His entire face simply radiated ingenuousness, an expansive, simple character, truth. If it isn’t a lie that the face is the mirror of the soul, I could have sworn from the very first day of my meeting with the gentleman with the badge that he was incapable of lying. I might even have laid a bet on it. Whether I would have lost or won the reader will discover later.
His chestnut hair and beard were thick and as soft as silk. They say that soft hair is a sign of a gentle, sensitive, ‘meek and mild’ soul: criminals and evil desperadoes tend to have wiry hair. Whether that’s true or not the reader will in any event find out later. But neither his facial expression nor his beard – nothing about that gentleman with the badge was so gentle and delicate as the movements of his huge, heavy body. In those movements you could detect good breeding, ease, grace and even – forgive the expression – a certain effeminacy. It would have cost my hero only a slight effort to bend a horseshoe or crush a sardine tin in his fist. However, not one movement revealed any sign of physical strength. He grasped the door handle or his cap as if they were butterflies – delicately, carefully, barely touching them with his fingers. His steps were noiseless, his handshake feeble. Looking at him you forgot he was as strong as Goliath and that with one hand he could lift what five editorial Andreys could never have budged. As I watched his delicate movements it was hard to believe that he was so strong and heavily built. Spencer1 would have hailed him as the very model of grace.
When he entered my office he became confused. Most likely my sullen, disgruntled look came as a shock to his gentle, sensitive nature.
‘Heavens, I’m sorry!’ he began in a soft, rich baritone. ‘Seems I’ve chosen a rotten time to come barging in here and forcing you to make an exception in my case. I can see you’re up to your eyes! Well now, this is what I’ve come about, Mr Editor. Tomorrow I have to go to Odessa on a very important business matter. Had I been able to postpone my trip until Saturday then, believe me, I wouldn’t have asked you to make an exception in my case. Normally I abide by the rules, because I like to do things the right way…’
‘God, how he goes on and on!’ I thought, stretching my hand towards my pen to show that I was terribly busy. At such times visitors really got on my nerves!
‘I’ll take only one minute of your time,’ my hero continued in an apologetic tone. ‘But first allow me to introduce myself… Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev, LL.B, former investigating magistrate. I don’t have the honour of belonging to the writing fraternity. All the same, my purpose in coming here is purely literary. Before you there stands a person who wants to make a start, despite his forty-odd years. Better late than never!’
‘Delighted… How can I help you?’
The gentleman who wanted to make a start sat down and gazed at the floor with imploring eyes.
‘I’ve brought you a little story,’ he continued, ‘which I’d like you to print in your paper. I’m telling you quite frankly, Mr Editor, I haven’t written this story either for literary fame or to express “sweet sounds” in words.2 I’m too old now for admirable things like that. No, I’m setting out on the writer’s path for purely commercial considerations… I want to earn some money… At the moment I’m completely unemployed. You know, I was investigating magistrate in S— district. I worked there for just over five years, but I didn’t make much money – nor did I preserve my innocence.’
Kamyshev glanced at me with his kind eyes.
‘The work there was a real bore,’ he added, softly laughing. ‘I simply slaved away until I called it a day and left. Now I’m out of a job and just about broke. If you published my story, regardless of any merits it may have, you’d be doing me more than a favour – you’d be helping me. I’m well aware that a newspaper isn’t a charitable institution, nor an old people’s home, but… if you’d be good enough to…’
‘You’re lying,’ I thought.
Those little trinkets and that diamond ring on his little finger didn’t tally at all with having to write for a living. What’s more, a barely perceptible cloud – something that the experienced eye can detect on the faces of those who only rarely lie – passed over Kamyshev’s face.
‘What’s the subject of your story?’ I asked.
‘Subject? What can I say? It’s nothing new… it’s about love, murder. Read it and you’ll see. It’s called From the Memoirs of an Investigating Magistrate.’
I probably frowned, as Kamyshev blinked in embarrassment, gave a start and quickly added:
‘My story’s written in the hackneyed style of previous investigating magistrates but… you’ll find facts in it… the truth. Everything that’s depicted in it, from start to finish, happened before my eyes… I was both eyewitness and even an active participant.’
‘It’s not a question of truth… You don’t necessarily have to see something in order to describe it – that’s not important. The point is, for far too long now our poor readers have had their teeth set on edge by Gaboriau3 and Shklyarevsky.4 They’re sick and tired of all these mysterious murders, these detectives’ artful ruses, the phenomenal quick-wittedness of investigating magistrates. Of course, there are different kinds of public, but I’m talking about the public that reads my paper. What’s your story called?’
‘The Shooting Party.’
‘Hmm, doesn’t sound much. And to be quite honest with you I’m so piled up with stuff here at the moment that it’s impossible to take on anything new, even if its merits cannot be questioned.’
‘But please take my story… please. You say it’s nothing much, but you can’t condemn something out of hand without even having seen it! Surely you must admit that even investigating magistrates are capable of writing seriously?’
