Envy

by Yuri Olesha

  “Kill him. Leave behind an honorable memory of yourself as your era’s hired assassin. Squeeze your enemy between one era and the next. He’s strutting, he’s already there, he’s already a genius, a cupid trailing his suite at the gates of the new world—his nose is in the air and he doesn’t see you—give him a good bang in parting. My blessings on you. And I”—Ivan raised his mug—“I, too, will destroy my enemy. Let’s drink, Kavalerov, to Ophelia. She is the instrument of my revenge.”

  Kavalerov opened his mouth to tell him the most important thing: We have a common enemy, you’ve given me your blessing to kill your brother. But he didn’t say a word because a man came up to their table and invited Ivan to follow him immediately, no questions asked. He was arrested, as we know from the preceding chapter.

  “Goodbye, my dear,” said Ivan. “They’re taking me to Golgotha. Go see my little girl”—he named the lane that had shone for so long in Kavalerov’s memory—“go there and look at her. You’ll understand that if such a creation betrayed you, there would be only one thing left: revenge.”

  He finished his beer and walked one step ahead of the mysterious man.

  On his way he winked at the customers, lavished smiles, glanced into the clarinet’s bell, and right at the door turned around. Holding his bowler in his extended hand, he declaimed:

  No charlatan from Germany—

  Deceit is not my game.

  I’m a modern-day magician

  With a Soviet claim to fame!

  5

  WHAT ARE you laughing for? You think I want to sleep?” asked Volodya.

  “But I’m not laughing. I’m coughing.”

  And Volodya went back to sleep almost before he could reach the chair.

  Young people got tired earlier. The other, older man—Andrei Babichev—was a giant. He worked all day and half the night. Andrei banged his fist on the table. The lampshade jumped up and down like the lid on a teakettle, but the other slept. The lampshade jumped. Andrei remembered James Watt watching the teakettle lid jumping over the steam.

  A famous legend. A famous picture.

  James Watt inventing the steam engine.

  “What will you invent, my James Watt? What machine will you invent, Volodya? What new secret of nature will you uncover, new man?”

  And at this Andrei Babichev began a conversation with himself. For a very short while he abandoned his work and, looking at the sleeping man, thought:

  “Could Ivan be right? Maybe I’m just an ordinary philistine and the family principle lives on in me. Is this why he’s so dear to me, this man who’s been living with me since his childhood years? Am I just used to him, have I come to love him like a son? Is that the only reason? Is it that simple? And what if he turned out to be a dolt? What I live for is focused in him. I’ve been lucky. The life of the new man is a long way off. I believe in it. And I’ve been lucky. Here he’s fallen asleep so close to me, my beautiful new world. The new world is living in my own house. I positively worship him. A son? A support? The grand finale of an era? That’s not true! That’s not what I need! I don’t want to die on a high bed, on pillows. I know it’s the masses, not a family, that will receive my last breath. Nonsense! We’re coddling this new world the way I coddle him. He’s precious to me as an embodied hope. I’ll drive him out if I’m wrong about him, if he isn’t new, isn’t completely distinct from me, because I’m still up to my gut in the old and can’t climb out anymore. I’ll drive him away then. I don’t need a son. I’m no father, he’s no son, and we’re no family. I’m the one who had faith in him, and he’s the one who’s justified my faith.

  “We’re no family, we’re mankind.

  “What does that mean? Does it mean the human emotion of fatherly love has to be destroyed? Why does he love me, he, the new man? This means that there, in the new world, the love between son and father will flourish as well. Then I do have the right to smile; then I do have the right to love him both as a son and as the new man. Ivan, Ivan, your conspiracy is pointless. Not all emotions are going to perish. Your rage is in vain, Ivan! Something will remain.”

  Long long ago, one dark night, swallowed by a ravine, up to their knees in stars, frightening the stars out of the shrubbery, two people were running: a commissar and a boy. The boy had saved the commissar. The commissar was huge, the boy a mite. Anyone who saw them would have thought that the giant, who kept falling to the ground, was fleeing, and they would have taken the boy for the giant’s hand.

  They had bonded forever.

