by Louise Welsh
“Ah, that’s you, you rascal! Well, you are a godsend, anyway, for here…”
“You were mistaken in suspecting your neighbour, the business gentleman, of unpleasant fragrance… I said nothing, but I laughed. The stench came from me: they had to bury me in a nailed-up coffin.”
“Ugh, you horrid creature! Still, I am glad you are here; you can’t imagine the lack of life and wit here.”
“Quite so, quite so, and I intend to start here something original. Your Excellency – I don’t mean you, Pervoyedov – your Excellency the other one, Tarasevitch, the privy councillor! Answer! I am Klinevitch, who took you to Mlle. Furie in Lent, do you hear?”
“I do, Klinevitch, and I am delighted, and trust me…”
“I wouldn’t trust you with a halfpenny, and I don’t care. I simply want to kiss you, dear old man, but luckily I can’t. Do you know, gentlemen, what this grand-père’s little game was? He died three or four days ago, and would you believe it, he left a deficit of four hundred thousand government money from the fund for widows and orphans. He was the sole person in control of it for some reason, so that his accounts were not audited for the last eight years. I can fancy what long faces they all have now, and what they call him. It’s a delectable thought, isn’t it? I have been wondering for the last year how a wretched old man of seventy, gouty and rheumatic, succeeded in preserving the physical energy for his debaucheries – and now the riddle is solved! Those widows and orphans – the very thought of them must have egged him on! I knew about it long ago, I was the only one who did know; it was Julie told me, and as soon as I discovered it, I attacked him in a friendly way at once in Easter week: ‘Give me twenty-five thousand, if you don’t they’ll look into your accounts tomorrow.’ And just fancy, he had only thirteen thousand left then, so it seems it was very apropos his dying now. Grand-père, grand-père, do you hear?”
“Cher Klinevitch, I quite agree with you, and there was no need for you… to go into such details. Life is so full of suffering and torment and so little to make up for it… that I wanted at last to be at rest, and so far as I can see I hope to get all I can from here too.”
“I bet that he has 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 has been here for five days, and if only you knew, grand-père, what a little wretch she is! Of good family and breeding and a monster, a regular monster! I did not introduce her to any one there, I was the only one who knew her… Katiche, answer!”
“He-he-he!” the girl responded with a jangling laugh, in which there was a note of something as sharp as the prick of a needle. “He-he-he!”
“And a little blonde?” the grand-père faltered, drawling out the syllables.
“He-he-he!”
“I… have long… I have long,” the old man faltered breathlessly, “cherished the dream of a little fair thing of fifteen and just in such surroundings.”
“Ach, the monster!” cried Avdotya Ignatyevna.
“Enough!” Klinevitch decided. “I see there is excellent material. We shall soon arrange things better. The great thing is to spend the rest of our time cheerfully; but what time? Hey, you, government clerk, Lebeziatnikov or whatever it is, I hear that’s your name!”
“Semyon Yevseitch Lebeziatnikov, lower court councillor, at your service, very, very, very much delighted to meet you.”
“I don’t care whether you are delighted or not, 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 are dead and yet we are talking and seem to be moving – and yet we are not talking and not moving. What jugglery is this?”
“If you want an explanation, baron, Platon Nikolaevitch could give you one better than I.”
“What Platon Nikolaevitch is that? To the point. Don’t beat about the bush.”
“Platon Nikolaevitch is our home-grown philosopher, scientist and Master of Arts. He has brought out several philosophical works, but for the last three months he has been getting quite drowsy, and there is no stirring him up now. Once a week he mutters something utterly 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 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 consciousness and goes on for two or three months… sometimes even for half a year… There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite senseless of course, about some bobok, ‘Bobok, bobok,’ but you see that an imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him.”
“It’s rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet I feel there’s a stench?”
“That… he-he… Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy. It’s apropos of smell, he said, that the stench one perceives here is, so to speak, moral – he-he! It’s the stench of the soul, he says, that in these two or three months it may have time to recover itself… and this is, so to speak, the last mercy… Only, I think, baron, that these are mystic ravings very excusable in his position…”
“Enough; all the rest of it, I am 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 cast aside all shame.”
“Ah, let us cast aside all shame, let us!” many voices could be heard saying; and strange to say, several new voices were audible, which 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 cast off all shame!” Avdotya Ignatyevna exclaimed rapturously.
