The third guest, Gruzin, was the son of a worthy and erudite senior official. He was the same age as Orlov, his colouring was fair, he had long hair, he was short-sighted and he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. I remember his long, pale fingers like a pianist's, and there was something of the musician and virtuoso about his whole f.gure, actually. Orchestral first violins have that same look. He coughed, he was subject to migraine, he seemed generally sickly and frail. At home they probably dressed and undressed him like a baby. He had been to law school, and had first worked in the legal department, had then been transferred to the Senate, and had left that, after which he had received a post in the Ministry of Works through his connections, but had soon left that too. In my time he had a job as section head in Orlov's division, but he used to say that he would soon be back in the legal department. His attitude to his work, and to this skipping from job to job, was extraordinarily flippant, and when people started talking seriously about ranks, decorations and salaries in his presence he would smile complacently and repeat Prutkov's aphorism about government service being 'the only place where you can learn the truth'. He had a little wife with a lined face who was very jealous, and five weedy little children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he loved his children only when he could see them. His general attitude to his family was one of indifference, rather, and he would make fun of it. He and his family lived on credit, and he borrowed here there and everywhere on every possible occasion, not exempting even office superiors and house- porters. His was a flabbynature so lazy that he didn't care what happened to him, but floated with the tide he knew not where and why. He- went wherever he was taken. If he was taken to some low dive, he went. If wine was set before him he drank it, and if it wasn't he didn't. If people abused their wives in his presence he abused his, asserting that she had wrecked his life, and when wives were praised he would praise his too.
'I'm very fond of the poor thing,' he would say quite sincerely.
He had no fur coat, and always went round wrapped in a rug smelling of the nursery. When he became absorbed in thought at supper, rolling bread balls and drinking a lot of red wine, I was practically certain, oddly enough, that there was something to him: something which he himself dimly sensed, very likely, but could not really fathom and appreciate, what with having so much fuss and vulgarity around him. He played the piano a little. He would sit down at the instrument, strike a couple of chords and quietly sing:
'What does the morrow hold for me?'
But then he would jump up at once as if scared, and retreat some distance from the piano.
The guests had usually forgathered by ten o'clock. They played cards in Orlov's study, while Polya and I served tea. Only now did I relish the full savour ofa flunkey's life. To stand by that door, four or five hours on end, to keep the glasses filled, to change the ash-trays, to dash to the table and pick up a dropped piece ofchalk or card—above all to stand, wait, be attentive without venturing to speak, cough or smile ... all that is harder than the hardest physical labour, I can tell you. I once used to take four-hour watch at sea on stormy winter nights, and watch-keeping is incomparably easier, I fmd.
They would play cards until two or sometimes three o'clock, then stretch themselves and go into the dining-room for supper: 'a bit of a bite', as Orlov called it. At supper there was conversation. It usually began when Orlov, smiling with his eyes, mentioned a common acquaintance, or a book which he had just read, or some new appointment or project. The fawning Kukushkin chimed in, and there began what to me, in my mood of the time, was a most hideous exhibition. Orlov's and his friends' irony knew no bounds, it spared no one and nothing. They spoke ofreligion: with irony. They spoke ofphilosophy, of the meaning and purpose oflife: with irony. If the peasant question cropped up there was still more irony. St. Petersburg has a peculiar breed of specialists in deriding every manifestation of life. They can't even pass a starving man or a suicide without some banal remark. But Orlov and his friends did notjoke orjeer, they just ironized. They said there was no God, that individuality disappeared completely at death . . . and that there were no immortals outside the French Academy. There was no such thing as true goodness, and never could be since its existence presupposed human perfectibility: a contradiction in terms, that. Russia was just as tedious and poverty^tricken as Persia. Our intellectuals were hopeless, on Pekarsky's reckoning, consisting very largely of futile incompetents. As for our peasants, they were s^ak in drink, sloth, thieving and degeneracy. We had no science, our literature was primitive, our commerce was based on fraud and on the idea that 'you can't sell without cheating'. Everything else' was the same, it was all absurd.
The wine would cheer them up by the end of supper, and the conversation became brighter. They made fun of Gruzin's family life, of Kukushkin's conquests, and of Pekarsky, who reputedly headed one page in his cash book To Charity and another To Demands of Nature. There were no faithful wives, they said, there was no wife with whom, given the knack, one couldn't have one's bit of fun without leaving her drawing-room at the very time when her husband was in his study next door. Adolescent girls were corrupt and no better than they should be. Orlov kept a letter written by some fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. On her way home from school she had 'picked up such a nice officer' on the Nevsky, said she, and he had taken her home and kept her there till late at night, and then she had rushed off to write to her girl-friend and share her ecstasies. Chastity had never existed, according to them, there was no such thing, nor was there any need for it, obviously: humanity had managed pretty well without it so far. And the harm done by 'loose living' was much exaggerated. A certain perversion specified in our penal code ... it hadn't stopped Diogenes being a philosopher and teacher. Caesar and Cicero were lechers, but also great men. Cato married a young girl in his old age, yet continued to rank as an austere, ascetic custodian of morals.
At three or four in the morning the party would break up, or they would drive out of town together—or else to one Barbara Osipovna's on Officer Street—while I would retire to my room where my headache and coughing kept me awake for some time.
IV
I remember a ring on the door-bell one Sunday morning about three weeks after I had entered Orlov's service. It was about half past ten and he was still asleep. I opened the door, and you can picture my astonishment when I saw a veiled lady on the landing.
'Has Mr. Orlov got up yet?' she asked. I recognized the voice of the Zinaida Krasnovsky to whom I had taken letters in Znamensky Square. Whether I had time or wit to answer her, I do not recollect, for I was so taken aback by her arrival. Not that she needed an answer, anyway. She had darted past me in a flash, filling the hall with the fragrance of her scent, which I still remember vividly. Then she disappeared into the flat and her footsteps died away. Not a sound was heard for at least half an hour. Then there was another ring at the door-bell. This time some dolled-up girl (evidently a maid from a wealthy household) and our porter, both puffing, brought in two suitcases and a dress- basket.