheet; the arm hung over the bloodstained rug, its fur showing reddish in the moonlight; the head with its sagging jaw was thrown in the direction of the door and stared at it with an unblinking eye; the eyebrows began to gleam browlessly; on the sheet emerged the imprint of five bloodstained fingers; and a fat heel protruded.

  A bush seethed: white-maned stripes came flying from the gulf; they flew close to the shore in ragged foam; they licked the sands; like thin blades of glass, they rushed over the sands; splashed into a salty lake, filling it with a salt solution; and ran back again. Between the branches of the bush one could see a sailing vessel rocking – turquoise, transparent; in a thin layer it cut the expanses with sharp-winged sails; on the surface of a sail a misty puff of smoke was growing denser.

  From the gulf white-maned stripes came flying; the moon illumined them, stripe after stripe foamed in the distance and thundered there; and then fell, flying right up to the shore in ragged foam; from the gulf the flying stripe spread over the flat shore – submissively, transparently; it licked the sands: it cut the sands – corroded them; like a thin blade of glass, it rushed over the sands; here and there the glassy stripes splashed into a salty lake; filled it with a salt solution.