Envy

by Yuri Olesha

  In the rain, with its drops bitter as tears, through the gusts of wind under which the flamingo vase ran like a flame, igniting the curtains, which were also rippling under the ceiling, Valya emerged from the bedroom.

  I was stunned to see her, but there was a simple explanation: a friend had arrived, his friends had rushed over to see him.

  Babichev may have stopped by for Valya, who may have been dreaming of this day. It’s all very simple. And I should be sent to a clinic, for treatment by hypnosis, so that I stop thinking in images, so that I stop ascribing to the young woman the effects of spherical lightning.

  I am going to spoil the simplicity for you!

  “Get the hell out of here!” my ear repeated.

  “It’s not quite that simple …” I began.

  There was a draft. The door was still open. The wind sprouted on me like a single wing. It beat madly over my shoulder, blowing on my eyelids. The draft anesthetized half my face.

  “It’s not quite that simple,” I said, pressing up against the doorjamb to try to snap off the horrible wing. “You went away, Volodya, and in that time Babichev was living with Valya. While you’re waiting four years, Andrei Petrovich was going to spoil Valya so much …”

  I wound up on the other side of the door. Half my face was anesthetized. Maybe I hadn’t felt the punch.

  The lock clicked, just like a branch breaking overhead, and I dropped from the beautiful tree with a thud, an overripe, lazy fruit.

  “It’s all over,” I said calmly, getting up. “Now I’m going to kill you, Comrade Babichev.”

  15

  IT WAS raining.

  The rain was heading down Tsvetnaya, hanging about the circus, turning onto the boulevards, to the right, and when it reached the Petrovsky Heights, suddenly it went blind and lost confidence.

  I crossed the “Pipe,” thinking about the fantastic fencer who walked in the rain, spearing drops with his rapier. The rapier glinted, the hems of his tunic fluttered, the fencer twisted, drops scattered, like a flute—and it was dry. He had inherited his father’s legacy. I was soaked through to the ribs, and I seemed to have received a slap in the face.

  I find that a landscape observed through the wrong end of binoculars is more lustrous and brilliant, more stereoscopic. Colors and contours sharpen up somehow. A thing, while remaining familiar, suddenly proves ridiculously small and unfamiliar. This gives the observer childish ideas. It’s like a dream. Notice, someone who turns his binoculars around starts smiling incandescently.

  After the rain the city became lustrous and stereoscopic. Everyone saw it: the trolley, colored carmine; the cobblestones far from monochromatic, among them even green ones; a housepainter high above emerged from the niche where he’d taken shelter from the rain, like a pigeon, and started in on his canvas of bricks; a boy in a window caught the sun in a shard of mirror …

  I bought an egg and a French roll from an old lady. I knocked the egg on the trolley post right in front of the passengers flying from the Petrovsky Gates.

  I started uphill. The benches went by at knee height. At this point the lane bulged a little. Resplendent mothers were sitting on the benches, having spread out kerchiefs first. Their eyes—the color of fish scales—shone in their suntanned faces. A tan covered their necks and shoulders as well. But their large young breasts, visible in their blouses, were white. Lonely and banished, I sadly drank in this whiteness, whose name was milk, motherhood, matrimony, pride, and purity.

  A nanny held an infant dressed up like the Pope.

  A seed hung from the lip of a little girl in a red headband. The little girl was listening to the orchestra, not noticing she had crawled into a puddle. The tubas looked like elephant ears.

  To everyone—the mothers, nannies, little girls, and musicians tangled up in their horns—I was a funnyman. The trumpeters cast sidelong glances at me, puffing their cheeks out even more. The little girl giggled because the seed had finally dropped. At this she also discovered the puddle. She blamed me for her failure and turned away in spite.

  I’ll prove I’m no funnyman. No one understands me. The incomprehensible seems either funny or scary. Now everyone’s going to be scared.

  I walked over to a street mirror.

