I bowed and thanked her for her trouble.
‘You can leave that,’ she said, pointing to the notebook.
She and my sister went up to Mrs Azhogin and they whispered for a minute or two, looking at me now and again. They were consulting one another about something.
‘Indeed,’ Mrs Azhogin said quietly as she came over to me and stared me in the face, ‘indeed, if this is keeping you from more serious work’ (she took the notebook from me) ‘you can hand it over to someone else. Don’t worry, my dear friend. Off with you now – and good luck.’
I said goodbye and left, feeling rather put out. As I went down the stairs I saw my sister and Anyuta Blagovo hurriedly leaving. They were talking excitedly, most probably about my railway job. My sister never used to come to rehearsals and was probably feeling guilty, afraid that Father might find out that she had been at the Azhogins’ without his permission.
Next day, at about half past twelve, I went to see Dolzhikov. A manservant showed me into a very fine room which the engineer used as drawing-room and office. Here everything was soft, elegant and even rather strange for someone like me, unused to such surroundings. There were expensive carpets, huge armchairs, bronzes, pictures, gilt and plush frames. The photographs all over the walls were of very beautiful women with clever, fine faces, in natural poses. From the drawing-room a door led straight onto a balcony overlooking the garden, where I could see lilac, a table laid for lunch, a great number of bottles and a bunch of roses. It smelt of spring, expensive cigars – the true smell of happiness – and everything seemed to be telling me that this man had really lived, worked hard and attained such happiness as is possible in this world. The engineer’s daughter was sitting at the writing-table reading the paper.
‘Have you come to see Father?’ she asked. ‘He’s having a shower and he’ll be down in a moment. Please take a seat.’
I sat down.
‘You live opposite, don’t you?’ she asked after a brief silence.
‘Yes.’
‘Every day I watch you out of the window, from nothing better to do. I hope it doesn’t bother you,’ she went on, glancing at the newspaper, ‘and I often see you or your sister. She always has such a kind, concentrated expression.’
Dolzhikov came in. He was drying his neck on a towel.
‘Papa, this is Monsieur Poloznev,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, so Blagovo told me,’ he said, turning briskly towards me without offering his hand. ‘Now listen, what do you want from me? What job do you think I have for you?’
In a loud voice, as if telling me off, he continued, ‘You’re a strange lot! Twenty men come here every day, thinking it’s an office I’m running here! I have a railway to run, gentlemen, and it’s damned hard work. I need mechanics, metal workers, navvies, carpenters, well-sinkers, but all you lot can do is sit on your behinds and scribble! You’re just writers!’
He exuded that same air of prosperity as his carpets and armchairs. Stout, rosy-cheeked, broad-chested, well-washed, he looked just like a china figure of a coachman in his cotton-print shirt and baggy trousers. He had a rounded, curly beard, a hooked nose, and his eyes were dark, clear, innocent. He didn’t have one grey hair on his head.
‘What can you do?’ he went on. ‘Nothing! I’m an engineer and I’m financially secure. But before I was put in charge of this railway I spent years sweating my guts out. I was an engine-driver, then I worked in Belgium for two years as a common greaser. So what work do you think I can give you, young man?’
‘Yes, you’re right, of course,’ I muttered. I was terribly taken aback and could not bear those clear, innocent eyes of his.
‘But you can at least work a telegraph, can’t you?’ he asked after a moment’s thought.
‘Yes, I’ve worked in a telegraph office.’
‘Hm… well, we’ll see. Go to Dubechnya2 for the time being. I do have someone there, but he’s a bloody dead loss.’
‘And what will my duties be?’ I asked.
‘We’ll see. Now, off you go for the time being and I’ll see to it. Only don’t start boozing while you’re working for me or come asking for any favours, or you’ll be out on your neck!’
He walked away without even a nod. I bowed to him and his daughter, who was reading the paper, and left. I felt so terribly depressed that when my sister asked what kind of reception I’d had at the engineer’s I just could not speak one word.
