Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence

by Lodge, Kirsten; Rosen, Margo Shohl; Dashevsky, Grigory

  “Is he alive now, dad?”

  “Of course he’s alive, but monstrously deformed. So there you are … Professor Berg cites some striking statistical facts in his capital work…”

  They sat and conversed tranquilly, like two friends who have struck on an especially interesting topic. Pavel’s face expressed horror and amazement, and he interjected questions, occasionally exclaiming, “The Devil only knows what it is! But surely those statistics of yours can’t be right?!” And inside he was deathly calm, as if a live heart were not beating in his chest, as if blood did not run in his veins, but instead he was hewn from one huge block of cold, unresponsive iron. What he himself had thought of the dire significance of his disease and his fall was direly confirmed by books, which he believed in—intelligent foreign words and numbers, implacable and incontrovertible as death. Some important, intelligent and omniscient person was speaking objectively about his imminent death, and in the calm neutrality of his words there was something fatal that didn’t leave a pitiful man a shred of hope.

  And Sergey Andreyevich, too, was of good cheer: he laughed, rounded off his words and gestures, waved his hand complacently, and felt with dismay that in the truth of his words a terrible and elusive lie was concealed. He glanced with suppressed anger at Pavel lounging before him, and he wanted terribly for him to be not his friend, with whom it was so easy to chat, but his son; for there to be tears, shouting, reproaches—but not this calm, false discussion. His son was slipping away from him again, and there was nothing he could find fault with, so that he could shout at him, stamp his feet—even, possibly, hit him—anything to find that vital something, without which life is not possible. “It’s helpful, what I’m saying: I’m forewarning him,” Sergey Andreyevich reassured himself; but his hand stretched with greedy impatience towards his pocket, where in his wallet next to a fifty-rouble note lay the drawing that had been crumpled and was now smoothed out. “I’ll ask now, and that will be the end of it,” he thought.

  But just then Pavel’s mother came in, a stout, pretty woman with a powdered face and eyes like Lily’s: grey and naïve. She had just got home, and her cheeks and nose were reddened from the cold.

  “Terrible weather!” she said. “It’s foggy again, you can’t see a thing. Yefim was driving too fast, he almost ran someone down on the corner.”

  “So you said 70 percent?” Pavel asked his father.

  “Yes, 72 percent. Well, how are the Sokolovs?” Sergey Andreyevich asked his wife.

  “The same as always. They’re bored. Anechka is a bit ill. They want to come over tomorrow evening. Anatoly Ivanovich has arrived, he sends his greetings.”

  She looked with contentment at their cheerful faces and friendly poses, and gave her son a little pat on the cheek; and as always, he grasped her hand as she drew it back and gave it a kiss. Whenever he saw his mother, he loved her; and when she was gone, he forgot about her very existence. And everyone felt that way about her, family and friends, and if she were to die, everybody would have a good cry over her and forget her the next minute—forget her completely, from her pretty face to her name. And no one ever wrote her letters.

  “Having a chat?” She looked at father and son cheerily. “Well, I’m very glad. It’s not nice when father and son aren’t getting along. Like Fathers and Sons. And you forgave him morning mass?

  “The fog was to blame …” Sergey Andreyevich and Pavel both smiled.

  “Yes, terrible weather! As if all the clouds had fallen to earth. I kept telling Yefim, ‘Please, slow down!’ and he says, ‘Yes, madam!’ and whips them harder. Where did Lily go? Lily! Call her to dinner! Gentlemen, fathers and sons, come to the table!”

  “Just a moment,” Sergey Andreyevich requested. “We’ll be right there.”

  “Yes, all right, but it’s already seven…”

  “Yes, yes. Go ahead and serve! We’ll be right there.”

  Yulia Petrovna went out, and Sergey Andreyevich came a step closer to his son. Pavel also stepped forward automatically and sullenly asked, “What?”

  Now they were standing opposite each other, openly and directly, and everything that had been said earlier disappeared, never to return—Professor Berg, the statistics and the 72 percent.

  “Pavel! Dear boy! Lily told me that you are upset about something. And in general I’ve noticed that you’ve changed lately. It’s not trouble at school, is it?”

