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The stranger with the small black moustache slipped on it.

With one hand then he gripped the staircase railing, while his other hand (with the bundle) confusedly described in the air a nervous zigzag; but the description of zigzag actually applied to his elbow: my stranger evidently wanted to protect the bundle from a vexatious accident – its precipitate fall on to the stone step, because in the movement of his elbow there truly was manifested the skilful stunt of an acrobat: the delicate cunning of the movement was prompted by a certain instinct.

And then in his meeting with the yardkeeper, who was coming up the stairs with an armful of aspen wood slung over his shoulder, the stranger with the black moustache again concentratedly began to display a delicate care about the fate of his bundle, which might catch on a log; the objects contained in the bundle must have been objects especially fragile.

Otherwise my stranger’s behaviour would not have been comprehensible.

When the momentous stranger cautiously descended to the black exit door, a black cat that was near his feet spat and, tucking up its tail, cut across his path, dropping at the stranger’s feet a chicken entrail: my stranger’s face was distorted by a spasm; while his head jerked nervously back, displaying a soft neck.

These movements were peculiar to young ladies of the good old days when the young ladies of those days were beginning to experience a thirst: to confirm with an unusual action an interesting pallor of face, imparted by the drinking of vinegar and the sucking of lemons.

And precisely these same movements sometimes distinguish those of our young contemporaries who are worn out by insomnia. The stranger suffered from this kind of insomnia: the tobacco-smoke-filled nature of his abode hinted at that; and the bluish tint of the soft skin of his face bore witness to the same thing – such soft skin that had my stranger not been the possessor of a small moustache, I think you would probably have taken the stranger for a young lady in disguise.

And so there was the stranger – in the small courtyard, a quadrangle that had been entirely covered in asphalt and hemmed in on every side by the five storeys of a many-windowed colossus. In the middle of the courtyard damp cords of aspen wood had been piled; and even from here one could see a piece of the Seventeenth Line, whistled round by the wind.

Lines!

Only in you has the memory of Petrine Petersburg remained.

The parallel lines in the marshes had once been drawn by Peter;27 those lines had become coated now with granite, now with stone enclosures, now with wooden ones. Of Peter’s straight lines in Petersburg not a trace remained; Peter’s line had been converted into the line of a later era: the rounded line of Catherine, the Alexandrine formation of white stone colonnades.

Only here, amidst the colossi, the small Petrine houses had remained; there a house built of logs; there a green house; there a blue one, single-storeyed, with a bright red sign reading Stolovaya.28 It was exactly houses such as these that were scattered here in ancient times. Here also, one’s nose was struck directly by various smells: there was a smell of salt, of herring, of hawsers, of leather jacket and pipe, and shore tarpaulin.

The Lines!

How they have changed: how these grim days have changed them!

The stranger remembered: in that window of that lustrous little house on a summer evening in June, an old woman chewed her lips; since August the window had been closed; in September a silk brocade coffin had been brought.

He reflected that life was going up in price and that soon the working people would have nothing to eat; that from there, from the bridge, Petersburg came stabbing here with the arrows of its prospects and a band of stone giants; that band of giants would soon shamelessly and brazenly bury in their attics and basements the whole of the islands’ poor.

From the island my stranger had long hated Petersburg: there, from where Petersburg rose in a wave of clouds; and the buildings hovered there; there above the buildings someone malicious and dark seemed to hover, someone whose breathing firmly coated with the ice of granite and stone the once green and curly-headed islands; someone dark, terrible and cold, from there, from the warring chaos, fixedly with a stony gaze, beat in his mad hovering the wings of a bat; and lashed the islands’ poor with official words, standing out in the fog: skull and ears; thus not long ago had someone been depicted on the cover of a little journal.

The stranger thought this and clenched his fist in his pocket; he remembered the circular and remembered that the leaves were falling: my stranger knew it all by heart. These fallen leaves were for many the last leaves: my stranger became a bluish shadow.

