She quickly goes out but she stops at the door to ask, ‘Did you know we owe Yegor five months’ wages? We mustn’t let the servants’ wages run up, I’ve told you that so many times! It’s far easier paying them ten roubles a month than fifty every five months!’
In the doorway she stops again to say, ‘The one I feel most sorry for is our Liza. She’s a student at the Conservatoire, she’s always mixing in good society, yet just look how she’s dressed! That fur coat would make anyone ashamed to be seen in the street with it. It wouldn’t matter so much if she were anyone’s daughter, but everyone knows that her father is a famous professor, a Privy Councillor!’
And after reproaching me with my name and position she finally leaves. So begins my day. Nor does it get any better.
While I’m drinking my tea in comes my daughter Liza in her fur coat and little hat, carrying some music books – all ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two, but she looks younger. She’s pretty and a bit like my wife when she was young. She kisses me affectionately on the temple and hand.
‘Good morning, Papa. How are you?’ she asks.
As a child she was very fond of ice cream and I often took her to a café. Ice cream was her criterion of excellence. If she wanted to praise me she would say, ‘Papa, you’re all ice creamy!’ One of her fingers would be called ‘pistachio’, another ‘cream’, another ‘raspberry’ – and so on. Usually when she came in to say good morning I would sit her on my knee and kiss her fingers.
‘Vanilla… pistachio… lemon…’ I would say.
And even now, for old time’s sake, I still kiss Liza’s fingers and mutter, ‘Pistachio, cream, lemon…’, but it somehow doesn’t sound right. I’m as cold as ice cream myself, I feel embarrassed. When my daughter comes in and touches my temple with her lips I give a sudden start, as if stung by a bee, produce a forced smile and turn my face away. Ever since I first began to suffer from insomnia one question has constantly been nagging me: my daughter often sees me, an elderly, distinguished man, blush painfully because I haven’t paid our footman his wages. She sees how often my worrying over petty debts makes me stop work and thoughtfully pace the room for hours on end. So why has she never once come to see me without her mother’s knowledge to whisper, ‘Papa, here’s my watch, my bracelets, earrings, dresses… pawn the lot, you need the money’? When she sees her mother and myself trying to keep up appearances why doesn’t she give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? I could never accept her watch, or bracelets or any other sacrifices – God forbid! I don’t need them.
And this leads me to think of my son, the army officer in Warsaw. He is an intelligent, honest and sober person. But that’s not enough for me. I fancy that if I had an old father and knew that there were times when he was ashamed of being so poor, I would give up my commission to someone else and take a job as a labourer. Such thoughts about my children poison me. But what good are these thoughts? Only a narrow-minded or embittered man can harbour malicious thoughts about ordinary mortals for not being heroes. But enough of that.
At a quarter to ten I have to go and deliver a lecture to my dear boys. I get dressed and walk down the road I have known for thirty years and which has a history of its own for me. Here is the large grey building with the chemist’s shop. Here there used to be a small house with an ale bar – there I planned my thesis and wrote my first love letter to Varya, in pencil, on a page with the heading Historia Morbi.7 Next comes the grocer’s, once kept by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit and later by a fat woman who was fond of the students because ‘every one of them had a mother’. Now it’s occupied by a red-haired shopkeeper – a very phlegmatic man who drinks his tea from a copper teapot. And here are the grim university gates that have long needed repairing, a bored janitor in a sheepskin jacket, a broom, heaps of snow… Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a bright young boy from the provinces who imagines that the Temple of Learning really is a temple. All in all, the dilapidated university buildings, the gloomy corridors and grimy walls, the lack of light, the dismal aspect of the steps, coat-hooks and benches play a leading role as a conditioning factor in the history of Russian pessimism. And here is our garden. I fancy it has grown neither better nor worse since I was a student. I do not like it. It would have been much more sensible to have grown some lofty pines and fine oaks there instead of shrivelled-up limes, yellow acacias and skimpy, clipped lilacs. Most students’ moods are influenced by their environment, therefore they should be able to see only what is noble, impressive and elegant at all times at their place of study. God preserve them from spindly trees, broken windows, grey walls and doors upholstered with torn oil-cloth.
When I approach my own entrance the door is flung open and I’m met by my old colleague, contemporary and namesake, Nikolay the porter. He lets me in, clears his throat and says, ‘It’s very frosty, Professor!’ Or if my fur coat is damp: ‘It’s raining, Professor!’
Then he runs on ahead and opens all the doors on the way. In my study he solicitously takes off my coat, at the same time managing to communicate some item of university news. Thanks to the close camaraderie that exists between all university porters and caretakers, he knows simply everything that is going on in all four faculties, in the registry, the Vice-Chancellor’s study and the library. There’s absolutely nothing he doesn’t know about. When the latest news is a Dean’s or Vice-Chancellor’s resignation, for example, I can hear him talking to the young janitors, naming candidates for the vacancy, explaining that So-and-So wouldn’t be approved by the Minister, or that So-and-So would turn it down himself. Then he goes into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers that were received in the registry about a secret conversation alleged to have taken place between the Minister and a trustee – and so on. If you spare all the details, in general he’s almost always right. His descriptions of each candidate’s character, although highly original, turn out to be correct as well. If you need to know in what year someone defended a thesis, took up his post, retired or died, then call on this old soldier’s prodigious memory and he will not only tell you the year month and day, but will also furnish all the details that accompanied this or that event. Only someone who loves his work can have such a memory.
He is a custodian of university traditions. From the porters who were his predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life and to this repository of wealth he has added many riches of his own, acquired during years of service. Many are the stories he will tell you – long or short – if you so desire. He can tell of extraordinary sages who knew everything, of remarkable scholars who would go without sleep for weeks on end, of science’s innumerable martyrs and victims. In his stories good always triumphs over evil, the weak over the strong, the wise over fools, the humble over the proud, the young over the old… There’s no need to take all his cock-and-bull stories and fables at their face value, but if you sift them you will be left with what is truly important: our fine traditions and the names of real, universally recognized heroes.
In our society all information about the academic world is confined to a few anecdotes about the phenomenal absent-mindedness of elderly professors and two or three witticisms variously ascribed to Gruber,8 myself or Babukhin.9 For an educated public this is rather feeble. If people loved learning, scholars, students as Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have included entire epics, legends and chronicles which it unfortunately lacks these days.