“Sickness has nothing to do with it,” Katya interrupts me. “It’s simply that your eyes have been opened, that’s all. You’ve seen something that for some reason you didn’t want to notice before. In my opinion, you must first of all break with your family and leave.”
“What you’re saying is absurd.”
“You don’t love them, so why this duplicity? And is that a family? Nonentities! They could die today, and tomorrow nobody would notice they were gone.”
Katya despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. In our day one can hardly talk of people’s right to despise each other. But if one takes Katya’s point of view and acknowledges that such a right exists, one can see that after all she has the same right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.
“Nonentities!” she repeats. “Did you have dinner today? How is it they didn’t forget to call you to the dining room? How is it they still remember your existence?”
“Katya,” I say sternly, “I ask you to be quiet.”
“And do you think I enjoy talking about them? I’d be glad not to know them at all. Listen to me, my dear: drop everything and leave. Go abroad. The sooner the better.”
“What nonsense! And the university?”
“The university, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it anyway. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years now, and where are your disciples? Have you produced many famous scientists? Count them up! And to multiply the number of doctors who exploit ignorance and make hundreds of thousands, there’s no need to be a good and talented man. You’re superfluous.”
“My God, how sharp you are!” I say, horrified. “How sharp you are! Be quiet, or I’ll leave! I don’t know how to reply to your sharpness!”
The maid comes in and invites us to have tea. At the samovar our conversation changes, thank God. Since I’ve already complained, I want to give free rein to my other old man’s weakness— reminiscence. I tell Katya about my past and, to my great astonishment, inform her of such details as I didn’t even suspect were still preserved in my memory. And she listens to me with tenderness, with pride, with bated breath. I especially like telling her how I once studied at the seminary15 and dreamed of going to university.
“I used to walk in our seminary garden …” I tell her. “The squeak of an accordion and a song from a far-off tavern would come on the wind, or a troika with bells would race past the seminary fence, and that was already quite enough for a sense of happiness suddenly to fill not only my breast, but even my stomach, legs, arms … I’d listen to the accordion or to the fading sound of the bells, and imagine myself a doctor and paint pictures—one better than the other. And so, as you see, my dreams have come true. I’ve received more than I dared dream of. For thirty years I’ve been a beloved professor, have had excellent colleagues, have enjoyed honorable renown. I’ve loved, married for passionate love, had children. In short, looking back, my whole life seems to me like a beautiful composition, executed with talent. Now it only remains for me not to ruin the finale. For that I must die like a human being. If death is indeed a danger, I must meet it as befits a teacher, a scientist, and the citizen of a Christian country: cheerfully and with a peaceful soul. But I’m ruining the finale. I’m drowning, I run to you asking for help, and you say to me: drown, that’s how it should be.”
But here the bell rings in the front hall. Katya and I recognize it and say:
“That must be Mikhail Fyodorovich.”
And, indeed, a moment later in comes my colleague, the philologist Mikhail Fyodorovich, a tall, well-built man of around fifty, clean-shaven, with thick gray hair and black eyebrows. He is a kind man and an excellent comrade. He comes from an old aristocratic family, very fortunate and talented, which has played a notable role in the history of our literature and education. He himself is intelligent, talented, very cultivated, but not without his oddities. To a certain degree we’re all odd, we’re all eccentrics, but his oddities seem to his acquaintances to be something exceptional and not entirely harmless. Among those acquaintances I know not a few who are totally unable to see his many virtues through his oddities.
He comes into the room, slowly removes his gloves, and says in a velvety bass:
“Good evening. Having tea? That’s quite appropriate. It’s hellishly cold.”
Then he sits at the table, takes a glass, and immediately starts talking. The most characteristic thing in his manner of talking is his permanently jocular tone, a sort of blend of philosophy and banter, as with Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He always talks about serious things, but never talks seriously. His opinions are always sharp, abusive, but owing to his soft, smooth, jocular tone, it somehow turns out that his sharpness and abuse do not grate on the ear, and you quickly get used to them. Every evening he brings along five or six anecdotes from university life, and when he sits at the table, he usually begins with them.
“Oh, Lord!” he sighs, with a mocking movement of his black eyebrows. “Such comedians there are in the world!”
“And so?” asks Katya.
“I’m leaving after my lecture, and on the stairs I meet that old idiot of ours, X … He’s walking along with his horse’s jaw thrust out as usual, looking for somebody to complain to about his migraine, his wife, and the students, who don’t want to attend his lectures. Well, I think, he’s seen me—that’s it, I’m lost…”
And so on in the same vein. Or else he begins like this:
“Yesterday I was at our Y’s public lecture. It surprises me that our alma mater—not to speak of the devil—ventures to show the public such patent oafs and dimwits as this Y. He’s a fool on a European scale! Good heavens, you wouldn’t find another like him in all of Europe, not even with a candle in broad daylight! He lectures, if you can imagine, just as if he’s sucking a candy: ssk-ssk-ssk … He gets cold feet, can’t make out his own notes, his wretched little thoughts barely move, like a monk on a bicycle, and above all there’s no way to tell what he’s trying to say. Flies die of boredom. The boredom can only be compared with what we have in our big auditorium at commencement, when the traditional speech is being read, devil take it.”
And at once a sharp transition:
“Some three years ago, as our Nikolai Stepanych remembers, I had to deliver that speech. Hot, stuffy, uniform tight under the arms—you could die! I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours … Well, I think, thank God, only ten pages left. And at the conclusion there were four pages I could omit altogether, so I counted on not reading them. That leaves only six, I thought. Then, imagine, I glance up and see some beribboned general and a bishop sitting next to each other in the front row. The poor souls are stiff with boredom, they roll their eyes so as not to fall asleep, and yet they still try to keep an attentive look on their faces and pretend that they like and understand my lecture. Well, I think, since you like it, you’re going to get it! For spite! And I up and read all four pages.”