Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Andrei Bely

  All this lasted but a moment. Nikolai Apollonovich silently picked up the pencil and handed it to the senator.

  ‘Here, Papa!’

  A pure trifle, knocking them together, had given birth within them both to an explosion of the most heterogeneous thoughts and feelings; Apollon Apollonovich was completely discomfited by the outrageousness of what had just happened: of his alarm in response to the deference of the insignificant service his son had performed for him (this man in red was after all his son: the flesh of his flesh: and to be afraid of one’s own flesh and blood was shameful – of what was he frightened?); none the less the outrageous thing had happened: he had squatted on his heels under his son and had physically experienced that same gaze on himself. Together with discomfiture Apollon Apollonovich felt annoyance: he reassumed a dignified manner, bent his waist coquettishly and proudly compressed his lips into a ring, taking the retrieved pencil into his hands.

  ‘Thank you, Kolenka … I’m very grateful to you … And I wish you a pleasant sleep …’

  At that same moment the son found his father’s gratitude equally discomfiting; Nikolai Apollonovich felt the blood rush to his cheeks; and when he thought he was turning pink he was already crimson. Apollon Apollonovich gave his son a stealthy glance; and perceiving that his son was crimson in the face, he himself began to turn pink; in order to conceal the pinkness, he flew with great rapidity up the staircase, flew in order to take his rest at once in his little bedroom, wrapped in a most delicate sheet.

  Nikolai Apollonovich found himself alone on the stairs of the velvet staircase, immersed in deep and persistent thought: but the lackey’s voice broke the train of his thoughts.

  ‘Good heavens! … My mind went blank, sir! … I can’t remember a thing! Barin, my dear barin: you see, something has happened! …’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Oh, something that I just can’t … How can I tell you – I do not dare …’

  On that step of the grey, velvet-carpeted staircase (trodden by the feet of ministers), Nikolai Apollonovich waited; while from the window, on that very spot where his parent had stumbled, a fine mesh of purple stains fell at his feet; this fine mesh of purple stains for some reason reminded him of blood (blood was showing purple on the old armaments, too). A familiar, hateful sense of nausea, though not of the earlier (and dreadful) dimensions, rose from his stomach: was he suffering from indigestion?

  ‘Something really has happened! Yes – well, here it is, then, sir: our barynya …

  ‘Our barynya, Anna Petrovna, sir …

  ‘She’s here, sir!!’

  At that moment Nikolai Apollonovich began to gape with nausea: and the enormous opening of his mouth expanded at the dawn: he stood there, red as a torch.

  The lackey’s ancient lips stretched forth beneath a blond cap of the most sumptuous and delicate hair:

  ‘She’s here, sir!’

  ‘Who is here?’

  ‘Anna Petrovna, sir …’

  ‘And who might she be? …’

  ‘Who, sir … Your maternal parent … Why, barin, little dove, you are just like a stranger: it’s your mother …’

  ‘?’

  ‘She’s come back to Petersburg from Shpain …’

  ‘She has sent a letter by messenger, sir: she’s staying at a hotel … Because – you yourself know why … She’s in such a situation, that …’

  ‘?’

  ‘His eminent excellency Apollon Apollonovich had just been pleased to go out, when a messenger arrived with a letter, sir … Well, I put the letter on the table and gave the messenger twenty copecks …

  ‘I would reckon that not an hour had passed when – gracious Lord: she herself suddenly appeared, sir! … She obviously knew for certain that there was nobody home, sir …’

  Before him gleamed the battle mace: the stain of fallen air showed so strangely purple; the stain of fallen air showed tormentingly purple: a purple column stretched from wall to window; specks of dust danced in the column and looked red. Nikolai Apollonovich thought that man, too, was only a column of smoking blood.

