Worlds Apart

by Alexander Levitsky

  “Chèr Klinevich, I quite agree with you, and there was no need for you to … to go into such details. Life is so full of suffering and torment and so little to make up for it … that I wanted finally to be at rest, and so far as I can see I hope to get all I can from here too.”

  “I’ll bet he’s already sniffed Katiche Berestov!”

  “Who? What Katiche?” There was a rapacious quiver in the old man’s voice.

  “A-ah, what Katiche? Why, here on the left, five paces from me and ten from you. She’s been here for five days, and if you only knew, grand-pere, what nasty little piece she is! Comes from a good family, well brought up, and a monster, a regular monster! I haven’t introduced her to anyone there, I was the only one who knew her … Katiche, speak up!”

  “Hee-hee-hee!” the response came in an unmusical girlish treble, in which there was a note sharp as the prick of a needle. “Hee-hee-hee!”

  “And is she a lit-tle blo-onde?” the grand-pere faltered, drawling out the syllables.

  “Hee-hee-hee!”

  “I’ve … for a long time I’ve,” the old man faltered breathlessly, “dreamed of a little blonde, about fifteen or so, and a situation just like this.”

  “Ah, what a monster!” cried Avdotia Ignatyevna.

  “Enough!” Klinevich decided. “I see there’s excellent material here. We’ll soon arrange things better. The main thing is to enjoy the rest of our time; but how much time? Hey, you, government clerk, Lebeziatnikov or whatever it is, I think that’s what they called you!”

  “Semion Yevseich Lebeziatnikov, Lower Court Councilor, at your service and very, very, very delighted to meet you.”

  “Delighted or not, damned if I care; but you seem to know everything here. Tell me first of all how it is we can talk? I’ve been wondering ever since yesterday. We’re dead but all the same we ‘re talking and we seem to be moving-and yet we’re not talking and not moving. What kind of hocuspocus is this?”

  “If you want, Baron, Platon Nikolaevich could explain it better than I could.”

  “What Platon Nikolaevich is that? Get to the point, don’t beat about the bush.”

  “Platon Nikolaevich is our home-grown philosopher, a scientist and Master of Arts. He brought out several philosophical works, but for the last three months he’s been getting quite drowsy, and there’s no stirring him up now. Once a week he’ll mutter a few words, completely irrelevant.”

  “To the point, to the point!”

  “He explains all this by the simplest fact, namely, that when we were living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there was death. The body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are concentrated, but only in the consciousness. I don’t know how to express it, but life goes on, as it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in the consciousness and goes on for two or three months … sometimes even for half a year…. There’s someone here, for instance, who is almost completely decomposed, but once every six weeks he’ll suddenly utter one word, quite senseless of course, about some bobok: ‘Bobok, bobok.’ Which means that even in him life is still warm, an imperceptible spark …”

  “It’s rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet I feel there’s a stench?”

  “That … hee-hee … Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy. Apropos of smell, he remarked that the stench one perceives here is, so to speak, a moral one—hee-hee! It’s the stench of the soul, he says, which has these two or three months to recover itself … and this is, so to speak, the last mercy…. Only I think, Baron, that these are mystical ravings, very excusable in his position …

  “Enough; all the rest of it, I’m sure, is nonsense. The great thing is that we have two or three months more of life and then—bobok! I propose to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to be ashamed of nothing.”

  “Ah, let’s, let’s not be ashamed of anything!” many voices could be heard saying; and strange to say several new voices were audible, these must have belonged to others newly awakened. The engineer, now fully awake, boomed out his agreement with peculiar delight. The girl Katiche giggled gleefully.

  “Oh, how I long to be ashamed of nothing!” Avdotia Ignatyevna exclaimed rapturously.

  “You hear that? If even Avdotia Ignatyevna wants to be ashamed of nothing …”

  “No, no, no, Klinevich, I was ashamed, up there I was, anyway, but here I terribly, terribly want to be ashamed of nothing.”