  I’m very fond of street mirrors. They pop up along your path. Your path is ordinary, calm—the usual city path, promising neither miracles nor visions. You’re walking along, not assuming anything, you raise your eyes, and suddenly, for a moment, it’s all clear to you: the world and its rules have undergone unprecedented changes.

  Optics and geometry—the essence of what had been your motion, your movement, your desire to go exactly where you were going—have been laid waste. You start thinking you have eyes in back of your head; you even smile distractedly at passersby, you’re embarrassed by this advantage of yours.

  “Ah,” you sigh quietly.

  The trolley, which had just gone out of sight, again rushes in front of you, cutting across the edge of the boulevard like a knife through cake. A straw hat hanging on a blue ribbon over someone’s arm (just this minute you saw her, she caught your attention, but you didn’t think to look around), comes back now, floating past your eyes.

  A vista opens up before you. You’re sure this is a building, a wall, but you have an advantage: it’s not a building! You’ve discovered a secret. There is no wall. Here you have a mysterious world where everything you’ve just seen is repeated—and repeated with that vivid stereoscopic quality that is in the exclusive power of the binoculars’ wrong end.

  You don’t know which way is up, as the saying goes. So suddenly have the rules been broken, so incredibly have the proportions changed. But you rejoice in your dizziness … Having guessed, you rush toward the blue square. Your face is suspended, motionless in the mirror, it alone has natural forms, it alone is a particle left over from the regular world, while everything else has collapsed, changed, and taken on a new regularity that you just can’t master, even after standing a whole hour in front of the mirror, where your face looks like it’s in a tropical garden. The vegetation is too green, the sky too blue.

  You just can’t say for certain (until you turn away from the mirror) which direction a pedestrian you’ve observed in the mirror is headed … If you just turned around …

  I watched myself in the mirror finishing my roll.

  I turned around.

  Someone was walking toward the mirror, having appeared from the side. I blocked his reflection. The smile he had prepared for himself came to me instead. He was a head shorter than me and looked up.

  He rushed toward the mirror to find and flick off the caterpillar that had landed on the far end of his shoulder. And he did flick it off, twisting his shoulder forward like a fiddler.

  I continued to think about optical illusions and mirror tricks and so asked this man before I recognized him: “Which direction did you come from? Where did you come from?”

  “Where?” he repeated. “Where did I come from?” He looked at me with clear eyes. “I dreamed myself up.”

  He took off his bowler, revealing a bald spot, and bowed with exaggerated stylishness. The way a has-been greets his benefactor. And like a has-been, he had bags under his eyes that sagged like purple stockings. He was sucking on a candy.

  I immediately recognized my friend, teacher, and consoler.

  I grabbed his hand, and nearly prostrating myself before him, began: “Tell me, answer me.”

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  “What is this … Ophelia?”

  He was about to answer. But a drool of fruit-drop leaked through a corner of his lips like sweet juice. Thrilled and moved, I awaited his reply.

  PART TWO

  1

  THE APPROACH of old age did not scare Ivan Babichev.

  Sometimes complaints did actually come from his lips over his quickly passing life, his lost years, his presumed stomach cancer … But these complaints were too sunny—probably even flat-out insincere. Complaints of a rheto
rical nature.

  Sometimes, placing his hand on the left side of his chest, he would smile and ask, “I wonder what sound a breaking heart makes?”

  Once he raised his arm to show his friends the back of his hand, where the veins were laid out in the shape of a tree, and he broke out in the following improvisation:

  “Here,” he said, “is the tree of life. Here is a tree that tells me more about life and death than the flowering and fading trees of gardens. I don’t remember when exactly I discovered that my wrist was blooming like a tree … but it must have been during that wonderful time when the flowering and fading of trees still spoke to me not of life and death but of the end and beginning of the school year! It was blue then, this tree, blue and slender, and the blood, which at the time I thought of not as a liquid but as light, rose like the dawn over it and turned my metacarpus’s entire landscape into a Japanese watercolor …

  “The years passed, I changed, and the tree changed, too.

