But all this happened later; on Friday, however, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, while I was writing at my desk, there was a knock at the door. This surprised me, as I was not expecting anyone.
“Come in!” I said.
The door opened and there I saw Lida. She was dressed in a grey suit with a white, very low-cut blouse and a grey hat. Her eyes immediately fixed themselves on me, so that I felt fleetingly uncomfortable. I offered her the armchair. Then I asked her to what I owed the pleasure of this visit.
“I’ve come to you because I consider you to be a decent man.”
“I’m flattered,” I said somewhat impatiently. “Nevertheless, your visit no doubt has some more immediate purpose. Surely you haven’t come just to give me your personal appraisal of my moral qualities?”
She continued looking straight at me; this unnerved me.
“We saw each other recently,” she said.
“You are referring to the evening when we dined at Pavel Alexandrovich’s?”
Her eyes contained a mixture of reproach and ennui, and then, for the very first time, it occurred to me that she might in fact not be as stupid as she looked.
“Are you quite sure that you want to speak to me in such a condescending tone, so blatantly giving me to know that you think I’m an idiot?”
She had switched into French; in Russian such a phrase would have been too difficult for her.
“Heaven forbid!”
“You spotted me on Place de la Bastille as I was arriving with my lover.”
“Forgive me, but your personal life is no concern of mine.”
“Yes, indeed,” she said impatiently.
After her words about my having seen her in Place de la Bastille, her motives for coming here seemed clear enough.
“I’m afraid you’re wasting your time,” I said. “You’re hoping that I won’t mention it to anyone, am I correct?”
She grimaced, as though swallowing something unpalatable.
“Yes.”
“Now see here,” I said. “Allow me to be perfectly frank with you. You don’t want Pavel Alexandrovich to know about this because you’re afraid of losing your position. I too don’t want him to learn of this, but for a somewhat different reason: I pity him.”
“But don’t you understand?”
“Let’s not, shall we? Pursuing this would not be to your advantage.”
She then launched into an unexpected and malicious tirade.
“No, of course you don’t understand. Parce que, voyez-vous, vous êtes un monsieur.|||| No one’s ever slapped you in the face. No one’s ever called you a whore.”
“On se tromperait de sexe.”***
“Shut up and let me speak. You’ve never had to walk the streets; you’ve never had to live for weeks without knowing where you’ll be spending the night. You’ve never been manhandled by the police. You’ve never had to spend nights with flea-ridden Arabs. You don’t know the meaning of a native quarter; you haven’t breathed in its air. You don’t understand what it means to have to depend on some fat, drooling client.”
Her speech was disjointed, her voice low and hoarse.
“You don’t know what it is to hate your own mother. You don’t know what it is to live your life in poverty. You just go to university, attending lectures, sleeping in a clean bed and sending your washing out to the laundry. On m’a traînée toute la vie dans la boue, moi.”†††
She paused. Her face betrayed an expression of weariness.
“Before, when I was alone, I used to cry. I’d cry from despair, from poverty, from the fact that there was nothing I could do about it. When I was a girl, I cried because my mother’s lover would beat her, and she would cry with me. What do you know about me? Nothing. Yet when you speak to me, your voice is full of contempt; do you think I can’t hear it? Yes, I understand: we belong to two different worlds—nous appartenons à deux mondes différents.”
“You must have read that somewhere,” I said calmly.
“Perhaps. But all the same, you don’t know the first thing about me.”
And so she began talking of her life. By her account, she truly had known nothing but poverty and degradation. Her mother used to send her out to collect fag ends in the street. Zina’s lover would beat them both. They would sing in the streets and in courtyards, where people would chase them away—they would sing in autumn, in the rain, and in winter, as the chill winds blew. They often had nothing to eat but what they could find in Les Halles. Lida had taken her first bath at the age of fifteen.
Then, when everything became too unbearable, she left home and went to Marseilles. She had no money for the ticket, so she paid for everything “in other ways”, as she phrased it. From Marseilles, she travelled on to Tunis.
There she spent four years. She spoke of the sultry African nights, of how she had gone for days on end without food and, without mincing her words, of what the Arabs had made her do. The more she spoke, the more I understood what until now I had only suspected—that she was ridden with vice and poverty and that she had spent her whole life in some stinking hell. She had been punched in the face, in the body and in the head, and she had even endured the cuts of a knife. She unbuttoned her blouse and below her breasts, held fast in their brassiere, I glimpsed white scar tissue. She had never been educated, although she did possess a good memory. In Tunis she had worked for a while as a maid to an old doctor, whose apartment contained a library; in the evenings she would read the books she borrowed from there, and the more she read—she claimed—the more dismal her own life seemed to her. Then she met Amar, who was ill and similarly down on his luck. He was suffering acutely from consumption and could no longer work. She stayed on with the doctor and spent every penny she earned on Amar, who, thanks to her nursing and care, began to convalesce. Even so, he was unable to return to his former work.
I had been listening to her without interrupting, but on this point I asked:
“Where was he working before? What had he been doing?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “In some factory, I think.”