“I say, if Avdotya Ignatyevna wants to cast off all shame…”
“No, no, no, Klinevitch, I was ashamed up there all the same, but here I should like to cast off shame, I should like it awfully.”
“I understand, Klinevitch,” boomed the engineer, “that you want to rearrange life here on new and rational principles.”
“Oh, I don’t care a hang about that! For that we’ll wait for Kudeyarov who was brought here yesterday. When he wakes he’ll tell you all about it. He is such a personality, such a titanic personality! Tomorrow 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 deuce take them all, there will be a little group of us anyway, and things will arrange themselves. Though meanwhile I don’t want us to be telling lies. That’s all I care about, for that is one thing that matters. One cannot exist on the surface without lying, for life and lying are synonymous, but here we will amuse ourselves by not lying. Hang it all, 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 am one of the predatory kind, you know. All that was bound and held in check by rotten cords up there on the surface. Away with cords and let us spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked!”
“Let us be naked, let us be naked!” cried all the voices.
“I long to be naked, I long to be,” Avdotya Ignatyevna shrilled.
“Ah… ah, I see we shall have fun here; I don’t want Ecke after all.”
“No, I tell you. Give me a taste of life!”
“He-he-he!” giggled Katiche.
“The great thing is that no one can interfere with us, and though I see Pervoyedov is in a temper, he can’t reach me with his hand. Grand-père, do you agree?”
“I protest! I protest with all my heart!” General Pervoyedov brought out firmly.
“Your Excellency!” the scoundrel Lebeziatnikov persuaded him in a murmur of fussy excitement, “your Excellency, it will be to our advantage to agree. Here, you see, there’s this girl’s… 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 us 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 we don’t care a hang about you,” drawled Klinevitch.
“Sir, I beg you not to forget yourself.”
“What? Why, you can’t get at 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 is mere refuse.”
“No, not mere refuse… Even here…”
“Here you will rot in the grave and six brass buttons will be all that will be left of you.”
“Bravo, Klinevitch, 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, Klinevitch, bravo! Ha-ha-ha!”
“I don’t understand what the sword stands for,” boomed the engineer.
“We shall run 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 honour,” the general cried, but only I heard him. There arose a prolonged and furious roar, clamour, and hubbub, and only the hysterically impatient squeals of Avdotya Ignatyevna were audible.
“But do let us make haste! Ah, when are we going to begin to cast off all shame!”
“Oh-ho-ho!… The soul does in truth pass through torments!” exclaimed the voice of the plebeian, “and…”
And here I suddenly sneezed. It happened suddenly and unintentionally, but the effect was striking: all became as silent as one expects it to be in a churchyard, it all vanished like a dream. A real silence of the tomb set in. I don’t believe they were ashamed on account of my presence: they had made up their minds to cast off all shame! I waited five minutes – not a word, not a sound. It cannot be supposed that they were afraid of my informing the police; for what could the police do to them? I must conclude that they had some secret unknown to the living, which they carefully concealed from every mortal.
“Well, my dears,” I thought, “I shall visit you again.” And with those words, I left the cemetery.
No, that I cannot admit; no, I really cannot! The bobok case does not trouble me (so that is what that bobok signified!).
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 admit.
I shall go to other tombs, I shall listen everywhere. Certainly one ought to listen everywhere and not merely at one spot in order to form an idea. Perhaps one may come across something reassuring.
But I shall certainly go back to those. They promised their biographies and anecdotes of all sorts. Tfoo! But I shall go, I shall certainly go; it is a question of conscience!
I shall take it to the Citizen; the editor there has had his portrait exhibited too. Maybe he will print it.
THE VERY IMAGE
Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) was born into an aristocratic family who had been left impoverished by the French Revolution. He moved to Paris at the age of eighteen where he met Baudelaire who introduced him to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and encouraged his interest in the occult. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was embraced by the decadent movement and is mentioned in Huysmans’ A Rebours.
Darting their dark eyes everywhere.
– C. Baudelaire
One grey November morning I was hurrying along the embankments. The air was damp with a cold drizzle. Black-clad passers-by, sheltering under shapeless umbrellas, came and went.