  “I understand, Klinevich,” boomed the engineer, “you propose to rearrange life here on new and rational principles.”

  “Damned if I care about that! For that we’ll wait for Kudeiarov, who was brought here yesterday. When he wakes he’ll tell you all about it. He’s such a personality, such a titanic personality! To-morrow they’ll bring along another natural scientist, I believe, an officer for certain, and three or four days later a journalist, and, I believe, his editor with him. But the devil can take them all so long as we have our own little group, and things arrange themselves. Though meanwhile I don’t want us to be telling lies. That’s all I care about, since that’s one thing that does matter. You can’t exist on the surface without lying, because living and lying are synonymous, but here we won’t lie, for the fun of it. Devil take it, the grave has some value after all! We’ll all tell our stories aloud, and we won’t be ashamed of anything. First of all I’ll tell you about myself. I’m one of the predatory kind, you know. Up on the surface all that was held in check by rotten cords. Away with the cords and let’s spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let’s strip and be naked!”

  “Let’s be naked, let’s be naked!” cried all the voices.

  “I long to be naked, I long to be,” Avdotia Ignatyevna shrilled.

  “Ah … ah, I see we’ll have fun here; I don’t want Ecke after all.”

  “No, I’d like to see a little more of life … you know, a little more of life!”

  “Hee-hee-hee!” giggled Katiche.

  “The great thing is that no one can interfere with us, and though I see Pervoedov is in a temper, he can’t reach me with his hand. Grand-pere, do you agree?”

  “I fully agree, fully, and with the utmost satisfaction, but on condition that Katiche is the first to give us her biography.”

  “I protest! I protest with all my heart!” General Pervoedov brought out firmly.

  “Your Excellency!” in hurried excitement and lowering his voice the scoundrel Lebeziatnikov murmured persuasively, “your Excellency, it will be to our advantage to agree. Here, you see, there’s this girl … and all their little affairs.”

  “There’s the girl, it’s true, but …”

  “It’s to our advantage, your Excellency, upon my word it is! If only as an experiment, let’s try it…”

  “Even in the grave they won’t let us rest in peace.”

  “In the first place, General, you were playing preference in the grave, and in the second you … be … damned.” drawled Klinevich.

  “Sir, I beg you not to forget yourself.”

  “What? You know you can’t get me, and I can tease you from here as though you were Julie’s lapdog. And another thing, gentlemen, how is he a general here? He was a general there, but here he’s zero.”

  “No, not zero…. Even here …”

  “Here you ‘ll rot in the grave and six brass buttons will be all that’s left of you.”

  “Bravo, Klinevich, ha-ha-ha!” roared voices.

  “I have served my sovereign … I have the sword …”

  “Your sword is only fit to prick mice, and you never drew it even for that.”

  “That makes no difference; I formed a part of the whole.”

  “There are all sorts of parts in a whole.”

  “Bravo, Klinevich, bravo! Ha-ha-ha!”

  “I don’t understand what the sword stands for,” boomed the engineer.

  “We shall ru
n away from the Prussians like mice, they’ll crush us to powder!” cried a voice in the distance that was unfamiliar to me, that was positively spluttering with glee.

  “The sword, sir, is an honor,” the general cried, but only I heard him. There arose a prolonged and furious roar, clamor, and hubbub, and only the hysterically impatient squeals of Avdotia were audible.

  “But hurry up, hurry up! Ah, when do we start being ashamed of nothing!”

  “Uh-uh-uh! … The soul does in truth pass through torments!” exclaimed the plebeian voice, and …

  And at that moment I suddenly sneezed. It happened unexpectedly and unintentionally, but the effect was striking: everything became as silent as one expects it to be in a churchyard, it all vanished like a dream. The real silence of the grave set in. I don’t believe they were embarrassed by my presence: they had made up their minds to be ashamed of nothing! I waited five minutes or so—not a word, not a sound. It also can’t be supposed that they were afraid of my informing the police; because what could the police do to them? I reluctantly conclude that they must have some secret, unknown to the living, which they carefully conceal from every mortal.

