Envy

by Yuri Olesha

  When we introduced ourselves in the morning, I told him about myself.

  “You looked pathetic,” he said, “I felt so sorry for you. Are you insulted at someone meddling in a stranger’s life, so to speak? If you are, then forgive me, please. But if you like, here’s what. It would be fine for you to stay on. I’d be very glad to have you. There’s lots of room. There’s light and air. And there’s a job for you: here—a little editing, selecting materials. How about it?”

  What had compelled this famous individual to condescend to such a degree to a young, suspicious-looking stranger?

  5

  ONE EVENING, two secrets were revealed.

  “Andrei Petrovich,” I asked, “who is this, in the frame?”

  On his desk stands a photograph of a swarthy young man.

  “What’s that?” He always asks me to repeat myself. His thoughts cling to his paper, he can’t tear them away immediately. “What’s that?” And he’s gone again.

  “Who is this young man?”

  “Ah… That’s Volodya Makarov. A remarkable young man.” (He never speaks normally to me. It’s as if I were incapable of asking him about anything serious. I always feel like I’m getting a proverb or a couplet from him in reply or—just mumbling. Now, instead of answering in an ordinary tone, “a remarkable young man,” he declaims it, nearly goes into recitativo: “A re-maaark-a-ble young man!”)

  “What makes him so remarkable?” I asked, taking my revenge with the bitterness of my tone. But he didn’t notice any bitterness.

  “Oh, you know. Just a young man. A student. You’re sleeping on his sofa,” he said. “In point of fact, he’s like a son to me. He’s lived here for ten years. Volodya Makarov. He just went away. To see his father. In Murom.”

  “Ah, so that’s how it is …”

  “That’s it.”

  He stood up from the desk and started to pace.

  “He’s eighteen. He’s a famous soccer player.”

  (“Ah, a soccer player,” I thought.)

  “Well now,” I said, “that truly is remarkable! To be a famous soccer player—that truly is a great quality.” (What am I saying?)

  He didn’t hear. He was in the grip of blissful thoughts. He was looking out from the balcony threshold into the distance, at the sky. He was thinking about Volodya Makarov.

  “He is a youth absolutely unlike anyone else,” he said all of a sudden, turning toward me. (I can see that the fact that I’m present, when this very same Volodya Makarov is in his thoughts, offends him.) “I owe him my life, first of all. He saved me from reprisals ten years ago. They were supposed to lay my nape on the anvil and strike me in the face with a hammer. He rescued me.” (He likes talking about this deed. It’s obvious he often recalls this deed.) “But that’s not important. What’s important is something else. He’s a completely new man. Well, all right.” (And he turned back to his desk.)

  “Why did you pick me up and bring me here?”

  “What’s that? Huh?” he mumbled a second after he heard my question. “Why did I bring you here? You looked so pathetic. I couldn’t help but take pity. You were sobbing. I felt so sorry for you.”

  “And the sofa?”

  “What about the sofa?”

  “But when your young man returns …”

  Without thinking, he replied plainly and cheerfully, “Then you’ll have to free up the sofa …”

  I should have stood up and smashed his face in. You see, he’d taken pity, he, that celebrated individual, had pitied the unfortunate young man who’d lost his way. But only temporarily. Until his main guy returned. He just found the evenings dull. But later he’d drive me out. He was quite cynical about this.

  “Andrei Petrovich,” I said. “Do you realize what you just said? You’re a lout!”

  “What’s that? Huh?” His thoughts broke away from his paper. Now his ear repeated my phrase to him, and I prayed fate that his ear was mistaken. Did he really hear? Well, let him. Once and for all.

  But external circumstance intervened. I was not destined to fly out of this house just yet.

  Outside, under the balcony, someone shouted, “Andrei!”

  He turned his head.

  “Andrei!”

  He stood abruptly, pushing away from the table with the palm of his hand.

  “Andryusha! My dear man!”

