I collected and reread my pages. (Who knows, maybe so as to convince myself that I hadn’t written them in the madhouse?) Now I’m all alone. Autumn is coming, the leaves are turning yellow. I’m sitting in this dreary little town (oh, how dreary little German towns are!), and instead of thinking over the next step, I live under the influence of feelings just past, under the influence of fresh memories, under the influence of all this recent whirl, which drew me into that turbulence then, and threw me out of it again somewhere. It still seems to me at times that I’m spinning in the same whirl, and that the storm is about to rush upon me, snatch me up with its wing in passing, and I will again break out of all order and sense of measure, and spin, spin, spin…
However, maybe I’ll settle somehow and stop spinning, if I give myself as precise an account as possible of all that happened this month. I’m drawn to my pen again; and sometimes there’s nothing at all to do in the evenings. Strangely, in order to occupy myself with at least something, I go to the mangy local library and take out the novels of Paul de Kock{11} (in German translation!), which I can barely stand, but I read them and—marvel at myself: it’s as if I’m afraid to spoil the charm of what has only just passed by a serious book or some serious occupation. As if this ugly dream and all the impressions it left behind are so dear to me that I’m even afraid to touch it with something new, lest it vanish in smoke! Is it so dear to me, or what? Yes, of course it is; maybe I’ll remember it even forty years later…
And so, I set about writing. However, all this can now be told partially and more briefly: the impressions are not at all the same…
First, to finish with grandmother. The next day she definitively lost everything. That’s how it had to happen: once that kind of person starts out on this path, then, like sliding down a snowy hill on a sled, it all goes faster and faster. She played all day, until eight o’clock in the evening; I wasn’t present when she played and know it only from hearsay.
Potapych attended her at the vauxhall the whole day. The little Poles who guided grandmother changed several times that day. She started by chasing away the previous day’s little Pole, whose hair she had pulled, and taking another one, but he turned out to be almost worse. Having chased that one away and taken back the first one, who hadn’t left and poked about during the whole time of his banishment right there behind her chair, thrusting his head in every moment—she finally fell into decided despair. The second chased-away little Pole also refused to leave; one stationed himself to her right, the other to her left. They quarreled and abused each other all the time over stakes and strategy, called each other łajdak[50] and other Polish compliments, then made peace again, threw money around without any order, gave directions in vain. When they quarreled, they each staked on his own side, one, for instance, on red, and the other, at the same time, on black. The end was that they got grandmother completely muddled and thrown off, so that she finally turned to the old croupier, all but in tears, asking him to protect her and chase them away. They were, in fact, chased away at once, despite their shouts and protests: they both shouted in unison, trying to prove that grandmother owed them money, that she had deceived them in some way, had acted dishonestly, meanly. Miserable Potapych told it to me in tears, that very evening after they lost, complaining that the Poles had stuffed their pockets with money, that he himself had seen them stealing shamelessly and constantly shoving money into their pockets. One, for instance, would wheedle five friedrichs d’or from grandmother for his labors and straight away stake them on the roulette table next to grandmother’s stakes. Grandmother would win, and he would shout that it was his stake that had won, and grandmother’s had lost. When they were chased out, Potapych stepped forward and reported that they had pockets full of gold. Grandmother at once asked the croupier to take measures, and though both little Poles began squawking (just like two snatched roosters), the police appeared and their pockets were emptied at once in grandmother’s favor. All that day, until she lost everything, grandmother had enjoyed a conspicuous authority with the croupiers and the whole vauxhall administration. Her renown had gradually spread through the town. All the visitors to the spa, from all nations, the ordinary and the most notable, flocked to look at “une vieille comtesse russe tombée en enfance,” who had already lost “several million.”
But grandmother gained very, very little from having rid herself of the two Poles. In their place a third Pole appeared at once to serve her, speaking perfectly pure Russian, dressed like a gentleman, though he smacked of the footman all the same, with enormous mustaches and with gonor.[51] He, too, kissed “the pani’s feet”[52] and “laid himself out at the pani’s feet,” but he treated everyone around him with arrogance, gave despotic orders—in short, he established himself at once not as grandmother’s servant, but as her master. Every moment, with every round, he turned to her and swore terrible oaths that he was a gonorable pan[53] and would not take a kopeck of grandmother’s money. He repeated these oaths so often that she finally became frightened. But since this pan at first actually seemed to improve her play and began to win a little, grandmother herself could no longer part with him. An hour later the two previous little Poles, who had been taken out of the vauxhall, appeared once more behind grandmother’s chair, again offering their services, if only to run errands. Potapych swore by God that the gonorable pan exchanged winks with them and even put something in their hands. Since grandmother had had no dinner and had hardly ever left her chair, one of the Poles actually proved usefuclass="underline" he ran next door to the vauxhall dining room and fetched her a cup of bouillon, and later tea as well. They both went, however. But towards the end of the day, when everybody could see that she was about to lose her last banknote, there were as many as six little Poles standing behind her chair, never seen or heard of before. And by the time grandmother was losing her last coins, they all not only didn’t listen to her, but didn’t even notice her, reached out to the table right over her, grabbed the money themselves, gave orders and placed stakes themselves, argued and shouted, chatted with the gonorable pan in a pan-brotherly way, while the gonorable pan even all but forgot about grandmother’s existence. Even when, having lost everything, grandmother was returning to the hotel at eight o’clock in the evening, three or four little Poles still refused to leave her and ran on both sides of her chair, shouting with all their might and insisting in a quick patter that grandmother had cheated them in some way and had to pay them something. Thus they came right up to the hotel, where, at last, they were driven away.
By Potapych’s reckoning, grandmother lost in that day a total of ninety thousand roubles, besides the money she had lost the day before. All her bonds—the five percent bonds, the state bonds, all the shares she had brought with her—she had cashed one after the other. I marveled at her ability to hold out for the whole seven or eight hours, sitting in her chair and hardly ever leaving the table, but Potapych told me that, on some three occasions, she had actually begun to win heavily, and, borne up by renewed hope, had no longer been able to leave. However, gamblers know how a man can sit almost around the clock in the same place over cards, without taking his eyes off the right one or the left.