  “I remember a splendid time; the tree was spreading. The pride I felt, seeing its inexorable flowering! It became gnarled and reddish brown—and therein lay its strength! I could call it my hand’s mighty rigging. But now, my friends! How decrepit it is, how rotten!

  “The branches seem to be breaking off, cavities have appeared … It’s sclerosis, my friends! And the fact that the skin is getting glassy, and the tissue beneath it is squishy—isn’t this a fog settling on the tree of my life, the fog that will soon envelop all of me?”

  There had been three Babichev brothers. Ivan was the second. The oldest was called Roman. He had been a member of a militant organization and had been executed for his part in a terrorist act.

  The youngest brother, Andrei, had emigrated. “How do you like that, Andrei?” Ivan wrote to him in Paris. “We have a martyr in the family! If only that would make Granny happy!” To which brother Andrei, with his characteristic rudeness, curtly replied, “You’re nothing but a scoundrel.” Thus was the disagreement between the brothers defined.

  Ever since childhood, Ivan had amazed his family and friends.

  As a twelve-year-old boy, he had demonstrated inside the family circle a strange type of instrument, sort of like a lampshade with a fringe of little bells, and assured them that he could use his instrument to summon up—on order—any dream for anyone.

  “Fine,” said his father, a school principal and a Latinist. “I believe you. I want a dream out of Roman history.” (“What exactly?” the boy asked pragmatically.) “I don’t care. The battle at Pharsalus. But if it doesn’t work, I’m going to tan your hide.”

  Late that night a wonderful ringing receded, flitted from room to room. The school principal was lying in his study, even and straight, out of pure spite, like in a coffin. Ivan’s mother was hovering by the peevishly closed doors. Little Vanya, smiling good-naturedly, was passing next to the sofa, shaking his lampshade, the way a tightrope walker shakes his Chinese umbrella. In the morning, in three bounds, before he was dressed, his father raced from his study to the nursery and dragged fat, good, sleepy, lazy Vanya out of bed. The day was still tentative, something may have come of it yet, but the principal tore open the curtains, falsely welcoming the coming of morning. His mother wanted to stop the beating, his mother put her hands together, exclaiming, “Don’t beat him, Petenka, don’t beat him … He made a mistake … I give you my word … What, you mean you didn’t dream it? … The ringing was going in the other direction. You know what kind of apartment we have … damp. I saw the battle at Pharsalus, I did! I dreamed the battle, Petenka!”

  “Don’t lie,” said the principal. “Tell me the details. How were the uniforms of the Balearic archers different from the uniforms of the Numidian slingers? … Wellllll?”

  He waited a moment, Vanya’s mother was sobbing, and the little experimenter got a beating. He conducted himself as if he were Galileo. That same evening, the maid told her mistress that she was not going to accept the proposal of a certain Dobrodeyev. “He’s always lying, you can’t believe him,” the maid explained it. “All night I dreamed of horses. They were all galloping, all terrible horses, like they were wearing masks. And seeing a horse means a lie.”

  The mother’s jaw wouldn’t stop trembling. She ran—like a lunatic—to the doors of the study. The cook was struck dumb at the oven; her jaw wouldn’t stop trembling either.

  The wife touched her husband’s shoulder. He was sitting at his desk, reattaching his monogram to his cigar box.

  And the mother babbled, “Petrusha, ask Frosya … I think Frosya dreamed the battle at Pharsalus …”

  No one knows what the principal thought of the maid’s dream. As for Ivan, we know that a month or two after the story with the artificial dreams, he was already talking about his new invention.

  Apparently he had invented a special liquid soap and a special pipe, which produced an amazing soap bubble. This soap bubble would get bigger as it flew, reaching first the size of a Christmas tree ornament, then a toy ball, then a globe as wide as a dacha flowerbed, and on and on all the way to the size of a barrage balloon—and then it would burst, showering the city with a brief golden shower.