  “No. There’s nothing wrong.”

  Sergey Andreyevich wished he could say, “My son!”—but this seemed awkward and artificial, and he said, “My friend!…”

  Pavel remained silent, and shoving his hands in his pockets, looked off to the side. Sergey Andreyevich flushed, adjusted his pince-nez with a trembling hand, and took out his wallet. Squeamishly, with two fingers he fished out the drawing with the smoothed-out creases and silently held it out to Pavel.

  “What is it?” asked Pavel.

  “Look!”

  Without removing his hands from his pockets, Pavel glanced back over his shoulder. The paper danced in Sergey Andreyevich’s puffy, white hand, but Pavel recognised it, and in the space of a moment he was burning with a terrible feeling of shame. Something rumbled in his ears, like thousands of rocks falling down a mountain; it was as if his eyes had been scorched with flame, and he could neither look away from Sergey Andreyevich’s face nor close his eyes.

  “Did you do this?” his father asked from somewhere far, far away.

  And with a sudden rush of anger Pavel answered proudly and openly, “Yes, I did it.”

  Sergey Andreyevich let go of the paper, and fluttering at the corners, it quietly sank to the floor. Then his father turned and quickly left the room, and in the dining room his loud and rapidly receding voice could be heard saying, “Have dinner without me! I have pressing business to attend to.” Pavel, meanwhile, went over to the washbasin and began to pour water on his hands and face, feeling neither the cold nor the water.

  “Plaguing the life out of me!” he whispered, gasping and choking in the stream that spattered against his eyes and mouth.

  After dinner, around eight, Lily’s girlfriends from school came over, and from his room Pavel heard them having tea in the dining room. There were a lot of them; they were laughing, and their ringing, young voices chimed against one another, like the wings of dragonflies at play, and it didn’t seem like a room on a gloomy autumn evening, but a green meadow, where the sun was shining on him from a July, midday sky. And the schoolgirls buzzed low, like May beetles. Pavel listened carefully to the voices, but Katya Reimer’s resonant, honest voice wasn’t among them, and he waited and waited, and gave a start whenever a fresh arrival spoke up. He prayed for her to come, and once he heard her voice absolutely clearly: “Here I am! …” and he all but wept with joy; but that voice blended in with the other voices, and no matter how hard he listened, he didn’t hear it again. Then the dining room became quiet, and the housemaid said something in her hollow voice, and from the salon came the sounds of the piano. Mellifluous and light, like a dance, but strangely sad and sorrowful, the music circled round Pavel’s head, like quiet voices from some alien, wonderful and forever lost world.

  Lily ran in, flushed from dancing. Her untroubled forehead was damp, and her eyes shone, and it seemed as if the folds of her brown school dress still bore traces of rhythmic swaying.

  “Pavel! I’m not mad at you!” she said, and kissed him quickly with hot lips, at the same time giving off a wave of the same hot and innocent breath. “Let’s go and dance! Come on!”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “It’s a pity not everyone came. Katya’s not here, Lida’s not here, and Pospelov went off to the theatre. Let’s go, Pavel, come on!”

  “I’ll never dance again.”

  “Silly! Come on, let’s go! Please come; I’ll be waiting for you.”

  At the door she felt sorry for her brother; she came back, gave him another kiss and, her mind eased, ran off. “Hurry up, Pavel! Hurry up
!”

  Pavel closed the door and began to pace the room with giant steps.

  “She didn’t come!” he said loudly. “She didn’t come!” he repeated, making a circuit around the room. “She didn’t come!”

  Someone knocked at the door and Petrov’s self-assured, insolent voice said, “Pavel! Open up!”

  Pavel stopped in his tracks and held his breath.

  “Pavel! What a fool! Open up! Elizaveta Sergeyevna sent me!”

  Pavel remained silent. Petrov knocked again, and then calmly said, “Well, you’re a swine, brother! And young—and green … sweet Katya’s not here and he’s sulking. Idiot!”

  Even Petrov dared to say “sweet Katya” with his impure lips!

