10. Mr. Parrot’s letters. He is preparing for an expedition. The goal is to ascend Ararat. Advantages of clear goals over obscure ones. Both equally futile.
11. A. S. G. character study. Start with the simplest movements, gradually progressing to more advanced (according to Lavater). Fidgety fingers—a sign of insecurity. Does not realize that he removes nonexistent pieces of fluff from his sleeve. Light walking gait in spite of large, narrow feet—a sign of imbalance. Leaning backward during conversation and then bringing his nose close to the person he is talking to. Facial expression inconsistent with his smooth speech. Vaguely focused stare. According to Lavater, the conclusion is: criminal tendencies! … Cf. removing the specks of dust to Lady Macbeth’s washing her hands. It seems that on this occasion, Lavater is mistaken.
12. Rapid growth of taverns is the sign of growing civilization. Isn’t the natural state therefore preferable?
13. Conversation with A. S. G.
“Doctor, I am glad to say you don’t look German. Apologies, etc. I like Russians, love my fatherland, etc.
“I have never doubted this, Your Excellency.”
14. Observe that in wartime, people who are not immediately threatened by its hazards and are at a safe distance talk about them a great deal and experience a sort of intoxicated pleasure. Lucretius: “Standing on a safe shore, I was excited to watch the swimmers who were perishing in the open sea.” Inde5 patriotism and eloquence.
15. New contagion cholera morbus has spread from India to Turkey. Its origins and course are unknown + the plague that is already endemic here.
16. Heard a curious anecdote in a tavern about the method of execution under General Ermolov. He ordered a mullah to be hung by his feet in front of the entire town. The mullah was left in disgrace in front of his people. On the assumption that he was being executed for his faith, he promised to eat pork. By that evening, he had lost his sight, rocked about, grabbed the crossbeam of the gallows, and climbed astride of it. He was dragged back. After it was reported to Ermolov, he was eventually hanged by the neck.
The story was narrated by a Georgian official. “We’ve seen nothing yet.”
From then on, natives have been hanged by the neck.
17. Salary paid. A. S. G. is silent as to where we go next. Our stopover in Tiflis is long term. The reasons are unknown. La jeune personne Daschinka? Nothing to do with me. Had a disagreement with M[altsov]. Griboedov’s servant, Alexander, is a depraved young man. Not only should he not accompany us to Persia, he should be thrown out at once. The reasons for A. S. G.’s affection for him are incomprehensible. The servant’s worst qualities are his indecency and quarrelsomeness.
18. Have been to the German colony this morning. It is populated mostly by the sectarians from Württemberg. They have been living here for 14 years. They remember their homeland, but they are used to their life here. Was treated to good German beer. A curious anecdote. A young girl of about 19 was kidnapped, escaped from Persian captivity with the help of her relatives. She looked glum and alienated from her family. She rejected their meager lot with indignation and recalled her life at the harem with tears in her eyes. She is quite savage.
19. No letters from St. Petersburg. Marquis is quite accommodating, gave me a dagger as a present, of no value, really. I take it he wishes to learn something about A. S. G.
“What a pity that you don’t play cards, doctor.”
“I play only with very poor players.”
20. The countess and Maltzoff. Corruption of morals as in the times of the marquises, but more covertly. He is not much of a philosopher but has good conceit of himself and has the reputation of being one. Considers me almost a comical figure.
21. Rumor that we are leaving for the theater of war to see our chief, Paskevich. I regret that I have agreed. I am prone to nervous fear at the sound of shooting. Asked about A. S. G.’s words in Petersburg: “the nonexistent state.” Answer: “It might soon come into being.”
A. S. G.’s friendship with Governor Zavileisky and their work together. His valet, Alexander, was discovered in the maids’ room, where he has acquired the habit of spending his nights, and by the countess’s request was lashed, but by A. S. G.’s request only lightly.
22. A. S. G. played a waltz of his own composition.
Said that music was an unfathomable art but that it has a great effect on the human body.