The yellow Seine swept its merchant vessels along as if they were outsize cockchafers. On the bridges, the wind kept snatching at hats whose owners fought with space to save them, with those convulsive gestures which are always such a painful sight for artists’ eyes.
My ideas were pale and misty; the thought of a business appointment, arranged the day before, was nagging at my mind. Time was pressing; and I decided to shelter under the porch of a doorway, from where it would be easier for me to signal a cab.
At that very moment I noticed, right beside me, the entrance of a square, solid-looking building.
It had reared up in the mist like a stone apparition, and, despite its rigid architecture, despite the dismal, eerie vapour in which it was enveloped, I recognized a certain cordial air of hospitality about it which reassured me.
“The people who live here,” I said to myself, “must surely be sedentary folk. This threshold has an inviting look: isn’t the door open?”
So, in the politest possible way, with a contented air, hat in hand, and even planning a complimentary speech to make to the mistress of the house, I went smilingly in, and promptly found myself before a room with a glass roof through which a ghastly light was falling.
There were pillars on which clothes, mufflers, and hats had been hung.
Marble tables were installed on all sides.
Some people were there with legs outstretched, heads raised, staring eyes, and matter-of-fact expressions, who appeared to be meditating.
And their gaze was devoid of thought, their faces the colour of the weather.
There were portfolios lying open and papers spread out beside each one of them.
And then I realized that the mistress of the house, on whose courteous welcome I had been counting, was none other than Death.
I looked at my hosts.
It was obvious that, in order to escape from the worries of a harassing life, most of them had murdered their bodies, hoping in that way to obtain a little more comfort.
As I was listening to the noise of the brass taps fastened to the wall and intended for the daily refreshment of those mortal remains, I heard the rumbling of a cab. It was stopping outside the establishment. I reflected that my businessmen were waiting, and turned round to take advantage of my good luck.
The cab had, in fact, just disgorged, on the threshold of the building, some students on the spree who needed to see death to believe in it.
I looked at the empty carriage and said to the driver:
“The Passage de l’Opéra!”
A little later, on the boulevards, the weather struck me as duller than ever, on account of the absence of any horizon. The skeletal trees looked as if, with the tips of their black branches, they were vaguely pointing out pedestrians to the sleepy policemen.
The carriage sped along.
The passers-by, seen through the window, gave me the impression of flowing water.
On arriving at my destination, I jumped out on to the pavement and plunged into the arcade, which was full of care-worn faces.
At the end I noticed, right in front of me, the entrance to a café – since burnt down in a famous fire (for life is a dream). It was tucked away at the back of a sort of shed, under a square, sinister archway.
“It is there,” I thought, “that my businessmen are waiting for me, glass in hand, t
heir shining eyes defying Fate.”
I accordingly turned the handle of the door and promptly found myself in a room into which a ghastly light was filtering through the windows.
There were pillars on which clothes, mufflers, and hats had been hung.
Marble tables were installed on all sides.
Some people were there with legs outstretched, heads raised, staring eyes, and matter-of-fact expressions, who appeared to be meditating.
And their faces were the colour of the weather, their gaze devoid of thought.
There were portfolios lying open and spread out beside each one of them.
I looked at those men.
It was obvious that, in order to escape from the obsessions of an unbearable conscience, most of them had long ago murdered their “souls,” hoping in that way to obtain a little more comfort.
As I was listening to the noise of the brass taps fastened to the wall and intended for the daily refreshment of those mortal remains, the memory of the rumbling cab came back to my mind.
“That driver,” I said to myself, “must have been afflicted in the course of time by a sort of coma, to have brought me back, after so many circumconvolutions, to my starting-point. All the same, I must admit (if there has been a mistake) that the second glimpse is more sinister than the first!”
I therefore silently shut the glass door and went home, firmly resolved – despite the force of example and whatever might become of me – never to do any business.
DRACULA’S GUEST
Bram Stoker
Abraham Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin. He was an invalid as a child and did not learn how to walk until he was seven years old. A trained lawyer, Stoker worked for most of his life as a theatre administrator for the actor-manager Henry Irving, who may have helped to inspire the character of Dracula. Stoker’s literary output was prodigious, but Dracula remains his most influential novel. In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe, who had previously been courted by Oscar Wilde.
When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d’hôtel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door: