Envy

by Yuri Olesha

  The dark blue straps of his suspenders hang down at his sides. He goes into the bedroom, finds his pince-nez on the chair, puts them on in front of the mirror, and returns to my room. Here, standing in the middle, he raises his suspender straps, both at once, as if hoisting a load onto his shoulders. He doesn’t say a word to me. I pretend to be sleeping. The sun is concentrated in two burning bundles in the metal snaps of his suspenders. (Things like him.)

  He doesn’t need to comb his hair or put his beard and mustache aright. His head is cropped close, and his mustache is short—right up to his nose. He looks like a fat little boy all grown up.

  He picks up the perfume bottle and the glass stopper chirps. He pours eau de cologne into his hand and passes his hand over the globe of his head—from forehead to nape and back.

  In the morning he drinks two glasses of cold milk. He gets the pitcher out of the sideboard, pours, and drinks it all without sitting down.

  My first impression of him knocked me out. I couldn’t admit it or allow it. He was standing in front of me dressed in an elegant gray suit and smelling of eau de cologne. His lips were fresh and a little puffy. It turned out, he was a dandy.

  Very often at night his snoring wakes me. Dazed, I can’t figure out what’s going on. It’s as if someone were threatening me over and over again: “Krakatoa … krra … ka … toaaa …”

  He was presented with this magnificent apartment. There’s a vase standing by his balcony doors on a polished pedestal! A vase made of the finest porcelain, curved, tall, glowing red as if blood pulsed through it gently. It reminds me of a flamingo. An apartment on the fourth floor. The balcony hangs in a light-filled space. The broad suburban street looks like a highway. Across the way, down below, is a garden—the kind of garden that’s typical of Moscow’s outskirts, dense with ponderous trees, a chaotic assortment that has sprouted up inside the three walls of a vacant lot, as in an oven.

  He’s a glutton. He takes his meals elsewhere. Last night he came back hungry and decided to have a bite to eat. Nothing in the pantry. He went downstairs (the store on the corner) and brought back a real haul: two hundred fifty grams of ham, a can of sardines, pickled mackerel, a big long loaf, a good half-moon of Dutch cheese, four apples, ten eggs, and Persian Pea marmalade. He’d ordered an omelette and tea (the kitchen in the building is communal, it’s manned by two cooks who take turns).

  “Put on the feed bag, Kavalerov,” he invited me, and fell to it himself. He ate the omelette straight from the skillet, chipping off pieces of egg white the way people chip enamel. His eyes grew bloodshot, he kept taking his pince-nez off and putting them back on, he smacked his lips, he snorted, and his ears wiggled.

  I entertain myself with observations. Have you ever noticed that salt falls off the end of a knife without leaving a trace—the knife shines as if untouched; that pince-nez traverse the bridge of a nose like a bicycle; that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of tiny inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils? No one notices them. They’re waging a battle for survival. They move in and out of view, even the huge sign letters! They rise up—class against class: the letters on the street plaques do battle with the letters on the posters.

  He stuffed himself silly. He reached for an apple with his knife but only slit the apple’s tawny peel before losing interest.

  Once in a speech a people’s commissar spoke of him with high praise: “Andrei Babichev is one of the state’s most remarkable men.”

  He, Andrei Petrovich Babichev, is the director of the Food Industry Trust. He’s a great sausage and pastry man and chef.

  And I, Nikolai Kavalerov, am his jester.

  2

  HE’S IN charge of everything that has to do with eating.

  He’s greedy and jealous. He’d like to cook all the omelettes, pies, and cutlets, bake all the bread himself. He’d like to give birth to food. He did give birth to the Two Bits.

  He’s raising his offspring well. Two Bits is going to be a giant of a building, the greatest cafeteria, the greatest kitchen. A two-course dinner’s going to cost two bits.

  War has been declared on kitchens.

  You can consider a thousand kitchens vanquished.

  He’s putting an end to home cooking, eighths of pounds, and small bottles. He’s assembling all the meat grinders, Primus stoves, skillets, faucets … Kitchen industrialization, you might call it.

  He’s set up several commissions. The vegetable-cleaning machines manufactured in the Soviet factory proved to be superb. A German engineer is building the kitchen. Babichev requisitions are being filled at all sorts of enterprises.

