Despair (6 page)

I got out of the car and walked around it. Paint scratched everywhere.

Having nothing better to do, Lydia busied herself with Ardalion’s lumpy briefcase: felt it, then opened it. I walked off a few steps (no, no—I cannot recall what it was I was brooding over); surveyed some broken twigs that lay at my feet; then turned back again. Lydia was now sitting on the footboard and whistling gently. We both lit cigarettes. Silence. She had a way of letting out smoke sideways, her mouth awry.

From afar came Ardalion’s lusty bawl. A minute later he appeared in a clearing and brandished his arms, beckoning us on. We drove slowly after him, circumnavigating the
tree trunks. Ardalion strode in front, his manner resolute and businesslike. Something flashed—the lake.

I have already described his lot. He was unable to show me its exact limits. With great stamping steps he measured the meters, stopped, looked back, half bending the leg supporting his weight; then shook his head and went to find a certain tree stump which marked something or other.

The two enlaced birches looked at themselves in the water; there was some fluff floating on its surface, and the rushes gleamed in the sun. The surprise promised us by Ardalion turned out to be a bottle of vodka, which, however, Lydia had already managed to hide. She laughed and she gamboled, for all the world like a croquet ball in her beige bathing costume with that double, red and blue stripe round the middle. When, after having had her fill of riding on Ardalion’s back as he slowly swam about (“Don’t pinch me, woman, or down you go!”), after much shrieking and spluttering, she came out of the water, her legs looked decidedly hairy, but soon they got dry, and a little bright bloom was all that showed. Before taking a header Ardalion would cross himself; there was, along his shin, a great ugly scar left by the civil war; from the opening in his repulsively flabby bathing suit the silver cross, of moujik pattern, that he wore next to his skin, kept jumping out when he jumped in.

Lydia dutifully besmeared herself with cold cream and lay down on her back placing herself at the disposal of the sun. A few feet away, Ardalion and I made ourselves comfortable in the shade of his best pine tree. From his sadly shrunken briefcase he produced a sketch-book, pencils; and presently I noticed that he was drawing me.

“You’ve a tricky face,” he said, screwing up his eyes.

“Oh, do show me!” cried Lydia without stirring a limb.

“Head a bit higher,” said Ardalion. “Thanks, that will do.”

“Oh, do show me,” she cried again a minute later.

“You first show me where you’ve chucked my vodka,” muttered Ardalion.

“No fear,” she replied. “I won’t have you drinking when I’m about.”

“The woman is dotty! Now, should you suppose, old man, that she has actually buried it? I intended, as a matter of fact, quaffing the cup of brotherhood with you.”

“I’ll have you stop drinking altogether,” cried Lydia, without lifting her greasy eyelids.

“Damned cheek,” said Ardalion.

“Tell me,” I asked him, “what makes you say I have a tricky face? Where is the snag?”

“Don’t know. Lead doesn’t get you. Next time I must try charcoal or oil.” He erased something; flicked away the rubber dust with the joints of his fingers; cocked his head.

“Funny, I always thought I had a most ordinary face. Try, perhaps, drawing it in profile?”

“Yes, in profile!” cried Lydia (as before: spread-eagled on the sand).

“Well, I shouldn’t exactly call it ordinary. A little higher, please. No, if you ask me, I find there is something distinctly rum about it. All your lines sort of slip from under my pencil, slip and are gone.”

“Such faces, then, occur seldom, that’s what you mean?”

“Every face is unique,” pronounced Ardalion.

“Lord, I’m roasting,” moaned Lydia, but did not move.

“Well, now, really—unique! … Isn’t that going too far? Take for instance the definite types of human faces that exist in the world; say, zoological types. There are people with the
features of apes; there is also the rat type, the swine type. Then take the resemblance to celebrities—Napoleons among men, Queen Victorias among women. People have told me I reminded them of Amundsen. I have frequently come across noses
à la
Leo Tolstoy. Then, too, there is the type of face that makes you think of some particular picture. Ikon-like faces, madonnas! And what about the kind of resemblance due to some fashion of life or profession? …”

“You’ll say next that all Chinamen are alike. You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the
difference
between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance. Haven’t we heard Lydia exclaim at the talkies: ‘Oo! Isn’t she just like our maid?’ ”

“Ardy, dear, don’t try to be funny,” said Lydia.