  He walked onto the balcony. I went to the window. We both looked out. Darkness. The pavement was illuminated only here and there by windows. In the middle stood a squat little man.

  “Good evening, Andryusha. How have you been? How’s the Two Bits?”

  (Through the window I could see the balcony and the hulking Andryusha. He was breathing hard, I could hear him.)

  The man outside kept shouting, but somewhat softer.

  “Why don’t you say something? I came to tell you the news. I’ve invented a machine. The machine is called Ophelia.”

  Babichev quickly turned. His shadow fell sideways on the street and nearly stirred up a storm in the foliage of the garden across the way. He sat down at his desk. He drummed his fingers on its glass cover.

  “Watch your back, Andrei!” the cry was heard. “Don’t get too high and mighty! I’m going to bury you, Andrei …”

  At that, Babichev jumped up again and with clenched fists flew out onto the balcony. The trees were definitely raging. His Buddha-like shadow came crashing down on the city.

  “Who do you think you’re fighting, you scoundrel?” he said. Then the railings shook. He struck his fist. “Who do you think you’re fighting, you scoundrel? Get out of here. I’ll have you arre-e-ested!”

  “Goodbye,” rang out from below. The tubby little man removed his hat, extended his arm, waved his hat (a bowler? I thought it was a bowler!); his manners were affected. Andrei was no longer on the balcony, and the little man, quickly scattering his little steps, retreated down the middle of the street.

  “There!” Babichev shouted at me. “There, admire that. My dear brother, Ivan. What a swine!”

  He was pacing, seething, around the room. And again he shouted at me.

  “Who is he—Ivan? Who? A lazybones, a harmful, infectious man. He should be shot!”

  (The swarthy young man in the portrait was smiling. He had a plebeian face. He flashed his gleaming teeth in a special, manly way. He exhibited a full glittering cage of teeth—like a Japanese.)

  6

  IT’S EVENING. He’s working. I’m sitting on the sofa. Between us is a lamp. The lampshade (this is how I see it) obliterates the upper half of his face, it’s gone. Hanging below the lampshade is the lower hemisphere of his head. Basically, it looks like a painted clay bank.

  “My youth coincided with the youth of our era,” I say.

  He isn’t listening. His indifference toward me is insulting.

  “I often think about our era. Our era is renowned. Isn’t it marvelous when the youth of an era and the youth of a man coincide?”

  His ear picks up the rhythm. Rhythm is ridiculous to the serious.

  “Of an era—of a man!” he repeats. (But go tell him he’s just repeated some words he heard: he won’t believe it.)

  “Europe is wide open for someone talented to become famous. They like other people’s fame there. Please, do something remarkable, and you’ll be taken by the arm and led onto the road of fame … We don’t have a path for individual success. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  What happens is exactly what would happen if I’d been talking to myself. I make noises, utter words—oh, go ahead. My noisemaking doesn’t bother him.

  “In our country the paths to fame are strewn with barriers. A gifted person either has to fade away or else resolve to lift the barrier and make a great fuss. I, for example, feel like arguing. I feel like flexing my personality. I want fame of my own. Here we’re afraid of paying attention to anyone. I want a lot of attention. I wish I’d been born in a small French town, grown up on dreams, set myself some lofty goal, and one fine day left my little to
wn and walked to the capital and there, working fanatically, achieved my goal. But I wasn’t born in the West. Now they tell me no one cares about anyone’s individuality, the most remarkable individual is nothing. And gradually I’m adjusting to this truth, but it could be debated. I think, well, say you gain fame by becoming a musician, a writer, or a commander, or by crossing Niagara Falls on a rope … These are legitimate ways of gaining fame because the individual puts himself on the line … But, well, imagine when all people talk about is single-mindedness and utility, when what they want in you is a sober, realistic approach to things and events—it makes you want to jump up and hatch some obviously benighted plan, accomplish some brilliant piece of mischief and then say: ‘Yes, you see you’re like that and I’m like this.’ Step out on the square, do something with yourself, and take your bow: ‘I lived and I did what I wanted to.’ ”

  He doesn’t hear a thing.

