At midday the peck of a key (now we switch to the prose-rhythm of Bely) was heard, and the lock reacted in character, clacking: that was Marianna (stopgap) Nikolavna home from the market; with a ponderous step and a sickening swish of her mackintosh she carried a thirty-pound netful of shopping past his door and into the kitchen. Muse of Russian prose-rhythm! Say farewell forever to the cabbage dactylics of the author of Moscow. All feeling of comfort was now gone. Of the morning capaciousness of time nothing remained. The bed had turned into a parody of a bed. In the sounds of dinner being prepared in the kitchen there was an unpleasant reproach, and the perspective of washing and shaving seemed as flat and impossible as the perspective of the early Italians. And with this, too, you will have to part some day.
A quarter past twelve, twenty past twelve, half past … He allowed himself one last cigarette in the tenacious although already tedious warmth of the bed. The anachronism of his pillow became more and more obvious. Without finishing his cigarette he got up and passed immediately from a world of many interesting dimensions into one that was cramped and demanding, with a different pressure, which instantly caused his body to tire and his head to ache; into a world of cold water: the hot was not running today.
A poetic hangover, dejection, the “sad animal” … The day before he had forgotten to rinse his safety razor, between its teeth there was stony foam, the blade had rusted—and he had no other. A pale self-portrait looked out of the mirror with the serious eyes of all self-portraits. On a tenderly itchy spot to one side of his chin, among the hairs which had grown up overnight (how many yards of them shall I cut off in my life?), there had appeared a yellow-headed pimple which instantly became the hub of Fyodor’s existence, a rallying point for all the unpleasant feelings now trekking in from different parts of his being. He squeezed it out—although he knew it would later swell up three times as big. How awful all this was. Through the cold shaving-soap foam pierced the little red eye: L’oeil regardait Caïn. Meanwhile the blade had no effect on the hairs, and the feel of the bristles when he checked them with his fingers produced a sense of hellish hopelessness. Drops of blood dew appeared in the vicinity of his Adam’s apple but the hairs were still there. The Steppe of Despair. On top of everything else the bathroom was on the darkish side and even if he had put on the light the immortelle-like yellowness of daytime electricity would have been no help at all. Finishing his shave anyhow, he squeamishly climbed into the bath and groaned under the icy impact of the shower; then he made a mistake with the towels and thought miserably that he would be smelling all day of Marianna Nikolavna. The skin of his face smarted, revoltingly chafish, with one particularly hot little ember on the side of his chin. Suddenly the door handle of the bathroom was jerked vigorously (that was Shchyogolev returning). Fyodor Konstantinovich waited for the footfalls to recede, and then popped back into his room.
Soon afterwards he entered the dining room. Marianna Nikolavna was ladling out the soup. He kissed her rough hand. Her daughter, who was just back from work, came to the table with slow steps, worn out and seemingly dazed by her office; she sat down with graceful languor—a cigarette in her long fingers, powder on her lashes, a turquoise silk jumper, short-cut fair hair brushed back from the temple, sullenness, silence, ash. Shchyogolev gulped down a dram of vodka, tucked his napkin into his collar and began to slop up his soup, looking over his spoon affably but cautiously at his stepdaughter. She was slowly mixing a white exclamation mark of sour cream into her borshch, but then, shrugging her shoulders, she pushed her plate away. Marianna Nikolavna, who had been gloomily watching her, threw her napkin on the table and left the dining room.
“Come on, eat, Aïda,” said Shchyogolev, thrusting out his wet lips. Without a word of reply, as if he was not there—only the nostrils of her narrow nose quivered—she turned in her chair, easily and naturally twisted her long body, obtained an ashtray from the sideboard behind her, placed it by her plate and flicked some ash into it. Marianna Nikolavna, with a hurt look beglooming her ample crudely madeup face, returned from the kitchen. The daughter placed her left elbow on the table and slightly leaning on it slowly began her soup.
“Well, Fyodor Konstantinovich,” began Shchyogolev, having satisfied his first hunger, “it seems matters are coming to a head! A complete break with England, and Hinchuk walloped! You know it’s already beginning to smell of something serious. You remember, only the other day I said Koverda’s shot was the first signal! War! You have to be very, very naïve to deny it’s inevitable. Judge for yourself, in the Far East, Japan cannot put up with …”
And Shchyogolev launched on a discussion of politics. Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon following which a logical and sober mind (in this case his mind) could with no effort explain and foresee a multitude of world events. The names of countries and of their leading representatives became in his hands something in the nature of labels for more or less full but essentially identical vessels, whose contents he poured this way and that. France was AFRAID of something or other and therefore would never ALLOW it.
England was AIMING at something. This statesman CRAVED a rapprochement, while that one wanted to increase his PRESTIGE. Someone was PLOTTING and someone was STRIVING for something. In short, the world Shchyogolev created came out as some kind of collection of limited, humorless, faceless and abstract bullies, and the more brains, cunning and circumspection he found in their mutual activities the more stupid, vulgar and simple his world became.
It used to be quite awesome when he came across another similar lover of political prognoses. For example, there was a Colonel Kasatkin, who used to come sometimes to dinner, and then Shchyogolev’s England clashed not with another Shchyogolev country but with Kasatkin’s England, equally nonexistent, so that in a certain sense international wars turned into civil wars, although the warring sides existed on different levels which could never come into contact with one another. At present, while listening to his landlord, Fyodor was amazed by the family likeness between the countries mentioned by Shchyogolev and the various parts of Shchyogolev’s own body: thus “France” corresponded to his warningly raised eyebrows; some kind of “limitrophes” to the hairs in his nostrils, some “Polish corridor” or other went along his esophagus; “Danzig” was the click of his teeth; and Russia was Shchyogolev’s bottom.
He talked all through the next two courses (goulash, kissel) and after that, picking his teeth with a broken match, went to take a nap. Marianna Nikolavna busied herself with the dishes before doing the same. Her daughter, having not uttered a single word, went back to her office.
Fyodor had only just managed to clear the bedclothes from the couch before a pupil arrived, the son of an émigré dentist, a fat, pale youth in horn-rimmed spectacles, with a fountain pen in his breast pocket. Attending, as he did, a Berlin high school, the poor boy was so steeped in the local habitus that even in English he made the same ineradicable mistakes as any skittle-headed German would have made. There was no force on earth, for example, which could have stopped him using the past continuous instead of the simple past, and this endowed every of his accidental activities of the day before with a kind of idiotic permanence.
Equally stubbornly he handled the English “also” like the German “also,” and in overcoming the thorny ending of the word “clothes” he invariably added a superfluous sibilant syllable (“clothes-zes”), as if skidding after having cleared an obstacle. At the same time he expressed himself fairly freely in English and had only sought the aid of a coach because he wanted to get the highest mark in the final examination. He was self-satisfied, discursive, obtuse and germanically ignorant; i.e., he treated everything he did not know with skepticism.
Firmly believing that the humorous side of things had long since been worked out in the proper place for it (the back page of a Berlin illustrated weekly), he never laughed, or limited himself to a condescending snicker. The only thing that could just barely amuse him was a story about some ingenious financial operation. His whole philosophy of life had been reduced to the simplest proposition: the poor man is unhappy, the rich man is happy. This legalized happiness was playfully put together to the accompaniment of first-class dance music, out of various items of technical luxury. For the lesson he always did his best to come a little before the hour and tried to leave a little after it.
Hurrying to his next trial, Fyodor left together with him, and the latter, accompanying him as far as the corner, endeavored to collect a few more English expressions gratis, but Fyodor,
