Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 26

Amidst the crowds that slowly flowed past, the stranger was flowing past. Or rather, he was flowing away in utter confusion from the intersection where he had been pressed against a carriage, from which had stared an ear, a top hat.

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.