“Ah, it’s you, you blackguard! Well, at least God sent you, otherwise here it’s…”
“You shouldn’t have suspected your negotiant neighbor of smelling bad… I just kept quiet and laughed. It’s from me; they even buried me in a nailed coffin.”
“Ah, nasty man! Only I’m glad even so; you wouldn’t believe, Klinevich, you wouldn’t believe what a dearth of life and wit there is here.”
“Yes, yes, but I intend to start something original here. Your Excellency—not you, Pervoedov—Your Excellency, the other one, Mr. Tarasevich, the privy councillor! Answer me! It’s Klinevich, the one who took you to Mademoiselle Furie last lent, do you hear me?”
“I hear you, Klinevich, and I’m very glad, and believe me…”
“I don’t believe a groat’s worth, and spit on it. I’d simply like to kiss you, dear old boy, but I can’t, thank God. Do you know, gentlemen, what this grand-père pulled off? He died two or three days ago and, can you imagine, left a whole four hundred thousand missing from the treasury? The fund was intended for widows and orphans, and for some reason he alone was in charge of it, so that in the end he wasn’t audited for about eight years. I can picture what long faces they’ve all got there now and how they’ll remember him! A delectable thought, isn’t it? All last year I kept being surprised at how such a seventy-year-old codger, podagric and chiragric, could have preserved so much strength for depravity, and—and now here’s the answer! Those widows and orphans—oh, the mere thought of them must have inflamed him!… I knew about it for a long time, I was the only one, Charpentier told me, and the moment I found out, right then, during Holy Week, I pressed him in a friendly way: ‘Hand me over twenty-five thousand or else you’ll be audited tomorrow.’ And, imagine, he came up with only thirteen thousand then, so it seems very opportune that he died now. Grand-père, grand-père, do you hear me?”
“Cher Klinevich, I quite agree with you, and you needn’t… go into such detail. There’s so much suffering and torment in life, and so little reward… I wished finally to have some peace, and, as far as I can see, I hope even here to extract all…”
“I’ll bet he’s already sniffed out about Katie Berestov!”
“What?… What Katie?” the old man’s voice trembled carnivorously.
“Aha, what Katie? Here, to the left, five steps from me, ten from you. It’s the fifth day she’s been here, and if you knew, grand-père, what a little hellcat she is… from a good family, educated, and—a monster, a monster to the last degree! I never showed her to anybody there, I alone knew… Katie, answer me!”
“Hee, hee, hee!” answered the cracked sound of a girl’s voice, but one could hear something like the prick of a needle in it. “Hee, hee, hee!”
“Is… she… blond?” the grand-père babbled, faltering, in three gasps.
“Hee, hee, hee!”
“I… I’ve long dreamed,” the old man babbled breathlessly, “a lovely dream about a little blonde… fifteen or so… and precisely in such a situation…”
“Ah, abominable!” Avdotya Ignatievna exclaimed.
“Enough!” Klinevich decided. “I see the material is excellent. We’ll immediately set things up here in the best possible way. Above all so as to spend the rest of our time merrily; but what sort of time? Hey, you, the official or whatever, Lebezyatnikov, I’ve heard they call you that!”
“Lebezyatnikov, court councillor, Semyon Evseych, at your service, and very, very, very gladly.”
“Spit on your gladly, only you seem to know everything here. Tell me, first of all (I’ve been wondering since yesterday), how is it that we can speak here? We’re dead and yet we can speak; we also move, as it were, and yet we don’t speak or move? What’s the trick?”
“If you wish, Baron, this can better be explained to you by Platon Nikolaevich.”
“What Platon Nikolaevich? Don’t mumble, get to the point.”
“Platon Nikolaevich, our local homegrown philosopher, natural scientist, and magister. He put out several books on philosophy, but it’s three months now and he’s falling quite asleep, so it’s no longer possible to shake him out of it. Once a week he mutters a few words that are quite beside the point.”
“To the point, to the point!…”
“He explains it all with the most simple fact—namely, that up there, while we were still alive, we mistakenly regarded death there as death. Here the body revives again, as it were, the remnants of life concentrate, but only in the consciousness. It’s—I don’t know how to put it—life continuing as if by inertia. Everything is concentrated, in his opinion, somewhere in the consciousness, and goes on for another two or three months… sometimes even half a year… There’s one here, for instance, who is almost entirely decomposed, but once in six weeks, say, he suddenly mutters some little word, a meaningless one, of course, about some bobok: ‘Bobok, bobok’—which means that in him, too, an imperceptible spark of life is still glimmering…”
“Rather stupid. Well, and how is it that I have no sense of smell, but can feel the stench?”
“That’s… heh, heh… Well, here our philosopher got himself into a fog. He observed precisely about smelling that here the stench one can feel is, so to speak, a moral one—heh, heh! A stench as if of the soul, so that one has time in these two or three months to reconsider… and that it is, so to speak, the last mercy… Only it seems to me, Baron, that this is all mystical raving, quite excusable in his position…”
“Enough, and the rest, I’m sure, is all nonsense. The main thing is two or three months of life, and in the final end—bobok. I suggest that we all spend these two months as pleasurably as possible, and for that we should all set things up on a different basis. Gentlemen! I propose that we not be ashamed of anything!”
“Ah, let’s not be, let’s not be ashamed of anything!” many voices were heard, and strangely, even quite new voices, meaning that in the interim new ones had awakened. With especial readiness, the now completely recovered engineer thundered his consent in a bass voice. The girl Katie giggled joyfully.
“Ah, how I want not to be ashamed of anything!” Avdotya Ignatievna exclaimed with rapture.
“Do you hear, if even Avdotya Ignatievna wants not to be ashamed of anything…”
“No, no, no, Klinevich, I was ashamed, I was ashamed there even so, but here I want terribly, terribly not to be ashamed of anything!”
“I gather, Klinevich,” the engineer bassed, “that you suggest setting up the—so to speak—life here on new and now reasonable principles.”
“Well, that I spit on! Regarding that, let’s wait for Kudeyarov, who was brought yesterday. He’ll wake up and explain everything to you. He’s such a person, such a gigantic person! Tomorrow I expect they’ll drag yet another natural scientist here, another officer probably, and, in three or four days, if I’m not mistaken, some feuilletonist and, I think, his editor along with him. Anyhow, to hell with them, it’s just that we’ll have our little crew assembled here and it will all get set up by itself. But meanwhile I want there to be no lying. That’s the only thing I want, because it’s the main thing. It’s impossible to live on earth and not lie, for life and lie are synonymous; but here, just for the fun of it, we won’t lie. Devil take it, the grave does mean something after all! We’ll all tell our stories aloud and not be ashamed of anything now. I’ll tell about myself first of all. I’m one of the carnivorous ones, you know. Up there it was all tied with rotten ropes. Away with the ropes, and let’s live for these two months in the most shameless truth! Let’s strip and get naked!”