  After waiting a minute for the music to start again in the salon, Pavel cautiously glanced into the empty dining room, passed through it and picked up his old summer coat from outside the bathroom door, where unneeded clothes were hanging in a jumble. Then he quickly passed through the kitchen and down the back stairs to the yard, and from there to the street.

  Right away it was as damp, cold and uncomfortable as if Pavel had gone down into the depths of a vast cellar, where the air was still and oppressive and woodlice crept along the high, slippery walls. And it seemed surprising that in the leaden, rotten-smelling fog some sort of indefatigable, animated life was nonetheless flowing along; it was in the rumbling of unseen carriages and in the enormous, blurry, bright globes, in the centres of which the streetlamps burned with a dull, even glow; it was in the hurried, formless contours resembling smeared ink blots on grey paper, growing out of the fog and disappearing back into it again, often felt only as a strange sensation that unerringly testified to the nearby presence of a human being. An unseen person bumped hard into Pavel and did not apologise; a woman elbowed Pavel and walked past him, looking closely into his face as she went. Pavel gave a shudder and angrily stepped away.

  He stopped in a deserted alley opposite Katya Reimer’s house. He often came here, and this time he came to show how unhappy and lonely he was, and how cruelly Katya Reimer had acted in not coming in his moment of mortal yearning and horror. The windows glowed faintly through the fog, and there was a savage and evil mockery in their lacklustre gaze, like that of a man sitting at a banquet table, stuffed to the gills, who looks at a hungry man and lazily smiles. And choking on the rotting fog, trembling from cold in his tattered old coat, Pavel drank in that look with hungry hatred. He saw Katya Reimer clearly: how she sat pure and innocent among pure people and smiled, and read a good book, with no thought for the street, in the dirt and cold of which stood a dying man. She was pure, and cruel in her purity; she was, perhaps, dreaming even now of some noble hero, and if Pavel were to go in to her and say, “I’m filthy, I’m ill, I’m debauched, and because of this I’m dying—help me!” she would turn away fastidiously and say, “Go away! I’m sorry for you, but you disgust me. Go away!” And she would cry; she was pure and kind, and she would cry … as she drove him out. And by the charity of her pure tears and proud compassion she would murder the one who had asked her for the humane love that doesn’t look back and doesn’t fear filth.

  “I hate you!” whispered a strange, shapeless blur of a man, gripped by the fog that had snatched him away from the living world. “I hate you!”

  Someone passed by Pavel without noticing him. Pavel pressed himself fearfully to the wet wall and moved only after the footsteps had died away.

  “I hate…”

  His voice was smothered in the fog as in cotton wool. The shapeless blur of a man slowly receded; near the streetlamp a metal button flashed, and everything dissolved, as if it had never been, as if only the sombre, cold fog had ever been there.

  The Neva River was freezing hopelessly beneath the heavy fog, and it was deathly silent; neither steamboat’s whistle nor the lapping of water carried from its broad, dark surface. Pavel sat down on one of the semicircular benches and pressed his back to its damp, tranquil, cold granite. His whole body began to tremble, and his chilled fingers could barely bend, and his wrists and elbows felt numb; but he hated the thought of going home: there was something in the music and festivities of the others that reminded him of Katya Reimer; it was awkward and offensive, like the smile of a chance passer-by at a stranger’s funeral. A few steps away from Pavel, dim figures floated by in the fog; one had a small, fiery spot by its head, obviously a cigarette; another one, barely visible, was wearing what were probably hard leather boots, and with every step they went click-click. And for a long time the sound of his footsteps could still be heard.

  One shade had halted indecisively. It had an enormous head, disproportionate to its height; its outlines were ugly and fantastic, and when it moved towards Pavel, he felt frightened. Close up, it turned out to be a large hat with white, curved feathers of the sort that often adorn funeral wreaths, while the shade itself was just an ordinary woman. Like Pavel, she was shivering from the cold, and she hid her big hands in the little pockets of her short woollen coat to no avail; standing, she was of medium height, but when she sat down next to Pavel, she became almost a head taller.

  “Do you have a cigarette, handsome young fellow?” she asked.

