Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 25

The aged senator communicated with the crowd that flowed in front of him by means of wires (telegraph and telephone). The shadowy stream seemed to him like the calmly current news of the world. Apollon Apollonovich was thinking: about the stars. Rocking on the black cushions, he was calculating the power of the light perceived from Saturn.

Suddenly—

—his face grimaced and began to twitch. His blue-rimmed eyes rolled back convulsively. His hands flew up to his chest. And his torso reeled back, while the top hat struck the wall and fell on his lap.

The involuntary nature of his movement was not subject to explanation. The senator’s code of rules had not foreseen. . . .

Contemplating the flowing silhouettes, Apollon Apollonovich likened them to shining dots. One of these dots broke loose from its orbit and hurtled at him with dizzying speed, taking the form of an immense crimson sphere—

—among the bowlers on the corner, he caught sight of a pair of eyes. And the eyes expressed the inadmissible. They recognized the senator, and, having recognized him, they grew rabid, dilated, lit up, and flashed.

Subsequently, on delving into the details of the matter, Apollon Apollonovich understood, rather than remembered, that the upstart intellectual^† was holding a bundle in his hand.

Hemmed in by a stream of vehicles,^† the carriage had stopped at an intersection. A stream of upstart intellectuals had pressed against the senator’s carriage, destroying the illusion that he, Apollon Apollonovich, in flying along the Nevsky, was flying billions of miles away from the human myriapod. Perturbed, Apollon Apollonovich had moved closer to the window. At that point he had caught sight of the upstart intellectual. Later he had remembered that face, and was perplexed by the difficulty of assigning it to any of the existing categories.

It was at just that moment that the stranger’s eyes had dilated, lit up, and flashed.

In the swarms of dingy smoke, leaning back against the wall of the carriage, he was still seeing the same thing in his eyes. His heart pounded and expanded, while in his breast arose the sensation of a crimson sphere about to burst into pieces.

Apollon Apollonovich, you see, suffered from dilatation of the heart.

Automatically putting on his top hat and pressing his hand to his racing heart, Apollon Apollonovich had abandoned himself to his favorite contemplation, cubes, in order to give himself a calm account of what had occurred.

***

The horses came to a halt. The policeman saluted. Behind the glass of the entryway, beneath the bearded caryatid^† supporting the stones of a little balcony, Apollon Apollonovich saw the same thing as always. The heavy-headed bronze mace gleamed there; the dark tricorne had fallen onto the shoulder there: the octogenarian doorman dozed over The Stock Exchange Register.^† Thus he had dozed the day before yesterday and yesterday.

Thus he had been sleeping for the past five years. Thus he would sleep on.

Since the time that Apollon Apollonovich had driven up to the Government Institution as head of the Government Institution, more than five years had gone by. And there had been events: there had been turmoil in China, and Port Arthur had fallen.^†

***

The door flew open. The bronze mace rang out. From the carriage door Apollon Apollonovich transferred his gaze into the entryway.

“Your Excellency. . . . Do sit down, sir. . . . Heavens, you’re all out of breath. . . .

“You’re always running like a little boy. . . .

“Maybe you’d like some water?”

But the eminent statesman’s face became all wrinkles:

“Tell me, if you will: who is the husband of the countess?”^†

“Which countess, may I ask?”

“Oh, just any countess.”

“?”

“The counter.”

***

“Heh, heh, heh, sir. . . .”

***