  ‘The doorbell rang … So of course I went and opened the door … I saw: a barynya. I didn’t know, a respectable barynya; only very plainly dressed; and all – in black … I said to her: “How can I oblige you, madam?” And she said to me: “Mitry Semyonych, don’t you recognize me?” And I fell on her dear hand: “Little mother,” I said, “Anna Petrovna …” ’

  The first scoundrel who came along had only to prod a man quite simply with a blade for his white, hairless skin to be sliced open (in the manner in which a jellied piglet with horseradish sauce is sliced), and the blood that throbbed at his temples to pour out in a stinking puddle …

  ‘And Anna Petrovna – God grant her health, sir – looked: looked, her ladyship did, at me … She looked at me and said in tears: “I want to see how you’ve managed here without me …” And from her reticule – a reticule, it was, of foreign fashion – she took out her hanky, sir …

  ‘I had the strictest orders not to let anyone in, if you will be pleased to know … Well, but I let our barynya in … And she …’

  The little old man’s eyes bulged; he remained with his mouth wide open and probably thought that the masters in the lacquered house had long ago gone mad: instead of displaying any surprise, regret or joy, Nikolai Apollonovich flew up the staircase, flapping his bright red satin whimsically into space like the tail of a lawless comet.7

  He, Nikolai Apollonovich … Or was it not he? No, it was he – he: he thought he had told them that day that he hated the repellent old man; that the repellent old man, the wearer of diamond insignia, was quite simply an inveterate swindler … Or had he said all that to himself?

  No – to them, to them!

  The reason that Nikolai Apollonovich had flown up the staircase, not letting Semyonych finish, was that he had clearly imagined: a certain foul act perpetrated by one scoundrel on another; suddenly he imagined the scoundrel; the gleaming scissors snipping in this scoundrel’s fingers as this scoundrel clumsily rushed to sever the bony old codger’s sleepy artery; the bony old codger’s forehead gathered into wrinkles; the bony old man’s neck was warm and its pulse was throbbing and it was … somehow crayfish-like; the scoundrel snipped the scissors about the bony old codger’s artery, and the stinking, sticky blood poured on to his fingers and the scissors, while the old codger – beardless, wrinkled, bald – at this point wept sobbing aloud and stared straight into his, Nikolai Apollonovich’s, eyes with a beseeching expression, squatting down and trying to press with a shaking finger that opening in his neck, from which with barely audible whistlings the red streams reeled, reeled and reeled …

  So vividly did this image appear before him that it was as if it had just happened (after all, when the old man had fallen on to his hands he might in the twinkling of an eye have torn down the battle mace, taken a swing with it, and …) So vividly did this image appear before him that he felt frightened.

  For this reason it was that Nikolai Apollonovich had rushed into flight through the rooms, past lacquer and sheen, his heels clattering, and running the risk of summoning the senator from his far-off bedchamber.

  A Bad Omen

  If to their excellencies, eminences, gracious sirs and citizens I were to put the question: what is the lodging of our imperial high officials, then, probably, these persons of venerable rank would reply to me directly in that affirmative sense that the lodging of our high officials is, in the first instance, space, by which we all mean a totality of rooms; these rooms consist: of a single room that is called a salle, or a hall, either of which please note – will do equally well: they consist, further, of a room for the reception of multivarious guests; and so on, so on, and so on (the remainder here is trivia).

  Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was a Real Privy Councillor; Apollon Apollonovich was a person of the first class (which is, again – the same thing), and finally: Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was a high off
icial of the Empire; all of this we have seen from the first lines of our book. So there it was: as a high official, even as a functionary of the Empire, he could not but take up his residence in spatial expanses that possessed three dimensions; and he took up his residence in spatial expanses: in cubic spaces that consisted, please note: of a hall (or – a salle) and so on, so on, and so on, things we have managed to observe from a cursory inspection (the remainder is trivia); among these trivia was his study, as were – being not particularly remarkable – his rooms.

