The Adolescent (38 page)

I

NOW ABOUT SOMETHING completely different.

I keep announcing: “something different, something different,” and I keep scribbling away about myself alone. Yet I’ve already declared a thousand times that I don’t want to describe myself at all, and I firmly didn’t want to when I began my notes; I understand only too well that the reader hasn’t got the slightest need of me. I’m describing and want to describe others, and not myself, and if I keep turning up all the time, that is a sad mistake, because I simply can’t avoid it, however much I wish to. Above all, it vexes me that, in describing my own adventures with such ardor, I thereby give reason for thinking that I’m the same now as I was then. The reader will remember, however, that I’ve already exclaimed more than once: “Oh, if only one could change the former and start completely anew!” I wouldn’t be able to exclaim like that if I hadn’t changed radically now and become a totally different person. That is all too obvious; and you can’t imagine how sick I am of all these apologies and prefaces that I’m forced to squeeze every minute even into the very middle of my notes!

To business.

After nine days of unconsciousness, I came to my senses regenerated, but not reformed; my regeneration, however, was stupid, naturally, if it’s taken in the vast sense, and maybe if it were now, it wouldn’t be so. The idea, that is, the feeling, again consisted (as a thousand times before) only in the fact that I should leave them completely, but this time leave without fail, and not as before, when I set myself the same topic a thousand times and never could do it. I didn’t want revenge on anyone, and I give my word of honor on that—though I had been offended by everyone. I was going to leave without disgust, without curses, but I wanted my own strength, and genuine this time, not dependent on any of them or the whole world; for I was all but reconciled with everything in the world! I record this dream of mine not as a thought, but as an irresistible feeling at that time. I didn’t want to formulate it yet, while I was in bed. Sick and without strength, lying in Versilov’s room, which they set aside for me, I was painfully aware of what a low degree of strengthlessness I had come to: some sort of little straw, not a man, lolled there in bed, and not only on account of illness—and how offensive that was to me! And so, from the very depths of my being, from all my strength, a protest began to rise, and I choked with a feeling of boundlessly exaggerated arrogance and defiance. I don’t even remember a time in my whole life when I was more filled with arrogant feelings than in those first days of my recovery, that is, when the little straw lolled in bed.

But for the moment I was silent and even decided not to think about anything! I kept peeking into their faces, trying to guess everything I needed by them. It was evident that they did not wish to ask questions or show curiosity either, but talked to me about completely irrelevant things. I liked that and at the same time it upset me; I won’t explain this contradiction. I saw Liza more rarely than mama, though she came to see me every day and even twice a day. From bits of their conversation and from the whole look of them I concluded that Liza had accumulated an awful lot of cares, and that she was even frequently away from home because of her affairs. For me it was as if the mere idea of the possibility of “her own affairs” already contained something offensive; however, these were all just sick, purely physiological feelings, which are not worth describing. Tatyana Pavlovna also came to see me almost daily, and though she wasn’t gentle with me at all, at least she didn’t abuse me as before, which vexed me in the extreme, so that I simply said to her, “Tatyana Pavlovna, when you’re not abusing me, you’re a great bore.” “Well, then I won’t come to see you,” she snapped, and left. And I was glad to have chased at least one of them away.

Most of all I tormented mama and got very irritated with her. I suddenly had a terrible appetite, and I grumbled a lot that the food came late (but it never came late). Mama didn’t know how to please me. Once she brought me soup and, as usual, began to feed me herself, but I kept grumbling while I ate. And suddenly I became vexed that I was grumbling: “She’s maybe the only one I love, and it’s her that I torment.” But my anger wouldn’t subside, and I suddenly burst into tears from anger, and she, poor dear, thought I was weeping from tenderness, leaned over, and started kissing me. I restrained myself and somehow endured it and actually hated her in that second. But I always loved mama, loved her then, too, and didn’t really hate her, but it was what always happens: the one you love most is the first one you insult.

The only one I did hate in those first days was the doctor. This doctor was a young man with a presumptuous air, who spoke sharply and even impolitely. As if all those people in science, just yesterday and suddenly, had found out something special, whereas nothing special had happened yesterday; but “the middle” and “the street ” are always that way. I endured for a long time, but in the end suddenly burst out and declared to him, before all our people, that he needn’t drag himself here, that I’d get well without him, that he, though he had the look of a realist, was filled with nothing but prejudice and didn’t understand that medicine had never yet cured anyone; that finally, in all probability, he was grossly uneducated, “like all our present-day engineers and specialists, who have lately started turning up their noses at us.” The doctor was very offended (proving what he was by that alone), yet he continued to visit. I finally announced to Versilov that if the doctor did not stop coming, I’d tell him something ten times more unpleasant. Versilov only observed that it was impossible to say anything even twice more unpleasant than what had been said, let alone ten times. I was glad he had noticed that.

