It was Alexei Tolstoy’s Bleak Morning. I opened it at random. “Makhno, having broken the key off the sardine can, took a mother-of-pearl knife with fifty blades out of his pocket and carried on working with that, opening cans of pineapple”—this is not good, I thought—“French pâté, and lobster, which filled the room with a pungent smell.”
I carefully replaced the book and sat down on the stool at the table. There was suddenly a delicious, pungent smell in the room—it must have been the smell of lobsters. I began wondering why I had never even tried lobster. Or oysters, for instance. In Dickens everybody eats oysters, working away with their folding knives, carving thick slices of bread and spreading them with butter… I began nervously smoothing out the tablecloth. I could see the old stains on it that hadn’t washed out. A lot of tasty food had been eaten on that tablecloth. Lobsters and brains with peas had been eaten on it. Small beefsteaks with piquant sauce had been eaten on it. Large and medium-sized beefsteaks too. People had stuffed themselves to bursting and sucked on their teeth in satisfaction… I had nothing to stuff myself with, but I started sucking my teeth.
My sucking must have sounded loud and hungry, because the old woman’s bed next door began creaking, she started muttering angrily and clattering about, and suddenly she came into my room. She was wearing a long gray shirt and carrying a plate, and the room was instantly filled with a smell of food that was real, not imaginary. The old woman was smiling.
She set the plate down right in front of me and boomed out in honeyed tones, “Eat, dear guest, Alexander Ivanovich. Eat what God has given, what he has sent with me.”
“Oh no, Naina Kievna,” I mumbled, “you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”
But out of nowhere a fork with an ivory handle had already appeared in my hand and I began eating, with the old granny standing beside me, nodding and intoning, “Eat, dear guest, eat to your heart’s content.”
I ate it all. It was hot potatoes with clarified butter…
“Naina Kievna,” I said fervently, “I’d have starved to death without you.”
“Had enough?” asked Naina Kievna, suddenly sounding rather unfriendly.
“That was magnificent. Thank you very, very much! You have no idea—”
“I don’t need any of your ideas,” she interrupted, seriously annoyed. “I asked if you’d had enough. Give me your plate here… I said, give me your plate!”
“By… by all means,” I said.
“‘By all means, by all means’… And that’s all I get for feeding you…”
“I can pay,” I said, beginning to get angry.
“‘Pay, pay’…” She went to the door. “And what if it’s something as can’t be paid for? And why did you have to go and lie?”
“What do you mean, lie?”
“Just that, lie! You said you wouldn’t go sucking on your teeth.” She stopped speaking and went out.
What’s wrong with her? I thought. A strange sort of old granny… Maybe she’d noticed the clothes hooks? I could hear the springs creaking as she squirmed about on her bed, muttering irritably. Then she started singing in a low voice, a strange, barbaric kind of song: “Oh, I’ll go strolling and I’ll go rolling, when I’ve eaten young Ivan’s tasty flesh.” Suddenly I felt a cold draft from the window. I shivered and stood up to go back to the sofa—then it struck me that I’d locked the door before I went to sleep. Bewildered, I walked over to the door and reached out a hand to check the latch, but the moment my fingers touched the cold metal, everything went hazy and I found myself lying on the sofa with my face buried in the pillow and my fingers groping at a cold log in the wall.
I lay there for a while in a half swoon before I realized that the old woman was snoring somewhere close at hand and there was someone talking in the room. A quiet voice was intoning solemnly and didactically, “The elephant is the largest of all animals that live on land. On the front of his face he has a large lump of flesh that is called a trunk, it being hollow and elongated like a pipe. He can extend it and flex it in all sorts of ways and use it instead of a hand…”
Chilled but curious, I cautiously turned over onto my right side. The room was as empty as ever. The voice continued even more didactically: “Consumed in moderate amounts, wine is highly beneficial for the stomach, but when too much is drunk, it produces vapors that degrade man to the level of mindless cattle. You have sometimes seen drunks and still remember the just revulsion that you felt for them…”
I jerked upright on the sofa and lowered my feet to the floor. The voice stopped. I got the feeling it had been speaking on the far side of the wall. Everything in the room was back the way it had been; I was surprised to see that even the set of hooks was hanging as it ought to be. And to my amazement, I felt very hungry again.
“Ex vitro tincture of antimony,” the voice suddenly declared. I shuddered. “Magifterium antimon angeli salae. Bafilii oleum vitri antimonii alexiterium antimoniale!” I clearly heard giggling. “What a load of gibberish!” the voice said, and continued in a tone of lament, “Soon these eyes, as yet unopened, shall no longer behold the sun, but allow them not to close without the viscero-beatific message of my forgiveness and bliss… These are The Spirit or Ethical Thoughts of the Glorious Jung, Abstracted from His Nocturnal Meditations. On sale in Saint Petersburg and Riga in Sveshnikov’s bookshops for two rubles in pasteboard.” Someone sobbed. “More raving nonsense,” the voice said, then declaimed with feeling:
I had realized now where the voices were. The sound was coming from the corner where the cloudy mirror hung.
“And now,” said the voice, “next: ‘Everything is a single Self; this Self is the universal Self. The identification with ignorance that results from the eclipse of the light of the Self disappears with the development of spirituality.’”
“And where’s that gibberish from?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting an answer. I was certain I was asleep.
“Aphorisms from the Upanishads,” the voice promptly replied.
“And what are the Upanishads?” I asked, no longer certain that I was asleep.
“I don’t know,” said the voice.
I got up and tiptoed over to the mirror. I couldn’t see my reflection. The cloudy glass reflected the curtain, the corner of the brick oven, and all sorts of other things. But I wasn’t there.
“What’s the matter?” asked the voice. “Do you have questions?”
“Who’s that speaking?” I asked, glancing behind the mirror. Behind the mirror there was a lot of dust and dead spiders. I pressed on my left eye with my forefinger. That was an ancient method for recognizing hallucinations that I’d read about in V. V. Bitner’s fascinating book What to Believe and What Not to Believe. All you have to do is press on your eyeball with your finger, and all the real objects—as distinct from the hallucinations—go fuzzy. The mirror went fuzzy, and my reflection appeared in it—a drowsy, anxious image. I could feel a draft on my feet. Curling up my toes, I went across to the window and looked out. There was no one outside, and there was no oak tree either. I rubbed my eyes and took another look. In front of me I could clearly see the mossy well with its windlass, the gates, and my car standing beside them. I am asleep, I thought in relief. My gaze fell on the windowsill and the tattered book. In my previous dream it had been the third volume of Alexei Tolstoy’s Road to Calvary. Now I read on the cover “P. I. Karpov. The Creative Work of the Mentally Ill and Its Influence on the Development of Science, Art, and Technology.” Shuddering, with my teeth chattering, I leafed through the book, looking at the colored inserts. Then I read poem number 2: