“It’s me, Your Excellency, so far it’s just me, sir.”
“What is your request and what is it you want?”
“Only to inquire after Your Excellency’s health; being unaccustomed, everybody feels sort of cramped here at first, sir… General Pervoedov wishes to have the honor of making Your Excellency’s acquaintance and hopes…”
“Never heard of him.”
“Good gracious, Your Excellency, General Pervoedov, Vassily Vassilievich…”
“You are General Pervoedov?”
“No, Your Excellency, I’m merely Court Councillor Lebezyatnikov, at your service, sir, but General Pervoedov…”
“Nonsense! And I beg you to leave me in peace.”
“Leave off,” General Pervoedov himself finally put a dignified stop to the vile haste of his sepulchral client.
“He’s not awake yet, Your Excellency, you must keep that in view, sir; it’s from not being accustomed: he’ll wake up and then take it differently, sir…”
“Leave off,” the general repeated.
“Vassily Vassilievich! Hey there, Your Excellency!” an entirely new voice suddenly shouted loudly and eagerly right next to Avdotya Ignatievna—a gentlemanly and brash voice with a fashionably weary articulation and an impudent scansion. “I’ve been observing the lot of you for two hours already; I’ve been lying here for three days; remember me, Vassily Vassilievich? Klinevich—we used to meet at the Volokonskys’, where I don’t know why but you, too, were admitted.”
“Well, Count Pyotr Petrovich… but can it be that you, too… and so young… I amsorry!”
“I’m sorry myself, only it’s all the same to me, and I want to get the most I can from everywhere. And it’s not count, it’s baron, just plain baron. We’re some mangy little barons, from lackey ancestry, and I don’t even know why—spit on it. I’m just a blackguard from pseudo-high-society and considered a ‘sweet polisson.’ 13My father was some sort of little general, and my mother was once received en hautlie. 14Ziefel the Yid and I passed fifty thousand in false banknotes last year, but I denounced him, and Yulka Charpentier de Lusignan 15took all the money with her to Bordeaux. And, imagine, I was already quite engaged—the Shchevalevsky girl, three months shy of sixteen, still in boarding school, comes with ninety thousand in dowry. Avdotya Ignatievna, remember how you corrupted me fifteen years ago, when I was just a fourteen-year-old page?…”
“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-pèrepulled 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?”
“CherKlinevich, 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-pèrebabbled, 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!”