What a man, though! I’m speaking of Versilov. He, he alone, was the cause of it all—and yet he was the only one I wasn’t angry with then. It wasn’t only his manner with me that won me over. I think we felt mutually then that we owed each other many explanations . . . and that, precisely for that reason, it would be best never to explain. It is extremely agreeable, on such occasions in life, to run into an intelligent person! I have already mentioned in the second part of my story, running ahead, that he gave me a very brief and clear account of the arrested prince’s letter to me, about Zershchikov, about his explanation in my favor, and so on. Since I had decided to be silent, I put to him, with all possible dryness, only two or three very brief questions; he answered them clearly and precisely, but entirely without superfluous words and, what was best of all, without superfluous feelings. I was afraid of superfluous feelings then.

About Lambert I say nothing, but the reader has, of course, guessed that I thought all too much about him. In my delirium, I spoke several times about Lambert; but once I came out of my delirium and could observe attentively, I quickly realized that everything about Lambert remained a secret, and that they knew nothing, not excepting Versilov. I was glad then, and my fear went away, but I was mistaken, as I found out later, to my astonishment: he had come to see me during my illness, but Versilov said nothing about it, and I concluded that for Lambert I had already sunk into oblivion. Nevertheless I often thought about him; what’s more, I thought not only without disgust, not only with curiosity, but even with concern, as if anticipating here something new, a way out that corresponded to the new feelings and plans that were being born in me. In short, I proposed to think Lambert over first of all, once I decided to start thinking. I’ll add one strange thing: I had completely forgotten where he lived and on what street it had all happened then. The room, Alphonsine, the little dog, the corridor—all that I remembered; I could paint a picture of it all now; but where it had all happened, that is, on what street and in what house—I had completely forgotten. And what’s strangest of all, I figured it out only on my third or fourth day of full consciousness, when I had long begun to be concerned with Lambert.

And so, such were my first sensations upon my resurrection. I’ve indicated only the most superficial, and very probably was unable to indicate the important. In fact, maybe it was precisely then that everything important was being defined and formulated in my heart; surely I didn’t spend the whole time being vexed and angry only because they hadn’t served me my broth. Oh, I remember how sad I could be then, and how grieved I sometimes was in those moments, especially when I was left alone for a long time. And they, as if on purpose, quickly understood that I felt oppressed with them and that their sympathy annoyed me, and they started leaving me alone more and more often: an unnecessarily subtle perceptivity.

II

ON MY FOURTH day of consciousness, I was lying in my bed between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and there was no one with me. It was a clear day, and I knew that after three, when the sun would be setting,
¹
its slanting red ray would strike straight into the corner of my wall, and there would be a bright spot of light there. I knew it from the previous days, and the fact that it would unfailingly happen in an hour, and, above all, that I knew it beforehand, like two times two, angered me to the point of spite. I turned my whole body convulsively, and suddenly, amidst the deep silence, clearly heard the words: “Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us.” The words were pronounced in a half-whisper, followed by a deep, full-chested sigh, and then everything became perfectly still again. I quickly raised my head.

Earlier, that is, the day before, and even two days before, I had begun to notice something peculiar in our three downstairs rooms. In that little room across the drawing room, which used to be mama’s and Liza’s, there was apparently someone else. More than once I had heard some sort of sounds during the daytime and at night, but it was all for moments, the briefest moments, then total silence would set in again at once for several hours, so that I paid no attention. The day before, the thought had occurred to me that it was Versilov there, the more so as he had come to my room soon afterwards, though I knew for certain from their own conversations that Versilov had moved somewhere to another apartment during the time of my illness, and spent his nights there. And about mama and Liza I had long known that (for the sake of my tranquillity, I thought) they had both moved upstairs, to my former “coffin,” and I had even thought once to myself, “How can the two of them have enough room there?” And now it suddenly turns out that some man is living in their old room and that the man is not Versilov at all. With an ease I wouldn’t have supposed I had (imagining till then that I was totally strengthless), I lowered my feet from the bed, put them into my slippers, threw on a gray lambskin robe that lay next to me (and had been donated to me by Versilov), and set out across our living room to mama’s former bedroom. What I saw there totally confounded me; I had never anticipated anything like it, and stopped as if rooted to the threshold.