Next morning I rose very early, at sunrise, to go to Dubechnya. Great Dvoryansky Street was absolutely deserted – everyone was still in bed – and my footsteps had a hollow, solitary ring. The dew-covered poplars filled the air with their gentle fragrance. I felt sad and reluctant to leave the town. I loved my birthplace, it seemed so beautiful and warm! I loved the greenery, the quiet sunny mornings, the sound of church bells. But the people I had to live with bored me, were like strangers and at times they disgusted me. I neither liked nor understood them. I could not understand what these sixty-five thousand people were living for or how they made ends meet. I knew that Kimry3 earned its living from boots, that Tula4 made samovars and rifles, that Odessa was a port. But I had no idea what our town was or what it produced. The people of Great Dvoryansky Street, and two other better-class streets, lived off their capital and civil servants’ salaries that were paid by the government. But how the remaining eight streets that ran parallel for two miles and disappeared behind the hill coped was always an insoluble mystery to me. It embarrasses me to describe how they lived. No public gardens, no theatre, no decent orchestra. Only young Jewish men went into the town and club libraries, so magazines and new books lay uncut for months. Rich, educated people slept in stuffy, cramped bedrooms on wooden beds crawling with bugs, children were kept in disgustingly dirty rooms called nurseries and even old and respected servants slept on the kitchen floor, covered in rags. On fast days the houses reeked of borsch and on others of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. They ate nasty food and drank unwholesome water. At the town hall, the governor’s, the bishop’s – all over the place – they had been talking for years about the town not having good, cheap water and maintained that two hundred thousand should be borrowed from the government to provide a proper supply. The three dozen or so very rich people in town, who had been known to gamble away whole estates at cards, also drank the bad water and were forever talking excitedly about the loan: this was something I just could not understand. It struck me that it would have been simpler for them to lay out the money from their own pockets.
I did not know one honest man in the whole town. My father took bribes, imagining that he was given them out of respect for his moral virtues. If schoolboys wanted to get into a higher class, they boarded with their teachers, who charged them the earth. At recruiting-time the military commander’s wife took bribes from the young men, even allowing them to buy her a few drinks, and once she was too drunk to get up off her knees in church. The doctors also took bribes at recruiting-time, while the town medical officer and vet levied a tax on butchers’ shops and inns. The local college traded in certificates granting exemption to certain classes; the senior clergy took bribes from the lower and from churchwardens. Anyone making an application at the municipal offices, the citizens’ bureau, the health clinic and any other kind of institution was followed as he left by shouts of ‘Don’t forget to say thank you,’ which meant going back and handing over thirty or forty copecks. And those who didn’t accept bribes – officials from the law department, for example – were arrogant, shook hands with two fingers, and were callous and narrow-minded. They played cards a great deal, drank a lot, and married the rich girls. There was no doubt that they had a harmful, corrupting influence on their surroundings. Only a few young girls gave any hint of moral purity. Most of them had honourable aspirations, were decent and pure of heart. But they had no knowledge of life and believed that bribes were given out of respect for moral virtue. After marrying they let themselves go, aged quickly and were hopelessly swallowed up in the mire of
that vulgar, philistine existence.
III
They were building a railway in our district. On Saturday evenings gangs of louts roamed around the town. They were called navvies and the people were scared of them. I often saw one of these brutes, bloody-faced and capless, hauled off to the police station, while material evidence in the form of a samovar or underwear still wet from the washing-line was carried behind. The navvies usually congregated around pubs and markets. They ate, drank and swore and pursued every woman of easy virtue who happened to be passing with piercing whistles. To amuse this starving riff-raff our shopkeepers gave dogs and cats vodka to drink, or tied a paraffin can to a dog’s tail and then whistled, making it tear down the street. Squealing in terror from the can clattering after it, the dog would think some dreadful monster was in hot pursuit and ran way out of town, far into the fields, until it dropped exhausted. And there were some dogs in the town that never stopped trembling, their tails permanently between their legs. People said the joke was too much for them and they had gone mad.
