XIX
Back home I collapsed into bed without even undressing.
‘At it again, you shameless man – swimming in the lake fully dressed!’ growled Polikarp as he pulled off my wet and muddy clothes. ‘Again I have to suffer! You think you’re a gentleman, an educated man, but you’re worse than any chimney sweep! I don’t know what they taught you at university.’
Unable to stand either human voices or faces, I wanted to shout at Polikarp to leave me in peace, but my words stuck in my throat. My tongue was as weak and exhausted as the rest of my body. However agonizing the ordeal, I still had to let Polikarp pull all my clothes off – even down to my drenched underwear.
‘You could at least turn over!’ my servant grumbled, rolling me from side to side like a small doll. ‘Tomorrow I’m handing in my notice! No, no – not for all the money in the world – I’ll be damned if I stay here any longer. This old fool’s had enough!’
Fresh, warm linen didn’t warm up or relax me. I was trembling so violently with rage and fear that my teeth were chattering. But I could find no explanation for this fear. Neither apparitions nor ghosts had ever scared me – not even the portrait of my predecessor Pospelov hanging over my head: he never took his lifeless eyes off me and seemed to be winking. But I wasn’t in the least ruffled when I looked at him. Although my future wasn’t crystal clear, I could say with a high degree of probability that nothing was threatening me, that no black clouds were near. Death was still far off, I had no serious illnesses and I attached no significance to personal disasters. So, what was I afraid of and why were my teeth chattering?
Nor was I able to explain the reason for my anger. It couldn’t have been the Count’s ‘secret’ that infuriated me so much. Neither the Count nor his marriage, which he had concealed from me, was any concern of mine. All that remains is to explain my state of mind at the time as shattered nerves and exhaustion. Any other explanation is beyond me.
When Polikarp had left I covered myself up to the head with the intention of sleeping. It was dark and quiet. My parrot kept turning restlessly in its cage and I could hear the regular ticking of the wall clock in Polikarp’s room. Everywhere else there reigned peace and quiet. Physical and moral exhaustion prevailed and I began to doze off. I felt that some great weight was gradually being lifted from me, that those hateful images were giving way in my consciousness to clouds of mist… I remember that I even began to have dreams. I dreamt that on one bright winter’s morning I was walking along Nevsky Prospekt50 in St Petersburg, looking into shop windows for want of something to do. I felt cheerful, gay at heart. I had no reason to hurry anywhere, I had nothing to do – complete freedom, in fact. The realization that I was far from my village, from the Count’s estate and from that cold angry lake, put me in an even more relaxed and cheerful frame of mind. I stopped by the largest shop window and started inspecting women’s hats. These hats were familiar to me. I had seen Olga wearing one of them, Nadezhda another; a third I had seen on the day of the shooting party on the fair head of Sozya, who had arrived so unexpectedly. Under these hats familiar faces began to smile at me. When I wanted to tell them something all three merged into one large, red face. This face rolled its eyes angrily and stuck its tongue out. Someone squeezed my neck from behind.
‘A husband murdered his wife!’ the red face shouted. I shuddered, cried out and jumped out of bed as if I had been stung. My heart beat violently and a cold sweat broke out on my forehead.
‘A husband murdered his wife!’ repeated the parrot. ‘Now, give me some sugar! How stupid you are. You fool!’
‘It’s only the parrot,’ I said, calming myself as I lay down again on my bed… Thank God…’
Then I heard a monotonous murmur – it was the rain pattering on the roof. The clouds that I had seen in the west when I was walking along the banks of the lake had now filled the whole sky. Faint flashes of lightning illuminated the portrait of the late Pospelov; thunder rumbled right over my head.
The last storm this summer, I thought.
I remember one of the first storms. Exactly the same kind of thunder had once rumbled in the forest when I had visited the forester’s house for the first time. The girl in red and I had stood by the window then, watching the lightning illuminate the pine trees. Fear shone in the eyes of that beautiful creature. She told me that her mother had been struck by lightning and that she herself was thirsting for a dramatic death. She would have liked to dress just like the richest lady aristocrats in the district. Luxurious dresses went well with her beauty, she felt. Conscious and proud of her delusions of grandeur, she wanted to ascend Stone Grave – there to die a dramatic death!
Her dream came tr— although not on Sto—*
Having abandoned all hope of getting to sleep, I got up and sat on my bed. The gentle murmur of the rain gradually turned into the angry roar that I loved so dearly when my heart was free from fear and anger. But now that roar appeared menacing; one thunderclap followed the other.
‘A husband murdered his wife!’ squawked the parrot.
Those were its last words. Closing my eyes in abject fear, I groped in the darkness for the cage and hurled it into the corner.
‘To hell with you!’ I shouted, hearing the crash of the cage and the parrot’s screeching.
That poor, noble bird! The flight into the corner had cost it dear. Next day its cage contained a cold corpse. Why had I killed it? If it was its favourite phrase about the husband who murdered his wife that rem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .†
When she handed over the flat, my predecessor Pospelov’s mother made me pay for all the furniture – even for the photographs of people I didn’t know. But she wouldn’t take one copeck for the valuable parrot. On the evening of her departure for Finland she spent the whole night bidding her noble bird farewell. I remember the sobbing and lamentations that accompanied this valediction. I remember her tears when she asked me to look after her friend until her return. I gave her my word of honour that her parrot would not regret making my acquaintance. And I had not kept my word: I had killed the bird. I can imagine what the old crone would have said if she had found out about the fate of her squawker!
XX
Someone tapped cautiously on my window. The little house where I lived stood on a road that was right on the edge of the village and I often used to hear tapping on my window, especially in bad weather when travellers were looking for somewhere to stay the night. This time it was no traveller tapping on the window. When I went over to it and waited until the lightning flashed, I saw the dark outline of some tall, thin man. He was standing in front of the window and seemed to be shivering from the cold. I opened the window.
‘Who’s there? What do you want?’ I asked.
‘It’s me, Sergey Petrovich,’ came that plaintive voice in which people who are chilled to the marrow and terribly frightened tend to speak. ‘It’s me. I’ve come to see you, old chap.’
That dark silhouette’s plaintive voice I was amazed to recognize as that of my friend Dr Pavel Ivanovich. I was baffled by this visit from Screwy, who normally led a regular life and who always went to bed before midnight. What could have prompted him to break his rules and turn up at my place at two o’clock in the morning – and in such bad weather into the bargain!