Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 24

It was the last day of September.

On Vasilievsky Island, in the depths of the Seventeenth Line,^† a house enormous and gray looked out of the fog. A dingy staircase led to the floors. There were doors and more doors. One opened.

And a stranger with the blackest of small mustaches appeared on its threshold.

Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small and yet not very large bundle tied up in a dirty napkin with a red border design of faded pheasants.

The staircase was black, strewn with cucumber peels and a cabbage leaf crushed under foot. The stranger slipped on it.

He then grasped the railing with one hand; the other hand (with the bundle) described a zigzag. The stranger wished to protect the bundle from a distressing accident, from falling onto the stone step, because the movement of his elbow mimicked a tightrope walker’s turn.

Then, meeting the porter, who was climbing the stairs with a load of aspen wood over his shoulder, the stranger began to show increased concern about the fate of the bundle, which might catch against a log.

When the stranger reached the bottom, a black cat underfoot hitched up its tail and cut across his path, dropping chicken innards at the stranger’s feet. And a spasm contorted his face.

Such movements are peculiar to young ladies.

And movements of precisely this same kind sometimes mark those of our contemporaries who are exhausted by insomnia. The stranger suffered from insomnia: his smoke-redolent habitation hinted at that. And the bluish tinge of the delicate skin of his face also bore witness.

The stranger remained standing in the courtyard, a quadrangle completely paved with asphalt and pressed in from all sides by the five stories of the many-windowed colossus. Stacked in the middle of the courtyard were damp cords of aspen wood. And visible through the gate was a section of the windswept Seventeenth Line.

Oh, you lines!

In you has remained the memory of Petrine Petersburg.^†

The parallel lines were once laid out by Peter. And some of them came to be enclosed with granite, others with low fences of stone, still others with fences of wood. Peter’s line turned into the line of a later age: the rounded one of Catherine, the regular ranks of colonnades.^†

Left among the colossi were small Petrine houses:^† here a timbered one, there a green one, there a blue, single-storied one, with the bright red sign “Dinners Served.” Sundry odors hit you right in the nose: the smell of sea salt, of herring, of hawsers, of leather jacket and of pipe, and of nautical tarpaulin.

Oh, lines!

How they have changed: how grim days have changed them!

The stranger recalled: on a summer evening, in the window of that gleaming little house, an old woman was chewing her lips. Since August the window had been shut. In September a brocade-lined coffin was brought.

He was thinking it was getting more and more expensive to live. Life was hard for working folk. From over there pierced Petersburg, both with the arrows of prospects and with a gang of stone giants.

From over there rose Petersburg: there buildings blazed out of a wave of clouds. There, it seemed, hovered someone spiteful, cold. From over there, out of the howling chaos someone stared with stony gaze, skull and ears protruding into the fog.

All of that was in the mind of the stranger. He clenched his fist in his pocket. And he remembered that the leaves were falling.

He knew it all by heart. These fallen leaves were the last leaves for many. He became a bluish shadow.

***

And as for us, here’s what we’ll say: oh, Russian people, oh, Russian people! Don’t let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! Black and damp bridges are already thrown across the waters of Lethe. If only they could be dismantled. . . .^†

Too late. . . .

And the shadows thronged across the bridge. And the dark shadow of the stranger.

Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small, yet not very large bundle.