Worlds Apart

by Alexander Levitsky

  I was left rooted to the spot.

  When I came to myself and looked about me, it seemed to me that the living, rosy hue that had come over my phantom had not yet disappeared, it was suffusing the air and washing over me … Dawn was breaking. Suddenly I felt extremely tired and set off for home. As I passed the barnyard I heard the first murmurs of the goslings (no birds awaken earlier than they do); along the roof-line a dawn perched on every bracepole—each was carefully and silently preening its feathers, sharply outlined against the milky sky. From time to time they would all take flight—and having flown about for a moment, would alight again in a row, without a sound … Twice from the nearby wood carried the hoarse cry of a black grouse settling into the dewy, dripping grass … My body was trembling slightly as I made my way to my bed and soon fell deeply asleep.

  XI

  The following night as I approached the old oak Ellis rushed out to greet me as you would greet a friend. I didn’t fear her now as I had before, and was almost glad to see her; I no longer attempted to understand what was happening; I simply wanted to fly farther, to strange places.< … >

  XIV

  Look around you, and calm yourself—Ellis said to me. I did and, as I recall, my first impression was so pleasurable that I could do nothing but sigh. A smoky-blue, silvery-soft something that was neither light nor shadow inundated me from all sides. At first I could make out nothing, blinded by that azure shimmer, but little by little there emerged the outlines of beautiful mountains, forests—a lake spread out before me, starlight twinkling in its depths as it broke on the shore with a quiet murmur. The scent of orange blossoms overwhelmed me like a wave—at the same instant, also like a breaking wave, came the intense, pure tone of a young woman’s voice. That scent and those tones seemed to entice me, and I began to descend … towards a sumptuous marble villa. Its whiteness gleamed hospitably in the midst of a cypress grove. The singing poured out from its wide-open windows; the waves of the lake, covered with orange blossom pollen, broke against its walls—and directly opposite, clad in a radiant haze, all adorned with statues, delicate colonnades and porticoes, arose from the lake a lofty, rounded island….

  Isola Bella … Lago Maggiore—Ellis announced.

  “Ah!” was my only response as I continued to descend. The woman’s voice rang through the villa with increasing strength and brightness: it drew me irresistibly…. I wished to see the face of the singer who was filling such a night with such music. We halted before a window.

  In the center of a chamber decorated in the Pompean taste and resembling more an ancient shrine than a modern drawing room, amid Greek figurines, Etruscan vases, exotic plants and rare carpets, illumined from above by the soft rays of two spherical crystal lamps—a young woman sat at the fortepiano. With her head bowed and her eyes half-closed she was singing an Italian aria; she sang and smiled, and at the same time her features expressed assurance, even sternness … a sign of pure pleasure! She smiled … and Praxilites’ faun—indolent, young as she was young, delicate, passionate—seemed to return her smile from a corner, through a curtain of oleander blossoms and the light smoke arising from a bronze brazier on an antique tripod. The stunning woman was alone. Enchanted by her singing and beauty, by the brilliance and fragrance of the night, shaken to the depths of my soul by her youthful, serene radiance, I had completely forgotten my companion, the strange way I had come to witness a life so far-removed from and alien to my own—I wished to go through the window and say….

  My body shuddered from a harsh shock—exactly as if I’d touched a Leyden jar. I glanced back … Ellis’ face, for all its transparency, was dark and threatening; anger flared in her suddenly wide-open eyes …

  Away!—she whispered irately, and once again the whirlwind, and darkness, and my head aspin … But the singer’s voice, cut off as she reached a high note, still lingered in my ears … < … >

  XVII-XVIII

  Next morning I had a headache, and my legs would barely carry me; but I paid no attention to my physical disarray, remorse was gnawing at me and anger at myself was suffocating me. < … >

  I summoned my housekeeper: “Marfa, what time did I go to bed last night, do you remember?”

  “Hard to say with you, Master … It was late, seems like. You went out at dusk, and your boot-heels were knocking about in there after midnight. Near daybreak—yes. For the third night in a row. You must have some trouble or other on your mind.”

  “Ah-ha!” I thought. So the flying is real and no doubt. “Well, and how do I look to you today?” I asked aloud.

