I nodded mechanically, but I was listening carefully.
‘The first blow is where!’
He struck the table so hard with his fist that the bottle almost toppled over.
‘The second is when!’
Again he smote the boards of the table.
‘And the third is who!’
In a different situation I would have appreciated this performance, but despite all his shouting and striking the table, I soon fell asleep right there on the bench; when I awoke it was already dark outside and somewhere in the distance I could hear sheep bleating.
I lifted my head from the table and surveyed the room – I felt as though I were in a cab drivers’ tavern somewhere in St Petersburg. A paraffin lamp had appeared on the table. Chapaev was still sitting opposite me holding his glass, humming something to himself and staring at the wall. His eyes were almost as clouded as the moonshine in the bottle, which was already half-empty. Perhaps I should talk with him in his own manner, I thought, and thumped the table with my fist in a gesture of exaggerated familiarity.
‘Tell me now, Vasily Ivanovich, straight from the heart. Are you a Red or a White?’
‘Me?’ asked Chapaev, shifting his gaze to me. ‘You want to know?’
He picked up two onions from the table and began cleaning them. One of them he cleaned until its flesh was white, but from the other he removed only the dry outer skin, exposing the reddish-purple layer underneath.
‘Look here, Petka,’ he said, placing them on the table in front of him. ‘There are two onions in front of you, one white, the other red.’
‘Well,’ I said.
‘Look at the white one.’
‘I am looking at it.’
‘And now at the red one.’
‘Yes, what of it?’
‘Now look at both of them.’
‘I am looking,’ I said.
‘So which are you, red or white?’
‘Me? How do you mean?’
‘When you look at the red onion, do you turn red?’
‘No.’
‘And when you look at the white onion, do you turn white?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I do not.’
‘Let’s proceed then,’ said Chapaev. ‘There are such things as topographical maps. And this table is a simplified map of consciousness. There are the Reds. And there are the Whites. But just because we’re aware of Reds and Whites, do we take on any colours? And what is there in you that can take them on?’
‘You are deliberately confusing things, Vasily Ivanovich. If we are not Reds and not Whites, then just who are we?’
‘Petka, before you try talking about complicated questions, you should settle the simple ones. “We” is more complicated than “I”, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I said.
‘What do you call “I”?’
‘Clearly, myself.’
‘Can you tell me who you are?’
‘Pyotr Voyd.’
‘That’s your name. But who is it bears that name?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘one could say that I am a psychological individual. A totality of habits, experience…And knowledge and preferences.’
‘And just whose are these habits, Petka?’ Chapaev asked forcefully.
‘Mine,’ I shrugged.
‘But you just said yourself, Petka, that you are a totality of habits. If they are your habits, does that mean that these habits belong to a totality of habits?’
‘It sounds funny,’ I said, ‘but in essence, that is the case.’
‘And what kind of habits do habits have?’
I began to feel irritated.
‘This entire conversation is rather primitive. We began, after all, from the question of who I am, of what my nature is. If you have no objection, then I regard myself as…Well, let us say, a monad. In Leibniz’s sense of the word.’
‘Then just who is it who goes around regarding himself as this gonad?’
‘The monad itself,’ I replied, determined to maintain a grip on myself.
‘Good,’ said Chapaev, screwing up his eyes in a cunning fashion, ‘we’ll talk about “who” later. But first, my dear friend, let us deal with “where”. Tell me, where’s it live, this gonad of yours?’
‘In my consciousness.’
‘And where is your consciousness?’
‘Right here,’ I said, tapping myself on the head.
‘And where is your head?’
‘On my shoulders.’
‘And where are your shoulders?’
‘In a room.’
‘And where is the room?’
‘In a building.’
‘And where is the building?’
‘In Russia.’
‘And where is Russia?’
‘In the deepest trouble, Vasily Ivanovich.’
‘Stop that,’ he shouted seriously. ‘You can joke when your commander orders you to. Answer.’
