Smoke (Alma Classics) Page 2

  1

  On 10th August 1862, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in front of the famous Conversation* in Baden-Baden,* a large crowd had gathered. The weather was delightful; everything round about – the green trees, the bright houses of the cheerful little town, the undulating outline of the mountains – everything had a festive air and lay like a brimming cup in the kindly sunshine. Everything was smiling in a kind of blind, trusting, gentle way, and the same uncertain but kind smile crossed the faces of the human beings, old and young, ugly and beautiful. Even the rouged and powdered faces of Parisian courtesans could not spoil the general impression of unadulterated contentment and rejoicing, and the multicoloured ribbons, the feathers, the golden and metallic flashes on hats and veils were an involuntary visual reminder of the animated sheen and the gentle play of spring flowers and rainbow wings. Even the all-pervasive dry guttural grating of French slang was no substitute for the twittering of birdsong and could not be compared with it.

  Everything, moreover, was in its ordered place. The orchestra in the Pavilion* was playing a potpourri from La traviata,* then a Strauss waltz, then ‘Tell Her’,* a Russian romance set to music by a diligent kapellmeister. In the gaming rooms the same well-known figures crowded round the green tables with the same dull, avaricious, partly puzzled, partly embittered, essentially predatory expression which gambling fever imparts to even the most aristocratic features; the same plumpish, exceedingly foppishly attired Tambov landowner, with the same incomprehensible convulsive haste, eyes on stalks, chest leaning on the table, ignoring the cold sneers of the croupiers, scattered with his sweaty hand to all four corners of the table the golden discs of louis d’or* at the very moment when they announced “rien ne va plus”,* thus depriving himself of all possibility of winning anything, even when luck was with him; this did not prevent him from supporting, with sympathetic indignation, Prince Koko, one of the well-known leaders of the aristocratic opposition, who, in the Paris salon of Princess Mathilde* and in the presence of the Emperor* himself, so appositely said: “Madame, le principe de la propriété est profondément ébranlé en Russie.”* Our dear compatriots, male and female, duly gathered round the Russian Tree – à l’arbre russe;* they approached opulently, casually, fashionably, and greeted one another majestically, elegantly, expansively, as befits people at the very summit of contemporary culture. But, having congregated and taken their seats, they had no idea what to say to one another and made do either with banal small talk or the well-worn, excessively crude and excessively dull rantings of a superannuated French ex-littérateur, who wore Jewish shoes on his scrawny feet and had a derisory beard on his visage, a buffoon and a windbag. He regaled “ces princes russes”* with stale rubbish from the old almanacs Charivari and Tintamarre* while they, “ces princes russes”, dissolved in grateful laughter, as if involuntarily acknowledging both the overwhelming superiority of the foreign wit and their own total inability to come up with anything amusing. Meanwhile all the “fine fleur”* of our society was there, “all the nobility and paragons of fashion”.* Count X. was there, an incomparable dilettante, a profound musical nature who “recites” songs divinely but who, in reality, cannot distinguish between two notes without prodding the keyboard crookedly with his index finger and who sings like a cross between a bad gypsy musician and a Parisian barber. There, too, was our delightful Baron Z., that master of all trades, man of letters, administrator, orator and card-sharper. There, too, was Prince Y., the friend of religion and the people who, in days of yore, in the blessed era of liquor-tax farming, had compiled an enormous fortune from the sale of bad vodka laced with thorn apple. There, too, was the brilliant General O., who had conquered something or other and pacified someone or other and yet did not know where to put himself or how to introduce himself. There, too, was R.R., a stout, comical man, who considered himself to be very sick and very clever but was as strong as an ox and as thick as a plank. This same R.R., alone among our contemporaries, still preserved the traditions of the society lions of the 1840s, the era of A Hero of Our Time* and of Countess Vorotynskaya.* He had preserved the habit of rocking back on his heels, “le culte de la pose”* (a phrase which cannot be translated into Russian), an unnatural deliberateness of movement and a sleepily majestic, apparently offended, expression on his immobile face, and had a tendency to interrupt others with a yawn, to examine his fingers and nails carefully, to laugh nasally and to move his hat suddenly from the back of his head to the front, and so on, and so on. There were even state officials here, diplomats, dignitaries with European names, men of sagacity and reason, who thought that the Golden Bull was issued by the Pope* and that the English poor tax* was a tax on the poor. Finally, there were the ardent but shy devotees of camellias, young society lions with immaculate partings on the backs of their heads and the most splendid of pendant side-whiskers, dressed in genuine London-made suits, young lions whom seemingly nothing prevented from being as shallowly trivial as the notorious French windbag. But no, nothing Russian is in vogue, and Countess Sh., the well-known arbiter of fashion and grand genre,* whom malicious tongues nicknamed “The Queen of the Wasps” and “Medusa in a Mobcap”, preferred, in the absence of the windbag, to turn to one of the Italians, Moldavians, American “spiritualists”, bold secretaries of foreign embassies, Germans with effeminate but cautious physiognomies and so on, all of whom moved in her circles. Following the example of the Countess, Princess Babette, the very woman in whose arms Chopin died (in Europe there are about a thousand ladies in whose arms he breathed his last), Princess Annette, who would have captivated everyone had it not been for the fact that at times, like the smell of cabbage amid the finest ambergris, the simple village washerwoman showed through, Princess Pachette, who had suffered the following misfortune: her husband had obtained an important post and suddenly, Dieu sait pourquoi* had attacked the town mayor and stolen twenty thousand roubles’ worth of public money, and the unmarried princesses Zizi and Zozo, the one comic, the other tearful – all of them sidelined their fellow countrymen and treated them harshly… Let us, too, abandon these charming ladies and leave the celebrated tree around which they sit in expensive but somewhat tasteless outfits, and may the Good Lord grant them relief from the boredom which gnaws at them.