  This is what I’ve learned about him:

  One morning, he, the trust director, his briefcase under his arm—a very respectable citizen of obviously statesmanly mien—walked up an unfamiliar staircase amid the charms of the service entrance and knocked on the first door he came to. As Harun al-Rashid he was visiting one of the kitchens in a worker-inhabited apartment house on the outskirts of town. He saw soot and filth, crazed furies rushing about in the smoke, children crying. They fell upon him immediately. Huge, he was getting in everyone’s way, taking up too much space, light, and air. Besides, he was carrying a briefcase and wearing pince-nez, all elegant and clean. And the furies decided that this had to be a member of some commission. Arms akimbo, the housewives tore into him. He left. Because of him (they shouted after him) the Primus stove had gone out, a glass was broken, and the soup was oversalted. He left without saying what he had meant to say. He has no imagination. He ought to have said this:

  “Women! We’re going to blow the soot off you, clean the smoke from your nostrils, the din from your ears, we’re going to get you a potato that peels itself magically, in an instant, we’re going to give you back the hours the kitchen has stolen from you—you’re going to get half your life back. You, young wife, you cook your husband soup. You sacrifice half your day to a puddle of soup! We’re going to transform your puddles into shimmering seas, we’re going to ladle out cabbage soup by the ocean, pour kasha by the wheelbarrow, the blancmange is going to advance like a glacier! Listen, housewives, wait, this is what we’re promising you: the tile floor bathed in sunlight, the copper kettles burnished, the saucers lily-white, the milk as heavy as quicksilver, and the smells rising from the soup so heavenly they’ll be the envy of the flowers on your tables.”

  Like a fakir, he can be in ten places at one time.

  He peppers his office memoranda with parentheses and underlining—he’s afraid people won’t understand and will mix something up.

  Here are examples of his memoranda:

  To Comrade Prokudin:

  Make candy wrappers (12 samples) that suit the buyer (chocolate, filling), but in the new way. Not “Rosa Luxemburg” (I found out what that is—a pastille!!), though, preferably something from science (something poetic—“Geography”? “Astronomy”?), a serious name that sounds enticing: “Eskimo”? “Telescope”? Report to me by telephone tomorrow, Wednesday, between one and two o’clock, at the office. Without fail.

  To Comrade Fominsky:

  Tell them to put a piece of meat (neatly cut, like a private butcher does) in each plate for the first course (of both the 50- and 75-kopek dinners). Keep careful track of this. Is it true that 1) they serve beer snacks without trays? 2) the peas are small and poorly soaked?

  He’s petty, suspicious, and as fussy as an old housekeeper.

  At ten o’clock in the morning he arrived from the cardboard factory. Eight people were waiting to see him. He received 1) the chief of smoking sheds, 2) the canning trust’s Far Eastern agent (he snatched a can of crab and ran out of the office to show somebody, came back, set it down beside him, next to his elbow, and for a long time could not calm down, constantly shooting looks at the blue can, laughing, scratching his nose), 3) an engineer from the warehouse construction site, 4) a German—regarding trucks (they spoke German; he must have finished off th
e conversation with a proverb, because it ended in rhyme and they both burst out laughing), 5) an artist who had brought the draft of an advertising poster (he didn’t like it—said it should be a muted blue—chemical, not romantic), 6) some restaurant manager wearing studs shaped like tiny milky-white bells, 7) a feeble little man with a curly beard who talked about heads of cattle, and, finally, 8) a delightful individual from the countryside. This last meeting was special. Babichev rose and moved forward, nearly opening his arms wide. He filled the entire office—this captivatingly clumsy, shy, smiling, sunburned, clear-eyed man, this Levin straight out of Tolstoy. He smelled of wildflowers and dairy dishes. They had a conversation about the state farm. A dreamy expression came over the faces of all present.

  At four twenty he left for a meeting with the Supreme Economic Council.

