Ivan Dmitrich smiled mockingly.
“You’re joking,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Gentlemen like you and your helper Nikita don’t care about the future at all, but rest assured, my dear sir, that better times will come! My expressions may be banal, you may laugh, but the dawn of the new life will shine forth, truth will triumph, and—it will be our turn to celebrate! I won’t live to see it, I’ll croak, but somebody’s great-grandchildren will see it. I greet them with all my heart, and I rejoice, I rejoice for them! Forward! May God help you, my friends!”
Ivan Dmitrich, his eyes shining, got up and, stretching his arms towards the window, went on in an excited voice:
“From behind these bars I bless you! Long live the truth! I rejoice!”
“I see no special reason for rejoicing,” said Andrei Yefimych, who found Ivan Dmitrich’s gesture theatrical, but at the same time liked it very much. “There won’t be any prisons and madhouses, and truth, as you were pleased to put it, will triumph, but the essence of things will not change, the laws of nature will remain the same. People will get sick, grow old, and die, just as they do now. However magnificent the dawn that lights up your life, in the end you’ll still be nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole.”
“And immortality?”
“Oh, come now!”
“You don’t believe in it. Well, but I do. In Dostoevsky or Voltaire somebody says if there were no God, people would have invented him.12 And I deeply believe that if there is no immortality, sooner or later the great human mind will invent it.”
“Well said,” pronounced Andrei Yefimych, smiling with pleasure. “It’s good that you believe. With such faith one can live beautifully even bricked up in a wall. You must have received some education?”
“Yes, I studied at the university, but I didn’t finish.”
“You’re a thinking and perceptive man. You can find peace within yourself under any circumstances. Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world—man has never known anything higher than these two blessings. And you can possess them even if you live behind triple bars. Diogenes13 lived in a barrel, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth.”
“Your Diogenes was a blockhead,” Ivan Dmitrich said sullenly. “What are you telling me about Diogenes and some sort of comprehension?” He suddenly became angry and jumped up. “I love life, I love it passionately! I have a persecution mania, a constant, tormenting fear, but there are moments when I’m seized by a thirst for life, and then I’m afraid of losing my mind. I want terribly to live, terribly!”
He paced about the ward in agitation and said in a lowered voice:
“When I dream, I’m visited by phantoms. People come to me, I hear voices, music, and it seems to me that I’m strolling in some forest, on the seashore, and I want so passionately to have cares, concerns … Tell me, what’s new there?” asked Ivan Dmitrich. “How are things?”
“Do you wish to know about the town or generally?”
“Well, first tell me about the town and then generally”
“How is it? In town, excruciatingly boring … There’s nobody to talk to, nobody to listen to. There are no new people. Though the young doctor Khobotov came recently.”
“He came while I was still there. A boor, or what?”
“Yes, an uncultivated man. It’s strange, you know… To all appearances, there is no intellectual stagnation in our capitals, there is movement—meaning that there must be real people there—but for some reason they always send us such people that you can’t stand the sight of them! A wretched town!”
“Yes, a wretched town!” Ivan Dmitrich said and laughed. “And how is it generally? What are they writing in the newspapers and magazines?”
It was already dark in the ward. The doctor got up and, standing, began to tell about what people were writing abroad and in Russia and what trends of thought could be observed at present. Ivan Dmitrich listened attentively and asked questions, but suddenly, as if recalling something terrible, clutched his head and lay down on the bed, his back to the doctor.
“What’s wrong?” asked Andrei Yefimych.
“You won’t hear another word from me!” Ivan Dmitrich said rudely. “Leave me alone!”
“But why?”
“Leave me alone, I tell you! What the devil do you want?”
Andrei Yefimych shrugged, sighed, and went out. Passing through the front hall, he said:
“How about cleaning up here, Nikita … It smells awful!”
“Yes, Your Honor!”
“What a nice young man!” thought Andrei Yefimych as he walked to his own quarters. “In all the time I’ve lived here, it seems he’s the first with whom one can talk. He knows how to reason and is interested in precisely the right things.”
Reading and then lying in bed, he kept thinking about Ivan Dmitrich, and waking up the next morning, he remembered that he had made the acquaintance of an intelligent and interesting man yesterday and resolved to visit him again at the first opportunity
X
Ivan Dmitrich lay in the same posture as yesterday, his head clutched in his hands and his legs drawn up. His face could not be seen.
“Good day, my friend,” said Andrei Yefimych. “Are you asleep?”
“First of all, I’m not your friend,” Ivan Dmitrich said into the pillow, “and second, you’re troubling yourself in vain: you won’t get a single word out of me.”
“Strange …” Andrei Yefimych murmured in embarrassment. “Yesterday we talked so peaceably, but for some reason you suddenly became offended and broke off all at once … I probably expressed myself somehow awkwardly, or perhaps voiced a thought that doesn’t agree with your convictions …”
“Yes, I’ll believe you just like that!” said Ivan Dmitrich, rising a little and looking at the doctor mockingly and with alarm; his eyes were red. “You can do your spying and testing somewhere else, you’ve got no business here. I already understood yesterday why you came.”
“Strange fantasy!” smiled the doctor. “So you think I’m a spy?”
“Yes, I do … A spy or a doctor assigned to test me—it’s all the same.”
“Ah, really, what a … forgive me … what an odd man you are!”
The doctor sat down on a stool by the bed and shook his head reproachfully.
“But suppose you’re right,” he said. “Suppose I treacherously try to snatch at some word in order to betray you to the police. You’ll be arrested and then tried. But will it be worse for you in court or prison than it is here? And if you’re sent into exile or even to hard labor, is that worse than sitting in this annex? I suppose not … So what are you afraid of?”
These words obviously affected Ivan Dmitrich. He quietly sat up.
It was between four and five in the afternoon, the time when Andrei Yefimych usually paced his rooms and Daryushka asked him whether it was time for his beer. The weather outside was calm and clear.
“I went for a stroll after dinner and stopped by, as you see,” said the doctor. “Spring has come.”
“What month is it now? March?” asked Ivan Dmitrich.
“Yes, the end of March.”
“Is it muddy outside?”
“No, not very. There are footpaths in the garden already.”
“It would be nice to go for a ride in a carriage somewhere out of town now,” said Ivan Dmitrich, rubbing his red eyes as if he had just woken up, “then come back home to a warm, cozy study and … have a decent doctor treat your headache … I haven’t lived like a human being for so long. It’s vile here! Insufferably vile!”