  2

  A few paces from the “Russian Tree”, at a small table in front of Weber’s coffee house,* sat a handsome man in his late twenties, spare and swarthy, with a pleasant, manly face. Leaning forward, and with both hands resting on a walking cane, he was sitting quietly and unobtrusively, like a man who would never take it into his head that anyone would notice him or bother about him. His large, expressive eyes, brown with a touch of yellow, looked slowly about him, now squinting because of the sun, now steadily fixing themselves on some eccentric figure as it went past, while a quick, almost childish smile played across his thin moustache, lips and prominent pointed chin. He was dressed in a capacious German-style overcoat and a soft grey hat half-covered his high forehead. At first sight he gave the impression of an honest, businesslike, rather self-assured fellow, such as are to be found in quite large numbers throughout the world. He seemed to be resting from prolonged labours and was enjoying the spectacle unfolding before him all the more ingenuously for his thoughts being far away. These thoughts revolved in a world very unlike that which surrounded him at that moment. He was a Russian; his name was Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov.

  We need to make his acquaintance and therefore must relate the story of his highly straightforward and uncomplicated past.

  The son of a retired official of merchant stock, he was not brought up in the town, as might have been expected, but in the country. His mother was of noble birth, educated in a school for the elite, a very kind and very sentimental being but not, however, without character. Being twenty years younger than her husband, she re-educated him as much as she could, turning him from civil servant to landowner, taming and toning down his robust and abrasive manner. Thanks to her he beg
an to dress smartly and behave properly, and gave up swearing. He began to respect scholars and scholarship, although, of course, he never picked up a single book, and did his best not to let himself down. He even began to walk more quietly and spoke in a modulated voice about increasingly elevated subjects, which cost him a good deal of effort. “Ah, I should have had you flogged,” he sometimes said to himself, but what he said aloud was: “Yes, yes, that is… of course. That is the question.” Litvinov’s mother also put the house on a European footing: she used the polite form of address to the servants and did not allow anyone to eat so much at dinner that they fell asleep. As for the estate, which belonged to her, neither she nor her husband could do anything with it: it had long since become derelict, but was extensive, with arable and pasture land, woods and a lake, on which a large factory had once stood; it was set up by an enthusiastic but shambolic landlord, flourished in the hands of a crooked merchant and comprehensively failed under the management of an honest German entrepreneur. Madame Litvinova was pleased that she had not dissipated her fortune or run up debts. Unfortunately, she did not enjoy good health and succumbed to consumption in the very year that her son entered Moscow University. Circumstances (about which the reader will learn in due course) prevented him from finishing his course and he decamped to the provinces, where he hung around for some time without anything to do, without connections and almost without friends. Thanks to the local nobility, who were ill disposed towards him and were imbued not so much with Western theory concerning the harmfulness of “absentee landlords” as with a home-grown conviction that “blood is thicker than water”, he joined the militia in 1855 and almost died of typhus in the Crimea, where he spent six months in a dugout on the shore of the Sivash sea without seeing a single allied soldier. Then he served as an election official, a job not without its unpleasantnesses, of course. Then, having lived in the country for a while, he developed a passion for agriculture. He realized that his mother’s estate, poorly and laxly managed by his enfeebled father, was not yielding even one tenth of the income which it could have done, and that in experienced and knowledgeable hands it could turn into a gold mine. But he also realized that it was precisely this experience and knowledge that he lacked, and went abroad to study agronomy and technology from scratch. He spent four and a bit years in Mecklenburg, Silesia and Karlsruhe, travelled to Belgium and England, worked conscientiously and acquired some know-how. It did not come easily but he persisted and now, confident in himself, in his future, in the benefits which he would bring to his fellow countrymen and, perhaps, to the whole region, he was contemplating returning to his homeland, to which he was summoned in every letter, with desperate pleas and entreaties, by his father, who had been completely fazed by the Emancipation, the reallocation of arable and pasture land, redemption payments,* in a word… But why was he in Baden?