The station was being constructed about three miles from town. The engineers were said to have asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles if they brought the line right up to the town. But the council was not prepared to pay more than forty and they fell out over the ten thousand. And now the citizens were sorry, because they had to build a road to the station which, according to estimates, would cost a great deal more. Sleepers and rails had already been laid along the whole line and service trains ran, carrying building materials and workmen. The only delay was with the bridges, which Dolzhikov was building, and one or two unfinished stations.
Dubechnya, as the first station was called, was about eleven miles away. I walked there. As the morning sun caught them, the cornfields shone bright green. The countryside was flat and cheerful round about here, and in the distance the station, hillocks and remote farmsteads were clearly outlined. How good it was to be out in the open country! And how I longed to be saturated by this awareness of freedom – if only for one morning – so that I could forget what was happening in town, forget how hungry and poor I was. Nothing was so off-putting as those sharp pangs of hunger, when loftier notions became strangely intermingled with thoughts of buckwheat porridge, mutton chops and fried fish. There I was standing in the fields looking up at a skylark hovering motionless in the air, hysterically pouring out its song, while all I could think was ‘Some bread and butter would be nice!’ Or I would sit by the roadside with my eyes closed, to rest and to listen to the wonderful sounds of May – when suddenly I’d recall the smell of hot potatoes. In general, for someone so tall and strongly built as myself, I wasn’t getting enough to eat and therefore my overriding sensation during the day was one of hunger. Perhaps it was because of this that I understood so well why many people work just for their daily bread and can talk only of food.
At Dubechnya the inside of the station was being plastered and an upper wooden storey added to the pumping-house. It was hot, there was a smell of slaked lime and the workmen idly wandered around piles of wooden shavings and rubble. A pointsman was sleeping near his hut and the sun beat right into his face. There wasn’t a single tree. The telegraph wires, with hawks perched on them here and there, hummed faintly. Not knowing what to do I wandered among the heaps of rubbish and remembered the engineer’s reply when I asked what my duties would be: ‘… we’ll see’. But what was there to see in this wilderness? The plasterers talked about a foreman and a certain Fedot Vasilyev. It was all foreign to me and I became more and more depressed – a physical depression when you are conscious of your arms, legs and massive body, but when you have no idea what to do with them or where to put them.
After wandering about for at least two hours I noticed some telegraph poles stretching away from the station to the right of the track, stopping by a white stone wall about a mile off. The workmen said that the office was over there and at last I understood that that was where I had to report.
It was a very old, long-abandoned country estate. The spongy stone wall, severely weathered, had collapsed in places. The blind wall of one of the outbuildings – which had a rusty roof patched with shiny bits of tin – faced the open country. Through the gates I could see a spacious yard thick with weeds and an old manor house with sun-blinds in the window and a steep roof red with rust. On each side of the house stood the outbuildings, which were identical. One had its windows boarded up, while the other’s were open. A line of washing hung nearby and some calves were wandering about. The last telegraph pole stood in the yard with a wire leading from it to a window in the outbuilding with the outward-facing blank wall. The door was open and I went in. A man with dark curly hair and a canvas jacket was sitting at a table by the telegraph apparatus. He gave me a stern, sullen look, but immediately smiled and said, ‘Hullo, Better-than-Nothing.’
It was Ivan Cheprakov, an old friend from school who had been expelled from Form Two for smoking. During the autumn we used to catch goldfinches, greenfinches and grosbeaks and sell them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still asleep. We would lie in wait for flocks of migrant starlings, shooting at them with pellets and then gathering up the wounded. Some of them died in the most terrible torment – to this day I can remember them squeaking at night in the cage in my room. The ones that recuperated were sold and we swore blind that they were males. In the market once I had only one starling left which I had been trying to sell and finally let it go for a mere copeck. ‘Still, it’s better than nothing!’ I said, trying to console myself as I put the copeck in my pocket. From that time street urchins and the boys from school nicknamed me ‘Better-than-Nothing’. Urchins and shopkeepers still teased me with this name, although no one except me could remember its origin.