For our part, however, we shall say: O, Russian people, Russian people! Do not let in the crowds of gliding shadows from the islands! Fear the islanders! They have a right to settle freely in the Empire: it is evidently for this purpose that black and grey bridges have been thrown over the waters of Lethe to the islands. They ought to be pulled down …

Too late …

The police did not even think of raising the Nikolayevsky Bridge; dark shadows began to throng over the bridge; among those shadows the shadow of the stranger began to throng, too. In its hand evenly swung a not exactly small, yet all the same not very large little bundle.

And, Having Caught Sight, Widened, Lit up, Flashed

In the greenish illumination of the Petersburg morning, in the saving ‘apparently’, a customary phenomenon also circulated in front of Senator Ableukhov: a manifestation of the atmosphere – a human stream; here people grew mute; their streams, accumulating in an undular surf, thundered, growled; but the accustomed ear could in no way detect that that human surf was a thunderous surf.

Welded together by the mirage the stream was disintegrating within itself into the elements of a stream: element upon element flowed by; perceptibly to the mind each was withdrawing from each, like planetary system from planetary system; neighbour was here in the same approximate relation to neighbour as that of a pencil of rays from the celestial vault to the retina of the eye, conveying to the centre of the brain along the telegraph of the nerves a troubled, stellar, shimmering message.

The aged senator communicated with the crowd that flowed before him by means of wires (telegraph and telephone); and the shadowy stream was borne to his consciousness like tidings that calmly flowed beyond the distances of the world. Apollon Apollonovich thought: about the stars, about the inarticulateness of the thunderous stream that was hurtling by; and, as he swayed on a black cushion, he calculated the intensity of the light that was perceptible from Saturn.

Suddenly … –

– his face winced and was distorted by a tic; his stony eyes, surrounded by blue, rolled convulsively; his wrists, clad in black suede, flew up to the level of his chest, as though he were defending himself with his hands. And his torso leaned back, while his top hat, striking the wall, fell on to his knees below his bared head …

The uncontrolled quality of the senator’s movement was not subject to the customary interpretation; the senator’s code of rules had not foreseen anything of this kind …

As he contemplated the flowing silhouettes – the bowlers, feathers, service caps, service caps, service caps, feathers – Apollon Apollonovich likened them to points in the celestial vault; but one of those points, breaking loose from its orbit, rushed at him with dizzying speed, assuming the form of an enormous and crimson sphere, or rather, what I mean is:

– as he contemplated the flowing silhouettes (service caps, service caps, feathers), Apollon Apollonovich saw on the corner among the service caps, among the feathers, among the bowlers, a pair of furious eyes: the eyes expressed a certain inadmissible quality; the eyes recognized the senator; and, having recognized, grew furious; perhaps the eyes had been waiting on the corner; and, having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed.

This furious stare was a stare consciously thrown and belonged to a raznochinets with a small black moustache, wearing a coat with a turned-up collar; subsequently going more deeply into the details of the circumstance, Apollon Apollonovich more concluded than remembered something else as well: in his right hand the raznochinets was holding a little bundle tied with a wet napkin.

The matter was so simple: squeezed by the stream of droshkys, the carriage had stopped at a crossroads (the policeman there was lifting his white baton); the stream of raznochintsy that was moving past, squeezed by the flight of the droshkys towards the stream of the ones that were racing perpendicularly, cutting across the Nevsky – this stream now simply pressed itself against the senator’s carriage, breaking the illusion that he, Apollon Apollonovich, as he flew along the Nevsky, was flying billions of versts away from the human myriapod that was trampling the very same prospect: rendered uneasy, Apollon Apollonovich moved close to the windows of the carriage, having seen that he was separated from the crowd by only a thin wall and a space of four inches; at this point he caught sight of the raznochinets; and began calmly to study him; there was something worthy of notice in the whole of that unprepossessing figure; and no doubt a physiognomist, encountering that figure in the street by chance, would have stopped in amazement: and then in the midst of his activities would have remembered that face he had seen; the peculiarity of that face consisted merely in the difficulty of classifying that face among any of the existing categories – no more than that …

This observation would have flickered through the senator’s head had this observation lasted a second or two longer; but last it did not. The stranger raised his eyes and – on the other side of the mirror-like carriage window, removed from him by a space of four inches, he saw not a face, but … a skull in a top hat and an enormous pale green ear.