  The reason he was in Baden is that he was daily expecting the arrival of his second cousin, and fiancée, Tatyana* Petrovna Shestova. He had known her almost from childhood and had spent the spring and summer with her in Dresden, where she had taken up residence with her aunt. He sincerely loved and deeply respected his young relative and, having completed his basic preparatory work and intent on moving to pastures new, to begin a real career outside the state sector, he proposed, asking her, as his beloved, his comrade and his friend, to join her life with his, in joy and sorrow, at work and at rest, “For better, for worse”,* as the English say. She consented, and he set off for Karlsruhe, where he had left his books, papers and things. But, you will again ask, why was he in Baden?

  The reason he was in Baden was that the person who brought Tatyana up, her aunt, Kapitolina Markovna Shestova, an old maid of some fifty-five years, a kind-hearted and extremely honest eccentric, a free spirit consumed with the fire of self-sacrifice, an esprit fort* (she read Strauss,* admittedly concealing the fact from her niece), a democrat, a sworn enemy of high society and autocracy, could not resist the temptation of having just one look at this high society in a place like Baden… Kapitolina Markovna went without a crinoline and wore her white hair in a bob, but luxury and glitter secretly excited her and she found it sweet and pleasurable to berate and despise them. How could he not accommodate the wishes of the dear old lady?

  But the reason why Litvinov was so calm and collected, why he gazed so confidently around him, was that his life was laid out clearly before him. His fate had been decided and he was proud of that fate and took delight in it, as something of his own making.

  3

  “Well, well, well, so this is where he is,” said a high-pitched voice right in his ear, and a puffy hand clapped him on the shoulder. He raised his head and saw one of his few Moscow acquaintances, one Bambayev, a decent fellow but among the most fatuous of men, no longer young, with soft cheeks and nose that looked as if they had been boiled, greasy, dishevelled hair and a stout, flabby body. Forever penniless and forever in ecstasy about something, Rostislav Bambayev mooched about noisily but aimlessly over the face of our long-suffering Mother Earth.

  “This is what you call a meeting,” he kept repeating, opening wide his bloodshot eyes and parting his puffy lips, above which a dyed moustache sat strangely and incongruously. “Good old Baden. Everyone crawls here like cockroaches. How did you get here?”

  Bambayev used the familiar form of you with absolutely everybody.

  “I arrived here three days ago.”

  “Where from?”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  “What do you mean, why? But wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe you don’t know who else has arrived? Gubaryov! Himself, in person! That’s who’s here. He rolled up from Heidelberg yesterday. You know him, of course?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “Only heard of him? Well I never! We’ll cart you off to see him immediately, this very minute. Not to know a man like that! By the way, here’s Voroshilov… Just a minute, maybe you don’t know him either? Let me have the honour of introducing you to each other. Both of you scholars! This one’s a phoenix even. Go on, embrace each other!”

  And, so saying, Bambayev turned to a handsome young man who was standing nearby. He had a fresh, pink but already serious face. Litvinov stood up and, of course, did not embrace him, merely exchanging brief bows with the “phoenix”, who, to judge by the sternness of his demeanour, was none too pleased with this unexpected introduction.

  “I said phoenix and I don’t resile from my word,” continued Bambayev. “Go to Petersburg, to the —— Corps and look at the honours board. Whose name is at the top? Voroshilov, Semyon Yakovlevich! But, my friends, Gubaryov, Gubaryov! That’s the man we must rush to see, really rush! I absolutely worship that man. And I am not alone. Everyone, without exception, worships him. What a piece he is writing now, about… about… about…”

  “What’s this piece about?” asked Litvinov.

  “About everything, my friend, like Buckle,* you know, only more profound, more profound. It will contain the solution to everything; everything will be clarified.”

  “And you’ve read the piece yourself?”

  “No, I haven’t. Indeed, it’s a secret which mustn’t be divulged. But you can expect anything from Gubaryov, anything. Yes!” Bambayev sighed and folded his arms. “If only two or three brains like that were to be found in Russia. Would that it were so, good Lord! I’ll tell you one thing, Grigory Mikhailovich: whatever you’ve been doing in recent times – and I don’t know what you do in general – whatever your convictions might be – I don’t know them either – in him, in Gubaryov, you’ll find food for thought. Unfortunately, he is not here for long. You must take advantage of his visit, you must go to see him!”

  A passing dandy with ginger curls and a blue ribbon on his low hat turned round and with a sarcastic smile looked at Bambayev through his eyeglass. Litvinov became irritated.