‘Well, of course, on the Earth.’
We clinked glasses and drank.
‘And where is the Earth?’
‘In the Universe.’
‘And where is the Universe?’
I thought for a second.
‘In itself.’
‘And where is this in itself?’
‘In my consciousness.’
‘Well then, Petka, that means your consciousness is in your consciousness, doesn’t it?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Right,’ said Chapaev, straightening his moustache. ‘Now listen to me carefully. Tell me, what place is it in?’
‘I do not understand, Vasily Ivanovich. The concept of place is one of the categories of consciousness, and so…’
‘Where is this place? In what place is this concept of place located?’
‘Well now, let us say that it is not really a place. We could call it a real…’
I stopped dead. Yes, I thought, that is where he is leading me. If I use the word ‘reality’, he will reduce everything to my own thoughts once again. And then he will ask where they are located. I will tell him they are in my head, and then…A good gambit. Of course, I could resort to quotations, but then, I thought in astonishment, any of the systems which I can cite either sidesteps this breach in the logic of thought or plugs it with a couple of dubious Latinisms. Yes, Chapaev was very far indeed from being simple. Of course, there is always the foolproof method of concluding any argument by pigeonholing your opponent – nothing could be easier than to declare that everything he is trying to demonstrate is already well known under such-and-such a name, and human thought has advanced a long way since then. But I felt ashamed to behave like some self-satisfied evening-class student who has leafed ahead through a few pages of the philosophy textbook during breaks. And had not I myself only recently told some St Petersburg philosopher, who had launched into a drunken discussion of the Greek roots of Russian communism, that philosophy would be better called sophisilly?
Chapaev laughed.
‘And just where can human thought advance to?’ he asked.
‘Eh?’ I asked in confusion.
‘Advance from what? Where to?’
I decided that in my absent-mindedness I must have spoken out loud.
‘Vasily Ivanovich, let us talk about all that when we are sober. I am no philosopher. Let us have a drink instead.’
‘If you were a philosopher,’ said Chapaev, ‘I wouldn’t trust you with anything more important than mucking out the stables. But you command one of my squadrons. At Lozovaya you understood everything just fine. What’s happening to you? Too afraid, are you? Or maybe too happy?’
‘I do not remember anything,’ I said, once again experiencing that strange tension in all my nerves. ‘I do not remember.’
‘Ah, Petka,’ Chapaev sighed, filling the glasses with moonshine. ‘I just don’t know what to make of you. Understand yourself first of all.’
We drank. Mechanically I reached for an onion and bit out a large chunk.
‘Perha
ps we should go for a breath of air before bed?’ asked Chapaev, lighting up a papyrosa.
‘We could,’ I replied, replacing the onion on the table.
There had obviously been a brief shower of rain while I was sleeping and the slope of the gully that rose towards the manor-house was damp and slippery. I discovered that I was absolutely drunk – having almost reached the top, I slipped and tumbled back down into the wet grass. My head was flung back on my neck and I saw above me the sky full of stars. It was so beautiful that for several seconds I simply lay there in silence, staring upwards. Chapaev gave me his hand and helped me to my feet. Once we had scrambled out on to level ground, I looked up again and was suddenly struck by the thought that it must have been ages since I had last seen the starry sky, although it had been there all the time right above my head, and all I had to do was look up. I laughed.
‘What’s up?’ asked Chapaev.
‘Nothing special,’ I said and pointed up at the sky. ‘The sky is beautiful.’
Chapaev looked upwards, swaying on his feet.
‘Beautiful?’ he queried thoughtfully. ‘What is beauty?’
‘Come now,’ I said. ‘What do you mean? Beauty is the most perfect objectivization of the will at the highest possible level of its cognizability.’
Chapaev looked at the sky for another few seconds and then transferred his gaze to a large puddle which lay at our feet and spat the stub of his papyrosa into it. The Universe reflected in the smooth surface of the water suffered a momentary cataclysm as all its constellations shuddered and were transformed into a twinkling blur.