  “How do you look? Let me have a peek … You’ve gone a little hollow-cheeked. And you’re pale, Master: it’s as if you’d got no blood in your face.”

  I felt myself sag a bit … and dismissed Marfa.

  “Keep on like this and you’ll die, or go out of your mind—I concluded as I sat pensively by the window. “You have to give it up. It’s dangerous. Feel how strangely your heart is beating. And when I’m flying I feel as if something is sucking away at my heart, or as if something is leaking from it, just like sap from a birch tree in the spring, if you sink an ax into it. I’ll be sorry to give it up, though. Yes, and Ellis … She’s playing cat and mouse with me … But she can’t really wish me any harm. I’ll trust myself to her one last time—I’ll look my fill—and then … But what if she’s drinking my blood? That’s horrible. What’s more, moving that fast can’t help but be bad for you: they say that even in England the trains are forbidden to travel more than one hundred and twenty versts an hour …”

  In this way I reasoned with myself — but at ten o’clock that evening I was already standing at the old oak. < … > Ellis came, threw over my head the end of her long, flowing sleeve. Immediately I was enveloped in a sort of white mist, soporific with the scent of poppies. Everything disappeared instantaneously; all light, all sound—and almost consciousness itself. Only the sensation of life remained—and this wasn’t unpleasant. Suddenly the mist vanished; Ellis had removed her sleeve, and I saw before me a huge mass of buildings crowded together, brilliance, movement, din … I saw Paris.

  XIX

  I’d been in Paris before and therefore immediately recognized the spot to which Ellis had shaped her course. It was the garden of the Tuileries, with its old chestnut-trees, wrought-iron fences, fortress-moat, and beastlike Zouaves on guard. Passing the palace, passing the Church of St. Roch, on whose steps the first Napoleon shed French blood for the first time, we halted high above the Boulevard des Italiens, where the third Napoleon did the same thing, and with equal success. Crowds of people—young and old dandies, workmen, women in sumptuous attire—were thronging the sidewalks; the gilded restaurants and cafes were blazing with lights, carriages of all sorts and kinds drove up and down the boulevard; everything was fairly seething and glittering, in every direction, wherever the eye fell…. But, strange to say, I didn’t feel like leaving my pure, dark, airy height; I didn’t want to approach that human ant-hill. It seemed as though a burning, oppressive, red-hot exhalation arose from it, not precisely fragrant, yet not precisely foul either; a lot of life, of living things were jumbled together there in a heap. I wavered…. But then the voice of a street-walker, sharp as the screech of iron rails, abruptly assaulted my ear; like a naked blade it thrust itself upward, that voice; it stung me like the fangs of a viper. I immediately pictured to myself a stony, greedy, flat Parisian face with high cheekbones, and the eyes of a pawn-broker, the rouge, powder, and curled hair, and the bouquet of garish artificial flowers on the high-peaked hat, the nails filed in the shape of claws, the monstrous crinoline…. I also pictured a brother steppe-dweller pursuing this venal doll with a detestable tripping gait…. I pictured to myself how, confused to the point of rudeness, and lisping with the effort, he tries to imitate the manners of the waiters at Véfour’s, how he squeals, fawns, wheedles—and a feeling of loathing took possession of me…. “No,”—I thought,—”Ellis will have no need to feel jealous here….”

&nb
sp; In the meantime I noticed that we were gradually beginning to descend…. Paris rose to meet us with all its din and reek….

  “Stop!”—I turned to Ellis.—”Don’t you find it stifling here, oppressive? < … > Carry me away, Ellis, I’m begging you. It’s just as I thought: there goes Prince Kulmamétov, hobbling along the boulevard; and his friend Baráksin is beckoning him and calling: ‘Iván Stepánitch, allons souper, as quickly as possible, and engage Rigolbosch itself!’ Take me away from these Mabilles and Maisons Dorés, away from fops, male and female, from the Jockey Club and Figaro, from the soldiers with their shaved heads and the fancied-up barracks, from the sergeants de ville with their goatees and the glasses of cloudy absinthe, from the domino players in the cafés and the gamblers on the ‘Change, from the bits of red ribbon in the buttonhole of the coat and the buttonhole of the overcoat, from Monsieur de Foi, the inventor of ‘the specialty of weddings,’ and from the free consultations of Dr. Charles Albert, from liberal lectures and governmental pamphlets, from Parisian comedies and Parisian operas and Parisian ignorance…. Away! Away! Away!”

