Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 30

“Suddenlys” are familiar to you. Why, then, do you bury your head like an ostrich at the approach of the inexorable “suddenly”?

“It” sneaks up behind your back. Sometimes it even precedes your appearance in a room. You feel horribly uneasy. In your back grows the sensation that a gang of things invisible has shoved its way in through your back, as through a door. You turn, you ask your hostess:

“Madam, would you mind if I close the door? I have a peculiar kind of nervous sensation: I can’t bear to sit with my back to the door.”

They laugh. You also laugh: as if there were no “suddenly.”

“It” feeds on cerebral play. It gladly devours all vileness of thought. And it swells up, while you melt like a candle. “Suddenly,” like a fattened yet unseen dog, begins to precede you, producing in an observer the impression that you are screened from view by an invisible cloud. This is what your “suddenly” is.

***

We left the stranger in that restaurant. Suddenly he turned around. It seemed to him that slime had gotten under his collar and had begun to ooze. He turned around. But there was nobody behind his back. And from there, from the door, something invisible shoved its way in.

At that very moment when my stranger turned away from the door, an unpleasant fat man came in through it. And as he walked toward the stranger, he set a floorboard creaking. His yellowish, clean-shaven face, inclined slightly to the side, smoothly floated on its own double chin. And besides, the face glistened.

At this point our stranger turned around. The person was waving a hat at him, half sealskin, with ear-flaps:

“Alexander Ivanych . . .”

“Lippanchenko!”^†

Round the person’s shirt collar was a necktie, satin-red, loud, and fastened with a large paste jewel. A dark yellow striped suit enveloped the person. Polish gleamed on his yellow shoes.

Taking a seat at the stranger’s table, the person yelled:

“A pot of coffee! And listen, some cognac. My bottle’s there, under my . . .”

And around them was heard:

“What about you? Did you have something to drink?”

“I did.”

“Something to eat?”

“I did.”

“Then permit me to say you’re a pig.”

***

“Careful!” exclaimed the stranger. The fat man, called Lippanchenko by the stranger, was about to set his dark yellow elbow on the sheet of newspaper covering the bundle.

“What?” Here Lippanchenko, lifting the paper, saw the bundle. His lips quivered.

“Is that the . . . the? . . .”

His lips still quivered, resembling pieces of sliced salmon,^† not yellowish red, but oily and yellow.

“How careless you are, Alexander Ivanovich, if I do say so.” Lippanchenko reached his clumsy thick fingers toward the bundle, all aglitter with the fake stones of his rings, all swollen, nails gnawed (and on the nails showed dark traces of brown dye, of a color identical to that of his hair; an attentive observer could draw the conclusion: why, this person dyes his hair).

“After all, the slightest movement (if I’d just set down my elbow), after all, there might have been a catastrophe.”

And with special caution the person now transferred the bundle to the chair.

“Well, yes, we would both have been splattered all over the walls,” the stranger joked unpleasantly.^†

***

And around them was heard:

“Don’t you dare call me a pig.”

“I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“Yes, you did. You’re mad you had to pay.”

“All right, go on and eat, let’s forget it.”

***

“Well then, Alexander Ivanovich, well then, my dear fellow, as for this bundle”—and Lippanchenko looked out of the corner of his eye—“take it to Nikolai Apollonovich right away.”

“Now wait a minute. The bundle will certainly be safe at my place.”

“That’s not convenient. You might be arrested. There it will be safe.”

And the fat man, leaning over, began whispering something in his ear:

“Pss–pss–pss . . .”

“Ableukhov’s?”

“Pss . . .”

“To Ableukhov? . . .”

“Pss . . .”

“With Ableukhov? . . .”

“No, not with the senator, with the son. Deliver this letter to him along with the bundle, here it is.”

Lippanchenko’s low narrow forehead was practically touching the stranger’s face. His searching little eyes were guarded, his lips quivered slightly and sucked at the air. The stranger lent a close ear to the whispering of the fat gentleman, carefully trying to make out the contents of the whispering, which was almost drowned out by the voices in the restaurant. And from the repugnant lips came a rustling (like the rustle of ants’ legs on a dug-up anthill). And it seemed as if the whispering had horrible contents, as though worlds and planetary systems were being whispered about here. But it was worthwhile listening closely, because the dreadful contents of the whispering were disintegrating into something humdrum.

“Be sure to deliver the letter.”

***

Around them was heard:

“What is Man?”

“Man is what he eats.”

“I know.”

“Well, since you know, grab a plate and eat.”^†

***

Lippanchenko’s suit reminded the stranger of the color of the yellow wallpaper in his habitation on Vasilievsky Island, a color associated with insomnia. That insomnia evoked the memory of a fateful face^† with very narrow little Mongol eyes. The face had looked repeatedly at him from the wallpaper. When he examined this place during the day, he could make out only a damp spot, over which crawled a sow bug. In order to distract himself from memories of the tormenting hallucination, he grew garrulous, to his own surprise:

“Listen carefully to the noise.”

“They’re noisy, all right.”

“You think you hear ‘s–s–s,’ but you really hear ‘SH’. . . .”

Lippanchenko, in a daze, had retreated into his own thoughts.

“You can hear something dull and slimy in the sound ‘sh.’ Or am I mistaken?”

“No, not at all,” and Lippanchenko tore himself away from his thoughts.

“All words with ‘sh’ are outrageously trivial.^† ‘S’ isn’t like that. ‘S–s–s’: sky, concept, crystal. The sound ‘s–s–s’ evokes in me the image of the curve of an eagle’s beak. But words with ‘sh’ are trivial. For example: the word fish. Listen: fi–sh–sh–sh, that is, something with cold blood. And again: slu–sh–sh–sh: something slimy; mush, something shapeless; rash, something diseased.”

The stranger broke off. Lippanchenko was sitting before him like utterly shapeless mush. And the ash from his cigarette slushed up the grayish atmosphere. Lippanchenko was sitting in a cloud. The stranger then looked at him and thought: “Ptui, what filth, how Tartarish.” Sitting before him was simply some kind of “SH.”

***

From the next table someone hiccuped and shouted: “Don’t you shush me, you!”

***

“Excuse me, Lippanchenko: are you by any chance a Mongol?”

“Why such a strange question?”

“Every Russian has some Mongol blood.”

***