Kamyshev said all this with a stutter, twiddling his pencil between his fingers and gazing at his feet. Finally he became extremely flustered and couldn’t stop blinking. I felt quite sorry for him.
‘All right, leave it here,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise that your story will be read soon. You’ll have to wait.’
‘For very long?’
‘I can’t say… come back in a month… or two… or three.’
‘That’s absolutely ages! But I dare not insist. You must do as you please.’ Kamyshev stood up and reached for his cap. ‘Thanks for the audience,’ he said. ‘I’m off home now and I’ll feed myself on hope. Three months of hoping! But I can see that you’ve had enough of me. I wish you good day, sir!’
‘Just one more word, if you don’t mind,’ I said, turning the pages of his thick notebook that were filled with very small handwriting. ‘You write here in the first person… So, by investigating magistrate I take it you mean yourself?’
‘Yes, but under a different name. My part in the story is rather scandalous… it would have been awkward to use my real name. Well then, in three months?’
‘Perhaps… but not earlier.’
The former investigating magistrate bowed gallantly, gingerly grasped the door handle and vanished, leaving his story on my desk. I took the notebook and put it away in the table drawer.
That handsome Kamyshev’s story reposed in my drawer for two months. One day, as I was leaving the office for my summer villa, I remembered it and took it with me.
After taking my seat in the railway compartment I opened the notebook and started reading from the middle: it excited my curiosity. That same evening, although I didn’t really have the time, I read the story from the beginning to the words ‘The End’, written with a flourish. That night I read the story right through again and when dawn came I was pacing my veranda and rubbing my temples as if I wanted to banish some new and painful thought that had suddenly entered my head. And this thought really was painful, unbearably intense… It struck me that I, who was no investigating magistrate and even less a forensic psychologist, had stumbled upon one man’s terrible secret, a secret that was no business of mine. I walked up and down the veranda, trying to persuade myself not to believe what I had discovered.
Kamyshev
’s story was not published for the reasons given at the end of my chat with the reader. I shall meet my reader again, but for the moment I’m taking leave of him for a long time and I offer Kamyshev’s story for his perusal.
It’s really a very ordinary story, containing many longueurs and in places the style is very uneven. The author has a weakness for striking effects and resounding phrases. Obviously he’s writing for the very first time, with an inexperienced, untrained hand. For all that, his story makes for easy reading. There’s a plot, it makes sense and – most important of all – it’s original, with a very distinctive character – it’s what one would call sui generis.5 And it does have some literary merit. It’s worth reading… here it is.
THE SHOOTING PARTY
(From the Memoirs of an Investigating Magistrate)
I
‘A husband murdered his wife! Oh, you’re so stupid! Now, will you please give me some sugar!’
This cry woke me up. I stretched myself and felt a heavy weight and lifelessness in every limb. You can get pins and needles in the legs and arms by lying on them, but now I felt that I’d made my whole body go to sleep, from head to foot. An after-dinner nap, in a stuffy, dry atmosphere, with flies and mosquitoes buzzing around, has a debilitating rather than invigorating effect. Jaded and bathed in sweat, I got up and went over to the window. It was after five in the afternoon. The sun was still high and was burning just as zealously as three hours earlier. The sunset and the cool of evening were still a long way off.
‘A husband murdered his wife!’
‘Enough of your nonsense, Ivan Demyanych!’ I said, giving Ivan Demyanych’s beak a gentle flick. ‘Husbands murder their wives only in novels or in the tropics, where African passions run high, dear chap. We’ve enough of such horrors as burglaries or false identities as it is…’
‘Burglaries…’ Ivan Demyanych intoned through his hooked beak. ‘Oh, you’re so stupid!’
‘But what can I do about it, dear chap? How are we humans to blame if we’re born with limited brainpower? What’s more, Ivan Demyanych, there’s nothing to be ashamed of if one behaves like an idiot in temperatures like these. You’re my clever little birdie, but it seems that your brains have curdled and grown stupid in this heat.’
My parrot’s called Ivan Demyanych, not Pretty Polly or any other bird name. He acquired this name purely by chance. My servant Polikarp was once cleaning his cage when he suddenly made a discovery without which my noble bird would have been called Pretty Polly to this day. For no apparent reason, it suddenly struck that lazy servant of mine that my parrot’s beak closely resembled the nose of Ivan Demyanych, our village shopkeeper, and ever since the name and patronymic of that long-nosed shopkeeper has stuck to my parrot. Thanks to Polikarp the entire village christened my remarkable bird Ivan Demyanych; thanks to Polikarp the bird became a real person, while the shopkeeper lost his real name: to the end of his days he’ll be spoken of by country bumpkins as the ‘magistrate’s parrot’.
