He had seen this ear before!
He broke into a run.
Cutting across columns of conversations, he caught fragments, and sentences took form.
“Do you know?” was heard from somewhere on the right. And died away.
And then surfaced:
“They’re planning . . .”
“To throw . . .”
A whisper from behind:
“At who?”
And then an indistinct couple said:
“Abl . . .”
They passed by:
“At Ableukhov?!”
The couple completed the sentence somewhere far away:
“Abl–ution is not the sol–u–tion for what . . .”†
And the couple hiccuped.
And the stranger stopped, shaken by all he had heard:
“They’re planning . . .”
“To throw . . .?”
Whispering began all around:
“Probable . . . proof . . .”
The stranger heard not “prob” but “prov,” and finished it himself:
“Prov–ocation?!”†
Provocation began its revelry all along the Nevsky. Provocation had changed the meaning of the words that had been heard.
He had simply, on his own, added the preposition “at.” With the addition of the letters “a” and “t” an innocent verbal scrap had changed into a scrap with horrible contents. And, most important: the preposition had been added by the stranger.
Provocation, accordingly, had its seat within him.
Oh, Russian people!
You are becoming shadows of swirling whorls of mist. From time immemorial the mists have been swirling out of the leaden expanses of the seething Baltic. Into the mists stared cannons.
At noon a muffled cannon-shot† triumphally filled all of Petersburg, the magnificent capital of the Empire. And the mists were rent asunder, and the shadows dispersed.
Only one shadow, a young man, was not shaken and did not disintegrate from the shot, as he continued his run to the Neva unhindered.
Suddenly he saw, fastened upon him, the eyes of two shabbily dressed but sweet girl students.
WHY DON’T YOU KEEP QUIET!
“We–me . . .”
But it sounded like:
“Me–me.”
And a scraggly bunch of gents in suitcoats would start squealing:
“A–aha–ha, aha–ha!”
***
A Petersburg street in autumn is piercing; it both chills you to the marrow, and tickles. As soon as you leave it and go indoors, the street flows in your veins like a fever.
The stranger experienced all that when he came into the sweaty and steamy vestibule, jam-packed with every which kind of black, blue, gray, yellow coat, with lop-eared caps, and with every conceivable kind of overshoe. A steamy pancake smell hung everywhere:
“Aaa! . . .”
***
The restaurant premises consisted of a small grimy room. The floor was waxed. The walls had been decorated by some amateur painter, and depicted remnants of a flotilla, from above which Peter was pointing off into space.
“A little picon in it?”
“No, no picon!”
He was thinking: why had there been a frightened look behind the carriage window? The eyes had bulged, gone petrified, and shut. The head had reeled back and disappeared. A hand had trembled impotently there; it was not a hand but . . . a tiny paw.
And in the meantime snacks were drying up on the counter; and wilted leaves of some kind were turning sour under a mound of overdone meat patties.
***
Lingering there at a distance was an idle sweating stalwart with a coachman’s beard, a blue jacket, and blacked boots. He was knocking back glass after glass. Now and then he would summon the waiter:
“How’s about a little somethin’?”
“Some melon, sir?”
“Your melon, it tastes like soap with sugar on it.”
“Perhaps a banana, sir.”
“That’s a dirty-sounding fruit.”
***
Thrice had my stranger swallowed the acerbic poison. And his consciousness, detaching itself from his body, like the handle on the lever of a mechanism, began revolving around the organism.
And the stranger’s consciousness became clear for an instant. Yes: where’s the bundle? Here it is, right beside me, here. . . .
The encounter had knocked his memory out.
***
“A nice piece of watermelon, sir?”
“The heck with your watermelon. All it does is crunch between your teeth, and there’s nothin’ left in your mouth. . . .”
“All right, how ’bout some vodka. . . .”
***
“Buy you a drink, pal?”
The idle sweating stalwart with a beard gave a wink.
“But why not?”
“I’ve already had enough.”
“Come on, have a little drink, just to keep me cumpaneee. . . .”
My stranger realized something: he looked at him suspiciously, clutched at the damp bundle, at a sheet (of newspaper). He covered the bundle with it.
“Hey, you from Tula, pal?”
“Not at all.”
***
He was thinking, and he wasn’t. His thoughts were thinking themselves, and they produced a picture: tarpaulins, hawsers, herring, sacks crammed full of something; amidst the sacks a workman dressed in blackest leather, and standing out distinctly in a fog of fleeting surfaces, kept hoisting sacks onto his back; and the sacks thudded dully into a barge overloaded with beams; the workman (something familiar about him) was standing over the sacks and was taking out a pipe.
***
“Here on business?”
(Oh, Lord!)
“No!”
“O–ho, and me, I’m a coachman.”
***
“Now my wife’s brother, he drives for Konstantin Konstantinych. . . .”†
“Well, so what?”
“So what? So nothin’!”
***
Suddenly . . .
But about suddenly, we shall speak later.
THE WRITING TABLE