She was a sweet young thing, and was only dimly aware—but did not permit herself to think about it—that there were such things as debauched women and diseases—horrible, shameful diseases that could make a man unhappy and revolting in his own eyes, and make him shoot himself with a revolver, for all his youth and promise! And she herself had walked on the promenade in a décolleté dress this summer, and when she held hands, she pressed close as she walked. She may even have kissed someone already…
Pavel clenched his fists and whispered through gritted teeth, “Disgusting!”
She probably had kissed someone … Pavel didn’t even dare look her way, and here she was already kissing, most likely with Petrov—he was cocky and insolent. And eventually she would give him her body, too, and she would do with him what people do with streetwalkers. How hideous! How base life was, containing nothing that brightened the eyes, shrouded in grief and despondency! Who knows, maybe now, even now Katya might have—a lover.
“It can’t be!” Pavel cried out, but someone inside him calmly and maliciously continued, and his words were terrible: “Yes, she does, probably some carriage driver or stable-boy. There have been cases where pure girls like her had servants for lovers, and no one knew about it, and everyone thought they were pure; but in the night they hurried off to meet their lovers, running in bare feet over freezing cold floors. Then they would get married and cheat on their husbands. It happens—he had read about this sort of thing. The Reimers have a stable-boy, a common, handsome lad…”
Pavel turned sharply and began to walk the other way.
Or maybe Petrov … She went out to meet him somewhere, and Petrov—he was insolent and daring—said to her, “It’s cold here; let’s go someplace warm! …” And she went.
Pavel could no longer think. He stood by the window, and it was as if he were being suffocated by the yellow, revolting fog, which was seeping sullenly and imperiously into the room, like a formless yellow-bellied viper. Fury and despair were choking him, but nonetheless he felt better knowing that he was not the only one who was vile, but everyone was vile, the whole world. And his disease didn’t seem so frightening and shameful. “It’s nothing,” he thought, “Petrov had it twice, Samoilov got it three times, Schmidt and Pomerantsev are already better, and I’ll get better, too.”
“I’ll be the same as they are, and everything will be fine,” he decided.
Pavel tested the lock, went to the table and took hold of the drawer handle; but suddenly he thought of all those well-hidden instruments, the vials of muddy liquid with their yellow, revolting labels, how he had bought them at the chemist’s, burning with embarrassment, and how the chemist had turned away from him as if he, too, were embarrassed; and how he had gone to see the doctor, who was a man with a noble and extraordinarily wholesome face, and it had even seemed strange that such a pure man was compelled constantly to deal with such dirty and disgusting diseases. And Pavel’s stretched-out hand dropped, and he thought, “Leave it, then! … I won’t take the treatment. Better to die…”
He lay down, and before his eyes stood the vials with the yellow labels, and they made it clear that everything bad that he thought about Katya Reimer was a wretched, abominable lie, as disgusting and dirty as his disease. And he was ashamed and frightened that he could think those things about a girl he loved and before whom he wasn’t fit to kneel; that he could think his dirty thoughts and wallow in them, and find them justified and gather out of their filth a strange and horrible hubris. And he became frightened of himself.
“Is this really me, and are these hands—mine?” he thought, and he examined his hand, still tanned from the summer sun and stained with ink at the fingertips.
And everything became incomprehensible and terrible, like a dream. He saw his room, the stucco ceiling and his boots shoved up against the bars of the bedstead as if for the first time. They were fashionable boots, with long, narrow toes, and Pavel wiggled his big toe to make sure that it was his own foot inside, not someone else’s. And then he was sure it was he, Pavel Rybakov, and he realised that it was too late for him—he had no hope. It was he who thought such filthy things about Katya Reimer; it was he who had a shameful disease; it was he who would die in no time at all, and people would cry over him when he was dead.
“Forgive me, Katya!” he whispered through pale, parched lips.