‘What I’ve always found astounding,’ he said, ‘is the starry sky beneath our feet and the Immanuel Kant within us.’
‘I find it quite incomprehensible, Vasily Ivanovich, how a man who confuses Kant with Schopenhauer could have been given the command of a division.’
Chapaev looked at me with dull eyes and opened his mouth to say something, but at this point we heard a clatter of wheels and the whinnying of horses. Someone was driving up to the house.
‘It is probably Kotovsky and Anna,’ I said. ‘It would seem, Vasily Ivanovich, that your machine-gunner has a penchant for strong personalities in Russian shirts.’
‘So Kotovsky’s in town, is he? Why didn’t you say so?’
He turned and walked quickly away, completely forgetting about me. I plodded slowly after him as far as the corner of the house and then stopped. The carriage stood by the porch, while Kotovsky himself was in the act of assisting Anna out of it. When he saw Chapaev approaching, Kotovsky saluted and went to meet him and they embraced. This was followed by a series of exclamations and slaps of the kind that occur at every meeting between two men who both wish to demonstrate how well they are able to keep their spirits up as they wander through the shifting sands of life. They wandered in the direction of the house, while Anna remained beside the carriage. Acting on a sudden impulse I set off towards her – on the way I almost fell again when I stumbled over an empty shell crate, and I had a brief presentiment that I would regret my impetuousness.
‘Anna, please! Do not go!’
She stopped and turned her head towards me. My God, how beautiful she was at that moment!
‘Anna,’ I blurted out, for some reason pressing my hands to my breast as I spoke, ‘please believe me when I say…How badly I feel just thinking about my behaviour in the restaurant. But you must admit that you did give me cause. I understand that this unremittingly self-assertive suffragism is not the real you at all, it is nothing more than conformity to a certain aesthetic formula, and that is merely the result…’
She suddenly pushed me away.
‘Get away from me, Pyotr, for God’s sake,’ she said with a frown. ‘You smell of onions. I’m willing to forgive you everything, but not that.’
I turned and rushed into the house. My face was burning so hotly that one could probably have lit a cigarette on it, and all the way to my room – I have no idea how I managed to find it in the darkness – I roundly cursed Chapaev with his moonshine and his onions. I flung myself on to the bed and fell into a state close to coma, no doubt similar to the state from which I had emerged that morning.
After a while somebody knocked.
‘Petka!’ called Chapaev’s voice. ‘Where are you?’
‘Nowhere!’ I mumbled in reply.
‘Now then!’ Chapaev roared unexpectedly. ‘That’s my lad! Tomorrow I’ll thank you formally in front of the ranks. You understand everything so well! So what were you up to, acting the fool all evening?’
‘How am I to understand you?’
‘You work it out for yourself. What can you see in front of you right now?’
‘A pillow,’ I answered, ‘but not very clearly. And please do not explain to me yet again that it is located in my consciousness.’
‘Everything that we see is located in our consciousness, Petka. Which means we can’t say that our consciousness is located anywhere. We’re nowhere for the simple reason that there is no place in which we can be said to be located. That’s why we’re nowhere. D’you remember now?’
‘Chapaev,’ I said, ‘I would like to be alone for a while.’
‘Whatever you say. Report to me in the morning, fresh as a cucumber. We advance at noon.’
He retreated along the corridor over the squeaking floorboards. For a while I pondered over what he had said – at first over this ‘nowhere’, and then over the inexplicable advance that he had set for noon the next day. Of course, I could have left my room and explained to him that it was impossible for me to advance because I was ‘nowhere’, but I did not want to do that – I was overwhelmed by a terrible desire to sleep, and everything had begun to seem boring and unimportant. I fell asleep and dreamed of Anna’s fingers caressing the ribbed barrel of a machine-gun. I was awakened by another knock at the door.