  “Well, my dears,” I thought, “I’ll be visiting you again.” And with those words, I left the cemetery.

  ______________

  No, that I cannot accept; no, I truly cannot! Bobok doesn’t trouble me (there, so that’s what “bobok” turned out to mean!)

  Depravity in such a place, depravity of the last aspirations, depravity of sodden and rotten corpses —and not even sparing the last moments of consciousness! Those moments have been granted, vouchsafed to them, and … and, worst of all, in such a place! No, that I cannot accept.

  I’ll go to tombs of other grades, I’ll listen in everywhere. To be sure I should listen everywhere, and not merely in one spot, in order to form an idea. I just might stumble on something reassuring.

  But I’ll certainly return there. They promised their biographies and anecdotes of all sorts. Phew! But I’ll go, I’ll certainly go; it’s a question of conscience!

  I’ll take it to the Citizen; there’s an editor there who’s had his portrait exhibited too. He just might print it.

  Translated by Jessie Coulson; ed. by A. L. and M. K.

  The Little Boy at the Savior’s Christmas Tree

  But I’m a novelist, and there’s a certain “tale” that, I suppose, I’ve made up. Why do I write “I suppose?” Of course I know for a fact that I’ve made it up, but still I keep imagining that it must have occurred, that precisely this did occur on Christmas Eve in a certain great city, on Christmas Eve, in a time of terrible frost.

  I imagine that in a cellar there was a boy, but still very young, about six or even younger. This boy woke up that morning in the damp and cold cellar. He was dressed in a sort of tiny thin dressing-gown and was shivering with cold. His breath floated out in a cloud of white steam, and, sitting on a trunk in the corner, in his boredom he was voluntarily blowing the steam out of his mouth, entertaining himself as he watched it float away. But he was very hungry. Several times that morning he had approached up to the pallet where his sick mother lay on a mattress thin as a pancake, some sort of bundle under her head for a pillow. How had she come here? She must have come with her boy from some other town and suddenly fallen ill. The landlady who rented these “corners” had been taken, two days before, to the police station. The lodgers had dispersed for the holiday, and the one remaining layabout had for the whole last twenty-four hours been sprawled out dead drunk, not even waiting for the holiday. In another corner of the room, moaning with her rheumatism, lay a wretched old woman of eighty who had once been a children’s nurse somewhere, but was now left to die alone, groaning, scolding and grumbling at the boy so that he was afraid to go near her corner. He’d gotten a drink of water in the outer room, but couldn’t find a little piece of crust anywhere, and had been on the point of waking his mother a dozen times. He got frightened, at last, in the darkness: evening had fallen long since, but no fire had been lit. Touching his mother’s face, he was surprised that she didn’t move at all, and that she was as cold as the wall. “But it’s very cold in here,” he thought. He stood for a while, unconsciously forgetting that his hand still rested on the dead woman’s shoulder, then he blew on his small fingers to warm them, and suddenly, having fumbled for his cap on the bed, haltingly, feeling his way, he left the cellar. He would have gone earlier, but was afraid of the big dog which had been howling all day by the neighbor’s door at the top of the stairs. However the dog was not there now, and the boy went out into the street.

  Heavens, what a city! He’d never seen anything like it before. Where he’d come from there was such black darkness at night, with one lamp for a whole street. The little, low-pitched, wooden houses were closed up with shutters; dusk fell—there was no one about, everyone shut themselves up in their homes and there was nothing but the howling packs of dogs, hundreds and thousands of them barking and howling all night. But it had been so warm there and they gave him food, while here—oh dear, if only he had something to eat! And what a noise and rattle here, what light and what people, horses and carriages, and what a frost—what a frost! The frozen steam hangs in clouds over the hard-driven horses, over their warmly breathing muzzles; their hoofs clink against the stones through the powdery snow, and everyone pushes so, and—oh, dear, he wants so much to eat something, even just a little piece of something—and how his fingers suddenly began hurting him. A policeman walked by and turned away to avoid seeing the boy.