And he could feel the filth that enveloped and permeated him. He had been feeling it ever since he had been infected. Every Friday Pavel went to the bathhouse, twice a week he changed his underclothes, and everything he wore was new, fresh and expensive; but it seemed as if he were completely immersed in some kind of foul-smelling swill, and wherever he went he left a foul-smelling trace in the air. He examined any tiny little spot on his jacket with fright and strange interest, and quite often his shoulders or head would start itching, and his underclothes felt like they were sticking to his body. And sometimes this happened at dinner, in front of people, and then he would become acutely aware of how terrifyingly alone he was, like a leper on his own rubbish heap.
His thoughts were equally dirty, and it seemed that if you opened his skull and took out his brains, they would be as dirty as rags, as the brains of animals splayed out in the slaughterhouse among the filth and manure. And women and more women, tired, made up, with cold and insolent eyes! They followed him on the street, and he was afraid to go out, especially in the evening, when the city was seething with such women like decaying flesh seething with worms; they came into his head as if it were their own dirty room, and he couldn’t drive them away. When he was asleep and powerless to regulate his feelings and desires, they arose like flaming ghosts from the depths of his being; when he stayed awake, a strange, terrifying force took him in its iron hands and threw him—blinded, changed, unrecognisable as himself—into the filthy embraces of filthy women.
“It’s all because I’m debauched,” thought Pavel with calm despair. “But not for long—I’ll shoot myself soon. I’ll see Katya Reimer today, and then shoot myself. Or no—I’ll just listen to her voice from my room, and when they call me, I won’t go.”
Moving his legs with difficulty, like an invalid, Pavel approached the window. Something dark, terrifying and hopeless, like the autumn sky, gazed in, and it seemed that there was no end to it, that it had always been, and there was no joy anywhere on earth, no pure, unclouded tranquillity.
“If there were light at least!” Pavel said with longing and, as a last resort, he remembered his journal. It was also well-hidden and hadn’t been opened since Pavel got infected: when one’s thoughts are filthy, and one has no love for oneself, for one’s own joys and sorrows, there’s nothing to write in a journal. Pavel took the journal, carefully and tenderly, as if it were an ailing child, and lay down with it on his bed. The notebook was beautifully bound and had gilt-edged paper; it was white and clean, and on the pages already covered with writing there was not a single dirty blot. Pavel carefully and deferentially leafed through it, and its gleaming, stiffly bending pages smelled of spring, the forest, sunlight and love.
There were so many thoughts about life here, such serious and resolute ideas, with such a multitude of clever foreign words, that it seemed to Pavel as if it were not he who had written them, but some elderly and terribly clever man; here was the first quiver of sceptical thought, the first pure doubts and questions addressed to God: where are You, O Lord? Here was the sweet sorrow of unfulfilled and unrequited love and the decision to be proud and noble and to love Katya Reimer all his long life, to the very grave. Here was the ominous, frightening question about the purpose and meaning of life and the open-hearted answer, from which wafted the scent of spring and bright sunlight: one must live in order to love people, who are so terribly unhappy. And not a word about those women. Only very sporadically, like the reflection of a black storm cloud on the green and laughing earth, there were short, underlined and terse notations: feeling bad. Pavel knew their secret and sorrowful meaning, cursed them with his ey
es and quickly turned the page that was tainted by them.
And all the while it seemed to Pavel that it was not he who had been writing, but some other person, a good, clever one; he was dead now, this person, and that was why everything he had written was so meaningful and so sad to read.
And a quiet pity for that dead person filled his heart; and for the first time in many days Pavel felt at home here, on his own bed, all by himself, and not out there, among thousands of hostile and alien lives.