“But you must concede,” I went on, “that sometimes it is the resemblance that matters.”

“When buying a second candlestick,” said Ardalion.

There is really no need to go on taking down our conversation. I longed passionately for the fool to start talking about doubles, but he simply did not. After a while he put up his sketch-book. Lydia implored him to show her what he had done. He said he would if she gave him back his vodka. She refused and was not shown the sketch. The memory of that day ends in a sunshiny haze, or else mingles with the recollections of later trips. For that first one was followed by many others. I developed a somber and painfully acute liking for that lone wood with the lake shining in its midst. Ardalion tried hard to bully me into making me meet the manager and acquire the piece of land next to his, but I was firm; and even had I been anxious to buy land, I should have failed all the same to make up my mind, as my business had
taken a sorry turn that summer and I was fed up with everything: that filthy chocolate of mine was ruining me. But I give you my word, gentlemen, my word of honor: not mercenary greed, not merely that, not merely the desire to improve my position … It is, however, unnecessary to forestall events.

How shall we begin this chapter? I offer several variations to choose from. Number one (readily adopted in novels where the narrative is conducted in the first person by the real or substitute author):

It is fine today, but cold, with the wind’s violence unabated; under my window the evergreen foliage rocks and rolls, and the postman on the Pignan road walks backwards, clutching at his cap. My restlessness grows.…

The distinctive features of this variation are rather obvious: it is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page. While he muses and writes, there is something or other going on around him; there is, for instance, this wind, this whirl of dust on the road which I see from my window (now the postman has swerved round and, bent double, still fighting, walks forward). A nice refreshing variation, this number one; it allows a breather and helps to bring in the personal note; thus lending life to the story—especially when the first person is as fictitious as all the rest. Well, that is just the point: a trick of the trade, a poor thing worn to shreds by literary fiction-mongers, does not suit me, for I have become strictly truthful. So we may turn to the second variation which consists of at once letting loose a new character, starting the chapter thus:

Orlovius was displeased.

When he happened to be displeased or worried, or merely ignorant of the right answer, he used to pull at the long lobe of his left ear, fringed with grey down; then he would pull at the long lobe of his right ear too, so as to avoid jealousies, and look at you over his plain, honest spectacles and take his time and then at last answer: “It is heavy to say, but I—”

“Heavy” with him meant “hard,” as in German; and there was a Teutonic thickness in the solemn Russian he spoke.

Now this second variation of a chapter’s beginning is a popular and sound method—but there is something too polished about it; nor do I think it becoming for shy, mournful Orlovius to fling open, spryly, the gates of a new chapter. I submit to your attention my third variation.

In the meantime … (the inviting gesture of dots, dots, dots).

Of old, this dodge was the darling of the Kinematograph,
alias
Cinematograph,
alias
Moving Pictures. You saw the hero doing this or that, and in the meantime … Dots—and the action switched to the country. In the meantime … A new paragraph, please.

 … Plodding along the sun-parched road and trying to keep in the shade of the apple trees, whenever their crooked whitewashed trunks came marching by its side …

No, that is a silly notion: he was not always wandering. Some filthy kulak would require an additional hand; another back would be needed by some beastly miller. Having never been a tramp myself, I failed—and still fail—to rerun his life on my private screen. What I wished to imagine most, was the impression left upon him by a certain morning in May passed on a patch of sickly grass near Prague. He woke up.
At his side a well-dressed gentleman was sitting and staring. Happy thought: might give me a smoke. Turned out to be German. Very insistently (was perhaps not quite right in the head?) kept pressing upon me his pocket mirror; got quite abusive. I gathered it was about likenesses. Well, thought I, let them likenesses be. No concern of mine. Chance of his giving me some easy job. Asked about my address. One can never know, something might come of it.