  Look down—Ellis answered me:—you’re no longer over Paris.

  I glanced down…. It was a fact. A dark plain, here and there intersected by the pale lines of roads, was swiftly passing beneath us and only on the horizon far behind us did the reflection of the innumerable lights of the world’s capital throb upward like the glow of a huge conflagration. < … >

  We’re now flying towards Russia—said Ellis. This wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that she almost always knew what I was thinking.—Do you want to go home?

  “Yes, home…. or, no! I’ve been in Paris; take me to Petersburg.”

  Now?

  “This instant … Only cover my head with your veil or I’ll be dizzy.

  Ellis raised her arm … but before the mist enveloped me I felt on my lips the touch of that soft, dull sting …

  XXII

  “AT-TE-E-E-E-ENTION!”—a prolonged cry resounded in my ears. “At-te-e-e-e-ention!” came the response, as though in despair, from the distance. “At-te-e-e-e-ention!” died away somewhere at the end of the world. I started. A lofty golden spire met my eye: I recognized the Peter-and-Paul Fortress.

  It was one of the north’s “white nights”! Yes, but was it night? Wasn’t it more of a pale, sickly day? I’ve never liked the Petersburg nights; but this time I was actually terrified: Ellis’ form disappeared entirely, melted like morning mist in the July sun, and I clearly saw my own body as it hung heavily and alone on a level with the Alexander column. So this was Petersburg! Yes, it really was. Those broad, empty, gray streets; those grayish-white, yellowish-gray, grayish-lilac, stuccoed and peeling buildings with their sunken windows, brilliant sign-boards, and iron pavilions over their porches; the nasty little vegetable shops; those facades; those inscriptions, sentry-boxes, watering-troughs; the golden cap of St. Isaac’s Cathedral; the useless, piebald Exchange; the granite walls of the fortress and the broken wooden pavement; those barges laden with hay and firewood; that odor of dust, cabbage, bast-matting and stables; those petrified yard-porters in sheepskin coats at the gates. Those cab-drivers curled up in death-like sleep on rickety carriages. Indeed it was our Northern Palmyra. Everything was visible and clear, painfully clear and distinct; everything was sadly asleep, strangely heaped up and outlined in the dimly-transparent air. The glow of sunset—a consumptive glow—had not yet departed, and would not depart until morning from the white, starless sky. It lay on the silky surface of Neva, and the river barely murmured, undulating as it hurried its cold, blue waters along …

  Let’s fly away—pleaded Ellis.

  And without waiting for an answer she carried me over the Neva, across Palace Square to Liteinaia Street. Footsteps and voices were audible below: along the street walked a cluster of young men with drink-sodden faces, discussing their dancing-classes. “Sub-lieutenant Stolpakov seventh!” a soldier dozing on guard by a pyramid of rusty cannon balls at the artillery barracks, suddenly cried out in his sleep. A little further on, at the open window of a tall house I caught sight of a young girl in a sleeveless crumpled silk gown, with a pearl snood on her hair and a cigarette in her mouth. She was avidly perusing a book: it was the work of one of the newest Juvenals.

  “Let’s fly away from here, “I said to Ellis.

  A minute more, and the mangy forests of decaying spruce-trees and mossy swamps surrounding Petersburg were flitting past us. We headed southwards; both sky and earth gradually grew darker and darker. The diseased night, the diseased day, the diseased city—all were left behind.