A. S. G. objected:
“From music, as from a woman, I expect only two things: elegance and grace. Poetry is a different matter.”
I pointed out the fortunate figuration that comes to fingers naturally, unforced. The repetition in the corresponding major key betrays an experienced hand, a dramatic one.
But Presto! Presto in the middle section! In the waltz! So utterly unexpected! A leap! Completely savage!
He listened very carefully and then responded:
“Why in spite of your varied knowledge do you remain unknown, my dear doctor?”
“Because I have too much of it.”
A somewhat dissatisfied smile.
“You don’t get it, doctor: I enjoy being on the road, the gray greatcoats, the simple life. And in the evening—warmth and dancing.”
I don’t exactly know what he meant by that.
He’s been walking about in an aboriginal caftan for the last three days. Complains about difficulty in breathing. I prescribed rubbing down with cold water.
23. Received a letter from St. Petersburg. Hot summer and numerous theater entertainments. A. S. G. in a conversation about Persia: “my political exile.” 100 rubles in silver + 150 for the previous month = 250. Fight heat with heat: explanation for the sheepskin hats worn by natives. Had a great laugh at the street fight of two elders.
24. Told A. S. G. about Marquis S.
He turned pale, pursed his lips, became fearsome and quite blind with rage. Half an hour later—music, laughter, declaiming poems by heart.
3
He enjoyed the possibility of choice and Nino’s unconditional submission.
He looked at Dashenka and Nino, compared them, and found comfort in the availability of both, of which no one but he was aware. Nino’s eyelashes fluttered at a single glance from him, and she would come unquestioningly, at once, and play the piano with him. The initial period of the courtship had come to an end, but he enjoyed protracting it. He enjoyed Dr. Adelung’s worried glances in his direction. The inexperienced Maltsov seemed happy enough, as if instead of going to Persia, he had received an appointment to Tiflis, to see Eliza. In this strange state, at this sudden Tiflis stopover, so incomprehensible to himself, he spent hours playing the piano as if trying to extract from the keyboard something ultimately clear and decisive, gazed distractedly at Dashenka, and alarmed Praskovya Nikolaevna.
What if, in the same light and easy manner, he were to hum a tune on the piano and say to her: “I’d like to talk to you about …” and then speak about Dashenka, not Nino, out of sheer absentmindedness?
She had already had a dream along these lines.
Zavileisky wrote him letter after letter, and when meeting Griboedov, he tried to talk to him about the project, but Griboedov merely answered, almost sympathetically:
“Quite fascinating.”
He was unbearably polite.
4
One evening, he was coming out of the Akhverdovs’ house.
Beneath him, right under his feet, on a flat roof, were a few moving shadows—some women were dancing to the muffled drumming of doli, which sounded like horses neighing somewhere underground. He looked around.
A shadow pressed itself toward the fence right in front of Nino’s lit window. Griboedov caught a glimpse of a flamboyant necktie. The young clerk was staring at Nino’s window.
Griboedov got angry. He wanted to approach the clerk and shoo him away, to tell him that this was inappropriate. The clerk paid no attention to him. But when Griboedov saw the clerk’s face, he stopped dead in his tracks. It wasn’t an attractive face, with si
deburns and little mustaches, but it was drawn so hard to the light in the window, was so oblivious of itself, that Griboedov looked at Nino’s window too. He could catch a glimpse of her forehead and hair, the movement of her hands, but couldn’t see the whole face or figure. Nino did not glance out the window once: she was preoccupied with something.
When observed from outside, the ordinary words uttered inside a room, such as “Dashenka, could you pass me the book?” or “Dashenka, I am tired of this dress,” sounded fragmented and acquire special meaning.
And looking at the clerk’s gaping mouth, he suddenly realized that Nino was incredibly pretty. He’d been vaguely aware that she was, but now he understood it perfectly. The drumbeat below was constant and muffled.
