And Katya listens and laughs. Her laughter is somehow strange: her inhalations alternate quickly and in regular rhythm with her exhalations, as if she were playing the harmonica, and yet all that laughs on her face are her nostrils. I’m dispirited and don’t know what to say. Beside myself, I explode, jump up from my place and shout:
“Be quiet, finally! What are you doing sitting here like two toads poisoning the air with your breath? Enough!”
And without waiting for them to finish their maligning, I prepare to go home. And it’s high time: past ten o’clock.
“I’ll stay a little longer,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “May I, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“You may,” Katya answers.
“Bene. In that case tell them to serve another little bottle.”
The two of them see me off to the front door with candles, and while I’m putting my coat on, Mikhail Fyodorovich says:
“You’ve grown terribly thin and old recently, Nikolai Stepanych. What’s the matter? Are you ill?”
“Yes, I’m a bit ill.”
“And he won’t be treated …” Katya puts in glumly.
“Why won’t you be treated? My dear man, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Regards to your family and my apologies for not visiting them. One of these days, before I go abroad, I’ll stop and say good-bye. Without fail! I leave next week.”
I go out of Katya’s annoyed, frightened by the talk of my illness, and displeased with myself. I ask myself: should I not, indeed, consult one of my colleagues? And I immediately imagine how my colleague, having auscultated me, goes silently to the window, ponders, then turns to me, and, trying to keep me from reading the truth on his face, says in an indifferent tone: “So far I see nothing special, but all the same, collega, I’d advise you to stop working …” And that will deprive me of my last hope.
Who doesn’t have hopes? Now, diagnosing myself and treating myself, there are moments when I hope that my own ignorance is deceiving me, that I’m also mistaken about the protein and sugar I find in myself, and about my heart, and about the swelling I’ve noticed twice now in the morning; re-reading the manuals on therapy with the zeal of a hypochondriac and changing my medications daily, I keep thinking I’ll hit on something comforting. It’s all paltry
Whether the sky is covered with clouds, or the moon and stars are shining in it, each time I return home, I look up at it and think that death will soon take me. One would think that at such moments my thoughts should be deep as the sky, bright, striking … But no! I think about myself, my wife, Liza, Gnekker, my students, people in general; my thoughts are bad, paltry, I’m tricking myself, and in those moments my worldview can be expressed in the words which the famous Arakcheev18 said in one of his private letters: “Nothing good in the world can be without bad, and there is always more bad than good.” That is, everything is muck, there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I’ve lived should be considered a waste. I catch myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself that they are accidental, temporary, and not lodged deeply in me, but at once I think:
“If so, then what is it that draws you to those two toads every evening?”
And I swear to myself that I will not go to Katya’s anymore, though I know I’ll go to her again tomorrow.
Ringing my doorbell and then going up the stairs, I feel that I no longer have a family and have no wish to return to it. Clearly, the new Arakcheevian thoughts are not lodged in me accidentally or temporarily, but govern my whole being. With a sick conscience, dejected, indolent, barely moving my limbs, as if a thousand pounds had been added to my weight, I lie down in bed and soon fall asleep.
And then—insomnia …
IV
Summer comes, and life changes.
One fine morning Liza enters my room and says in a joking tone:
“Let’s go, Your Excellency. Everything’s ready.”
My Excellency is taken outside, put into a carriage, and driven somewhere. I ride along and, having nothing better to do, read the signboards from right to left. The word “pothouse” comes out “esuohtop.” That would suit an ancient Egyptian: the pharaoh Esuohtop. I go on over a field past the cemetery, which makes precisely no impression on me at all, though I’ll soon be lying in it; then I go through a woods and another field. Nothing interesting. After a two-hour drive, My Excellency is led into the bottom floor of a summer house and installed in a very cheerful little room with light blue wallpaper.
At night there’s the usual insomnia, but in the morning I’m not awake and listening to my wife, but lying in bed. I don’t sleep, but experience that drowsy, half-oblivious state when you know you’re not asleep, and yet have dreams. At noon I get up and, out of habit, sit at my desk, but I don’t work now, I entertain myself with the French books in yellow covers that Katya sends me. Of course, it would be more patriotic to read Russian authors, but I confess I’m not especially in favor of them. Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products. Even the best products of handicraft cannot be called remarkable and cannot be praised without a “but.” The same can be said of all the literary novelties I’ve read over the last ten or fifteen years: not one is remarkable, and there’s no avoiding a “but.” Intelligent, noble, but not talented; talented, noble, but not intelligent; or, finally, talented, intelligent, but not noble.
I’m not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don’t satisfy me either. But they’re less boring than the Russian ones, and not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work—a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don’t have. I can’t remember a single new book in which the author doesn’t do his best, from the very first page, to entangle himself in all possible conventions and private deals with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological analysis, a third must have “a warm attitude towards humanity,” a fourth purposely wallows for whole pages in descriptions of nature, lest he be suspected of tendentiousness … One insists on being a bourgeois in his work, another an aristocrat, etc. Contrivance, caution, keeping one’s own counsel, but no freedom nor courage to write as one wishes, and therefore no creativity.
All this refers to so-called belles-lettres.
As for serious Russian articles, for instance on sociology, art, and so on, I avoid reading them out of sheer timidity. In my childhood and youth I was for some reason afraid of doormen and theater ushers, and that fear has stayed with me. I’m afraid of them even now. They say we fear only what we don’t understand. And, indeed, it’s very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear. The extraordinary importance, the facetiously pontifical tone, the familiar treatment of foreign authors, the knack of augustly pouring from empty into void—I find it all incomprehensible, frightening, and nothing like the modesty and gentlemanly calm tone I’m accustomed to in reading what doctors and natural scientists write. Not only articles, it’s even painful for me to read the translations done or edited by serious Russian people. The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.