In that same quarter of a second the senator saw in the stranger’s eyes – that same immensity of chaos from which by the nature of things the foggy, many-chimneyed distance and Vasily Island surveyed the senator’s house.

It was precisely at that moment that the stranger’s eyes widened, lit up, flashed: and it was precisely at that moment that, separated by a space of four inches and the carriage wall, quickly on the other side of the window hands were thrown up, covering eyes.

The carriage flew past; with it, into those damp spaces, flew Apollon Apollonovich; to where from where – on clear days rose splendidly – the golden needle, the clouds and the crimson sunset; to where from where today came swarms of grimy clouds.

There in the swarms of grimy smoke, as he leaned back against the wall of the carriage, in his eyes he still saw the same thing: the swarms of grimy smoke; his heart began to thump; and expanded, expanded, expanded; in his breast there came into being the sensation of a growing, crimson sphere that was about to explode and shatter into pieces.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov suffered from dilatation of the heart.

All this lasted an instant.

Apollon Apollonovich, automatically putting on his top hat and pressing a black suede hand to his galloping heart, again devoted himself to his beloved contemplation of cubes, in order to give himself a calm and sensible account of what had taken place.

Apollon Apollonovich again looked out of the carriage: what he saw now blotted out what had gone before: a wet, slippery prospect; wet, slippery flagstones shining feverishly in the miserable September day!

The horses stopped. A policeman saluted. Behind the glass of the entrance porch, behind a bearded caryatid that supported the stones of a small balcony, Apollon Apollonovich saw the same spectacle as usual: a heavy-headed bronze mace gleamed there; the dark triangle of the doorman had subsided on an octogenarian shoulder there. The octogenarian doorman was falling asleep over the Stock Exchange Gazette. Thus had he fallen asleep yesterday, and the day before yesterday. Thus had he slept for the past fateful five years29 … Thus would he sleep for the next five years to come.

Five years had now passed since Apollon Apollonovich rolled up to the Institution as the junior head of the Institution: over five years had passed since that time! And there had been events: China had been in a state of ferment and Port Arthur had fallen.30 But the vision of the years is immutable: an octogenarian shoulder, gold braid, a beard.

The door flew open: the bronze mace banged. Apollon Apollonovich carried his stony gaze into the wide open entrance porch. And the door closed.

Apollon Apollonovich stood and breathed.

‘Your excellency … Please sit down, sir … Look at you, how you’re panting …’

‘You’re forever running as though you were a little boy …’

‘Please sit down, your excellency: get your breath back …’

‘There now, that’s it, sir …’

‘Perhaps … a little water?’

But the face of the distinguished man of state brightened up, became childish, senile; it dissolved entirely in wrinkles:

‘But tell me, please: what is the husband of a countess, a grafinya?’

‘A countess, sir? … But which one, may I be allowed to ask?’

‘Oh, just any old grafinya.’

‘The husband of a grafinya is a grafin, a decanter!’

‘Hee-hee-hee, sir …’

And the heart that was disobedient to the mind trembled and thumped; and because of this, everything all around it was the same and not the same …

Of Two Poorly Dressed Coursistes …31

Among the slowly flowing crowds the stranger was flowing, too; and more precisely, he was flowing away, in complete confusion, from that crossroads where by the stream of people he had been squeezed against the black carriage, from whence had stared at him: a skull, an ear, a top hat.

That ear and that skull!