  These not particularly remarkable rooms were now illumined by the sun; and now the incrustation of the tables was firing into the air, and the mirrors were now merrily gleaming: and all the mirrors began to laugh, because the first mirror, which looked into the hall from the drawing-room, now reflected the white, as if flour-covered, countenance of a Petrushka, the Petrushka of the puppet-booth, bright red as blood, who had taken a running dive out of the hall (one heard the stamp of his footsteps); at once mirror threw reflection to mirror; and in all the mirrors the Petrushka of the puppet-booth was reflected: it was Nikolai Apollonovich, who had flown headlong into the drawing-room and now stood there as though rooted to the spot, letting his eyes run from mirror to cold mirror, because he saw: the first mirror, the one that looked into the hall from the drawing-room, reflected a certain little object to Nikolai Apollonovich: a skeleton in a buttoned-up frock-coat, possessing a skull from which to right and to left a naked ear and a small side-whisker curled; but between side-whiskers and ears the sharpened little nose looked larger than it ought to have done; above the sharpened little nose two dark eyesockets were lifted in reproach …

  Nikolai Apollonovich realized that Apollon Apollonovich was waiting for his son here.

  Instead of his son, Apollon Apollonovich saw in the mirrors quite simply a red puppet from a booth; and seeing the booth puppet, Apollon Apollonovich froze; the booth puppet had stopped in the middle of the hall so strangely and bewilderedly …

  Then, unexpectedly to himself, Apollon Apollonovich closed the doors to the hall; retreat was cut off. That which he had begun must be finished quickly. Apollon Apollonovich regarded the talk about the strange behaviour of his son as a painful surgical act. Like a surgeon darting up to the operating table on which scalpels, saws and drills are laid out, Apollon Apollonovich, rubbing yellow fingers, walked right up to Nicolas, stopped, and, seeking the eyes that were avoiding him, unwittingly fished out his spectacle-case, twirled it between his fingers, put it away again, coughed rather restrainedly, was silent for a moment, and then said:

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is: the domino.’

  At the same time he thought that this apparently shy young man, grinning from ear to ear and avoiding looking him straight in the eye with that same gaze – this shy young man and insolent Petersburg domino, about which the Jewish press had been writing, were one and the same person; that he, Apollon Apollonovich, a person of the first class and a pillar of gentle society – he had sired him; at that same moment Nikolai Apollonovich rather embarrassedly observed:

  ‘Yes, well … a lot of people were wearing masks … And so I also went along in a … little costume …’

  At that same moment Nikolai Apollonovich thought that this two-arshin little body of his father’s, constituting in circumference no more than twelve and a half vershoks,8 was the centre and circumference of some immortal centre: in there, after all, was the seat of the ‘I’; and any board at all that broke at the wrong moment was capable of crushing that centre: crushing it for good; perhaps under the influence of this perceived idea, Apollon Apollonovich ran as quickly as he could towards that distant table, and drummed two fingers on it, as Nikolai Apollonovich, advancing on him, guiltily laughed:

  ‘It was fun, you know … We danced, you know …’

  But to himself he thought: skin, bones and blood, with not a single muscle; yes, but this obstacle – skin, bones and blood – must, by a command of fate, be blown to pieces; if that were to be avoided today, it would come surging back again tomorrow evening, and tomorrow night it would …

  Here Apollon Apollonovich, catching that same gaze glowering at him in the gleaming mirror, turned on his heels and caught the end of the sentence.

  ‘Then, you know, we played petit-jeu.’9

  Staring intently at his son, Apollon Apollonovich made no reply; and that same gaze gloweringly fixed itself on the parquetry of the floor … Apollon Apollonovich remembered: why, this strange Petrushka had been a small body; once upon a time he had carried that small body with fatherly tenderness in his arms; the fair-curled little boy, putting on a little dunce-cap made of paper, would climb up on his neck. His voice out of tune and cracking, Apollon Apollonovich had sung hoarsely:

  Silly little simpleton

  Kolenka is dancing:

  He has put his dunce-cap on –

  On his horse he’s prancing.

  Afterwards he had carried the child up to this very mirror; in the mirror both old man and young man were reflected; he would show the boy the reflections, saying:

  ‘Look, little son: there are strangers there.’

