paused and then said, turning away slightly and giving two half-hearted sobs, that if the gentleman did not help him, then the only thing left for him would be suicide. He added, waving his hand with casual desperation, that he had personally lost all his
joie de vivre
—he expressed it differently, but that was the sum of it—however, he pitied his wife, and it was possible that she would not survive the blow, for she was chronically ill and was not to blame. The mention of blame seemed rather peculiar to me, but he immediately explained that her second husband—he himself was her third—had given her syphilis, and now, he claimed, it was taking a toll on her health.
“Yes,” mused the host, “indeed…”
Then he asked in an entirely different tone of voice:
“Who gave you my address?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I asked, who gave you my address?”
“I… I’m sorry, I was just passing and thought that, perhaps, some Russians might live here…”
“In other words, you don’t want to say. As you wish. Only I know that your surname is Kalinichenko, that you were arrested not in Lyons but in Paris, and not for knocking down a pedestrian but for theft.”
The man in the cap became uncommonly agitated and, stuttering with rage, said that if the gentleman held such an unjust opinion of him then he had better take his leave. His humility having vanished, his little eyes took on a furious expression. He stood up and made a swift exit, without saying goodbye.
“Do you know him?” I enquired.
“Of course,” he replied. “We all know one another more or less. That is, I mean to say, everyone who belongs, or belonged, to that milieu. Only he failed to suspect that the Pavel Alexandrovich Shcherbakov who lives in this apartment and whose address was given to him by Kostya Voronov, despite his assurances not to pass it on to another living soul, is none other than the same who formerly lived in Rue Simon le Franc. Otherwise, of course, he wouldn’t have bothered with the story about Lyons and the motorcycle, which for thirty francs Chernov, the former writer, concocted and wrote down for him since he lacked the imagination with which to do it himself.”
“So he made up the sick wife?”
“Not entirely,” said Shcherbakov. “As far as I’m aware, my visitor has never been married. In such circles many legal formalities are deemed unnecessary. However, the woman he lives with is indeed syphilitic. But of course I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether or not she’s ever been married. I have my doubts. Let us agree that it’s of little consequence either way. And now, after all that, permit me to say how happy I am to see you here.”
The conversation immediately acquired a different, far more cultivated tone; as with everything else, there was a sense that Pavel Alexandrovich wished to forget the period preceding his current circumstances. Nevertheless, he started—he could not help but do so—with a comparison.
“For so long I was deprived,” he began, “of entry to a world that had once been my own… perhaps because I’m no philosopher, and I’m certainly no stoic. I mean to say that for a philosopher, the external conditions of life—remember Aesop’s example—should play no part whatsoever in the development of human thought. I must admit, however, that there are certain materialistic details at whose mercy a man can find himself—insects, filth, cold, foul odours…”
He was sitting in a deep armchair, smoking a cigarette, with a cup of coffee resting in front of him.
“…all this has a most unpleasant effect on a man. Perhaps it’s some law of psychological mimicry gone too far. After all, it’s quite understandable: we often knowwhich conditions govern the inception of some biological law or other, but we cannot predict when that action will terminate, nor can we be sure that its effects will always be the same. Why is it that
King Lear
and
Don Quixote
should lose all
Judith Miller, Tracie Peterson
Lafcadio Hearn, Francis Davis
Jonathan Strahan [Editor]