Later: conversation in a barn on a warm dark night: “Now, as I was saying, that was an odd’un, that bloke I met one day. He made out we were doubles.”

A laugh in the darkness: “It was you who saw double, you old sot.”

Here another literary device has crept in: the imitation of foreign novels, themselves imitations, which depict the ways of merry vagabonds, good hearty fellows. (My devices seem to have got mixed up a little, I am afraid.)

And speaking of literature, there is not a thing about it that I do not know. It has always been quite a hobby of mine. As a child I composed verse and elaborate stories. I never stole peaches from the hothouse of the North Russian landowner whose steward my father was. I never buried cats alive. I never twisted the arms of playmates weaker than myself; but, as I say, I composed abstruse verse and elaborate stories, with dreadful finality and without any reason whatever lampooning acquaintances of my family. But I did not write down those stories, neither did I talk about them. Not a day passed without my telling some lie. I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating. For such sweet lying my mother would give me a cuff on the ear, and my father thrash me with a riding whip which had once been a bull’s
sinew. That did not dismay me in the least; rather, on the contrary, it furthered the flight of my fancies. With a stunned ear and burning buttocks, I would lie on my belly among the tall weeds in the orchard, and whistle and dream.

At school I used, invariably, to get the lowest mark for Russian composition, because I had a way of my own with Russian and foreign classics; thus, for example, when rendering “in my own words” the plot of
Othello
(which was, mind you, perfectly familiar to me) I made the Moor skeptical and Desdemona unfaithful.

A sordid bet won from a wenching upperformer resulted in a revolver’s coming into my possession; so I would trace with chalk, on the aspen trunks in the wood, ugly, screaming, white faces and proceeded to shoot those wretches, one by one.

I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?

For several years I was haunted by a very singular and very nasty dream: I dreamed I was standing in the middle of a long passage with a door at the bottom, and passionately wanting, but not daring to go and open it, and then deciding at last to go, which I accordingly did; but at once awoke with a groan, for what I saw there was unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed room. That was all, but it was so terrible that I never could hold out; then one night a chair and its slender shadow appeared in the middle of the bare room—not as a first item of furniture but as though somebody had brought it to climb upon it and fix a bit of drapery, and since I knew
whom
I would find there next time stretching up with a hammer and a mouthful
of nails, I spat them out and never opened that door again.

At sixteen, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdy house; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my affection on roly-poly Polymnia with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard—I simply adore orchards.

During the War, as I may have already mentioned, I moped in a fishing village not far from Astrakhan, and had it not been for books, I doubt whether I should have lived through those dingy years.

I first met Lydia in Moscow (whither I had got by miracle, after wriggling through the accursed hubbub of civil strife), at the flat, belonging to a chance acquaintance of mine, where I lived. He was a Lett, a silent, white-faced man with a cuboidal skull, a crew cut, and fish-cold eyes. By profession a teacher of Latin, he somehow managed, later, to become a prominent Soviet official. Into those lodgings Fate had packed several people who hardly knew one another, and there was among them that other cousin of Lydia’s, Ardalion’s brother Innocent, who, for some reason or another, got executed by the shooting squad soon after our departure. (To be frank, all this would be far more befitting at the beginning of the first chapter than at the beginning of the third.)

My own, my own! My juvenile experiments in the senseless sounds I loved, hymns inspired by my beery mistress—and “Shvinburne” as he was called in the Baltic provinces … Now, there is one thing I should like to know: was I endowed
in those days with any so-called criminal inclinations? Did my adolescence, so dun and dull to all appearances, secrete the possibility of producing a lawbreaker of genius? Or was I, perhaps, only making my way along that ordinary corridor of my dreams, time after time shrieking with horror at finding the room empty, and then one unforgettable day finding it empty no more? Yes, it was then that everything got explained and justified—my longing to open that door, and the queer games I played, and that thirst for falsehood, that addiction to painstaking lying which had seemed so aimless till then. Hermann discovered his alter ego. This happened, as I have had the honor of informing you, on the ninth of May; and in July I visited Orlovius.