Zherbunov swallowed a mouthful of liquid from his cup and grimaced in distaste. Then I tried a sip from mine. It was khanja, a bad Chinese vodka made from kaoliang. I started chewing on a pie, but I could not taste it at all; the freezing effect on my throat of the cocaine had still not worn off.
‘What’s in the pies?’ Barbolin asked gingerly. ‘People keep disappearing these days, after all. I don’t feel like breaking my fast that way.’
‘I tried it once,’ Zherbunov said simply. ‘It’s like beef’.
Unable to bear any more of this, I took out the tin box and Barbolin set about stirring the powder into our cups.
Meanwhile the gentleman in evening dress finished playing, donned his sock and shoe with elegant rapidity, stood up, bowed, picked up the stool and quit the stage to the sound of scattered applause. A handsome-looking man with a small grey beard got up from a table beside the stage. His throat was wrapped in a grey scarf as though to conceal a love bite. I was astonished to recognize him as the poet Valery Briusov, now old and emaciated. He mounted the stage and turned to face the hall.
‘Comrades! Although we live in a visual age, in which lines of printed words are being supplanted by sequences of images or… hmm…,’ he declaimed, ‘still tradition does not abandon the struggle, but seeks to discover new forms. To this day the immortal Dostoevsky and his novel Crime and Punishment continue to inspire young seekers of truth, both with axes to grind and without. And so now a little tragedy -that is the precise definition of this play’s genre, according to the author himself, the chamber poet Ioann Pavlukhin, Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please for the little tragedy Raskolnikov and Marmeladov.’
‘Your attention please,’ echoed Zherbunov, and we drank.
Briusov left the stage and returned to his table. Two men in military uniform carried a massive gilded lyre on a stand and a stool out on to the stage from the wings. Then they brought out a table, stood a pot-bellied liqueur bottle and two glasses on it, and pinned up two pieces of cardboard at either side of the stage, bearing the words ‘Raskolnikov’ and ‘Harmeladov’ (I immediately decided that the misspelling of the second name was not a mistake but a symbol of some kind), and finally they hung a board bearing the incomprehensible word ‘yhvy’ in the centre of the stage. Having duly situated all of these objects in their places, they disappeared. A woman in a long tunic emerged from the wings and began running leisurely fingers over the strings of the lyre. Several minutes passed in this fashion before a quartet of individuals in long black cloaks appeared on stage. Each of them went down on one knee and raised a black hem to conceal his face from the audience. Someone applauded. At the opposite end of the stage two figures appeared wearing tall buskins, long white robes and Creek masks. They began slowly moving towards each other, but stopped before they came close. One of them had an axe hanging under his arm in a noose entwined with roses - I realized that he was Raskolnikov. This, in fact, was obvious enough without the axe, because the board bearing his name was hanging by the wings on his side of the stage.
The other figure halted, slowly raised his arm in the air and began intoning in ponderous hexameters. In almost exactly the same words as his drunken prototype in the novel, he confessed that he had nowhere left to turn, then declared that Raskolnikov’s blazing eyes betrayed a keen sensibility of the woes of the downtrodden and oppressed, and immediately suggested that they should drink to that (this was indeed a revolutionary innovation).
The actor with the axe declined curtly. Marmeladov quickly drained his glass and continued his oration, paying Raskolnikov a long and confused compliment, in which I found several of the images quite effective - for instance that of the arrogant strength of emptiness blossoming behind the hero’s eyes and lending his face a semblance of the visage of God.
On hearing the word ‘God’, Zherbunov nudged me with his elbow.
‘What d’you reckon?’ he asked in a low voice.
‘It is still too soon,’ I whispered in reply, ‘Carry on watching.’
Marmeladov’s meaning grew more and more ambiguous. Dark hints began to surface in the flow of his words: a comparison of the grey St Petersburg morning with a blow from an axe to the back of the head, of his own world-weary soul with a dark closet in which the bodies of dead women lay. At this, Raskolnikov began showing clear signs of nervousness, and he enquired what Marmeladov wanted of him. In some confusion, Marmeladov asked him to sell the axe.
In the meantime I surveyed the hall. There were three or four people at each round table; the customers were a very mixed bunch, but as has always been the case throughout the history of humanity, it was pig-faced speculators and expensively dressed whores who predominated. Sitting at the same table as Briusov, and grown noticeably fatter since the last time I had seen him, was Alexei Tolstoy, wearing a big bow instead of a normal tie. The fat that had accumulated on him seemed to have been pumped from the skeletal frame of Briusov: together they looked quite horrific.
Looking further, at one of the tables I noticed a strange man sporting a military blouse criss-crossed with belts and an upturned handlebar moustache. He was alone at his table, and instead of a teapot there was a bottle of champagne standing in front of him. I decided that he must be a big Bolshevik boss. I do not know what it was in his calm, powerful face that struck me as unusual, but for several seconds I was unable to take my gaze off him. His eyes met mine, but he immediately turned away to face the stage, where the meaningless dialogue was continuing.
Raskolnikov attempted to discover for what purpose Marmeladov required the axe and received replies couched in vague, flowery phrases about youth, the Grail, eternity, power, hope and - for some strange reason - the phases of the moon. Eventually Raskolnikov capitulated and handed over the axe. He was counting the wad of bills that Marmeladov had given him in payment, when he suddenly swayed back and froze in astonishment. He had noticed that Marmeladov was standing there in front of him wearing a mask. Still speaking in the same laboured hexameters, he began asking Marmeladov to remove the mask. I was particularly struck by one image which he used, ‘Your eyes are like two yellow stars’ - Briusov broke into applause at the words, but overall it was far too long and drawn out. After Raskolnikov had repeated his request for the third time, Marmeladov paused in silence for a long, terrible moment before tearing the mask from his face. Simultaneously the tunic attached to the mask was torn from his body, revealing a woman dressed in lacy knickers and a brassiere, sporting a silvery wig with a rat’s-tail plait.
‘Oh God!… The old woman! And I am empty-handed… ‘Having pronounced these final words in an almost inaudible voice, Raskolnikov slumped to the floor from the full height of his buskins.
What followed made me blench. Two violinists leapt out on to the stage and began frenziedly playing some gypsy melody, while the Marmeladov woman threw her tunic over
Raskolnikov, leapt on to his chest and began strangling him, wiggling her lace clad bottom to and fro in excitement.
For a moment I thought that what was happening was the result of some monstrous conspiracy, and that everybody was looking in my direction. I glanced around like a beast, my eyes once again met those of the man in the black military blouse, and I somehow suddenly realized that he new all about the death of Vorblei - that he knew, in fact, far more serious things about me than just that.
At that moment I came close to leaping up from my chair fend taking to my heels, and it took a monstrous effort of will to remain sitting at the table. The audience was applauding idly; several of them were laughing and pointing at the stage, but most were absorbed in their own conversations and their vodka.