  XXIII

  We flew more slowly than usual, and I was able to watch the broad expanse of my native land unrolling before me in a series of endless panoramas. Forests, copses, fields, ravines, rivers—now and then villages and churches—and then again fields, and forests, and copses, and ravines…. I began to feel melancholy and bored in an indifferent sort of way, somehow. And it wasn’t because we were flying over Russian in particular that I felt melancholy and bored. No! The earth itself, that flat surface unfolding beneath me; the entire globe with its inhabitants, transitory, impotent, crushed by want, by sorrow, by diseases, fettered to a clod of contemptible earth; that rough, brittle crust, that excrescence on the fiery grain of sand that was our planet—our planet where a mold has sprung up that we celebrate as the organic, vegetable kingdom; and those man-flies, a thousand times more insignificant than actual flies; their huts stuck together with mud, the tiny traces of their petty, monotonous pother, their amusing struggles with the unchangeable and the inevitable,—how disgusting all this suddenly seemed! My heart slowly sickened, and I no longer wanted to look at those insignificant pictures, at that stale exhibition…. Yes, I was bored—worse than bored. I didn’t even feel compassion for my fellow men: all my emotions were sunk in one which I hardly dare to name: in a feeling of revulsion; and that revulsion was strongest of all and most of all toward myself.

  Stop—whispered Ellis—Stop, or I won’t be able to carry you. You’re getting heavy.

  “Head home.”—I replied in the very voice I used when addressing the same words to my coachman—as I emerged, at four in the morning, from the houses of my Moscow friends with whom I had been discussing the future of Russia and the significance of the peasant commune ever since dinner.—”Head home,” I repeated, and closed my eyes.

  XXIV

  But I soon opened them again. Ellis was pressing against me in a strange sort of way; she was almost pushing me. I looked at her, and the blood curdled in my veins. Anyone who has happened to see on someone else’s face a sudden expression of profound terror, without understanding what’s causing it, will understand me. Terror, harassing terror, contorted, distorted the pale, almost obliterated features of Ellis. I had never seen anything like it even on a living human face. This was a lifeless, shadowy phantom, a shadow … and that swooning terror….

  “Ellis, what’s wrong?”—I said at last.

  She … she … the shadow replied with an effort—She!

  “She? Who’s she?”

  Don’t say it, don’t—hurriedly stammered Ellis—We must get away, or it will all will be over. … Look: there!

  I turned my head in the direction of her trembling hand and saw something … something truly horrifying. It was all the more horrifying because it had no definite shape. Something heavy, gloomy, yellowish-black in hue, mottled like the belly of a lizard—not a storm-cloud, and not smoke—was moving over the earth with a slow, serpentine motion. A measured, wide-reaching undulation downward and upward—an undulation which brought to mind the ominous wing-sweep of a bird of prey in search of its quarry. Then the inexpressibly revolting swoop earthwards—just the way a spider swoops down to the captured fly…. Under the influence of this threatening mass—I saw this, I felt it—everything was annihilated, everything was silenced…. A rotten, pestilential odor emanated from it and a chill that sickened the heart, darkened the sight, made the hai
r stand on end. A power was advancing; the irresistible power to which all are subject, a power which—without sight, form, thought—sees everything, knows everything, and, like a bird of prey selects its victims and crushes them like a serpent, licking them with its chilly sting….

  “Ellis! Ellis!”—I shrieked like a madman.—”Is that Death?—Death itself?”

  The wailing sound I had heard earlier burst from Ellis’s mouth. This time it was more like a despairing, human scream—and we dashed away. But our flight was strange and frighteningly uneven; Ellis turned somersaults in the air; she fell downward, she threw herself from side to side like a partridge when mortally wounded, or when she wants to lure the hound away from her brood. Even so, long, waving tentacles separating themselves from the inexpressibly dreadful mass rolled after us like outstretched arms, like claws. The huge form of a muffled figure on a pale horse rose up for one moment, and soared up to the very sky…. Still more agitated, still more despairing Ellis threw herself about.

  It saw me! It’s all over! I’m lost!—her broken whispers could now be heard—What a horrid fate! I could have enjoyed—I could have come to—life … but now. … annihilation, annihilation!

  This was too unbearable…. I fainted.

  XXV

  When I came to myself I was lying stretched out on the grass, with a dull pain all through my body, as though I’d been severely hurt. Dawn was breaking in the sky: I could make out objects clearly. Not far away, along the edge of a birch-coppice ran a road fringed with willows; the surroundings seemed familiar to me. I began to recall what had happened to me, and shuddered all over when the last, monstrous vision recurred to my mind …