  “You might even go and kill yourself. Suicide for no good reason. To make trouble. To show that every person has the right to dispose of his own self. Even now. Hang yourself over the entryway.

  “Even better, hang yourself over the entryway at the Council of People’s Commissars, on Varvarskaya—it’s Nogin now—Square. There’s a great big arch there. Ever see it? That would be very effective.”

  In the room where I lived before I moved here there’s a terrifying bed. I feared it like a ghost. It’s as stiff as a barrel. It makes your bones rattle. I had a dark blue blanket on it that I’d bought in Kharkov, at the Blagoveshchensk fair, in a bad year. A woman was selling pies. They were covered with a blanket. Cooling, still not ready to give up the heat of life, they were virtually murmuring under the blanket, squirming like puppies. At the time I was living as badly as everyone else, and this picture breathed such well-being, hominess, and warmth that I made a firm decision that day to buy myself the very same kind of blanket. My dream came true. One fine evening I crawled under a dark blue blanket. I boiled under it and squirmed, the warmth made me jiggle as if I were made of gelatin. It was stupendous dropping off to sleep. But time passed, and the blanket’s patterns swelled and turned into pretzels.

  Now I sleep on an excellent sofa.

  By intentionally stirring I make its taut new virginal springs twang. Separate, tripping rings emerge from its depths. I picture air bubbles streaming to the water’s surface. I fall asleep like a baby. On the sofa I fly off into childhood. Bliss descends upon me. Like a child, I again know that brief interval of time between the initial drooping of eyelids, the first dropping off, and the beginning of real sleep. Once again I can draw out that interval, savor it, fill it with thoughts that suit me, and before I plunge into sleep, still exercising control over my waking consciousness, I can see my thoughts take on the flesh of dreams, transformed like bubbles rising from deep underwater to turn into fast rolling grapes, a hefty bunch of grapes, a whole fence full of thickly tangled bunches: a path alongside the grapes, a sunny road, heat …

  I’m twenty-seven years old.

  Changing my shirt once, I saw myself in the mirror and caught a striking likeness to my father. In reality, there is no such likeness. I recalled my parents’ bedroom, and me, a small boy, watching my father change his shirt. I felt sorry for him. He couldn’t be handsome and famous anymore, he was already set, finished, he couldn’t be anything more than he already was. That’s what I thought, pitying him and quietly taking pride in my own superiority. But now I’ve caught a glimpse of my father in myself. It’s not a similarity of shapes—no, it’s something else. I’d call it a generic similarity, as if I’d suddenly felt my father’s seed in me, in my substantiation. As if someone had said to me: You’re set. Finished. That’s all there is. Sire a son.

  I’m never going to be handsome or famous. I’m never going to come to the capital from a small town. I’m never going to be a commander, or a commissar, or a scholar, or a racer, or an adventurer. All my life I dreamed of an extraordinary love. Soon I’ll be going back to my old apartment, to the room with the scary bed. The neighbors there are awful, especially the widow Prokopovich. She’s forty-five, but in the courtyard they still call her Anichka. She cooks dinners for a collective of hairdressers. She set up a kitchen in the hallway. She has a hot plate in a badly lit niche. She feeds several kittens. Silent, scrawny kittens fly up after her hands with galvanic movements. She shakes out the giblets for them, so the floor looks like it’s been decorated with pearly gobs of spit. Once I slipped on something’s heart—small and tightly formed, like a chestnut. She goes around entangled in animal guts and sinew. A knife flashes in her hand. She tears through the guts with her elbows, like a princess tearing through a spider’s web.

  The widow Prokopovich is old, fat, and podgy. You could squeeze her out like liverwurst. In the morning I used to catch her at the washbasin in the hallway. She’d be half dressed and would give me a womanly smile. By her door, on a stool, was a basin, and in it floated the hair she had combed out.

