The Idiot (15 page)

‘Yes, yes, my dear, he was an abbot in olden times, but I’m off to the count’s, he’s been waiting for ages, and the fact is that he set our appointment himself ... Prince, goodbye!’

The general set off, with swift steps.

‘I know what sort of count
he’s
off to see!’ Yelizaveta Prokofyevna said sharply, transferring her gaze irritably to the prince. ‘What was I saying?’ she began, trying to remember, with distaste and annoyance. ‘Oh, what was it? Ah yes: now, who was this abbot?’

‘Maman,’
Alexandra began, while Aglaya even stamped her foot.

‘Don’t interrupt me, Alexandra Ivanovna,’ the general’s wife rapped out. ‘I also want to know. Sit down here, Prince, in this armchair her
e, opposite, no, here, where there’s some sun, move into the light so I can see you. Well now, who was this abbot?’

‘The Abbot Pafnuty,’ the prince replied, with serious attention.

‘Pafnuty? That’s interesting; well, what of him, then?’

The general’s wife asked her questions impatiently, swiftly and sharply, never taking her eyes off the prince, and whenever the prince replied she nodded her head after each word he spoke.

‘The Abbot Pafnuty, of the fourteenth century,’ the prince began. ‘He governed a monastery on the Volga, in what today is the province of Kostroma. He was well known for his holy life, travelled to the Horde,
¹
helped to organize the business of those times, and signed a certain deed, and I have seen a copy of that signature. I liked the handwriting, and I learned the knack of it. When the general wanted to see my writing just now, so that he could assign me a job, I wrote a few sentences in different scripts, including “The Abbot Pafnuty hath signed this with his hand” in the Abbot Pafnuty’s own handwriting. The general liked it very much, and so he remembered it just now.

‘Aglaya,’ said the general’s wife, ‘remember: Pafnuty, or better, write it down, for I always forget things. Actually, I thought it would be more interesting. Where is this signature, then?’

‘I think it’s still on the table in the general’s study.’

‘Have it brought here at once.’

‘Oh, I think it would be better if I wrote it for you another time, if you would like that.’

‘Of course,
Maman,’
said Alexandra, ‘but now it would be better to have breakfast; we’re hungry.’

‘There’s that, too,’ the general’s wife decided. ‘Come along, Prince; are you very hungry?’

‘Yes, I’ve begun to feel very hungry, and I am very grateful to you.’

‘It’s very good that you’re so polite, and I can see that you are not at all the ... eccentric you were introduced as. Come along. Sit down here, opposite me,’ she fussed, seating the prince when they arrived in the dining room, ‘I want to look at you. Alexandra, Adelaida, help to serve the prince. He’s not such an ... invalid after all, is he? Perhaps the napkin isn’t necessary ... Prince, are you used to having a napkin tied round your neck at meal-times?’

‘I think that formerly, when I was about seven years old, I used to have that done, but now I usually put the napkin on my knees when I’m eating.’

‘Quite right. And your fits?’

‘Fits?’ The prince was slightly astonished. ‘My fits are rather infrequent now. However, I don’t know, they say that the climate here will be bad for me.’

‘He speaks well,’ the general’s wife remarked, turning to her daughters and continuing to nod her head after the prince’s every word, ‘I really didn’t expect it. It must all be nonsense and fabrication
- as usual. Eat, Prince, and tell me: where were you born, where were you raised? I want to know it all; I find you extremely interesting.’

The prince thanked her and, while eating with hearty appetite, again began to tell everything he had already had to say several times that morning. The general’s wife grew more and more content. The girls also listened quite closely. They considered their degree of kinship; it turned out that the prince knew his family tree rather well; but no matter how hard they tried, there proved to be no almost no relation between him and the general’s wife. There might have been a distant kinship among the grandfathers and grandmothers. This arid subject particularly appealed to the general’s wife, who hardly ever had the opportunity of talking about her family tree as much as she wanted to, and she rose from the table in an excited state of mind.

‘Let’s all go to our salon,’ she said, ‘and they’ll bring the coffee there. We have a room we share,’ she addressed the prince, leading him out, ‘really my own little drawing room where, when we are on our own, we sit together and each of us gets on with her own work: Alexandra here, my eldest daughter, plays the piano, or reads, or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (and is incapable of finishing anything) and Aglaya just sits and does nothing. I’m no good with my hands, either: nothing works out right. Well, here we are; you sit down here, Prince, by the fire, and tell us something. I want to know how you tell a story. I want to be quite convinced, and when I see old Princess Belokonskaya I shall tell her all about you. I want them all to take an interest in you, too. Well, then, speak.’

