The Idiot (71 page)

‘At this same time, that is, around the time that Surikov “a-froze” the baby, about the middle of March, I suddenly began to feel much better for some reason, and this went on for about two weeks. I began to go out, most often towards twilight. I loved the March twilight, when the frost was beginning to bite and the gas was being lit; I sometimes walked a long way. Once I was overtaken on Shestilavochnaya Street
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in the dark by some “gentleman”, I could not make him out properly; he was carrying something wrapped in paper and was dressed in a
kurguz
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and a disgraceful old overcoat - far too thin for the season. When he drew level with a street lamp, some ten paces ahead of me, I noticed something fall out of his pocket. I hurried to pick it up - and just in time, because a person in a long caftan suddenly popped up; but, seeing the object in my hands, he did not begin to argue, glanced fleetingly at my hands and slipped past. This object was a large, old-fashioned morocco leather pocket book, tightly stuffed; but somehow I knew at first sight that whatever else this pocket book contained, it was not money. The passer-by who had lost it was already walking some forty paces ahead of me, and soon disappeared from view in the crowd. I broke into a run and began to shout to him; but as all I could shout was “Hey!”, he did not even turn round. Suddenly he darted off to the left, through the gateway to a tenement building. When I ran inside the gateway, where it was very dark, there was no one there. The tenement was enormous, one of those Leviathans built by speculators, for small flats; those tenements sometimes contain up to a hundred rooms. As I ran in through the gateway, I had the impression that in the rear right-hand corner of the enormous courtyard a man was walking along, though in the darkness I could hardly discern anything. Having run as far as the corner, I saw the entrance to a staircase; the staircase was narrow, extremely dirty and not lit at all; but further up I could hear a man still ascending the steps at a run, and I set off up the staircase, calculating that somewhere a door would be opened for him, and I would catch him up. So it transpired. The fl
ights of stairs were very short but their number was infinite, and I became dreadfully out of breath; a door was opened and closed again on the fifth floor, I guessed this while still three floors below. While I ran up, got my breath back on the landing and looked for the bell, several minutes passed. At last the door was opened to me by a woman who was blowing up the samovar in a tiny kitchen; she heard out my questions in silence, understood nothing, of course, and silently opened the door to the next room, also small, horribly low-ceilinged, with poor-quality, essential furniture and an enormous, wide bed draped with curtains, on which lay “Terentyich” (as the woman called him), drunk, it seemed to me. On the table a candle-end was burning down in an iron holder, and there was a half-shtof
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of vodka, almost empty. Terentyich mumbled something to me as he lay there and waved towards the next door, but the woman had left, so there was nothing left for me but to open that door. I did so, and entered the next room.

‘This room was even more cramped than the last one, so that I did not even know where to turn round; the narrow, single bed in the corner took up a dreadful amount of space; the other furniture consisted of three plain chairs, piled with all sorts of rags, and the very plainest of wooden kitchen tables in front of an old oilcloth sofa, making it almost impossible to pass between the table and the bed. On the table burned another tallow candle in an iron holder like the one in the other room, and on the bed squealed a tiny baby, no more than three weeks old, perhaps, to judge by its crying; it was being “changed”, swaddled that is, by a sick, pale woman, who looked young, was in a marked state of undress, and was, perhaps, only just beginning to get up again after giving birth; but the child would not quiet down and went on crying in expectation of the skinny breast. On the sofa slept another child, a three-year-old girl, covered, it appeared, by a tail-coat. By the table stood a gentleman in a very frayed frock coat (he had taken off his topcoat, and it lay on the bed) and was undoing some blue paper in which were wrapped about two pounds of white bread and two small sausages. On the table there was a pot of tea, and some pieces of black bread lying strewn about. From under the bed an open travelling box projected, and two bundles of rags stuck out.

‘In a word, there was terrible disorder. It seemed to me from the first that both of them - the gentleman and the lady - were decent folk, but reduced by poverty to that degrading condition in which disorder finally overcomes all attempts to fight it, and even leads people to the bitter necessity of taking a kind of bitter and almost vengeful sense of satisfaction in it, one that increases with each day.