She said she loved this man more than anything else in the world and was ready to lay down her life for him.
“The need seldom arises in such cases,” I said. “This is hardly the libretto of some opera. By the way, why does he limp?”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen him walk.”
Again she stared straight at me, and for the first time I noticed the menacing look in her eyes.
“He had an accident,” she said.
Later the doctor let her go and so she returned to Paris, where she met Pavel Alexandrovich. It happened in the street, at dusk; she had been sitting on a bench, crying because Amar was still in Tunis and lacked the funds to make the journey to join her. Pavel Alexandrovich had asked her why she was crying. She explained to him that she felt wretched. Though she made no mention of Amar. He invited her into a café and spoke to her as no one had ever done before. Then he gave her some money and said that if she was ever in need, she could come to him or call him on the telephone. It was not difficult to guess the rest. Pavel Alexandrovich, according to Lida, would take her to the Louvre, teach her many things she did not know, and give her books that he thought interesting to read.
In spite of the clear effort she was making to speak kindly of Pavel Alexandrovich, her animosity towards him still seeped through. I imagine she despised him for his gullibility and loathed the idea that he was superior to Amar. She expressed herself rather differently, saying that she was grateful to Pavel Alexandrovich, but, naturally, she could never love him. She was incapable of loving him, and I ought to understand this—but at the same time she could not live without love.
“Now tell me, don’t I deserve at least a little happiness—even at the price of deceit?”
Her penchant for using literary turns of phrase stolen from bad novels—especially during moments of pathos—irritated me somewhat. When she talk
ed about Tunis, about her hatred for her mother, about the beatings, about her entire wretched life, she spoke in simple, precise terms.
“Now I’m at your mercy,” she said. “You’ve heard all there is to know about me; my fate and that of the man I love depends on you. You know you may ask of me all that I can give, and you know I cannot refuse you.”
Now I looked at her as I had never done before. I saw her legs in their stockings, the flexion of her body in the armchair, her heavy eyes, her delicate face, her red mouth and blonde hair tumbling down to her shoulders. I vividly recalled that evening at the cinema and what had come afterwards, her naked body reflected in a multitude of mirrors. The room felt both cold and stifling at the same time. I closed my eyes and thought of many things—and for a moment I felt truly sorry for her. She possessed only one means of payment for everything, and she was prepared to pay in order to protect what she called love, which was nothing but an irresistible attraction to that currish invalid, Amar. I remembered his face; it was peculiarly expressive in the sense that it had his destiny inscribed on it. A single glance was enough to know that this was the face of a doomed man and that the life awaiting him would not be a long one; either he would die of tuberculosis or he would perish on account of some other ailment, or perhaps he would be killed in some settling of scores and his body would be picked up by the police—with his throat slit or a bullet in his chest. Such, in any case, was my impression of him, and nothing could shake this. Lida’s life, too, was tied to his fate. However, neither was in my hands; here she was mistaken.
Even if my mind had not been occupied by those recent visions of Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus—visions that had been interrupted by Lida’s arrival—and reflections on Amar and the unrelenting notion of his being her lover—even had it not been for all this, her words, “You know I cannot refuse you,” would still have had a sobering effect on me because they had sounded so unambiguous.
Then Lida began to dissolve, and in her place I saw a blurred white spot; a faint ringing started in my ears and it felt as if everything around me had become weightless and unreal. It was like the onset of a fainting fit, which somehow held the seduction of impending sweet oblivion. I made an effort to overcome it, lit a cigarette, inhaled several times and said:
“I won’t detain you any longer. However, I do wish to say a few words to you. Firstly, I don’t need anything from you; remember this once and for all. Secondly, we do indeed, as you said, belong to two different worlds, and in the world where I live people do not blackmail each other, they do not write anonymous letters, and they do not under any circumstances go about informing on one another. Perhaps if they had led a life like yours it would be a different story. That you have a right to happiness is your own affair; I consider it a very poor happiness. But if that is sufficient for you, one can only envy you. If I were asked to give up my world for the one in which you live, I’d sooner put a bullet through my brains.”
I then stood up and added:
“I wish you all the best. You may rest assured that your visit and this conversation will remain strictly between the two of us.”
After she left, something trembled and disappeared. For several seconds the room was quiet and deserted. Then I heard a mute, amorphous rumble, and it dawned on me that I was watching a battle whose outcome had been decided long ago, being impossible to alter or defer; it was the Battle of Lützen, which had played such a crucial part in the history of the Thirty Years War.
At this juncture of my life, time was passing by almost unnoticed; it was one of the least stable concepts I knew. Only later did I realize that my strength was being consumed by the constant pressure I found myself under, which was a reflection of some deep unrelenting internal struggle. It existed predominantly in the depths of my consciousness, in its dark recesses, beyond the control of logic. I sometimes began to feel as if I were close to victory, approaching the day when all these painful visions would vanish without trace. In any case, they were becoming ever more indistinct now; vague fragments of someone’s life would flash before my eyes without having time to crystallize, and each time my return to reality would come quicker than it did before. Yet victory still eluded me: at times everything would suddenly grow dim and blurred; the noise of the street and the chatter of people would disappear—and then, with mute terror, I would await the return of one of those prolonged nightmares I had so recently known. This would go on for several minutes before the hum of the street rushed back to my ears and I was overcome by a brief tremor—then finally there would be calm.