Cheprakov wasn’t strongly built. He was narrow-chested, round-shouldered and long-legged. His tie was like a piece of string, he had no waistcoat, and his down-at-heel boots were in a worse state than mine. He rarely blinked and always had a look of urgency about him, as though about to grab something.
‘Now, wait a jiff,’ he said, fidgeting. ‘And listen! Now, what was I saying?’
We started talking. I found out that the estate where I now was had been the Cheprakovs’ property until recently, and only last autumn had passed into the hands of Dolzhikov, who thought it more profitable to put his money into land than keep it in cash. Already he had bought three sizeable estates in the district on mortgage. At the sale Cheprakov’s mother had reserved the right to live in one of the outbuildings for two years and had talked them into giving her son a job in the office.
‘It would have surprised me if he hadn’t bought it!’ Cheprakov said, referring to the engineer. ‘He makes so much out of the contractors alone! He fleeces everybody!’
Then he took me off to dinner, having decided, after a great deal of fuss, that I would live with him in the outbuilding and have my meals at his mother’s.
‘She’s very tight-fisted with me,’ he said. ‘But she won’t charge you very much.’
It was very cramped in the small rooms where his mother lived. All of them, even the hall and lobby, were crammed with furniture brought from the big house after the sale of the estate. It was all mahogany and very old-fashioned. Mrs Cheprakov, a very plump, middle-aged woman with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in a large armchair at the window knitting a stocking.
She greeted me with great ceremony.
‘Mother, this is Poloznev,’ Cheprakov said, introducing me. ‘He’ll be working here.’
‘Are you a gentleman?’ she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice. I thought I could hear fat gurgling in her throat.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Please sit down.’
It was a poor meal. All we had was sour curd pie and milk soup. Yelena Nikiforovna, our hostess, kept winking strangely, first with one eye, then the other. Although she spoke and ate, there was something deathly about her whole body and she even seemed to smell like a corpse. There was
scarcely a flicker of life in her, only the dim consciousness that she was a lady, and a landowner, who had once owned serfs, and that she had been a general’s wife, whom the servants had to call madam. When these pathetic remnants of life briefly flared up she would tell her son, ‘Jean, you’re not holding your knife properly.’
Or she would breathe deeply and tell me, with all the affectedness of a hostess anxious to entertain her guest, ‘As you know, we’ve sold the estate. It’s a pity, of course, we’d grown so used to it. But Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster at Dubechnya, so we shan’t be leaving. We’ll live in the station, which is really the same as being on the estate. Such a nice man, that engineer! He’s very handsome, isn’t he?’
Not long before, the Cheprakovs had been living in style, but after the general died everything changed. Mrs Cheprakov started quarrelling with the neighbours and taking people to court. She stopped paying her managers and workmen. She was in perpetual fear of being robbed and in about ten years Dubechnya had become unrecognizable.
Behind the main house was an old garden that had run wild, and it was choked with weeds and bushes. I walked up and down the terrace, which was still firm and beautiful. Through a french window I could see a room with a parquet floor – most probably the drawing-room. The only furniture was an old-fashioned piano and engravings in broad mahogany frames on the walls. All that was left of the flower-beds were peonies and poppies holding their white and bright red heads above the grass. Young maples and elms, gnawed at by cows, grew over the paths, stretching out and crowding one another. The garden was thickly overgrown and seemed impenetrable, but this was only near the house, where there were still poplars, pines and ancient limes, all of the same age and survivors of former avenues. Beyond them, however, the garden had been cleared for mowing hay, and here it was not so damp, one’s mouth and eyes were not attacked by cobwebs, and now and then a gentle breeze stirred. The deeper you went into that garden the more it opened out. Here there were wild cherry and plum trees, wide-spreading apple trees disfigured by props and canker. There were such lofty pear trees that it was hard to believe they really were pear trees. This part of the garden was rented to women traders from the town and it was guarded against thieves and starlings by an idiot peasant who lived in a cottage.