He stood rooted to the spot.
The Dashenka affair was nonsense.
There was only Nino.
5
A house of gold, and in it lives a beauty,
A fair maid, the daughter of a prince.
▶ Griboedov
In the morning, Dr. Adelung told him about Marquis Sevigny. He had noticed that the marquis and an unknown official, whom the doctor had met at the Castellases, had been watching him.
At one in the afternoon, the mail arrived with the letter from Faddei, informing him of Rodofinikin’s fury.
At two, he was with Zavileisky, had him read through the entire report, added two more pages in his own hand, and made corrections. Zavileisky immediately gave the report to a scribe to produce copies in triplicate. At three in the afternoon, Sashka was buying saddle horses and packhorses at the bazaar. He took a long time over it, examining their teeth, punching their stomachs, and looking so vaguely and insolently into the sellers’ black, greedy eyes that they were suitably cowed and brought the price down by a little. To everyone’s surprise, Sashka made good buys, at a very reasonable price. Only two turned out to be a complete waste of money. Sashka had bought the nags believing that they were Karabakh steeds.
At three o’clock, Griboedov sent a dispatch to Paskevich, the Count of Erivan, with a request to provide him with the means to reach him; summoned Maltsov and Adelung; and told them to be ready to leave the following morning.
At four o’clock, he was with Praskovya Nikolaevna. He was transformed.
Sevigny was in the room with Dashenka, and when he caught sight of Griboedov, one of his eyes froze. Dashenka wore the expression of a girl who knew she was loved.
“Marquis, do you know that the older branch of the Sevigny family tree, from which you have sprung, has ceased to exist?”
Sevigny scowled:
“Since when, Alexander Sergeyevich?”
“As of today.”
“I don’t understand,” muttered the marquis.
“Dashenka, dear, could you give us a moment, please? So, Marquis …”
Sevigny was slowly rising to his feet before Griboedov’s Georgian chekmen.
“My first question to you is: What can you tell me about your homeland, Greece? About the Morea, for example, famous for its groceries? …”
Sevigny was muttering, one of his eyes still unmoving:
“I don’t understand.”
“Quite so. My second question is: How much do you get for spreading the rumor that I am a gambler and belong to a circle of cardsharps?”
“My third question: Who beat you up at Matassi’s restaurant?”
He could hear the false white teeth chattering.
“And my fourth question: When are you thinking of leaving this house for good?”
At this point, the Greek began to subside, to fall backward, and he would have collapsed into the armchair, but Griboedov, almost without touching him, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and the Greek was unable to sit down.
Then Griboedov went quickly to the door and flung it open.
The Greek passed through the doorframe slowly and with some difficulty, and yet almost with dignity.
Griboedov followed him with his eyes—from armchair to door.
At the threshold, the Greek shook and began to pull something out of his pocket, probably his visiting card; he found it and proffered it to Griboedov as a pauper stretches out his hand for alms. Griboedov took the card with two fingers, and without bending his arm again, just using his fingers, shoved it back into the Greek’s pocket.
“This way.”
The door slammed shut.
Praskovya Nikolaevna ran out of another room and looked at the departing man, unaware of what had just happened.
Griboedov was laughing:
“I have just ostracized him …”
She grabbed his sleeve and mumbled:
“Alexander, Alexander … I have to go to Dashenka.”
Griboedov stayed on alone.
This house was his home.
The dinner that night was consolation for the losses and joys, because people losing or acquiring love still have to eat, but that dinner changed nothing.
He was looking at the tear-stained face of Dashenka, who had been crying because of him, and he was longing to take her in his arms and to ruffle her hair, almost in a fatherly fashion.
Praskovya Nikolaevna, for some reason feeling elated, was very talkative, but she was chattering not about what had happened, and not about Sipiagin: she was talking about what was right in front of her eyes—about the flowers on the table and about her painting—she tried her hand at it—and that she was not good at painting flowers, particularly roses; she couldn’t capture the right shade.