  The boy lived with the giant, grew, grew up, became a Young Communist, and went to the university. He’d been born in a railway village, the son of a linesman.

  His comrades loved him, adults loved him. He sometimes worried that everyone liked him; sometimes this seemed unmerited and mistaken. Camaraderie was his strongest emotion. Concerned about balance, or, more precisely, the imbalance committed by nature in distributing gifts, he sometimes resorted to dodges to even out the impression he made, to lower it, anxious to dampen his own glow.

  He wanted to reward other less successful people his age with his devotion, his readiness for self-sacrifice, his ardent manifestations of friendship, his search in each of them for remarkable traits and abilities.

  His presence spurred his comrades to competition.

  “I thought, why do people get angry or insulted?” he said. “People like that have no concept of time. This demonstrates their unfamiliarity with technology. Time is a technical concept, after all. If everyone were technicians, then hate, vanity, and all the petty emotions would vanish. You’re smiling? You have to understand it. You need to understand time in order to be free of petty emotions. An insult might last, say, an hour or a year. They have enough imagination for a year. But they aren’t going to have enough momentum for a thousand years. They see only three or four sections on the dial, they’re crawling, fussing … Where can they go! They aren’t going to cover the whole dial. And anyway, if you tell them there’s a dial, they won’t believe you!

  “So why only petty emotions? Lofty emotions are short-lived too, after all. What about magnanimity?

  “You see, you have to listen to what I’m saying. There’s a correctness in magnanimity … a technical correctness. Don’t smile. Yes, yes. No, in fact … I think I’ve got it mixed up. You’re confusing me. No, wait up! The revolution was … well, what? Very cruel, of course. Hah! But who was it out to get? It was magnanimous, right? There was enough good for the whole dial! Right? You have to be insulted for the whole circle of the dial, not just two sections … Then there’s no difference between cruelty and magnanimity. Then there’s one thing: time. The iron logic of history, as they say. But history and time are one and the same, doubles. Don’t laugh, Andrei Petrovich. I’m saying that man’s main emotion has to be an understanding of time.”

  He also said, “I’ll knock the bourgeois world down a peg. They’re making fun of us. The old men are grumbling. Where are your new engineers, surgeons, professors, inventors? they say. I’ll assemble a big group of comrades, a hundred or so. We’ll organize a union. For taking the bourgeois world down a peg. You think I’m boasting? You don’t understand anything. I’m not getting carried away at all. We’re going to work like animals. Wait and see. People will come bow at our feet. And Valya’s going to be in that union.”

  He woke up.

  “I was dreaming,” he laughed, “dreaming that Valya and I were sitting on a roof and looking at the moon through a telescope.”

  “What’s that? Huh? A telescope?”

  “And I’m telling her that way down there, below, is the ‘sea of crises,’ and she asks me, ‘A sea of cries?’”

  That spring Volodya went away for a while to visit his father in Murom. His father worked in the Murom locomotive-building shops. After two days of separation, on the night of the third day, Andrei was riding home. At a turn the driver slowed down, it was getting light, and Andrei saw a man lying at the base of a wall.

  The man
lying on the grate reminded him of the absent man. He jerked to attention at the sight and leaned toward the driver. “No, they have nothing in common,” Andrei nearly cried out. And indeed, there was no similarity between the man lying there and the man who was absent. It was simple: he had a vivid picture of Volodya in his mind. He thought, “What if suddenly something compelled Volodya to adopt the same pathetic pose? It was simple; he’d done something foolish and let his emotions run wild.” The car stopped.

  They lifted Nikolai Kavalerov up and listened to his ravings.

  Andrei brought him home, dragged him to the fourth floor and put him to bed on Volodya’s sofa, tucked him in, and pulled the blanket up to his neck. He lay there on his back, the grating’s waffle impression still on his cheek. His host walked off to bed in a state of contentment: the sofa was not going empty.

  That same night, he dreamed that a young man had hanged himself on a telescope.

  6

  THERE was a remarkable bed in Anichka Prokopovich’s room. It was made of precious wood with a dark cherry varnish and had mirrored arches on the inside of the headboard.