Remembering them, the stranger hurled himself into flight.

Couple after couple flowed past: threesomes, foursomes flowed past; from each one to the sky rose a smoky pillar of conversation, interweaving, fusing with smoky, contiguously moving pillar; intersecting the pillars of conversation, my stranger caught fragments of them; from those fragments both phrases and sentences formed.

The gossip of the Nevsky began to plait itself.

‘Do you know?’ came from somewhere to the right and expired in the accumulating rumble.

And then to the surface again came:

‘They’re going to …’

‘What?’

‘Throw …’

There was a whispering from the rear.

The stranger with the small black moustache, turning round, saw: a bowler hat, a walking stick, a coat; ears, a moustache and a nose …

‘Who at?’

‘Who, who,’ came an echoed whisper from afar; and then the dark suit spoke.

‘Abl …’

And, having spoken, the suit moved on.

‘Ableukhov?’

‘At Ableukhov?’

But the suit finished what it was saying somewhere over there …

‘Abl … oody wish you’d try to splash me with a … cid … just you try …’

And the suit hiccuped.

But the stranger stood still, shaken by all he had heard:

‘They’re going to? …’

‘Throw? …’

‘At Abl …’

‘Oh no: they’re not going to …’

While all round the whisper began:

‘Soon …’

And then again from the rear:

‘It’s time …’

And having disappeared round the crossroads, there came from another crossroads:

‘It’s time … pravo, indeed it is …’

The stranger heard not pravo (indeed) but provo- and himself completed the word:

‘Provocation?!’

Provocation began to go on a spree along the Nevsky. Provocation altered the sense of all the words that had been heard: with provocation did it endow the innocent ‘indeed’; while it turned ‘I bloody wish’ into the devil knew what:

‘At Abl …’

And the stranger thought:

‘At Ableukhov.’

He had simply of his own accord attached the preposition ‘at’: by the appendage of the letter a and the letter t an innocent verbal fragment had been changed into a fragment of dreadful content; and what was most important: it was the stranger who had attached the preposition.

The provocation, consequently, lay in him; and he was running away from it: running away – from himself. He was his own shadow.

O Russian people, Russian people!

Do not admit the crowds of flickering shadows from the island: stealthily those shadows penetrate into your corporeal abodes; they penetrate from there into the nooks and crannies of your souls: you become the shadows of the wreathed, flying mists: those mists have been flying from time immemorial out of the end of the earth: out of the leaden spaces of the wave-seething Baltic; into the fog from time immemorial the crushing mouths of the cannons have stared.

At twelve o’clock, in accordance with tradition, a hollow cannon shot solemnly filled Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire: all the mists were broken and all the shadows were scattered.

Only my shadow – the elusive young man – was not shaken and was not diffused by the shot, completing his run to the Neva without hindrance. Suddenly my stranger’s sensitive ear heard behind his back an ecstatic whisper:

‘It’s the Elusive One!’

‘Look – it’s the Elusive One!’

‘How brave he is! …’

And when, unmasked, he turned his island face, he saw steadily fixed on him the little eyes of two poorly dressed coursistes …

Oh, You Be Quiet! …

‘Býby … byby …’

Thus did the man at the small table thunder: a man of enormous dimensions; he was stuffing a piece of yellow salmon into his mouth and, as he choked, shouting out incomprehensible words. He seemed to be shouting:

‘Vy – by … (You should …)’

But what was heard was:

‘Bý – by …’

And a company of emaciated men in lounge-suits was beginning to squeal:

‘A-ah-ha-ha, ah-ha-ha! …’

A Petersburg street in autumn permeates the whole organism: chills the marrow and tickles the shuddering backbone; but as soon as you come from it into some warm premises, the Petersburg street runs in your veins like a fever. The quality of this street was experienced now by the stranger as he entered a rather dirty hallway, stuffed tight: with black, blue, grey and yellow coats, devil-may-care caps, lop-eared ones, dock-tailed ones and every possible kind of galosh. One felt a warm dampness; in the air hung a white vapour: the vapour of pancake smell.