It was already getting dark, and the strange, yellowish gleam faded away; shrouded in fog, the long autumn night came on noiselessly, and the houses and people drew closer together, as if frightened. The streetlamps had begun to burn with a pale, indifferent light, and the light they shed was cold and mournful; here and there, house windows began to blaze with the light of a warm fire, and each such house where even just one window was lit seemed to be glowing with a tender, affectionate smile and became big, black and affectionate like an old friend. Carriages rolled by, swaying, just as before, and pedestrians hurried along; but now it seemed that each one of them had a goal: to arrive as soon as possible at a warm place full of friendly light and friendly people. Pavel closed his eyes and vividly recalled what he had seen before they had left the countryside, when he had been out by himself for a walk one evening: silent autumnal twilight, a velvety rain falling from the sky and a long, straight highway. At either end it receded into an even mist, suggesting an endlessness like life itself; and coming down the road at a brisk pace towards Pavel were two tinkers, yoked to a small cart. The cart rumbled faintly as it went; the tinkers threw their weight against the traces and moved along quickly, their heads bobbing in rhythm; while far away ahead of them, almost on the horizon, a little spark glittered like a bright, vivid point. For a minute, they were alongside Pavel; and when he turned around to look at them, the highway was deserted and dark, as if the people harnessed to the cart had never been there.
Pavel saw the highway and the twilight, and this was all that filled his thoughts. It was a momentary lull, when his rebellious, overwrought soul, worn out from its efforts to break out of an iron circle of contradictions, lightly and soundlessly slipped out of him and rose high up. This was peace and quiet, and a renunciation of life, something so good and sad that it was impossible to convey in human speech. For more than half an hour Pavel sat in his armchair almost motionlessly; it grew dark in the room, and bright spots from lamps and something else as well began to play over the ceiling; and he kept on sitting there, and his face seemed pale in the darkness and not like it usually was.
“Pavel, open up!” came his father’s voice.
Pavel jumped up, and at his sudden movement the same sharp, knife-like pain took his breath away. Bent over, clutching at his sunken belly with his cold hands, he gritted his teeth and mentally answered, “Coming,” since he wasn’t able to speak aloud.
“Pavel, are you asleep?”
Pavel opened the door. Sergey Andreyevich came in, somewhat perplexed, somewhat tentatively, but at the same time commandingly, the way fathers come in when they are aware of their right to enter their son’s room whenever they like, while at the same time wishing to appear gentlemanly and strictly respecting the inviolability of other people’s living space.
“So, old boy, been sleeping, have you?” Sergey Andreyevich asked gently, awkwardly patting Pavel on the shoulder in the dark.
“No, not really … dozing,” answered Pavel unwillingly, but also gently, still full of quiet tranquillity and inchoate thoughts. He understood that his father had come in to make up with him, and thought, “What good will it do?”
“Please light the lamp,” his father requested. “It’s the only escape from the fog, lighting lamps. I’ve been nervous all day long today.”
“He’s apologising …” thought Pavel, removing the glass and striking a match.
Sergey Andreyevich sat down in the chair by the table, adjusted the lampshade, and having noticed the notebook entitled “Journal,” tactfully put it aside and even covered it up with papers. Pavel silently observed his father’s actions and waited.
“Have you got a match?” Sergey Andreyevich asked as he got out a cigarette. He had matches in his pocket, but he wanted to allow his son the pleasure of doing him a service.
