Smoke (Alma Classics) Page 5
“All the same, Sozont Ivanovich,” Litvinov said in his turn, “why must we inevitably be subjected to such trials? You yourself say that at first something monstrous emerged. Well, and what if this monstrosity remained? And it has remained, as you yourself know.”
“Only not in the language, and that means a lot. And it wasn’t me who made our nation. It isn’t my fault that it’s fated to pass through such a phase. The Germans have developed properly. The Slavophiles shout: ‘Give us proper development too.’ Where can we get it from when the first historical act of our time – the summoning of princes from overseas – is wrong and abnormal and has been repeated in each of us until this day? Each of us, at least once in our lives, has said something indisputably foreign and non-Russian: ‘Come, rule over me and be my lord.’* Perhaps I am prepared to agree that, in putting an essence of foreignness into our own bodies, we cannot know for certain in advance what it is we are putting in: a piece of bread or a piece of poison? But then it’s a well-known fact that you can’t go from bad to good via the better, but always via the worse. Even poison is sometimes useful in medicine. Only fools or rogues can find it appropriate to point triumphantly at the poverty of the peasants after the Emancipation, or at their increased drunkenness after the abolition of liquor-tax farming. Via bad to good!”
Potugin ran his hand across his face.
“You asked me my opinion of Europe,” he began again. “I’m amazed by it, I’m extremely devoted to its principles and do not think it in any way necessary to hide the fact. I stopped being afraid of expressing my opinions a long time ago – no, not a long time ago, recently, some time ago. But then you had no misgivings about setting out your train of thought to Mr Gubaryov. I, thank God, have stopped taking account of the ideas, beliefs and habits of my interlocutor. In essence, I don’t see anything worse than that unnecessary pusillanimity, that base obsequiousness by dint of which you see some important dignitary of ours feigning interest in some student who means nothing to him, almost playing with him and doing his every bidding. Well, let us suppose that the dignitary acts like this out of a desire for popularity, but why should plebeians like us bow and scrape? Yes, sir. Yes, sir, I’m a Westernizer, that is to say I’m devoted to Europe, that is to say, to be more exact, I’m devoted to culture, that same culture which is so charmingly mocked here – to civilization, yes, yes, that’s an even better word – and I love it with all my heart, and believe in it. I have no other belief and never will. That word: ci-vi-li-za-tion” (Potugin pronounced clearly and stressed every syllable) “is comprehensible, pure and sacred, while all the others – official nationalism, glory and what have you – smell of blood. Forget them.”
“Well, so what about Russia, your native country, Sozont Ivanovich? Do you love her?”
Potugin ran his hand across his face.
“I love her passionately, and hate her passionately.”
Litvinov shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s old hat, Sozont Ivanovich, a commonplace.”
“So what? What’s the problem? Why have you taken fright? A commonplace! I know very many good commonplaces. Here’s an example for you: freedom and order. That’s a well-known commonplace. Is it better like it is in Russia, in your opinion: bureaucratic hierarchy and disorder? And surely all these phrases which intoxicate young minds – the despised bourgeoisie, la souveraineté du peuple,* the right to work – surely these are commonplaces. And as for love, which is inseparable from hatred—”
“Byronism,” interrupted Litvinov. “Romanticism of the Thirties.”
“Forgive me, sir, but you’re mistaken. The first to point out this mixture of feelings was Catullus,* the Roman poet Catullus, two thousand years ago. I read this in his work because I know some Latin as a consequence of my clerical origins, if I make so bold as to express myself thus. Yes, sir, I both love and hate my Russia, my strange, kind, vile, dear native land. Now I’ve abandoned her. I had to get a bit of air after twenty years of sitting behind an official desk in a government building. I’ve left Russia and I’m very happy and at ease here. But I’ll soon go back, I can sense it. The soil’s good here, but you can’t grow cloudberries on it.”