  There was another street—oh, what a wide one, here he’d be run over for certain; how everyone was shouting, racing and driving along, and the light, the light! And what was this? A huge glass window, and through the window a tree reaching up to the ceiling; it was a fir tree, and on it were ever so many lights, so many gold paper ornaments and apples, and around the tree little dolls and horses; and running about the room there were children, dressed up and clean, laughing and playing and eating and drinking something. And then a little girl began dancing with one of the boys, what a pretty little girl! And he could hear the music through the window. The boy looked and wondered and laughed, though his toes were aching with the cold and his fingers were red and stiff so that it hurt him to move them. And all at once the boy remembered how his toes and fingers hurt him, and began crying, and ran on; and again through another window-pane he saw another Christmas tree, and on a table cakes of all sorts—almond cakes, red cakes and yellow cakes, and three grand ladies were sitting there, and they gave the cakes to anyone who came up to them, and the door kept opening, lots of gentlemen and ladies went in from the street. The boy crept up, suddenly opened the door and went in. Oh, how they shouted at him and waved him back! One lady went up to him hurriedly and slipped a kopeck into his hand, and with her own hands opened the door into the street for him! How frightened he was. And the kopeck rolled away and clinked upon the steps; he couldn’t bend his red fingers to hold it right. The boy ran away and went on, where he did not know. He was ready to cry again but he was afraid, and ran on and on and blew on his fingers. And he was miserable because he felt suddenly so lonely and terrified, and all at once, mercy on us! What was this again? People were standing in a crowd admiring something. Behind a glass window there were three little dolls, dressed in red and green dresses, and exactly, exactly as though they were alive. One was a little old man sitting and playing a big violin, the two others were standing close by and playing little violins, and nodding in time, and looking at one another, and their lips moved, just as if they were really talking only you couldn’t hear through the glass. And at first the boy thought they were alive, and when he grasped that they were dolls he laughed. He had never seen such dolls before, and had no idea there were such dolls! And he wanted to cry, but he the dolls were funny, so funny. All at once he fancied that some one behind him caught at his smock: a wicked big boy was standing beside him and suddenly hit him on the head, snatched off his cap and tripped h
im up. The boy fell down on the ground, at once there was a shout, he was numb with fright, he jumped up and ran away. He ran, and not knowing where he was going, ran in at the gate of some one’s courtyard, and sat down behind a wood-stack: “They won’t find me here, besides it’s dark!”

  He sat huddled up and was breathless from fright, and all at once, quite suddenly, he felt so happy: his hands and feet suddenly left off aching and grew so warm, as warm as though he were on a stove; then he shivered all over, then he gave a start, why, he must have been asleep. How nice to have a sleep here! “I’ll sit here a little and go and look at the dolls again,” said the boy, and smiled thinking of them. “Just as though they were alive! …” And suddenly he heard his mother singing over him. “Mama, I’m sleeping; how nice it is to sleep here!”

  “Come to my Christmas tree, little one,” a soft voice suddenly whispered over his head.

  He thought that this was his mother again, but no, it was not she. Who it was calling him, he could not see, but someone bent over and embraced him in the darkness; and he stretched out his hands to him, and … and all at once—oh, what a bright light! Oh, what a Christmas tree! And yet it was not a fir tree, he had never seen a tree like that! Where was he now? Everything was bright and shining, and all round him were dolls; but no, they weren’t dolls, they were little boys and girls, only so bright and shining. They all came flying round him, they all kissed him, took him and carried him along with them, and he was flying himself, and he saw that his mother was looking at him and laughing joyfully. “Mama; oh, how nice it is here, Mama!” And again he kissed the children and wanted to tell them at once about those dolls in the shop window.