Weeks and months passed in a similar manner. In the summer Pavel Alexandrovich and Lida escaped to Fontainebleau, where he persisted in inviting me although I never went. I stayed on in Paris, entirely alone, spending the majority of my time reading and going on long walks; I had no money to go anywhere. Then autumn came, and a wintery chill blew in from a window that had been left ajar. I spent the whole month of January in a state of unaccountable, distressing languor; each morning I would awake with a foreboding of catastrophe, and each day would pass without mishap. This feeling unnerved and wearied me, and only occasionally did I manage to rid myself of it and become the person I wanted to be: a normal man, unthreatened by either psychological attacks or fits of madness. Which was essentially what I felt whenever I found myself at Pavel Alexandrovich’s.
One cold February evening I was having dinner at his apartment. Lida was absent. He and I were sitting at the table together, and he was in a contemplative mood. We then moved into his study; coffee had been served and there was a bottle of very strong, sweet wine, of which I took a few sips, although he, as usual, didn’t touch a drop. He had donned a velvet smoking jacket, but was still wearing a shirt with a starched collar. As I looked at him I mused on how the happiest period of his life was probably the very one he was experiencing right now, how he had never known better times. It seemed impossible to think that this impression could be in any way erroneous. Everything about him—his movements, at once slow and certain, his gait, his bearing, the intonations in his voice, which seemed deeper and more expressive than before—confirmed such an assessment. It was very warm in his study, especially since the fire had been lit in addition to the central heating; the heavy curtains by the window billowed ever so slightly in the gentle breeze. I sat in an armchair, gazing into the fire. Then I shifted my eyes onto Pavel Alexandrovich and said:
“You know, as I look at this little fire, time seems to be regressing imperceptibly, farther and farther, and the more it regresses, the more I undergo subtle changes—and so now I find myself sitting naked and covered in hair at the entrance to some smoky Stone Age cave, by a fire laid by one of my far-distant ancestors. It’s a charming picture of atavism.”
“It is my belief that we do not exist beyond atavism,” he said. “Everything that belongs to us, everything we know, everything we feel, we receive temporarily from the dead.”
“Temporarily?”
“Of course. How could it be any otherwise?”
The hot flame flickered beneath the coals, and I could hear the gentle crackling of their combustion. I was feeling drowsy from the heat. Pavel Alexandrovich said:
“I’ve been thinking more and more about death recently. Not because I foresee it in the near future, but probably because I’m at a venerable age and it’s natural, my young friend, to think about death at my stage in life. The most astonishing thing is that I think about it without the least fright or distress.”
“Presumably because these thoughts are of a purely abstract nature.”
“Not only that, I think. There’s a certain seductiveness about the prospect, something majestic and of the utmost significance. Remember the words of the requiem: ‘rest in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…’”
“In the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…” I immediately saw before me the echoing vaults of a church rising up, a coffin with the body of an unknown man, the priest, the deacon, the censers, the icons, the mot
ionless flight of gilded angels on the Royal Gates of the iconostasis, and the inscription high up above the angels, above this thousand-year history of Christianity: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
“Do you believe in God, Pavel Alexandrovich?”
“I didn’t so much before, but now I do. He who has known years of poverty will find it easier to believe than any other man. Because, you see, Christianity is the religion of the poor, and that is why the Gospels contain words to this effect, as I’m sure you’ll recall.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I also remember a great deal more. I once had occasion to read a most edifying encyclical by a pope—I forget which—who argued that one must know how to interpret the Church’s views on wealth and poverty correctly. Specifically, there could be no talk of donating one’s wealth, or even a tenth of it, to the poor: this was a misinterpretation. The tenth pertained to income; capital was never subject to Christian taxation. This is patently ridiculous, and if there is a hell, then I hope this pope, while he’s sat there, roasting for centuries in some gigantic frying pan, has found the time to realize his grievous error concerning the Church’s stance on property.”
“I used to believe I would die just like my friends in Rue Simon le Franc,” continued Shcherbakov. “That is to say, my body would have been found at dawn one winter’s morning, somewhere near the Seine, by a bench, covered in frost. That was only to be expected.”
A small shaded lamp lit up his face, serene and contemplative.
“And you know, I always used to find the thought objectionable; enviously I’d look on at lavish funerals, until one day I thought: I’d like to die like that. So that’s how I often imagine my own end now, not without a certain—how shall I say?—comfort: a will, a notary, a long illness that teaches me humility and prepares me for the final journey, the last sacraments, the obituary in the newspaper: ‘We regret to announce the death of Pavel Alexandrovich Shcherbakov…’, then the date and time of the funeral.”
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