Pavel Kuzmich was also not vexed because his treatise — complete with footnotes, index and bibliography — stored in his memory, would remain unknown to the public and go with him into his grave where it would be useless because things there are known even to the laymen. No, his theory was complete, perfect and esoteric, and the despised expression ars gratia artis had become clear to him. In any case, Pavel Kuzmich considered that theory to be his less and less, and more and more to be a revelation that he had allowed to unveil itself to him, in which case all of his merit was removed. And that was connected to Hegel’s thesis that the World Spirit reveals the phenomenal character, revealing itself. And it became ultimately clear to him that Hegel’s saying, the conceitedness of which he had reacted strongly to in the past, the saying that was even worse for reality, if it did not fit in with my system, irrefutably correct and he could feel this correctness in his soul — a little piece of reality that, taken as a whole, had gone really bad.
If it will not bring me fame and fortune, Pavel Kuzmich thought, this knowledge will at least prepare me to calmly withstand the blows of earthly destiny. Because, if determinism, as it has been proven, originates in the future and not from the past, then that means that history is thought into being by a reasonable and eternal being and that it is not blind randomness — a registry that carries the corpses of the past through time.
And he no longer regretted that he had published some passages of the Treatise in the journal Voprosy Filosofii, 1923, where they were found by a dedicated and conscientious philosopher who immediately attacked him in the newspapers as a petit-bourgeois mystic. If he had not done so, he would not have been judged nor would he be in the prison, where — no matter how hard it was — his place was determined by Providence.
Pavel Kuzmich knew that if someone wanted to change the future, following the inexorable and unspeakable secrets of time, they necessarily ended up like the past — ouk on.
Joseph Vartolomeyich offered Pavel Kuzmich another cigarette.
“Oh, Pavel Kuzmich,” he said, “I have started to long for books. And since we’re talking about books, imagine that the two of us become the heroes of somebody’s novel. Everything happens to us that happens, but permit me, it would be better. That way we would exist after all, but we wouldn’t feel anything because we would be imaginary characters.”
“My dear friend,” Kuzmich said, “there’s not much difference between a novel and life. It’s all a story. It is just a matter whether a concrete being, you or I, forced the story to come alive. We can imagine worse, much worse, surroundings than these, but those hellish circumstances have no meaning unless there is a person within them.”
“Interesting, interesting,” mumbled Joseph Vartolomeyich. “Kowalsky told me similar things as well. He could talk for hours about strange things, and I am sorry that I have forgotten so much of that.”
“What did Kowalsky tell you about?”
“Well, for example, once he said that, in the end, the world will turn into an enormous madhouse where the lunatics will not know that they are crazy because everything will be normal.”
“What did he mean by ‘normal’?” Pavel Kuzmich wondered.
“Well, like this: Let’s say that I go crazy and begin imagining that I am the captain of a ship; in that future madhouse they will not cure me, but rather they will give me a ship and entrust command of it to me. If you, forgive the proposition, go crazy and begin to think you are a military leader, the doctors will not try to convince you otherwise, but will give you an army and send you to the battlefield. Well, now, I as the ship’s captain can transport materials and equipment for your troops. You see, instead of suppressing the madness, they will make it useful for society. I think that Kowalsky made a report about that to the congress of the Comintern.”
“By God, Joseph Vartolomeyich,” Griboyedov said, “that boy had a wild imagination.”
After lunch, warmed by the thin but warm soup, Joseph Vartolomeyich fell asleep and — who knows for which number of times — dreamt a dream: as if he, Vartolomeyich, is walking through a barren field toward a brilliantly shining building on the horizon. He is alone and feels some sort of anxiety. And at that moment Vartolomeyich (in the dream) remembers that he has dreamt that same dream hundreds of times, always forgetting it after waking up. The shining building, which had been a tiny dot on the horizon many years ago, is now quite close and he can make out its miraculous shape. To the left and right of him, on the periphery of his dream, Vartolomeyich, from the corner of his eye, sees some stooping specters in camouflaged uniforms. “Even here?” Joseph Vartolomeyich wonders, but then notices that those specters are unsuccessfully attempting to push their way into the higher region and that the fact that he noticed them makes their job easier, so he stops paying attention to them. It was becoming clear to him that he was drawing close to a goal that he had unconsciously sought all his life without knowing it. For, if he had known, he thought, he would have messed something up because people always end up in a place opposite to the one they were headed for. “Yes,” Kuznyetsov thought further, “everything will become clear when I reach that building and when the circle is completed.” And then (in the dream), knowing that it was not a dream, he continued walking toward the building that became larger and larger, ever closer, so close that he recognized the silhouettes of people whose faces were somehow familiar to him.
When he awoke, there was not a trace of the calmness he had attained in his dream. The barracks seemed to be even smaller, dirtier and darker, and the people even more tormented and afraid. Pavel Kuzmich was not in his bunk. Vartolomeyich wanted to tell him about his dream when he returned, but he changed his mind. Not because he was ashamed but because that dream, translated into words, was too pale, too unconvincing. Still, somewhere deep inside him the knowledge ripened that he had not wasted his life, and that the years spent in the prison were the crown of that life. Because, the path followed by those who refuse to destroy ends up in prison, just as it had, in former times, ended up at the stake, and before that in the Colosseum. And Joseph Vartolomeyich knew — more by intuition — that the question of good and evil is a question of the organization of life. And life, that is sleeping, waking, working, eating, sleeping, waking… And if you want to sleep comfortably, to do nothing, to eat well, you must turn from the path of good and step onto the path of evil. And the one who organizes the monotony of life according to his whims does not necessarily have to be evil by the standards of the world; he can be generous, honest, and once again end up in nothingness. Here, Joseph Vartolomeyich became dizzy from all the strange revelations, so he shook his head and rolled a cigarette. And when he heard the voice coming from the door: “Kuznyetsov, to the warden’s office, immediately!” Joseph Vartolomeyich thought of an autumn day and the wispy birches losing their leaves…