‘Maman,
but that’s a very strange way to ask someone to tell a story,’ observed Adelaida, who had meanwhile straightened her easel, taken her brushes and palette and begun to copy a landscape she had begun long ago, from a print. Alexandra and Aglaya sat down together on the small sofa and, folding their arms, prepared to listen to the conversation. The prince noticed that special attention was being directed towards him from all sides.

‘If I were ordered like that, I shouldn’t say anything,’ Aglaya observed.

‘Why not? What’s strange about it? Why shouldn’t he tell us something? He has a tongue. I want to find out how well he talks. About anything, really. Tell us your view of Switzerland, your first impression. Now you’ll see, he’ll begin at once, and begin splendidly ...’

‘The impression it made on me was a powerful one ...’ the prince began.

‘There you are,’ the impatient Lizaveta Prokofyevna chipped in, turning to her daughters, ‘he’s begun.’

‘Then at least let him speak,
Maman,’
Alexandra stopped her. ‘This prince may be a great fraud, and not an idiot at all,’ she whispered to Aglaya.

‘Probably, I saw it long ago,’ Aglaya replied. ‘And it’s vile of him to play a role like this. What does he expect to gain from it?’

‘My first impression was a very powerful one,’ the prince repeated. ‘When I was taken out of Russia, through various German towns, I merely looked in silence and, I remember, did not even ask any questions. This was after a series of violent and agonizing attacks of my illness, and always, if the illness got worse and the fits were repeated several times in a row, I used to fall into a complete torpor, wholly lost consciousness, and although my mind continued to function, it was as if the logical flow of my thoughts was broken off. I couldn’t connect more than two or three ideas in consecutive order. So it seems to me. But when the fits died down, I again became healthy and strong, as I am now. I remember: there was an unendurable sadness in me; I even wanted to cry; I was constantly astonished and anxious: it had a dreadful effect on me that all this was
foreign;
that I understood. The foreign-ness crushed me. I completely awoke from this darkness, I remember, in the evening, at Basle, on entering Switzerland, and what woke me up was the hee-hawing of a donkey in the town market. The donkey gave me a dreadful shock and for some reason greatly appealed to me, and at the same time it was as if everything in my head suddenly cleared.’

‘A donkey? That’s strange,’ the general’s wife observed. ‘Though actually, there’s nothing strange about it, one of us might easily fall in love with a donkey,’ she observed, with an angry glance at the laughing girls. ‘It happened in mythology. Continue, prince.’

‘Since then I’ve had a dreadful soft spot for donkeys. There’s even a kind of sympathy between us. I began to make inquiries about them, as I’d never seen them before, and was at once convinced that they’re a most useful animal, hard-working, strong, patient, inexpensive and long-suffering; and through that donkey I suddenly began to like the whole of Switzerland, so that my earlier sadness passed completely.’

‘This is all very strange, but you may omit the donkey; let us go on to another subject. Why do you keep laughing, Aglaya? And you, Adelaida? The prince gave us a splendid description of the donkey. He saw it himself, and what have you seen? Have you been abroad?’

‘I’ve seen a donkey,
Maman,’
said Alexandra.

‘And I’ve heard one, too,’ Aglaya chimed in. All three again began to laugh. The prince laughed along with them.

‘That’s very naughty of you,’ the general’s wife observed. ‘You must excuse them, Prince, they’re good-hearted, really. I’m forever quarrelling with them, but I love them. They’re giddy and frivolous, crazy.’

‘But why?’ the prince laughed. ‘If I’d been in their place I wouldn’t have let the opportunity slip either. I’m still on the donkey’s side though: the donkey is a good-hearted and useful fellow.’

‘And are you good-hearted, Prince? I ask out of curiosity,’ the general’s wife inquired.

They all began to laugh again.

‘It’s that confounded donkey, back again; I wasn’t thinking of it!’ cried the general’s wife. ‘Please believe me, Prince, I had no thought of ...’

‘Hinting? Oh, I believe you, beyond all doubt!’

And the prince laughed and laughed.

‘It’s good that you can laugh. I see that you’re a most good-hearted young man,’ said the general’s wife.

‘Sometimes I’m not good-hearted,’ the prince replied.