Having received the numbered metal tag for his overcoat, a tag that burned the palm of his hand, the raznochinets with the pair of moustaches at last entered the hall …

‘A-a-a …’

At first the voices deafened him.

‘Cra-aa-yfish … aaa … ah-ha-ha …’

‘You see, you see, you see …’

‘You’re not saying …’

‘Em-em-em …’

‘And vodka …’

‘But for goodness’ sake … But come now … But there must be something wrong …’

All this threw itself in his face, while behind his back, from the Nevsky, behind him in pursuit ran:

‘It’s time … indeed …’

‘What do you mean indeed?’

‘Cation – acacia – cassation …’

‘Bl …’

‘And vodka …’

The restaurant’s premises consisted of a small, rather dirty room: the floor had been rubbed with polish; the walls had been decorated by the hand of a painter, depicting over there the remnants of a Swedish flotilla, from the elevation of which Peter was pointing into space; and from there flew spaces with the blue of white-maned rollers; but through the stranger’s head flew a carriage surrounded by a swarm …

‘It’s time …’

‘They’re going to throw …’

‘At Abl …’

‘Indee …’

Oh, idle thoughts! …

On the wall there was a splendid display of curly spinach, depicting in zigzags the plaisirs of Peterhof’s nature32 with spaces, clouds and a sugar Easter cake in the form of a small, stylish pavilion.

‘Do you want picon33 in it?’

The podgy landlord addressed our stranger from behind the vodka counter.

‘No, I don’t want picon in it.’

But wondered all the while: why there had been a frightened gaze – behind the carriage window: why the eyes had bulged, turned to stone and then closed; why a dead, shaven head had reeled and vanished; why from the hand – a black suede one – the cruel whip of a government circular had not dealt him a blow on the back; why the black suede hand had trembled there, impotently; why it had not been a hand but … a wretched little handie …

He looked: on the counter the snacks were turning dry, under glass bells some kind of limp little leaves were going rancid, along with a pile of overdone meatballs from the day before yesterday.

‘Another glass …’

There in the distance sat an idly sweating man with a most enormous coachman’s beard, in a blue jacket and blacked boots on top of grey trousers of military colour. The idly sweating man was knocking back glasses; the idly sweating man was summoning the mop-headed waiter:

‘What are you yelling for?’

‘I want something …’

‘Melon, sir?’

‘To the devil: your melon is soap with sugar …’

‘A banana, sir?’

‘An indecent sort of fruit …’

‘Astrakhan grapes, sir?’

Thrice did my stranger swallow the astringent, colourlessly shining poison, the effect of which recalls the effect of the street: the oesophagus and the stomach lick its vengeful fires with a dry tongue, while the consciousness, detaching itself from the body, like the handle on the lever of a machine, starts to revolve around the whole organism, making everything incredibly clear … for one instant only.

And the stranger’s consciousness cleared for an instant: and he remembered: jobless people were going hungry over there: jobless people were begging him there; and he had promised them; and taken from them – yes? Where was his little bundle? Here it was, here – beside him, here … Taken the bundle from them.

Indeed: that encounter on the Nevsky had knocked out his memory.

‘Some watermelon, sir?’

‘To the devil with your watermelon: it just sticks in your teeth, and there’s nothing in your mouth …’

‘Well, some vodka then …’

But the bearded man suddenly fired off:

‘I’ll tell you what I want: crayfish …’

The stranger with the small black moustache settled down at the small table to wait for that person who …

‘Won’t you have a glass?’

The idly sweating bearded man merrily winked.

‘Thank you, but …’

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Well, I’ve already been drinking …’

‘You ought to drink some more: in my company …’

My stranger put two and two together: suspiciously he gave the bearded man a look, grabbed hold of the soggy little bundle, grabbed hold of a torn sheet of paper (newspaper); and with it, as if casually, covered the little bundle.