I bought Ivan Demyanych from the mother of my predecessor, investigating magistrate Pospelov, who passed away shortly before my appointment. I bought him together with some old-fashioned oak furniture, sundry trashy kitchen utensils and in general all the various household effects left by the deceased. To this day my walls are embellished with photographs of his relatives, and a portrait of the former owner still hangs over my bed. The deceased, a lean, wiry man with red moustache and thick underlip, sits goggling at me from his discoloured walnut frame, never taking his eyes off me while I’m lying there in his bed. I haven’t taken down one photograph from the walls – briefly, I’ve left the flat exactly as I found it. I’m too lazy to think of my own comfort and I would have no objection to the living as well as the dead hanging on my walls – if the living should so desire.*
Ivan Demyanych found it as stifling as I did. He ruffled his feathers, spread his wings and screeched phrases out loud that he had learned from my predecessor Pospelov and from Polikarp. To occupy myself somehow during my post-prandial leisure time I sat down in front of the cage and started observing the movements of my parrot, who was making a determined effort to escape from the torments inflicted by the stifling heat and the insects that resided in his feathers, but without success. The poor thing seemed as miserable as sin.
‘What time does ’e get up?’ boomed a voice from the hall.
‘It all depends!’ Polikarp replied. ‘Sometimes he’ll wake up at five, sometimes he’ll carry on sleeping till morning. There’s nothing I can do about it, you know.’
‘Are you ’is valet?’
‘His house servant. Now, don’t bother me and shut up… Can’t you see I’m reading?’
I peeped into the hall. There was my Polikarp, lolling on the large red trunk and reading some book, as usual. Peering into it with his drowsy, unblinking eyes, he kept twitching his lips and frowning. He was clearly irritated by the presence of that stranger – a tall, bearded peasant who was standing by the trunk and trying in vain to engage him in conversation. On my appearance the peasant took one step away from the trunk and stood to attention like a soldier. Polikarp pulled a dissatisfied face and rose slightly without taking his eyes off his book.
‘What do you want?’ I asked the peasant.
‘I’m from the Count, yer ’onner. The Count begs to send ’is compliments and asks you to come over right away.’
‘Is the Count back?’ I asked in amazement.
‘That’s right, yer ’onner. Came back last night, ’e did. ’Ere’s a letter for you, sir.’
‘Just look what the devil’s brought in!’ exclaimed my Polikarp. ‘For two years we led nice quiet lives while he was away and now he’ll go and turn the whole district into a pigsty again. There’ll be no end to the shameful goings-on!’
‘Shut up, I’m not asking you!’
‘You don’t have to ask me! I’m telling you straight. You’ll leave his place filthy drunk and then you’ll go swimming in the lake, just as you are, with your suit on. And I’m the one who’ll have to clean it afterwards! That’s at least a three-day job!’
‘What’s the Count doing just now?’ I asked the peasant.
‘ ’E was just sitting down to ’is dinner when ’e sends me over. Before that ’e was fishing in the bathing-pool, sir. What shall I tell ’im?’
I opened the letter and read the following:
My dear Lecoq!6
If you’re still alive and well and haven’t forgotten your ever-intoxicated friend, don’t waste another minute, attire yourself and ride over post-haste! I got back only last night, but already I die of boredom! The impatience I wait for you with knows no bounds. I wanted to come for you myself and carry you off to my lair, but the heat has fettered my limbs! All I can do is sit still and fan myself. Well, how are you? And how is that very clever Ivan Demyanych of yours? Do you still do battle with that old pedant Polikarp? Come quickly and tell me everything…
Your A. K.
I didn’t need to look at the signature to recognize in that large, ugly scrawl the drunken hand of my friend, Count Karneyev, who rarely put pen to paper. The brevity of the letter, its pretensions to a certain degree of playfulness and liveliness, showed beyond doubt that my dull-witted friend had torn up a large quantity of notepaper before managing to complete it. Pronouns such as ‘which’ were absent from the letter and all gerunds were sedulously avoided – the Count rarely managed to employ both at one sitting.
‘What answer shall I give, sir?’ asked the peasant.
I didn’t reply to this question immediately and any decent man in my place would have hesitated as well. The Count was very fond of me and most sincerely thrust his friendship upon me. But I felt nothing like friendship for him and I even disliked him. Therefore it would have been more honest to reject his friendship once and for all than go and visit him and play the hypocrite. Besides, going over to the Count’s meant plunging once again into the kind of life that my Polikarp dignified by the name of ‘pigsty’ an
d which, for the entire two years before the Count left his estate for St Petersburg, had been shattering my robust health and drying my brains out. That dissipated, abnormal life, so full of dramatic incident and mad drunkenness, had failed to undermine my organism. But on the other hand it made me notorious all over the province… I was popular…
My reason told me the whole truth, the basic truth; a blush of shame for my recent past spread over my face and my heart sank at the thought that I wouldn’t have the courage to say no to that trip to the Count’s. But I didn’t hesitate for long: the struggle lasted no longer than a minute.
‘Convey my respects to the Count,’ I told the messenger, ‘and thank him for thinking of me… tell him I’m busy and that… tell him I’m…’
And just at that moment, when a definitive ‘no’ was about to roll off my tongue, I was suddenly overcome by a painful feeling. A young man, so full of life, strength and desire, cast by fate into that rural backwater, was gripped by feelings of melancholy and loneliness…
The Shooting Party Page 4