‘Chapaev! I asked you to leave me alone! Let me get some rest before battle!’
‘It’s not Chapaev,’ said a voice outside the door. ‘It’s Kotovsky.’
I half sat up in my bed. ‘What do you want?’
‘I must talk to you.’
I took my pistol out of my pocket and laid it on the bed, covering it with the blanket. God alone knew what he could want. I had a presentiment that it was somehow connected with Anna.
‘Come in then.’
The door opened and Kotovsky entered. He looked quite different from when I had seen him during the day – now he was wearing a dressing-gown with tassels, from beneath which protruded the striped legs of a pair of pyjama trousers. In one hand he held a candlestick with three lighted candles, and in the other he had a bottle of champagne and two glasses – when I spotted the champagne my guess that Anna had complained to him about me became a near certainty.
‘Have a seat.’ I pointed to the armchair.
Setting the champagne and the candlestick on the table, he sat down.
‘May I smoke here?’
‘By all means.’
When he had lit his cigarette, Kotovsky made a strange gesture – he ran his open hand across his bald head, as though he were pushing back an invisible lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead. I realized that I had seen the movement somewhere before, and immediately remembered where – on our first meeting, in the armoured train, Anna had smoothed down her non-existent locks in almost exactly the same way. The idea flitted through my mind that they must be members of some strange sect headed by Chapaev, and these shaven heads were connected with their rituals, but a moment later I realized that we were all members of this sect – all of us, that is, who had been obliged to suffer the consequences of Russia’s latest attack of freedom and the lice that inevitably accompanied it. I laughed.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Kotovsky asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘I was thinking about how we live nowadays. We shave our heads in order not to catch lice. Who could have imagined it five years ago? It really is incredible.’
�
��Remarkable,’ said Kotovsky, ‘I was thinking about just the same thing – about what is happening to Russia. That’s why I came to see you. On a kind of impulse. I wanted to talk.’
‘About Russia?’
‘Precisely,’ he said.
‘What is there to say?’ I said. ‘Everything is abundantly clear.’
‘No, what I meant was – who is to blame?’
‘I do not know,’ I said, ‘what do you think?’
‘The intelligentsia. Who else?’
He held out a full glass towards me.
‘Every member of the intelligentsia,’ he continued, his face showing a dark grimace, ‘especially in Russia, where he can only survive if someone else supports him, possesses one revoltingly infantile character trait. He is never afraid to attack that which subconsciously he feels to be right and lawful. Like a child who is not afraid to do his parents harm, because he knows that they may put him in the corner, but they won’t throw him out. He is more afraid of strangers. And it’s the same with this vile class.’
‘I do not quite follow you.’
‘No matter how much the intelligentsia may like to deride the basic principles of the empire from which it has sprung, it knows perfectly well that within that empire the moral law retained its vital strength.’
‘How? How does it know?’
‘From the fact that if the moral law were dead, the intelligentsia would never have dared to trample the cornerstones of the empire under foot. Just recently I was rereading Dostoevsky – do you know what I thought?’
I felt one side of my face twitch.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Good is by its very nature all-forgiving. Just think, all of these butchers who are so busy killing people nowadays used to be exiled to villages in Siberia, where they spent days at a time hunting hares and hazel-hens. No, the intelligentsia is not afraid of sacrilege. There’s only one thing it is afraid of – dealing with the question of evil and its roots, because it understands, and quite rightly, that here it could get shafted with a telegraph pole.’
‘A powerful image.’
‘Toying with evil is enjoyable,’ Kotovsky continued passionately. ‘There’s no risk whatsoever and the advantages are obvious. That’s why there’s such a vast army of villainous volunteers who deliberately confuse top with bottom and right with left, don’t you see? All of these calculating pimps of the spirit, these emaciated Bolsheviks, these needle-punctured liberals, these cocaine-soaked social-revolutionaries, all these…’
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