  One day, in a peaceful year long past, on a national holiday, to a fanfare, sprinkled with confetti, Anichka’s husband climbed a wooden platform, showed his lottery ticket, and received from the master of ceremonies a receipt giving him the right to own the marvelous bed. They carted it away. Little boys whistled. The blue sky was reflected in the moving mirrored arches, like the lids on two beautiful eyes opening and slowly closing.

  The family lived and fell apart—and the bed made it through all the bad times.

  Now Kavalerov lived in the corner behind the bed.

  He had gone to see Anichka and said, “Thirty rubles a month, that’s what I can pay you for that corner.”

  And Anichka smiled broadly and agreed. He had nowhere else to go. A new tenant was firmly ensconced in his old room. Kavalerov sold his terrible bed for four rubles, and it moaned and groaned leaving him.

  Anichka’s bed looked like an organ.

  It took up half the room. Its top faded into the twilight of the ceiling.

  Kavalerov thought, “If I were a child, Anichka’s little son, just think how many poetic, magical notions my childish mind would create in thrall to the spectacle of this extraordinary thing! Now I’m an adult, and now I can only pick out its general outlines, a few details here and there, but then I could have …

  “ … But then, surrendering neither to distances, nor scales, nor time, nor weight, nor gravity, I would have crawled in the corridors formed by the gap between the bedspring and the bedframe; I would have hidden behind the columns that now seem no bigger than measuring glasses; I would have set imaginary catapults on its barriers and fired at my enemies losing strength in their flight across the soft, sucking ground of the blanket; I would have arranged receptions for ambassadors under the mirrored arch, like the king of the novel I’d just read; I would have embarked on fantastic journeys over the carving—up and up—over the cupids’ legs and buttocks, I would have crawled over them the way people crawl over the statue of the Buddha, unable to take it in with one glance, and from the last arch, from that dizzying height, I would have hurled myself into the terrible abyss, into the pillows’ icy abyss …”

  Ivan Babichev was leading Kavalerov over a green mound … Dandelions were flying out from under his feet, sailing—and their sailing was a dynamic reflection of the heat … Babichev was pale from the heat. His full face was shining; the heat was actually carving a mask from his face.

  “Over here!” he commanded.

  The outskirts of town were in bloom.

  They crossed a vacant lot and walked along the fences. German shepherds raged behind the fences and rattled their chains. Kavalerov whistled, taunting the dogs. But anything’s possible: a dog might get smart, break its chain, bound over the fence. A capsule of terror dissolved somewhere in the pit of the taunter’s stomach.

  The companions went down a greening slope, nearly onto the roofs of the little red houses at the top of the gardens. Kavalerov didn’t know the place, and even when he saw the Krestovsky water towers in front of him, he couldn’t get oriented. The whistling of locomotives, the railroad clang, reached him.

  “I’ll show you my machine,” said Ivan, glancing back at Kavalerov. “You’ll pinch yourself … okay … again … and again … It’s not a dream? No? Remember, you weren’t sleeping. Remember, it was all very simple: you and I walked across a vacant lot, a puddle that never dries up shone, there were pots on the paling—remember that, my friend—there were remarkable things to notice in the trash along the way, under the fences, in the gutters; for instance, look, a page from a book. Bend down, take a look before the wind carries it away. See? An illustration from Taras Bulba—recognize it?—they probably threw out the wrapping from something to eat from that window, and the page landed here. Onward! What’s this? Russia’s eternal, traditional bast sandal in the gutter? Not worth noticing—too academic an image of desolation! Onward! A bottle—wait, it’s still whole, but tomorrow a cart wheel will crush it, and if soon after us some other dreamer comes our way, he’ll have the perfect satisfaction of recognizing the famous bottle gas, the famous shards writers have glorified for their quality of blazing up amid the trash and desolation and creating all kinds of mirages for lonely wanderers. Observe, my friend, observe—over there, buttons, hoops, there’s a scrap of bandage, there are little towers of Babel of petrified human feces … In short, my friend, the usual wasteland relief … Remember it. It was all simple. And I brought you here to show you my machine. Pinch yourself. Okay. That means you’re not dreaming, right? Well, all right. But later—I know what’s going to happen—later you’re going to say you weren’t feeling well, it was too hot, you may have just imagined a lot of it because of the heat, the exhaustion, and so forth … No, my friend, I demand that you confirm that you are in a normal condition. What you are about to see may knock you for a loop.”