  His father was in the kitchen. (He was one of that gloomy clan of fathers who takes pride in his knowledge of certain culinary secrets and who considers it his exclusive privilege, say, to determine the number of bay leaves necessary for some famed soup that had been handed down from generation to generation, or, say, to observe how long eggs should remain in the pot in order to achieve the ideal “coddled” state.)

  Outside the kitchen window, in the small courtyard, against the wall, little Ivan was spinning tales. His father, who was listening with his yellow ear, looked out. Little boys had gathered around Ivan. And Ivan was lying about the soap bubble. It was going to be as big as a hot-air balloon.

  Once again bile bubbled up inside the principal. The year before, his oldest son Roman had left the family. The father had taken it out on his younger sons.

  God had used his sons to offend him.

  He retreated from the window, actually smiling out of malice. At dinner he waited for Ivan’s pronouncements, but Ivan didn’t make a peep. “I see he despises me. I see he thinks I’m a fool,” the principal seethed. And at the end of the day, when father Babichev was drinking tea on the balcony, suddenly somewhere very far away, in the very back background, which was melting, glassy, flittering fine and yellow in the rays of the setting sun, a large orange globe appeared in his field of vision. It was sailing slowly, crossing the field on a slant …

  The principal poked his head inside, and through a crack in the door saw Ivan just then on the windowsill in the next room. The schoolboy, looking hard out the window, was clapping his hands loudly.

  “I achieved great satisfaction that day,” recalled Ivan Petrovich. “My father was frightened. For a long time after that I tried to meet his eyes, but he averted them. And I began to feel sorry for him. His face turned gray. I thought he was going to die. And I magnanimously cast off the mantle. He was a dry man, my papa, petty but inattentive. He didn’t know that on that day the aeronaut Ernest Vitollo was flying over the city. Marvelous posters had announced this. I confessed to cheating unwittingly. I must tell you that my soap-bubble experiments did not lead to my longed-for results.”

  (The facts attest that when Ivan Babichev was a twelve-year-old schoolboy, ballooning had not yet reached widespread development, and it’s unlikely that flights would have been arranged in those days over a provincial town.

  But what if he had made this up? Who cares! Making things up is what reason likes best.)

  His friends delighted in Ivan Babichev’s improvisations.

  “And it seems to me that the night after that grievous day, my papa dreamed of the battle at Pharsalus. He didn’t go to school in the morning. Mama brought him his mineral water in the study. The details of the battle must have shaken him. Maybe he couldn’t reconcile himself to this mockery of history which his dream had indulged in …
He may have dreamed that the battle’s outcome was decided by Balearic archers flying in on hot-air balloons …”

  With this ending Ivan Babichev concluded his tale of soap bubbles.

  The next time he shared with his friends the following incident from his adolescence:

  “A student, by the last name of Shemiot, was courting a young lady, but you know I don’t remember the young lady’s name … let’s … let’s … let’s say the name of the young lady who stamped her heels like a goat was Lilya Kapitanaki. All the boys knew what was going on in her yard. The student would stand sentry under Lilya’s balcony, all set but afraid to summon from the golden depths of the balcony door this girl who was probably sixteen and who seemed to us boys like an old lady.

  “The student’s cap was blue, his cheeks red. The student rode up on his bicycle. Indescribable was the student’s melancholy when one Sunday, in May, one of those Sundays that number no more than ten in the memory of meteorological science, one Sunday when the breeze was so sweet and kind you felt like tying a blue ribbon to it, the student, having swooped up to the balcony, saw Lilya’s auntie leaning on the railing, as gaudy and florid as the slipcover in a small-town guesthouse—all curls, spirals, and twists, and with her hair done up like a snail … And the auntie was obviously overjoyed at the appearance of student Shemiot; from high up she opened her arms, you might say, to the student and proclaimed in a potato voice, the kind of voice that’s wet with saliva and full of tongue, she said, exactly as if she were eating a casserole: ‘But Lilya’s leaving for Kherson. She’s leaving today. At seven forty. She’s going away for a long time. She’s going away for the whole summer. She told me to send her greetings, Sergei Sergeyevich! Greetings!’