There sat a very gray-haired old man with a big, awfully white beard, and it was clear that he had been sitting there for a long time. He sat not on the bed but on mama’s little bench, and only leaned his back against the bed. However, he held himself so straight that it seemed he didn’t need any support, though he was obviously ill. Over his shirt he wore a jacket lined with sheepskin, his knees were covered with mama’s plaid, there were slippers on his feet. One could tell that he was tall and broad-shouldered, and he looked quite hale, despite his illness, though somewhat pale and thin. He had an oblong face, very thick hair, but not too long, and he seemed to be over seventy. Beside him on a little table, within his reach, lay three or four books and a pair of silver spectacles. Though I hadn’t had the least thought of meeting him, I guessed that same moment who he was, only I still couldn’t figure out how he had sat there all those days, almost next to me, so quietly that up to then I had never heard a thing.

He didn’t stir when he saw me, but gazed at me intently and silently, as I did at him, with the difference that I gazed with boundless astonishment, and he without the least. On the contrary, having scrutinized the whole of me, to the last line, in those five or ten seconds of silence, he suddenly smiled and even laughed softly and inaudibly, and though the laughter passed quickly, its bright, mirthful trace remained on his face, and above all in his eyes, very blue, radiant, big, but with lids slightly drooping and swollen with age and surrounded by countless tiny wrinkles. This laughter of his affected me most of all.

I think that when a person laughs, in the majority of cases he becomes repulsive to look at. Most often something banal is revealed in people’s laughter, something as if humiliating for the laugher, though the laughing one almost always knows nothing of the impression he makes. Just as he doesn’t know, as nobody generally knows, what kind of face he has when he’s asleep. Some sleepers have intelligent faces even in sleep, while other faces, even intelligent ones, become very stupid in sleep and therefore ridiculous. I don’t know what makes that happen; I only want to say that a laughing man, like a sleeping one, most often knows nothing about his face. A great many people don’t know how to laugh at all. However, there’s nothing to know here: it’s a gift, and it can’t be fabricated. It can only be fabricated by re-educating oneself, developing oneself for the better, and overcoming the bad instincts of one’s character; then the laughter of such a person might quite possibly change for the better. A man can give himself away completely by his laughter, so that you suddenly learn all his innermost secrets. Even indisputably intelligent laughter is sometimes repulsive. Laughter calls first of all for sincerity, but where is there any sincerity in people? Laughter calls for lack of spite, but people most often laugh spitefully. Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful? (About mirth in our time—that was Versilov’s observation, and I remembered it.) A man’s mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone’s character won’t be cracked for a long time, then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I’m not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how he weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he’s a good man. Note at the same time all the nuances: for instance, a man’s laughter must in no case seem stupid to you, however merry and simplehearted it may be. The moment you notice the slightest trace of stupidity in someone’s laughter, it undoubtedly means that the man is of limited intelligence, though he may do nothing but pour out ideas. Or if his laughter isn’t stupid, but the man himself, when he laughs, for some reason suddenly seems ridiculous to you, even just slightly—know, then, that the man has no real sense of dignity, not fully in any case. Or, finally, if his laughter is infectious, but for some reason still seems banal to you, know, then, that the man’s nature is on the banal side as well, and all the noble and lofty that you noticed in him before is either deliberately affected or unconsciously borrowed, and later on the man is certain to change for the worse, to take up what’s “useful” and throw his noble ideas away without regret, as the errors and infatuations of youth.

I am intentionally placing this long tirade about laughter here, even sacrificing the flow of the story, for I consider it one of the most serious conclusions of my life. And I especially recommend it to those would-be brides who are ready to marry their chosen man, but keep scrutinizing him with hesitation and mistrust, and can’t make the final decision. And let them not laugh at the pathetic adolescent for poking with his moral admonitions into the matter of marriage, of which he doesn’t understand the first thing. But I understand only that laughter is the surest test of a soul. Look at a child: only children know how to laugh perfectly—that’s what makes them seductive. A crying child is repulsive to me, but a laughing and merry child is a ray from paradise, a revelation from the future, when man will finally become as pure and simplehearted as a child. And so something childlike and incredibly attractive also flashed in the fleeting laughter of this old man. I went up to him at once.