  Kavalerov confirmed it: “I am in the most normal condition.”

  There was a fence, a not very tall wooden fence.

  “There she is,” said Ivan. “Wait a second. Let’s sit. Over here, above the gully. I was telling you that my dream was the machine to end all machines, a universal machine. I thought about the perfect instrument, I was figuring on concentrating hundreds of different functions in one small apparatus. Yes, my friend. A beautiful, noble task. A task worth getting fanatic over. I had the idea of subduing the mastodon of technology, making it tame, domestic … Of giving man a simple, familiar lever that wouldn’t frighten him, that would be as ordinary as a doorknob …”

  “I don’t understand anything about mechanics,” Kavalerov said. “I’m afraid of machines …”

  “And I succeeded. Listen to me, Kavalerov. I invented just such a machine.”

  (The fence beckoned and, actually, one could easily assume there wasn’t any secret behind its ordinary gray boards.)

  “She can blow up mountains. She can fly. She can lift heavy weights. She can mine ore. She can take the place of a hot plate, a stroller, long-range weapons … This is the genius of mechanics itself …”

  “Why are you smiling, Ivan Petrovich?”

  (Ivan winked with the corner of his eye.)

  “I’m blossoming. I can’t talk about her without my heart leaping like an egg in boiling water. Listen to me. I gave her hundreds of abilities. I invented a machine that can do everything. Do you understand? You’d be about to see it, but …”

  He stood up, and placing his hand on Kavalerov’s shoulder, said solemnly, “But I forbade her. One fine day I realized I’d been given a supernatural opportunity to take revenge for my era … I’d corrupted the machine. On purpose. Out of spite.”

  He burst into happy laughter.

  “No, you have to understand, Kavalerov, what a great satisfaction it is. I gave the basest of human emotions to the greatest creation of technology! I disgraced the machine. I took revenge for my era,
which gave me the brain that lies in my skull, my brain, which dreamed up an amazing machine … Who should I leave her to? The new world? They’re chewing us up like food; they’re bewitching the nineteenth century the way a boa bewitches a hare … Chewing us up and digesting us. What’s useful they absorb, what’s harmful they excrete … They excrete our emotions, our technology they absorb! I’m taking revenge for our emotions. They won’t get my machine, they won’t exploit me, they won’t absorb my brain … My machine could have made the new era happy, just like that, from the very first days of its existence, brought technology into its heyday. But you see—they aren’t going to get her! My machine is the dying era’s way of giving the finger to the nascent age. They’ll be drooling when they see her … Just think, the machine is their idol, the machine … and all of a sudden … And all of a sudden the best machine of all turns out to be a liar, a lowlife, a sentimental good-for-nothing! Let’s go … I’ll show you … She can do anything, but right now she sings our ballads, the foolish ballads of the old era, and gathers the old era’s flowers. She falls in love, gets jealous, cries, dreams … I did this. I mocked the divinity of these coming men, I mocked the machine. And I gave her the name of a girl who went out of her mind from love and despair—Ophelia … The most human and touching name of all …”

  Ivan led Kavalerov along.

  Ivan slipped through a gap, displaying to Kavalerov a shiny brassy backside—like two peas in a pod—two dumbbells. Maybe the heat really was having an effect on him, the unusual remote emptiness, the newness of the landscape, surprising for Moscow, maybe exhaustion really was taking its toll, except that when Kavalerov was left alone in that deserted place far removed from the legitimate noises of the city, he surrendered to a mirage, an auditory hallucination. It was as if he were hearing Ivan’s voice talking to someone through the gap. Then Ivan recoiled. And Kavalerov did the same, even though he was standing a goodly distance from Ivan—as if fright were hiding somewhere in the trees opposite and was holding both of them on a single string that it was pulling.