  Sometimes Kolenka would cry, and later he would scream at nights. And now? And now? Apollon Apollonovich saw not a ‘little body’ but a body: alien, large … Was it alien?

  Apollon Apollonovich began to circulate about the drawing-room, both back and forth:

  ‘You see, Kolenka …’

  Apollon Apollonovich lowered himself into a deep armchair.

  ‘Kolenka, I must … That is, not I, but – I hope – we must … must have an accounting: do you have sufficient time at your disposal now? The question, and it is a disturbing one, concerns the fact that …’ Apollon Apollonovich stumbled in mid-sentence, again ran over to the mirror (at that moment the chimes of the clock struck), and out of the mirror at Nikolai Apollonovich looked death in a frock-coat, lifting a gaze of reproach, drumming its fingers; and the mirror cracked with loud laughter: across it like lightning a crooked needle flew with a gentle crunching sound; and froze there for ever in a silvery zigzag.

  Apollon Apollonovich had cast his gaze at the mirror, and the mirror had cracked; superstitious people would have said:

  ‘A bad omen, a bad omen …’

  And of course, they would have been right: a talk was imminent.

  Nikolai Apollonovich was obviously trying to postpone the accounting for as long as possible; but since last night the accounting was superfluous: everything would now account for itself in any case. Nikolai Apollonovich regretted that he had not made a dash for it out of the drawing-room in time (how many hours already had the agony been stretching, stretching: and under his heart something was swelling, swelling); he experienced a strange voluptuous pleasure in his horror: and could not tear himself away from his father.

  ‘Yes, Papa: I must admit that I have been expecting us to have some sort of an accounting.’

  ‘Ah … you’ve been expecting it?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Are you free?’

  ‘Yes, I am free.’

  He could not tear himself away from his father: before him … But here I must make a brief digression.

  Oh, worthy reader: we have presented the exterior of the wearer of diamond insignia in exaggerated, excessively sharp outlines, but without any kind of humour; we have presented the exterior of the wearer of diamond insignia merely as it would appear to any passing observer – and not at all as it would doubtless have revealed itself to itself and to us: we, after all, have taken its measure; we have penetrated a soul shaken to the very limits and into furious whirlwinds of consciousness; it will, then, do no harm to remind the reader of the aspect of that exterior in its most general outlines, because we know: as is the visible aspect, so also is the essence within. Here it is sufficient merely to note that if this essence were to appear before us, if all these whirlwinds of consciousness were to rush past us, tearing the frontal bones apart, and if we were able to coldly open u
p the blue sinewy swellings, then … But – silence. In a word, in a word: the passing gaze would perceive here, in this very spot, the skeleton of an old gorilla covered by a frock-coat …

  ‘Yes, I am free …’

  ‘In that case, Kolenka, go to your room: you must gather your thoughts first. If you find in yourself something that it would do no harm for us to discuss, come to see me in my study.’

  ‘Very well, Papa …’

  ‘Yes, and by the way: please take off those puppet-booth rags … To be quite frank, I don’t like all that one little bit! …’

  ‘?’

  ‘No, I don’t like it one little bit! I don’t like it in the extreme!!’

  Apollon Apollonovich let his hand drop; two yellow bones drummed distinctly on the card table.

  ‘Actually,’ said Nikolai Apollonovich, getting confused, ‘actually, I ought to be …’

  But the door slammed: Apollon Apollonovich had circulated into his little study.

  By the Card Table

  Nikolai Apollonovich remained where he was, by the card table: his gaze began to run over the leaves of the bronze incrustation, the boxes and shelves that jutted out of the walls. Yes, it was here that he had played; here for long hours he had sat – in this armchair here, on the pale satin azure of whose seat little garlands twined; and just as before, the copy of David’s painting Distribution des aigles par Napoléon Premier. The painting depicted the great emperor wearing a wreath and a purple mantle, stretching out his hand to the assembly of marshals.