  “What are you shouting for?” he said. “It’s as if you were
urging a hound to the chase. I haven’t had dinner yet.”

  “So what? We can dine at Weber’s right now, the three of us. Splendid! Have you got the money to pay for me?” he added in an undertone.

  “Yes, yes, only I really don’t know…”

  “Enough, please. You’ll thank me and he’ll be pleased… Oh, good Heavens!” Bambayev interrupted himself. “They’re playing the final of Ernani.* Charming! A som-mo Carlo!…* But I’m like that. In tears straight away. Well, Semyon Yakovlevich! Voroshilov! Let’s go, shall we!”

  Voroshilov, who was continuing to stand in a pose of graceful immobility and maintaining his former, somewhat haughty demeanour, lowered his eyes significantly, frowned and muttered something through his teeth… but did not refuse. Litvinov thought: “What of it! Let’s do it – time’s on my side.” Bambayev took his arm, but, before setting off for the coffee house, beckoned with his finger to Isabella, the well-known Jockey Club flower girl;* he had taken it into his head to buy a bouquet from her. But the aristocratic flower girl did not move; why should she approach a gentleman who was without gloves and wearing a grubby velveteen jacket, a multicoloured cravat and patched boots, whom she had never seen before, not even in Paris? Then Voroshilov in his turn beckoned to her. She did not approach him and he, choosing a tiny bouquet of violets from her box, threw her a guilder.* He thought to surprise her with his largesse, but she did not bat an eyelid, and when he turned away from her she contemptuously pursed her tightly closed lips. Voroshilov was dressed very fashionably, even refinedly, but the experienced eye of the Parisienne at once discerned in his attire, in his bearing, in his very gait, which bore traces of early military training, an absence of genuine, pure-blooded “chic”.

  Taking their seats in the main salon at Weber’s and ordering dinner, the new acquaintances engaged in conversation. Bambayev expatiated loudly and heatedly about Gubaryov’s exalted significance but quickly fell silent and, sighing and chewing noisily, knocked back glass after glass. Voroshilov ate and drank little, as if loth to do so, and, after questioning Litvinov about the nature of his occupation, began to express his own opinions, not so much about Litvinov’s occupation as about sundry “questions” in general. He suddenly became animated and hurtled along like a fine horse, delineating each syllable, each letter, boldly and sharply, like a dashing cadet at his final examination, and waving his arms about vigorously but uncoordinatedly. With every second he became ever more voluble, ever more glib, the more so because no one interrupted him. It was as if he were reading a dissertation or giving a lecture. Names of the very latest scholars, with the addition of the dates of birth or death of each of them, the titles of newly published pamphlets and, in general, names, names and more names flowed effortlessly from his tongue, affording him enormous pleasure, which was reflected in his flashing eyes. Voroshilov obviously despised everything old and valued only the cream of education and the latest advances in science; to mention, even in passing, the book of some Dr Sauerbengel about prisons in Pennsylvania* or yesterday’s article in the Asiatic Journal* about Vedas and Puranas* (he pronounced the word “journal” English fashion although, of course, he knew no English) was to him sheer joy and delight. Litvinov listened carefully to him, but was unable to make out what his speciality was. One moment he was holding forth about the role of the Celts in history, the next he was transported into the ancient world and was discussing Aeginetan* marbles and commenting excitedly on the sculptor Onatas, who lived before Phidias* and whom, however, he turned into Jonathan, thus giving all his comments a coloration which was not quite biblical nor yet American. Then he would suddenly leap over into political economy and call Bastiat* a fool and a yokel, “as bad as Adam Smith and all the physiocrats”.* “Physiocrats!” Bambayev would whisper in his wake. “Don’t you mean aristocrats?” Incidentally, Voroshilov brought about an expression of amazement on Bambayev’s face with a casually oblique remark about Macaulay,* whom he called an obsolete writer already superseded by science. As for Gneist* and Riehl,* he declared that they were only worth a mention, and shrugged his shoulders. Bambayev also shrugged his shoulders. “And all this at once, without prompting, in front of strangers, in a coffee house,” Litvinov reflected, looking at the fair hair, bright eyes and white teeth of his new acquaintance (he was particularly disconcerted by these large sugar-white teeth and the uncoordinated sweep of these hands). “And he hasn’t smiled once. Yet, for all that he must be a decent fellow and extremely inexperienced.” Finally, Voroshilov grew weary and his voice, resonant and hoarse like that of a young cockerel, broke off somewhat. At that point Bambayev began to declaim verses and again almost dissolved in tears, which made a scandalous impression on one neighbouring table, at which an English family had gathered, and produced giggling at another. Two cocottes were dining at this second table with some superannuated child in a lilac wig. The waiter brought the bill; the friends settled up.