“You’re happy, you’re at ease, and I like it here too,” said Litvinov. “I too came here to study, but that doesn’t prevent me from seeing such things.” He pointed to two passing cocottes around whom several members of the Jockey Club* were showing off and rolling their R sounds French style, and at the Gaming Hall, which was packed, despite the lateness of the hour.
“But who told you that I’m blind to this?” retorted Potugin. “Forgive me, your remark reminds me of the crowing of our miserable little journals during the Crimean War over the shortcomings of the British wartime administration as revealed by the Times.* I myself am not an optimist, and everything human, our whole life, that whole comedy with a tragic end, does not appear to me in a rosy light. But why try to pin on the West something which is, perhaps, deep-rooted in our human nature. That Gaming Hall is a disgrace, it’s true, but is our home-grown card-sharping any better? No, my dear Grigory Mikhailovich, let us be a bit more humble and a bit quieter; a good pupil sees his teacher’s mistakes but politely refrains from mentioning them, for those selfsame mistakes are to his benefit and put him on the right road. But if you really do want to sound off about the rotten West, here comes Prince Koko at the trot; he’s probably blown the quit rent, earned by the sweat of their brow, of a hundred and fifty families in a quarter of an hour at the card table. His nerves are on edge and what’s more I saw him in Marx’s* leafing through Veuillot’s pamphlet.* He’ll be an excellent interlocutor for you!”
“Pardon me, pardon me,” said Litvinov hastily, seeing Potugin getting up from his place, “I don’t know Prince Koko at all well and of course I prefer talking to you.”
“I’m very grateful to you,” Potugin interrupted, standing up and bowing. “I’ve already talked to you rather a lot as it is, or rather I alone did the talking and you’ve probably observed yourself that a man is somehow always ashamed and uncomfortable when he talks to excess on his own. It’s especially so when it’s the first time, as if he’s saying: ‘Look, that’s what I’m like.’ I look forward to our next pleasant meeting and, I repeat, I’m very glad to have made your acquaintance.”
“Wait a minute, Sozont Ivanovich – at least tell me where you live and whether you intend to stay there long.”
Potugin seemed slightly taken aback.
“I’ll be staying in Baden another week, but we can meet here at Weber’s or at Marx’s. Failing that, I’ll come and see you.”
“All the same, I need to know your address.”
“Yes, but the thing is – I’m not alone.”
“You’re married?” asked Litvinov suddenly.
“No, you can’t be serious. Where did you get that idea? But I have a young girl with me.”
“Ah!” said Litvinov with a polite grimace, although apologizing, then lowered his eyes.
“She’s just six,” Potugin continued, “the daughter of a certain lady… a very good friend of mine. It’ll be better for us to meet here. Goodbye, sir.”
He rammed his hat down over his curly hair and quickly retreated. He could be seen a couple of times beneath the gas lamps, which shed a fairly dim light on the road leading to the Lichtentaler Allee.*
6
“A strange man,” thought Litvinov as he made his way to his hotel. “A strange man. I’ll have to seek him out.” He entered his room; a letter on the table caught his eye. “Ah, from Tanya,” he thought, rejoicing in anticipation; but the letter was from his father in his country estate. Litvinov broke the large heraldic seal and was about to begin reading… A strong scent, very pleasant and familiar, caught his attention. He looked round and saw a large bouquet of fresh heliotropes in a glass of water on the window sill. In some surprise he bent down to the flowers, touched them
, sniffed them… It seemed that something came back to him, something very distant, but what it was exactly he could not think. He rang for room service and asked where the flowers had come from. The servant replied that a lady had brought them who did not want to leave her name, but said that he, “Herr Zluitenhof”, would undoubtedly guess from the flowers who she was. Something again seemed to come back to Litvinov… He asked the servant what the lady had looked like. The servant explained that she was tall and exquisitely dressed, but had a veil over her face.
“Probably a Russian countess,” he said.
“Why do you suppose that?” asked Litvinov.
“She gave me two guilders,” answered the servant, grinning.
