He could discuss these two books for hours and it seemed that he had read nothing else in his life. He was generous with stories of judicial practice in the provinces and with Jewish anecdotes. Instead of “we had some champagne and set out” he expressed himself as follows: “We cracked a bottle of fizz—and hup.” As with most babblers, his reminiscences always contained some extraordinary conversationalist who told him endless things of interest (“I’ve never met another as clever as he in all my life,” he would remark somewhat uncivilly)—and since it was impossible to imagine Boris Ivanovich in the role of a silent listener, one had to allow that this was a special form of split personality.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do?
Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound.
“My better half,” he said on another occasion, “was for twenty years the wife of a kike and got mixed up with a whole rabble of Jew in-laws. I had to expend quite a bit of effort to get rid of that stink. Zina [he alternately called his stepdaughter either this or Aïda, depending on his mood], thank God, doesn’t have anything specific—you should see her cousin, one of these fat little brunettes, you know, with a fuzzy upperlip.
In fact, it has occurred to me that my Marianna, when she was Madam Mertz, might have had other interests—one can’t help being drawn to one’s own people, you know. Let her tell you herself how she suffocated in that atmosphere, what relatives she acquired—oh, my Gott—all gabbling at table and she pouring out the tea. And to think that her mother was a lady-in-waiting of the Empress and that she herself had gone to the Smolny School for young ladies—and then she went and married a yid—to this very day she can’t explain how it happened: he was rich, she says, and she was stupid, they met in Nice, she eloped to Rome with him—in the open air, you know, it all looked different—well, but when afterwards the little clan closed upon her, she saw she was stuck.”
Zina told it quite differently. In her version the image of her father took on something of Proust’s Swann. His marriage to her mother and their subsequent life were tinted with a romantic haze. Judging by her words and judging also by the photographs of him, he had been a refined, noble, intelligent and kindly man—even in these stiff St. Petersburg cabinet pictures with a gold stamped signature on the thick cardboard, which she showed Fyodor at night under a streetlamp, the old-fashioned luxuriance of his blond mustache and the height of his collars did nothing to spoil his delicate features and direct, laughing gaze.
She told him about his scented handkerchief, and his passion for trotting races and music, and that time in his youth when he had routed a visiting grand master of chess, and the way he recited Homer by heart: in talking of him she selected things that might touch Fyodor’s imagination, since it seemed to her she detected something sluggish and bored in his reaction to her reminiscences of her father, that is to the most precious thing she had to show him. He himself noticed this strangely delayed responsiveness of his. Zina had one quality which embarrassed him: her home life had developed in her a morbidly acute pride, so that even when talking to Fyodor she referred to her race with challenging emphasis, as if stressing the fact that she took for granted (a fact which its stressing denied) that he regarded Jews, not only without the hostility present to a greater or lesser degree in the majority of Russians, but did so without the chilly smile of forced goodwill.
In the beginning she drew these strings so taut that he, who in general did not give a damn about the classification of people according to race, or racial interrelations, began to feel a bit awkward for her, and on the other hand, under the influence of her burning, watchful pride, he became aware of a kind of personal shame for listening silently to Shchyogolev’s loathesome rot and to his trick of garbling Russian, in imitation of a farcical Jewish accent as when he said, for instance, to a wet guest who had left traces on the carpet: “Oy, vat a mudnik!”
For a certain time after her father’s death their former friends and relatives from his side had automatically continued to visit her mother and her; but little by little they thinned out and fell away, and only one old couple for a long time continued to come, feeling sorry for Marianna Nikolavna, feeling sorry for the past and trying to ignore Shchyogolev’s retreating to his bedroom with a cup of tea and a newspaper. But Zina had continued to preserve her connection with the world her mother had betrayed, and on visits to these former family friends she changed extraordinarily, grew softer and kinder (she herself remarked upon this), as she sat at the tea table among the quiet conversations of old people about illnesses, weddings and Russian literature.
At home she was unhappy and this unhappiness she despised. She also despised her work, even though her boss was a Jew—however, a German Jew, i.e., first of all a German, so that she had no qualms about abusing him in Fyodor’s presence. So vividly, so bitterly and with such revulsion did she tell him about that lawyer’s office, where she had already been working for two years, that he saw and smelled everything as if he himself were there every day. The atmosphere of her office reminded him somehow of Dickens (in a German paraphrase, it is true)—a semi-insane world of gloomy lean men and repulsive chubby ones, subterfuge, black shadows, nightmare snouts, dust, stench and women’s tears.
It began with a dark, steep, incredibly dilapidated staircase which was fully matched by the sinister decrepitude of the office premises, a state of affairs not true only of the chief barrister’s office with its overstuffed armchairs and giant glass-topped-table furnishings. The main office, large, plain, with bare, shuddering windows, was choked with an accumulation of dirty, dusty furniture—especially dreadful was the sofa, of a dull purple color with protruding springs, a horrible, obscene object dumped here after gradually passing through the offices of all three directors—Traum, Baum and Käsebier. The innumerable shelves blocking every inch of wall were crammed with grim blue folders that stuck out their long labels, along which from time to time crawled a hungry, litigious bedbug.
By the windows worked four typists: one was a hunchback who spent her salary on clothes; the second was a slender, flighty little thing whose father, a butcher, had been killed with a meat hook by his hot-tempered son; the third was a defenseless young girl who was slowly collecting a trousseau, and the fourth was a married woman, a buxom blonde, whose soul was little more than a replica of her apartment and who recounted movingly how after a day of SPIRITUAL LABOR she felt such a thirst for the relaxation of physical work that upon coming home she would throw open all the windows and joyously set about the washing.
The office manager, Hamekke (a fat, coarse animal with smelly feet and a perpetually oozing furuncle on the nape, who liked to recall how in his sergeant days he had made clumsy recruits clean the barrack-room floor with toothbrushes), used to persecute the latter two with particular pleasure—one because the loss of her job for her would have meant not getting married, the other because she forthwith began to cry—those abundant, noisy tears which were so easy to provoke afforded him wholesome pleasure. Hardly literate, but gifted with an iron grip, immediately able to grasp the most unsavory aspect of any case, he was highly prized by his employers, Traum, Baum and Käsebier (a complete German idyll, with little tables amid the greenery and a wonderful view). Baum was rarely to be seen; the office maidens found that he dressed marvelously, and in truth his