  “Pardon me, lovely young lady, I don’t smoke,” Pavel replied, familiarity and excitement in his tone.

  The woman giggled shrilly, her teeth chattered from the cold, and the smell of beer wafted over Pavel.

  “Let’s go to my place,” said the woman, and her voice was shrill like her laugh. “Let’s go! You’ll treat me to a little vodka!”

  Something fast, broad and swirling now opened up before Pavel, as if he were falling off a mountain—yellow flames in the midst of the wavering darkness, and a promise of strange celebration, madness and tears. But on the outside he was chilled to the bone by the raw fog, and his elbows were growing numb. And with a politeness in which there was defiance, scorn and tears of hopeless despair, he said, “O, divine one! Do you so desire my passionate caresses?”

  The woman seemed to be offended; angrily, she turned away, her teeth chattered and she said no more, irately pressing her thin lips together. She had been tossed out of the pub because she wouldn’t drink sour beer and had splashed it into the barman’s face; her boots had holes in the toes and they leaked, and all this made her feel like sulking and giving someone a good scolding. Out of the corners of his eyes, Pavel saw the profile of her face, with its short nose and broad, fleshy chin, and he smiled. She was exactly like the women who haunted him, and he thought it was funny, and a strange sort of feeling made him feel close to her. And he liked it that she was angry.

  The woman turned around and exclaimed sharply, “Well? Are we going or not? Why the hell don’t you make up your mind!”

  And Pavel answered with a laugh, “Right you are, miss: why the hell! Why the hell not, why not go, you and I, and drink vodka and succumb to refined pleasures?”

  The woman freed her hand from her little pocket and gave him a half-angry, half-friendly clap on the shoulder. “Whatever you say, mate. Well then, I’ll go ahead and you behind.”

  “Why?” Pavel asked, surprised. “Why behind, and not next to you, divine …” he faltered for a moment—“Katya?”

  “My name is Manechka. Because you would be ashamed to be beside me.”

  Pavel grabbed her hand and drew her towards him, and the woman’s shoulder awkwardly hit him in the chest. She laughed and walked unsteadily, and now it was evident that she was a little tipsy. At the gates of one building she disengaged her hand, and taking a rouble from Pavel, went to get some vodka from the gatekeeper.

  “Hurry up, Katya darling!” Pavel entreated, losing sight of her in the black and murky opening of the gates.

  From the distance came back, “Manechka, not Katya!”

  A streetlamp burned, and Pavel pressed his cheek to its cold, moist post and closed his eyes. His face was immobile, like a blind man’s, and inside him all was as peaceful and quiet as a cemetery. Such a moment occurs in
men condemned to death, when their eyes are already bound and the sound of busy steps echoing on the scaffold has fallen silent, and in the threatening silence the great mystery of death is already half-revealed. And, like the ominous beat of drums, a voice rang out hollowly in the distance: “Where did you get to? I was looking and looking for you … I couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought you’d gone, and I was going to take myself off as well.”

  Pavel took himself in hand, shrugged something off and asked in a cheerful, loud voice, “And what about the vodka? That’s the main thing, the vodka! For what are we, you and me, dear Katya, without a little vodka?”

  “And what do I call you? I wanted to call you by name, but you didn’t tell me what it was.”

  “Katya darling, my name is a bit strange: they call me Percent, Percent. You can call me Percenty. That way it comes out more affectionate, and our intimate relations admit of that,” Pavel said, leading the woman on.

  “There’s no such name. Only dogs have names like that.”

  “What do you mean, Katya darling! Even my father calls me that: Percenty, Percenty! I swear to you by Professor Berg and the holy statistic!”

  The fog and the lights moved, and again the woman’s shoulders banged against Pavel’s chest, and before his eyes dangled a large, curved feather, the kind that adorns hearses; then something black, decaying and foul-smelling surrounded them, and then some steps teetered up and then down again. Pavel almost fell in one place, and the woman supported him. Then there was a stuffy room, smelling strongly of cobblers’ wares and sour cabbage; a lamp was burning, and the sound of uneven, angry snoring was coming from behind a chintz curtain.