  The widow Prokopovich is the symbol of my male degradation. Here’s how it works: Please, I’m ready, make a mistake with the doors at night, I’ll leave it unlocked on purpose, I’ll take you in. We can live and enjoy ourselves. But give up your dreams of extraordinary love. That’s all past. Look at what you’ve become, neighbor: tubby, in trousers that are too short. Well, what else do you need? That one? With the slender arms? Your dream woman? With the pretty oval face? Forget it. You’re a daddy now. Stretch out, okay? I’ve got a wonderful bed. My dearly departed won it in a lottery. A quilted coverlet. I’ll look after you. I feel sorry for you. Okay?

  Sometimes her look expressed frank indecency. Sometimes, when she ran into me, a small sound would come tumbling from her throat, a round vocal drop expelled by a spasm of delight.

  “I’m no daddy, you hash-slinger! I’m no mate for you, you snake!”

  I fall asleep on the Babichev sofa.

  I dream that a lovely girl, laughing delicately, is crawling under the sheet with me. My dreams are coming true. But how, how do I thank her? I’m scared. No one has ever loved me for free. There’ve been prostitutes, but even they tried to get all they could out of me. What is she going to ask of me? As happens in dreams, she guesses my thoughts and says, “Oh, don’t worry. Just two bits!”

  I remember from years gone by: as a schoolboy, I was taken to the wax museum. In a glass cube a handsome man in a frock coat with a smoking wound in his chest was dying in someone’s arms.

  “This is French President Carnot, wounded by an anarchist,” my father explained to me.

  The president was dying, breathing, his eyelids were fluttering. The president’s life was passing as slowly as a clock. I watched spellbound. A magnificent man lay there, his beard thrust forward, in a green-tinted cube. It was magnificent. Then for the first time I heard the rumble of time. Time was racing overhead. I swallowed ecstatic tears. I decided to become famous so that someday my wax double, replete with the rumbling of the ages, which only a few would be given to hear, would pose just like that in a green-tinted cube.

  Now I write repertoire for showmen: monologues and couplets about tax inspectors, Soviet princesses, nepmen, and alimony.

  At the institute, what’s all the clatter?

  What’s all the fuss—what’s the matter?

  Lizochka—the typist—Blum

  Is banging on her gift—a drum.

  Still, maybe someday in the great panopticon there will be a wax figure of an odd, fat-nosed man with a pallid, good-natured face, disheveled hair, little-boy tubby, wearing a jacket with just one button left at the belly, and on the cube a small plaque: NIKOLAI KAVALEROV.

  Nothing more. Just that. And everyone who sees it will say, “Ah!” And they’ll be reminded of certain stories, legends maybe. “Ah! That’s the one who lived in that famous time, who hated and envied everyone, who boasted, went overboard, let great plans get the better of him, who wanted to do so much and did nothing—and ended up committing a vile, repulsive crime …”

/>   7

  FROM TVERSKAYA I turned onto a side street. I needed to get to Nikitskaya. It was early morning. The street was jointed. I moved from joint to joint like a bad case of rheumatism. Things don’t like me. I’m hurting the street.

  A tiny little man in a bowler was walking in front of me.

  At first I thought he was in a hurry, but I soon discovered that this way of a rushing along with his entire torso thrust forward was altogether characteristic of the little man.

  He was carrying a pillow. He was dangling a big pillow in a yellowed slipcase behind his back. It kept hitting him on the back of his knee, making dents come and go.

  Sometimes, in the middle of town, in some side street, they plant a romantic flowering hedge. We were walking along beside a hedge of just that sort.

  A bird on a branch flashed, jerked, and tapped, somehow reminding me of hair clippers. The man walking ahead turned to look at the bird. Walking behind, I caught a glimpse of only the first phase, the half-moon of his face. He was smiling.

  “Truly, isn’t there a similarity?” I nearly exclaimed, certain that the same similarity had occurred to him as well.

  The bowler.

  He removed it and wrapped one arm around it like an Easter cake. His other hand held the pillow.