‘As I entered, this gentleman, who had come in just before me and was unpacking his provisions, was discussing something quickly and heatedly with his wife; the latter, though she had not yet finished her nappy-changing, had already begun to whimper; the news must have been bad, as usual. The face of this gentleman, who looked about twenty-eight, was swarthy and thin, framed by black side-whiskers, with a chin
shaven till it shone, and it seemed to me rather decent and even pleasant; it was gloomy, with a gloomy gaze, but also with a morbid tinge of pride that was too easily offended. When I went in, a strange scene took place.

‘There are people who take exceeding pleasure in their own irritable touchiness, especially when it reaches the final limit (which always happens very quickly); at that moment they even find it more enjoyable to be offended than not to be offended. These irritable people always suffer dreadful torments of remorse afterwards, if they are intelligent, of course, and able to reflect that they got ten times more worked up than was necessary. This gentleman looked at me for some time in amazement, and his wife with fear, as though there were something wondrously strange about someone entering their room; but suddenly he pounced on me with almost rabid fury; I had not yet managed to mutter a couple of words, but he, especially since he saw that I was decently dressed, must have considered himself to have been terribly insulted by the fact that I had dared to glance into his corner with such lack of ceremony and see the whole untidy mess of which he himself was so ashamed. Of course, he was glad of the chance to take out on someone else all the anger he felt at all his failures. For one moment I even thought he was going to hurl himself on me and engage me in fisticuffs; he had turned pale, as in a woman’s hysterical fit, and gave his wife a dreadful fright.

‘“How dare you come in here! Get out!” he cried, trembling and even finding it hard to get the words out. But suddenly he saw his pocket-book in my hands.

‘“I think you dropped this,” I said as calmly and coolly as I was able. (That, as a matter of fact, was the right way to go about it).

‘He stood before me in total dismay, and for some time seemed unable to take anything in; then he quickly grabbed at his side pocket, opened his mouth wide in horror, and slapped his forehead.

‘“Good Lord! Where did you find it? How?”

‘I explained in the briefest of terms and even more coolly, if that were possible, how I had picked up the pocket-book, how I had run and called after him and how, at last, by guesswork and almost by feel, had followed him up the stairs.

‘“Oh God!” he exclaimed, turning to his wife. “It contains all our documents, it contains my last deeds, it contains all ... Oh, dear sir, do you know what you have done for me? I would have been lost!”

‘Meanwhile I had reached for the door handle, in order to leave without replying; but I was out of breath myself, and suddenly my agitation burst out in such a violent fit of coughing that I could hardly maintain my balance. I saw the gentleman rush about in all directions in order to find me a vacant chair, grab the rags, at last, from one chair, throw them on the floor and hurriedly offer me the chair, carefully making me sit down. But my cough continued and did not subside for about another
three minutes. When I recovered myself, he was sitting beside me on another chair, from which he had also probably thrown the rags to the floor, studying me intently.

‘“I think you’re ... suffering from something?” he said in the tone of voice that doctors usually employ when approaching a patient. “I’m a medic,” (he did not say “doctor”), for some reason indicating the room to me, as though protesting against his present situation. “I can see
that you ...”

‘“I have consumption,” I said as shortly as I could, and stood up.

‘He at once also leaped to his feet.

‘“It may be that you’re exaggerating, and ... if you took remedies ...”

‘He was very disconcerted and seemed unable to regain his composure; the pocket-book stuck out of his left hand.

‘“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” I broke in again, reaching for the door handle, “B-n examined me last week (I brought B-n into it again here), and in my case the diagnosis is certain. I’m sorry ...”

‘I was again about to open the door and leave my embarrassed and grateful doctor, who was crushed with shame, but just then the damned cough again seized hold of me. At this, my doctor insisted that I should sit down again and rest; he turned to his wife, and she, without leaving her place, quietly said some words of thanks and friendship to me. As she did so she became very embarrassed, and a blush even began to play on her dry, pale-yellow cheeks. I stayed, but with a look that indicated every second that I was dreadfully afraid of disturbing their privacy (which was the right note to strike). My doctor’s remorse had begun to torment him now, I could see that.

