While between the staircase of the department and the doors to his office, Apollon Apollonovich, by an act of his will, shifted the center of his consciousness. Cerebral play was retreating to the edge of the field of vision, as were the whitish patterns of wallpaper: a small pile of dossiers placed parallel shifted to the center of the field, as had the portrait.
The portrait? That is:
“He’s gone—and Rus he has deserted. . . .”†
Who? The senator? He? Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov? Why, no: Vyacheslav Konstantinovich.† And what about him, Apollon Apollonovich?
“My turn has come, in very truth . . .
Beloved Delvig calls for me. . . .Ӡ
My turn is my turn: there comes a turn for everyone—
“And o’er the earth new thunderclouds have gathered,
The hurricane . . .Ӡ
The small pile of papers leaped to the surface of his consciousness. Apollon Apollonovich took aim at the current business day.
“Hermann Hermannovich, be so good as to prepare that, oh, what’s it called . . .
“The dossier on the deacon Zrakov’s pupil!”†
Now he recalled (he had completely forgotten): yes, the eyes. They had been astonished, they had grown rabid. . . . And why that zigzag? A most unpleasant one. And he seemed to have seen that upstart intellectual at some time or other. Or maybe—nowhere, never.
Apollon Apollonovich opened the door to his office.†
The writing table stood there, and the logs in the fireplace crackled away. Apollon Apollonovich was warming his frozen hands at the fireplace, while his cerebral play went on constructing misty planes:
“Nikolai Apollonovich . . .”
At this point Apollon Apollonovich . . .
“?”
Apollon Apollonovich stopped at the door.
His innocent cerebral play again moved spontaneously into his brain, that is, into the pile of papers and petitions. Apollon Apollonovich perhaps would have considered cerebral play on the same plane as the wallpaper of the room; the plane, however, in moving apart at times, admitted a surprise into the center of his mental life.
Apollon Apollonovich recalled:
Once before he had seen that upstart intellectual—just imagine—in his very own house.
One time he had happened to be descending the staircase. Nikolai Apollonovich, leaning over the balustrade, was chatting with someone. The statesman did not consider that he had the right to make inquiries about Nikolai Apollonovich’s acquaintances. His sense of tact naturally prevented him from asking:
“Kolenka, my dear boy, who is it that’s visiting you?”†
Nikolai Apollonovich would have lowered his eyes:
“Nobody special, papa: people come to see me.”
That was precisely why Apollon Apollonovich had not taken the slightest interest at that time in the identity of the upstart intellectual wearing an overcoat and looking in from the vestibule. The stranger had the very same small mustache and startling eyes (such as you would encounter at night in the Moscow chapel of the Martyr Panteleimon,† which is by the Nikolsky Gate; such as you would encounter in the portrait of a great man appended to his biography; and further: in a neuropathological clinic).
Even then the eyes had dilated, gleamed, and flashed. Therefore, it had already happened once and, perhaps, would be repeated.
***
Apollon Apollonovich suddenly looked beyond the door: tables and more tables! Piles of dossiers! And, inclined heads! What a bustling and mighty paper mill!
***
The cerebral play of the wearer of diamond-studded decorations was distinguished by strange, very strange, extremely strange qualities: his cranium was becoming the womb of thought-images, which at once became incarnate in this spectral world.
Oh, better that Apollon Apollonovich should never have cast off a single idle thought, but should have continued to carry each and every thought in his head, for every thought stubbornly evolved into a spatiotemporal image, and continued its uncontrolled activities outside the senatorial head.
Apollon Apollonovich was like Zeus: out of his head flowed goddesses and genii. One of these genii (the stranger with the small black mustache), arising as an image, had already begun to live and breathe in the yellowish spaces. And he maintained that he had emerged from there, not from the senatorial head. This stranger turned out to have idle thoughts too. And they also possessed the same qualities.
They would escape and take on substance.
And one fugitive thought was the thought that the stranger really existed. The thought fled back into the senatorial brain.
The circle closed.
Apollon Apollonovich was like Zeus. Thus, scarcely had the Stranger-Pallas been born out of his head when from there another Pallas, exactly like it, came crawling out.†
This Pallas was the senator’s house.
***
The lackey was climbing the staircase. Oh, most beautiful staircase! And the steps: soft, like the convolutions of the brain, over which cabinet ministers had climbed more than once. The lackey was already in the hall. . . .
And then again the hall: most beautiful. Windows and walls, somewhat cold. . . .
We have cast an eye over this habitation, guided by the general characteristics which the senator was wont to bestow on all objects.
Thus:—
—having found himself on one rare occasion in the flowering bosom of nature, Apollon Apollonovich saw: the flowering bosom of nature. For us this bosom would immediately break down into its characteristics: into violets, buttercups, pinks; the senator would again reduce the particulars to a unity. We would say, of course:
“There’s a buttercup!”
“There’s a nice little forget-me-not. . . .”
But Apollon Apollonovich would say simply and succinctly:
“A flower. . . .”
Just between us: for some reason, Apollon Apollonovich considered all flowers the same, bluebells.
He would have characterized even his own house with laconic brevity, as consisting, for him, of walls (forming squares and cubes) into which windows were cut, of parquetry, of tables. Beyond that were details.
But we would do well to remember: what has flickered by (pictures, grand piano, mirrors, mother-of-pearl, small incrusted tables)—everything that has flickered by—was only an irritation of the cerebral membrane, if not an indisposition of the cerebellum.
An illusion of a room would be constructed, and it would then fly apart, leaving no trace. And when the door to the small hollow-echoing corridor slammed shut, it was only a hammering in the temples.
There proved to be no drawing room behind the slammed door but rather, cerebral spaces: convolutions, gray and white matter, the pineal gland; while the heavy walls of sparkling spurts (due to the afflux of blood) were a leaden and painful sensation: of the occipital, frontal,