Litvinov dismissed him and for a long time stood reflectively in front of the window. Finally, however, he broke off and again took up his father’s letter. In it his father poured out his usual complaints, declaring that no one was taking his grain, even for free, that the peasants had completely stopped being submissive and that the end of the world was probably at hand. “Just imagine,” he wrote, among other things, “my latest coachman – the little Kalmuck, do you remember? – had a spell put on him; he would have perished and I’d have had no one to accompany me on my travels. Thank Heavens, however, some kind people gave me some advice and suggested that I send the victim to Ryazan, to a priest who’s an acknowledged expert on spells. And indeed, the treatment could not have worked better, in confirmation of which I append the priest’s letter as documentary proof.” Litvinov ran his eye over this document with some curiosity. It stated that the yard serf Nikanor Dmitryev
was stricken with a condition unknown to medical science. This condition is caused by evil-doers but is down to Nikanor himself, because he did not fulfil his promise to a young girl and she, therefore, through the agency of certain people, rendered him incapable of anything, and if, in these circumstances, I had not announced myself as coming to his aid, he would have perished utterly, like a caterpillar; but I, relying on the all-seeing eye, became his life support – how I did this is a secret, but I ask Your Honour that that this young girl should not henceforth use such evil powers and there is nothing to prevent you threatening her a little, otherwise she could again work her evil on him.
Litvinov pondered this document: it was redolent of the remote steppe, the blind darkness of stagnant existence, and it seemed weird that he had read this letter in Baden of all places. Meanwhile, it had long since struck midnight; Litvinov went to bed and blew out the candle. But he could not get to sleep: the faces he had seen, the words he had heard kept mingling and tangling strangely in his head, which was burning and aching from the tobacco smoke. Then he fancied he heard Gubaryov’s mooing and imagined his downcast eyes with their dull, stubborn look. Then, suddenly, those same eyes flared up and grew restive, and he recognized Sukhanchikova, heard her cracked voice and involuntarily, in a whisper, repeated after her: “She slapped his face; she slapped his face.” Then there emerged before him the shambling figure of Potugin and for the tenth, for the twentieth time, he remembered his every word; now, like a jack-in-the-box, Voroshilov sprang up in his tight-fitting greatcoat which sat on him like a new uniform while Pishchalkin nodded sagely and importantly with his perfectly trimmed and genuinely well-meaning head; over there Bindasov croaked and cursed and Bambayev rejoiced lachrymosely. But the main thing was that scent, that unrelenting, unabating, sweet heavy scent which gave him no peace and pervaded the darkness ever more strongly and which ever more insistently reminded him of something but which yet remained totally elusive. It occurred to him that the scent of flowers is injurious to health in a bedroom at night and he got up, groped his way to the bouquet of flowers and took it out into the next room; but even from there the languorous smell penetrated his pillow under the blanket and he tossed and turned fretfully from side to side. Delirium was already beginning. Already the priest, the “spells expert”, had crossed his path twice in the guise of a very nimble hare,* with a beard and a plait. And, sitting with a huge general’s cockade, as if in a bush, Voroshilov began to trill like a nightingale above his head… when suddenly he sat up in bed and, wringing his hands, exclaimed: “Can it be her? It can’t be.”
But in order to explain Litvinov’s exclamation we must ask the indulgent reader to go back several years with us.