‘“If I ...” he began, breaking off for a moment and changing the subject. “I’m so grateful to you and so guilty before you ... I ... you see ...” he again indicated the room. “At the present moment I’m in such a situation ...”

‘“Oh,” I said, “it’s not hard to see; it happens every day; I expect you’ve lost your job and have come here to St Petersburg in order to explain yourself and seek another post?”

‘“How did you ... find out?” he asked with surprise.

‘“It’s obvious at first sight,” I replied, mockingly in spite of myself. “Many people come here from the provinces with high hopes, run about, and live like this.”

‘He suddenly began to talk heatedly, his lips trembling; he began a plaintive discourse, and, I confess, it caught my interest; I sat with him for almost an hour. He told me his story, a very common one, as a matter of fact. He had been a doctor in a province, held a government post, but then all sorts of intrigues had begun, in which even his wife had become involved. He had stood on his pride, lost his temper; a change in the provincial government took place which worked to the advantage of his enemies; he was undermined, and complaints were made about him; he lost his post and used the last of his means on travelling to St Petersburg in order to explain himself; in St Petersburg it took him a lo
ng time to obtain a hearing, of course, and then when he obtained one he was met with a refusal, then lured with promises, then threatened with rigorous measures, then told to write an explanation, then had the explanation rejected, was then told to file a petition - in a word, he had been running about for five months now, had spent all his savings; he had pawned his wife’s last rags, and now a child had been born and, and ... “today I got the final rejection of the petition I filed, and I have almost no bread, there is nothing, my wife has given birth. I, I ...”

‘He jumped up from his chair and turned away. His wife was weeping in the corner, the baby was beginning to shriek again. I took out my notebook and began to write in it. When I had finished and got up, he was standing before me, staring with timid curiosity.

‘“I’ve written your name down,” I told him, “well, and all the rest: place of work, the name of your governor, the dates, the months. I have a friend, was at school with him, Bakhmutov, and his uncle is Pyotr Matveyevich Bakhmutov, State Councillor,
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who works as director ...”

‘“Pyotr Matveyevich Bakhmutov!” my medic exclaimed, almost beginning to tremble. “But I mean, he’s the one on whom almost everything depends!”

‘Indeed, in the story of my medic and its dénouement, which I accidentally brought about, everything came together and was settled as though it had been arranged that way deliberately, just as in a novel. I told those poor folk that they should try not to place any hopes in me, that I myself was a poor high-school student (I deliberately exaggerated my lowliness; I had finished my studies long ago and was no longer a high-school student) and that there was no need for them to know my name, but that I would go right now to Vasily Island and see my friend Bakhmutov, and as I knew for a fact that his uncle, a State Councillor, a bachelor with no children, revered his nephew and was passionately fond of him, seeing in him the last scion of his family, “perhaps my friend will be able to do something for you and for me, of course, through his uncle ...”

‘“All I need is to be allowed to explain myself to his excellency! If only I might be granted the honour of explaining in my own words!” he exclaimed, trembling as in a fever, his eyes glittering. He actually said: “be granted the honour”. Repeating once more that the project would probably fall through and would all be a nonsense, I added that if tomorrow morning I did not come and see them, that would mean that the project was at an end, and there was no point in them expecting anything. They saw me out with bows, they were almost beside themselves. Never will I forget the expressions on their faces. I took a cab and set off at once for Vasily Island.

‘For several years at high school I was in perpetual conflict with this Bakhmutov. We considered him an aristocrat, or at any rate that was what I called him; he dressed well, arrived in his own carriage, did not boast at all, was always an excellent companion, was always exceptionally cheerful and even sometimes rather witty, though he was not very
clever, in spite of always being top of the class; I was never top in anything. All his comrades liked him, except me. Several times during those several years he approached me; but each time I snubbed him morosely and irritably. I had not seen him now for about a year; he was at the university. When, some time before nine, I entered his rooms (to great ceremony: I was announced), he greeted me at first with astonishment, not at all kindly, even, but then at once became more cheerful and, looking at me, suddenly burst out laughing.