‘Are you from Tula?’

The stranger tore himself away from his thought with displeasure and said with sufficient rudeness – said in a falsetto voice:

‘I’m certainly not from Tula …’

‘Where are you from, then?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I just do …’

‘Well: I’m from Moscow …’

And with a shrug of his shoulders he angrily turned away.

And he thought: no, he did not think – the thoughts thought themselves, expanding and revealing a picture: tarpaulins, hawsers, herring; and sacks stuffed full of something: the immensity of the sacks; among the sacks, with a bluish hand, a workman dressed in black leather was shouldering a sack, standing out clearly against the fog, against the flying watery surfaces; and the sack fell dully: from his back into a barge that was laden with girders; while the workman (a workman he knew) stood above the sacks and pulled out a pipe with his clothes dancing most absurdly in the wind like a wing.

‘You here on business?’

(Oh, Lord!)

‘No, just – here …’

And he said to himself:

‘A police spy …’

‘Is that so: well, I’m a coachman …’

‘My brother-in-law’s a coachman for Konstantin Konstantinovich …’34

‘Well, and what of it?’

‘What of it: nothing – no strangers here …’

Obviously a police spy: wish the person would come soon.

Meanwhile the bearded man fell into hapless reflection over a plate of uneaten crayfish, crossing his mouth, and giving a prolonged yawn.

‘Oh, Lord, Lord! …’

Of what were his thoughts? Of Vasily Island? The sacks and the workman? Yes – of course: life was going up in price, the workman had nothing to eat.

Why? Because: over the black bridge Petersburg comes lunging here; over the bridge and the arrows of the prospects – in order to crush the poor under heaps of stone coffins; he hated Petersburg; above the accursed regiments of buildings that rose up from the opposite bank out of a wave of clouds – someone small soared out of the chaos and floated there like a black point: there was a constant screeching and weeping from there:

‘The islands must be crushed! …’

Only now did he realize what had happened on Nevsky Prospect, whose green ear had looked at him from a distance of four inches – behind the carriage wall; the small, trembling, dead little fellow had been that same bat which, as it soared – tormentingly, menacingly and coldly, threatened, screeched …

Suddenly –

But of ‘suddenly’ we shall speak – in what follows.

The Writing Desk Stood There

Apollon Apollonovich was taking aim at the current working day; in the twinkling of an eye there arose before him: reports from yesterday; he envisaged clearly the folded documents on his desk, their sequence, and on those documents the markings he had made, the form of the letters of those markings, the pencil with which carelessly in the margins had been entered: a blue ‘set in motion’, with a little tail on the final n; a red ‘inquiry’ with a flourish on the y.

In a brief moment, Apollon Apollonovich transferred the centre of his consciousness by willpower from the departmental staircase to the doors of his office; all his cerebral games retreated to the edge of his field of vision, as did those whitish patterns over there on the white background of the wallpaper: a little heap of parallel-placed dossiers was transferred to the centre of that field, as was that portrait that had just fallen into the centre.

And – the portrait? That is: –

And he is not – and Rus he has abandoned …35

Who is ‘he’? The senator? Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov? But no: Vyacheslav Konstantinovich …36 But what about him, Apollon Apollonovich?

And it now seems – my turn has come,

My Delvig dear doth summon me …37

Order – order: by turn –

And o’er the earth new thunderclouds have gathered

And the hurricane them …38

An idle cerebral game!

The little heap of papers leapt up to the surface: Apollon Apollonovich, having taken aim at the current working day, addressed the clerk:

‘German Germanovich, please be so good as to prepare a dossier for me – that one, what is it called? …’

‘The dossier on deacon Zrakov with the enclosure of material evidence in the form of a tuft of beard?’