‘Well, I
am
good-hearted,’ the general’s wife inserted unexpectedly. ‘And if you really want to know, I’m always good-hearted, and that is my only failing, for one shouldn’t always be good-hearted. I very frequently lose my temper, with them, and with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the dreadful thing is that when I’m angry I’m at my most good-hearted. Just before your arrival I lost my temper and indulged in play-acting as though I didn’t understand anything and couldn’t understand anything. I do that sometimes; like a child. Aglaya took me to task for it; thank you, Aglaya. As a matter of fact, it’s all nonsense. I’m not as stupid as I seem, and as my daughters would like to make out. I have character, and make no bones about showing it. But I should make clear that I say this without malice. Come here, Aglaya, give me a kiss, that’s right ... and that will do with expressions of affection,’ she observed, when Aglaya had kissed her on the lips and on the hand with emotion. ‘Continue, Prince. Perhaps you will remember something more interesting than a donkey.’

‘I really don’t understand how one can tell a story so directly,’ Adelaida observed again. ‘I would be quite at a loss.’

‘But the prince won’t be at a loss, because the prince is extremely clever and at least ten times, possibly a dozen times more clever than you. I hope you will be aware of that after this. Prove it to them, Prince; continue. We really can move on from the donkey at last. Well, what did you see abroad apart from a donkey?’

‘The bit about the donkey was clever, too,’ observed Alexandra. ‘The prince was very interesting when he described his bout of illness, and also how after that one external shock he began to like everything. I’ve always been interested in how people go mad and then recover again. Especially if it happens suddenly.’

‘Is that so? Is that so?’ the general’s wife hurled back at her. ‘I see that you can sometimes be clever, too; well, that’s enough laughter! You had reached the subject of Switzerland’s natural environment, I believe, Prince. Well?’

‘We arrived in Lucerne, and I was taken out on the lake. I was aware of how marvellous it was, but at the same time I felt dreadfully miserable,’ said the prince.

‘Why?’ asked Alexandra.

‘I don’t know. Seeing nature like that for the first time always makes me unhappy and anxious; but this all happened when my illness was still with me.’

‘Oh no, but I’d like to see it very much,’ said Adelaida. ‘And I don’t know when we’ll be going abroad. I haven’t been able to find a subject for a painting for two years: “The East and South were long ago depicted...”
²
Prince, find me a subject for a painting.’

‘I don’t know anything about it. I think one simply looks and paints.’

‘I don’t know how to look.’

‘Why are you talking in riddles? I don’t understand any of it,’ the general’s wife interrupted. ‘What do you mean: “I don’t know how to look”? You have eyes, so look. If you don’t know how to look here, you won’t learn abroad either. You had better tell us how you yourself looked, Prince.’

‘Yes, that would be better,’ Adelaida added. ‘After all, the prince learned to look abroad.’

‘I don’t know; I merely got my health back there; I don’t know if I learned to look. Though I was very happy nearly all of the time.’

‘Happy? Do you know how to be happy?’ exclaimed Aglaya. ‘Then how can you say that you didn’t learn to look? I expect you could teach us.’

‘Yes, do teach us, please,’ Adelaida laughed.

‘I can’t teach anything,’ the prince laughed, too. ‘I spent nearly all my time abroad in that Swiss village; very rarely I made a short trip somewhere close at hand; so what can I teach you? At first it was merely diverting; I quickly began to recover; then each day became precious to me, and the longer I was there the more precious they became, so I that began to notice it. I would go to bed very contented, and get up even happier. But why it was so it’s rather hard to say.’

‘So you never felt like going anywhere, you never felt an urge to go anywhere?’ asked Adelaida.

‘At first, right at the outset, yes, I did feel an urge, and I lapsed into great anxiety. I kept thinking all the time of how I was going to live; I wanted to test my fate, felt anxious particularly at certain moments. You know, there are such moments, particularly when one is in seclusion. We had a waterfall there, a small one, it fell high from the mountain, almost like a fine thread, perpendicular - white, noisy, foaming; it fell from high up but seemed quite low, was more than half a mile distant, but seemed only about fifty yards away. I liked to listen to its noise at night; it was at those moments that I sometimes reached great anxiety. Also sometimes at noon, when I’d go up into the mountains somewhere, stand alone amidst the mountains, around me pine trees, old, large and resinous; on the top of a rock an old medieval castle, ruins; our little village far below, scarcely visible ; a bright sun, a blue sky, a terrible silence. It was there that something kept calling me somewhere, and I kept thinking that if I were to walk straight, walk for a very long time and go beyond that line, the line where earth meets sky, there the whole riddle around me would be solved and instantly I would see a new life, a thousand times more powerful and noisy than our own; I kept dreaming of a big city like Naples, with palaces, noise, thunder,
life ... Oh, what didn’t I dream! And then it seemed to me that even in prison one might discover an immense life.’