Ahead of him was the meeting with Paskevich and the trek around the plague-stricken areas, into his future kingdom.
His home was here.
Only now did he dare to look at Nino properly for the first time. She regarded him fearfully, subsiding before him, almost like the Greek, lowering herself, heavy-lidded, the mouth gone suddenly wide and half open. She reminded him of Lenochka. And at the same time, she was the clerk’s vision in the window from the other night.
When they were leaving the table, Griboedov took her by the hand and said simply:
“Venez avec moi, j’ai quelque chose à vous dire.”6
“What do you want to say to me?”
There was a distant shadow of the Georgian accent in her Russian words. She obeyed him as she’d always done. He would take her to the pianoforte and make her sit down. He would teach her.
Without saying a word, as if invisible to everyone, he took her to the garden, and they strolled through it toward her ancestral home, the home of the Princes Chavchavadze. They entered the drawing room.
And there was nowhere further to go.
Nino burst into soundless tears, and the tears rolled down out of her round, heavy-lidded eyes, and she laughed.
6
They received her mother’s blessing. Then, in the evening, Princess Salome and Praskovya Nikolaevna sat on the veranda and spoke for a long time, quietly, very quietly, drained and tired, as if they were the ones who were being married again, or as if somebody had died and this was the start of that incomprehensible joy of dressing them up for the last time.
Griboedov and Nino sat in the dark corner on the windowsill, and he lingered on her lips.
They sat for an hour, then two; they sat all through the night. He taught her how to kiss as he previously had taught her music, and there was the same foreign, childish echo in her kissing as in her speech and in her piano-playing.
7
Before his departure, he sat down and wrote a flowing letter to Rodofinikin in his fluid, slanted handwriting. What he wanted to write was:
“Darling Date,
I can see through you, officialo-nincompoopolo, damn you to hell. And I don’t care a fig, my dear insect of a man, either about you or your instructions. A plague on you, dear Mr. Date, and when you recover, please be assured of my remaining your faithful and humble servant, Alexander Griboedov.”
Instead he wrote:
“Your Excellency:
Please accept my gratitude for
your assistance in transporting my luggage to Astrakhan, though we don’t know yet what is to happen to the crockery, etc. We still have to eat on the way to Tehran. Here, at the count’s house, we have at our disposal everything we need, but on the road, I won’t be able, it would seem, to entertain good folk with coffee or tea … I am just about to set off into the plague-ridden area.
(Would you care to join me …?)
Mr. Bulgarin has informed me that you, highly esteemed Konstantin Konstantinovich, are sending me a specific personal instruction, ordering me not to delay in Tiflis a moment longer. I ask you, for the love of God, not to tighten the strings of my natural passion and my diligence or they may snap.
(Or you may find yourself in trouble with Paskevich.)
Accept my assurances of all the sincere feelings …
(Which?)
… of respect and boundless devotion
To Your Excellency
(‘Officialo-nincompoopolo’)
Yours faithfully,
Alexander Griboedov.”
And he set off on the road.
8
GENERAL SIPIAGIN’S CONVERSATION ON THE SAME NIGHT, WITH HIS FRIEND, A COLONEL, OVER A BOTTLE OF WINE
I am a straightforward man. I am a strategist and a tactician. This is what I am.
For example, what kind of military rhetoric do I favor? The strategic sort. Exclamatory proclamations. “Russians, remember the tenets of Peter the Great!” And believe it or not, I immediately see the troops and the chariots carrying the body of the dead emperor.
In my book A Guide for Mounted Riflemen, I coached skirmishers always to take their time. If you write it in an ordinary manner, it will soon be forgotten. But I did it in a memorable form. So I wrote:
Question: Must the skirmisher hurry when taking a shot?
Answer: No, quite the reverse.
Because when put like this, it goes straight to the heart and is easy to remember.
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar Page 29