  3

  IN THE evening, at home, he sits under a palm-green lampshade. In front of him are sheets of paper, notebooks, and scraps of paper with columns of numbers. He flips through the pages of his desk calendar, jumps up, searches the shelves, pulls out bundles, kneels on a chair, and—belly on desk, fat face propped on hands—reads. The desk’s green expanse is covered with a sheet of glass. In the end, what’s so special? A man working, a man at home, in the evening, working. A man staring at a sheet of paper and twisting a pencil in his ear. Nothing special. But his entire behavior says: You’re a philistine, Kavalerov. Naturally, he doesn’t say so. There’s probably nothing of the kind in his thoughts, either. But it’s tacitly implied. Some third party is telling me this. Some third party is making me rage as I observe him.

  “Two bits! The Two Bits!” he cries. “The Two Bits!”

  Suddenly he starts laughing. He has read something hilarious in his papers or seen something in the column of figures. He calls me over, choking with laughter. He neighs and pokes at the page. I look and see nothing. What did he find so funny? There, where I can’t even distinguish the principles of comparison, he sees something so irregular that he’s infected with laughter. I listen, horrified. It’s the laughter of a heathen priest. I listen like a blind man listening to a rocket explode.

  “You’re a philistine, Kavalerov. You don’t understand a thing.”

  He doesn’t say this, but it’s implied.

  Sometimes he doesn’t return until late at night. Then I receive instructions over the telephone.

  “Is this Kavalerov? Listen, Kavalerov. I’m going to be getting a call from Bread and Bakeries. Have them call 2-73-05, extension 62, write it down. Did you write it down? Extension 62, the Main Concession Committee. Bye.”

  Bread and Bakeries is summoning Trust Director Babichev. Babichev’s at the Main Concession Committee. What do I care? But I’m gratified because I’m taking an indirect part in the fate of Bread and Bakeries and Babichev. I experience administrative ecstasy. My role really is insignificant, though. A lackey’s role. What’s the matter? Do I respect him? Am I afraid of him? No. I don’t think I’m any worse than he is. I’m no philistine. I’ll prove it.

  I feel like catching him out, exposing his vulnerabilities, finding a weak point. When I happened to see him for the first time at his morning toilette, I was sure I’d caught him, that his invulnerability had been breached.

  Toweling off, he walked out of his room toward the balcony, and a meter and a half away from me, twisting the towel in his ears, he turned his back. I saw that back, that stout back, from behind, in the sunny light, and nearly cried out. The back gave everything away. The tender yellow of his fat body. The scroll of someone else’s fate had unfolded before me. Old man Babichev had cared for his skin; the pads of fat had been softly distributed over his aging torso. My commissar inherited this thin skin, noble color, and pure pigmentation. And most important, what evoked real triumph in me, was the fact that on his waist I saw a mole, a special, inherited, aristocratic mole, the very same kind—blood-filled, a transparent, tender little thing that stood away from his body on a stem—by which mothers recognize stolen children decades later.

  “You—a lord, Andrei Petrovich! Hah! You’re a faker!” nearly tore from my lips.

  But then he turned his chest toward me.

  On his chest, under his right clavicle, there was a scar. It was round and a little rough, like the impression left by a coin on wax. As if a branch had grown on that spot and been chopped off. Babichev had done hard labor. He had attempted escape, and they had shot him.

  “Who’s Jocasta?” he asked me one day out of the blue. Unusual questions, unusual because of their abruptness, tend to leap from him (especially in the evenings). All day long he’s busy. But his eyes slide over the advertisements and shop windows, and the tips of his ears catch words from other people’s conversations. The raw material hits him. I’m his only unofficial interlocutor. He feels a need to start up a conversation, but he considers me incapable of serious conversation. He knows that people converse when they relax. He decides to pay some kind of homage to ordinary human wonts. He asks me idle questions. I answer. I’m an idiot around him. He thinks I’m an idiot.

  “Do you like olives?” he asks.

  “Yes, I know who Jocasta is! Yes, I like olives, but I don’t want to answer idiotic questions. I don’t think I’m stupider than you.” That’s how I should answer him. But I don’t have the guts. He’s crushing me.

  4

  I’VE BEEN living under his roof for two weeks. Two weeks ago he took me home, drunk, from the front door of the saloon …

  I’d been thrown out of the saloon.

  The fight at the saloon got going by degrees; at first nothing intimated scandal; on the contrary, a friendship might have started between the two tables. Drunks are sociable. The crowd where the woman was sitting suggested I join them, and I was all set to accept the invitation, but the woman, who was charming and skinny and was wearing a dark blue silk blouse that hung loose from her collarbone, made a crack about me, and I took offense and halfway there turned back to my own table, carrying my mug in front of me like a lantern.