7
At the beginning of the 1850s there lived in Moscow, in extremely straitened circumstances, almost in poverty, the large princely Osinin family. They were not Tatar or Georgian, but genuinely pure-blooded princes, descendants of Ryurik.* Their name often occurs in our chronicles during the time of the first Grand Princes of Moscow, the unifiers of the Russian lands. They possessed large patrimonies and many other estates and were more than once rewarded for their “works, blood and wounds”. They sat in the Boyars’ Duma* and one of them even used his patronymic as a sign of his high status. However they fell into disfavour when enemies slanderously accused them of “sorcery and spells”. They were ruined “terribly and in perpetuity”, their honour was impugned and they were exiled to remote places. The Osinins fell and never recovered, never regained power. In time they came back into favour and even had their Moscow house and their goods and chattels restored, but nothing availed them. The family became impoverished, “fell on hard times” and did not go up in the world under either Peter or Catherine.* Ever declining and sinking, it already numbered private stewards, heads of liquor-tax offices and police superintendents among its members. The Osinin family, about which we have already begun to speak, consisted of husband, wife and five children. They lived near Sobachka Square in a one-storey wooden house with a striped front porch giving onto the street, green lions on the gates and other aristocratic insignia; they were scarcely able to make ends meet, owed money to the greengrocer and often went without wood and candles in the winter. The Prince himself was a feeble, fairly stupid man. He had once been a handsome dandy but had completely deteriorated. It was not so much out of respect for his name as out of regard for his wife, a former maid-of-honour, that he was given one of the Moscow sinecures, which brought with it a small salary, a high-sounding name and no work. He did not involve himself in anything and merely smoked from morning to night without shedding his dressing gown, sighing deeply the while. His spouse was a sick and spiteful woman, constantly beset by household squabbles, by the problems of placing her children in state schools and of keeping up her Petersburg contacts. She could not reconcile herself either to her situation or to the distance she found herself from Court.
While he lived in Moscow, Litvinov’s father had got to know the Osinins and had had occasion to render some services to them. Once he had lent them about three hundred roubles. His son, being a student, often visited them; his lodgings happened to be situated not far from their house. But it was not their close proximity which attracted him, nor was he tempted by their less than ideal way of life. He had begun to visit the Osinins from the moment he fell in love with their eldest daughter Irina.
At that time she was in her eighteenth year; she had just left a school for young ladies, from which her mother had withdrawn her owing to an unpleasantness with the headmistress. The unpleasantness arose because Irina was to have recited, in French, at a public ceremony, verses of welcome to the school’s trustee, but was replaced by another girl, the daughter of a very rich liquor-tax farmer. The Princess could not stomach this affront and Irina herself did not forgive her headmistress for this injustice. She had already been dreaming in advance of how, in front of everyone and attracting universal attention, she would stand up and say her piece and how Moscow would begin to talk about her… And indeed, Moscow would probably have begun to talk about Irina. She was a tall, graceful girl, with a somewhat flat chest, with youthful narrow shoulders, a pale, matt complexion – pure and smooth as porcelain and rare in someone of her years – and thick fair hair, in which fair strands were intermingled with darker ones in an original fashion. Her fea
tures, exquisite, almost refined in their regularity, had not entirely lost the guileless expression peculiar to the first flush of youth. But the languid inclination of her beautiful neck and her smile, which was not exactly distracted nor yet weary, suggested a sensitive young woman, while in the very outline of her thin, faintly smiling lips and her small, aquiline, slightly compressed nose there was something self-willed and passionate, something dangerous both for other people and for herself. Striking, really striking, were her eyes, greyish-black with greenish tints, hooded and elongated like those of an Egyptian goddess, with radiant eyelashes and bold eyebrows. These eyes had a strange expression: they seemed to be looking attentively, thoughtfully, from some unknown depth, some unknown distance. At school Irina had the reputation of being one of the best pupils as far as brains and ability went, but of having an unstable and manipulative character and a penchant for trouble. One class teacher prophesied that her passions would destroy her – “vos passions vous perdront”* – on the other hand another teacher persecuted her for her coldness and lack of feeling, calling her “une jeune fille sans cœur”.* Irina’s friends found her proud and self-possessed, her brothers and sisters were afraid of her, her mother did not trust her and her father became uncomfortable when she fixed her mysterious eyes on him; but in both her father and her mother she instilled a feeling of involuntary respect, not by virtue of her qualities but by virtue of the special, vague expectations which she aroused in them, Heaven only knows why.