He lit his cigarette, glanced at the black cover of Buckle, and began, “I disagree radically with Tolstoy and others who pursue the ‘simple life,’ fruitlessly waging war against civilisation and demanding that we start going around on all fours again. But it is impossible not to agree that civilisation’s darker side fills one with extremely”—he raised his hand and let it fall—“extremely serious reservations. For instance, if we look at what’s going on now even in, say, that wonderful country of France…”
Sergey Andreyevich was an intelligent and good man, and he thought all the things that intelligent and good people of his country and time thought, having all gone to the same schools and read the same good books, newspapers and journals. He was an inspector for the Phoenix insurance company and often left the capital city on business; and when he was home, he hardly had time to catch up with his numerous acquaintances, go to the theatres and exhibitions, and browse through the latest publications. Despite all this he set aside time to be with his children, especially with Pavel, as he attributed special importance to the process of a boy’s development. Besides, he never knew what to talk about with Lily, so instead he lavished more affection on her. He didn’t cosset Pavel, inasmuch as he was a boy, but he did talk with him, the way he would talk to a grown-up or even a friend, the only difference being that he never discussed trivial matters, trying instead always to direct the conversation towards serious topics. Because of this, he considered himself a good father, and whenever he began to speak with Pavel, he felt like a professor at his podium. And both he and Pavel liked this very much. He even hesitated to probe too deeply into Pavel’s progress at the institute, fearing it might destroy the harmony of their relationship with shouting, scolding and reprimands. He was always acutely ashamed of his rare outbursts and justified them by his fiery temperament. He knew all Pavel’s thoughts, his views and his newly forming convictions, and he had always thought he knew Pavel inside and out. And he was very surprised and upset when it suddenly turned out that Pavel was not to be found in these convictions and views, but was somewhere outside of them, in some sort of mysterious moods and sickening drawings, about whose origins it was imperative that he should demand an account. Sooner or later—but absolutely imperative.
And now he spoke very well and intelligently about how culture improves particular aspects of life, but that on the whole it leaves a sort of dissonance, a sort of empty, dark place everyone feels, but no one can name—but there was an uncertainty and unevenness in his speech, like that of a professor who is not sure of his listeners’ attention and feels their anxious and distracted mood. And there was something else in his speech: something sneaky, slippery and probing. More frequently than usual he turned to Pavel: “What do you think, Pavel? Do you agree, Pavel?”
And he was extraordinarily glad when Pavel expressed his agreement. His white, puffy fingers, which moved in rhythm to his speech and threateningly stretched towards Pavel, seemed to be feeling for something; he was cautiously, cunningly stealing up on something, and the words he was saying were like a voluminous masquerade costume, behind which could be felt the outline of other, as yet unknown, terrible words. Pavel understood this and gazed with inchoate fear at the coldly gleaming pince-nez, at the wedding ring on his father’s fat finger, at the slight back-and-forth movement of his leg in its gleaming boot. His fear increased, and Pavel already felt, already knew what his father would talk about next, and his heart, though beating quietly, seemed to echo in his chest. The voluminous costume was quivering and slipping lower, and cruel words strained convulsively to get out into the open. Now his father had finished speaking about alcoholics and lit a cigarette with a slightly trembling hand.
/>
“Here it comes!” thought Pavel, and he shrank back, the way a black crow with a broken wing shrinks back in its cage when someone’s enormous outstretched hand reaches towards it through the cage door.
Sergey Andreyevich gave a heavy sigh and began, “But there is something, Pavel, that is even more terrible than alcoholism…”
“Here it comes!” thought Pavel.
“More terrible even than the ravages of war, more devastating even than the plague or cholera…”
“Now! Now!” thought Pavel, shrivelling up, and his entire body felt as if it were in icy water.
“… Debauchery! Have you, Pavel, chanced to read any books on this interesting problem?”
“I’m going to shoot myself!” Pavel thought immediately, but aloud he said calmly, and with polite interest, “Not particularly on that subject, but more generally, yes, I’ve run across it. That problem, dad, interests me very much.”
“Really? …” Sergey Andreyevich’s pince-nez flashed. “Yes, it is a terrible problem, and I am convinced, Pavel, that the fate of all civilised humanity depends on how it is resolved. Really … the degeneration of whole generations, even whole countries; psychological disturbances with all the horrors of insanity and enervation … So there you are … And finally, innumerable diseases that destroy the body and even the soul. You, Pavel, cannot even imagine what a nasty thing such an illness is. One of my university friends—later he entered the military law academy, a certain Skvortsov, Alexander Petrovich—caught something in his second year, and he wasn’t even seriously ill, but he got so frightened that he poured a bottle of kerosene over himself and ignited it. They were barely able to save him.”
Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence Page 25