  That was when the jokes came raining down on me. And I really may have seemed ridiculous, like a shaggy piece of fruit. A man’s hearty bass laugh pursued me. They lobbed peas at me. I walked around my table and sat down facing them; the beer sloshed onto the marble because I couldn’t free my thumb, which was stuck in the mug handle. Tipsy, I broke out in confessions: abjection and arrogance flowed into a single bitter stream:

  “You … troupe of monsters … an itinerant troupe of freaks who’ve kidnapped this young lady …” (The people around me listened up: the shaggy fruit was expressing himself oddly, his speech had risen above the general hubbub.) “You, sitting to the right under the little palm—you’re freak number one. Get up and show yourself to everyone … Notice, comrades, most esteemed public … Quiet! Orchestra, a waltz! A neutral, melodious waltz! Your face looks like a harness. Your cheeks are nothing but wrinkles—reins, not wrinkles; your chin is an ox; your nose a coachman, like a bad case of leprosy, and the rest is a load of horseshit … Sit down. Next: monster number two … Are those cheeks or knees? … Very handsome! Admire it, citizens, a troupe of freaks is passing through … And what about you? How did you get through the door? Didn’t you catch your ears? And you, glued to the kidnapped girl, ask her what she thinks about your blackheads. Comrades …” (I turned in every direction) “they … these ones here … they were laughing at me!? That one there was laughing … Do you know how you were laughing? You made the same sounds as an empty enema … Young lady … ‘in gardens that the spring adorned, a tsaritsa came whom no rose could match, laying siege to all your eighteen years! … ’ Young lady! Scream! Call for help! We’ll rescue you. What’s happened to the world? He pinches you and you shiver? You like it?” (I paused and then said triumphantly) “Please, sit here with me. Why were you laughing at me? I stand before you, stranger girl, and I beg you: Don’t lose me. Just stand up, push them aside, and step this way. What are you expecting from him, from all of them? What? Tenderness? Intel
ligence? Kindness? Devotion? Come to me. It’s ridiculous for me even to compare myself to them. You’ll get much more from me …”

  I spoke, horrified at what I was saying. I recalled keenly those particular dreams when you know it’s a dream, and you do what you want knowing you’ll wake up. But here it was obvious that no waking was going to follow. The irrevocabilities were piling up at a furious pace.

  I got thrown out.

  I lay there unconscious. Later, when I woke up, I said, “I invite them, but they don’t come. I invite those pigs, and they don’t come.” (My words referred to all women collectively.)

  I lay facedown on a grate in the sidewalk. There was something moldy under the grate. Something rustled in the black cube down there: the garbage was alive. Falling, for a moment I’d seen the grate, and the memory of it had governed my dream, which was a distillation of the alarm and terror I’d experienced at the saloon and the humiliation and dread of punishment, and in my dream it had turned into a chase scene—I was running away, trying to save myself, I’d marshaled all my strength, and then my dream broke off.

  I opened my eyes, quivering with joy at my deliverance. But my waking was so incomplete that I perceived it as a transition from one vision to another, and in my new vision the leading role was played by my deliverer, he who had rescued me from the chase, that someone whose hands and sleeves I showered with kisses, thinking I was kissing in my sleep the one whose neck I had my arms around, weeping bitterly.

  “Why am I so unlucky? … Why is living in the world so hard for me!” I babbled.

  “Stretch him out with his head up,” said my savior.

  I was being taken away in a car. Coming to, I saw the sky, the pale, too bright sky, racing from my heels and past my head. This vision thundered, it was dizzying, and each time it ended in a wave of nausea. When I woke up in the morning, in terror I reached for my legs. Before I’d even figured out where I was or what had happened to me, I remembered the jolts and the rocking. I was riveted by the thought that they’d taken me away in an ambulance, that they’d amputated this drunk’s legs. And I reached out, confident that I was touching the thick, barrelish roundness of bandages. It turned out to be simple, though: I was lying on a sofa in a big, clean, light-filled room that had a balcony and two windows. It was early morning. The balcony’s stone was warming up peacefully, turning pink.