‘No, not that one …’

‘The one on the landowner Puzov and the hotel room? …’

‘No: the dossier about the potholes of Ukhtomsk …’

No sooner was he about to open the door to his office than he remembered (he had almost completely forgotten): yes, yes – the eyes: they widened, were astonished, grew enraged – the eyes of the raznochinets … And why, why had there been that zigzag of his hand? … It had been most unpleasant. And he thought he had seen the raznochinets – somewhere, at some time: perhaps nowhere, never …

Apollon Apollonovich opened the door of his office.

The writing desk stood in its place with the little heap of case documents: in the corner the fireplace crackled its logs; preparing to immerse himself in work, Apollon Apollonovich warmed his frozen hands at the fireplace, while the cerebral game, restricting the senator’s field of vision, continued to erect there its misty planes.

He Had Seen the Raznochinets

Nikolai Apollonovich …

At this point, Apollon Apollonovich …

‘No, sir: wait.’

‘? …’

‘What the devil?’

Apollon Apollonovich stopped outside the door, because – how could it be otherwise?

His innocent cerebral game again spontaneously rose into his brain, that is, into the pile of documents and petitions: Apollon Apollonovich would have considered as a cerebral game the wallpaper of the room within whose confines the projects ripened; Apollon Apollonovich treated the spontaneity of mental combinations as a plane surface: this plane surface, however, moving apart at times, let through a surprise into the centre of his intellectual life (as, for example, just now).

Apollon Apollonovich remembered: he had once seen the raznochinets.

He had once seen the raznochinets – imagine – in his own home.

He remembered: one day he had been coming down the stairs, going in the direction of the exit; on the stairs Nikolai Apollonovich, leaning over the banisters, had been talking to someone animatedly: the statesman did not consider himself within his rights to inquire about Nikolai Apollonovich’s acquaintances; a sense of tact then naturally prevented him from asking straight out: ‘Kolenka, tell me, who is it who visits you, my dear fellow?’

Nikolai Apollonovich would have lowered his eyes.

‘Oh, it’s nothing, Papa, I just receive visits from people …’

And the conversation would have been broken off.

That was why Apollon Apollonovich was not in the slightest interested in the identity of the raznochinets who was looking out of the hallway in his dark topcoat; the stranger had that same small black moustache and those same striking eyes (you would have encountered just such eyes at night in the Moscow chapel of the Great Martyr Panteleimon,39 by the Nikolsky Gate: – the chapel is famed for the curing of those possessed by devils; you would encounter just such eyes in the portrait appended to the biography of a great man; and, what is more: in a neuropathic clinic and even in a psychiatric one).

On that occasion, too, the eyes had; widened, begun to glitter, gleamed; in other words: that had happened once, and, perhaps, that would be repeated.

‘About everything – yes sir, yes sir …’

‘It will be necessary to …’

‘Obtain the most detailed information …’

The man of state received his most detailed information not by a direct, but by a circuitous route.

Apollon Apollonovich looked out of his office door: writing desks, writing desks! Piles of dossiers! Heads inclined over the dossiers! Squeaking of pens! Rustling of pages being turned! What a seething and mighty production of papers!

Apollon Apollonovich calmed down and immersed himself in work.

Strange Qualities

The cerebral play of the wearer of diamond decorations was distinguished by strange, highly strange, exceedingly strange qualities: his cranium became the womb of mental images that were instantly incarnated in this ghostly world.

Once he had taken into consideration this strange, highly strange, exceedingly strange circumstance, it would have been better had Apollon Apollonovich not cast from himself one single idle thought, continuing to carry around idle thoughts, too, in his head: for each idle thought stubbornly developed into a spatio-temporal image, continuing its – by now unchecked – activities outside the senatorial head.

Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: out of his head flowed gods, goddesses and spirits. We have already seen: one such spirit (the stranger with the small black moustache), coming into being as an image, had then quite simply begun to exist in the yellowish expanses of the Neva, asserting that he had come – precisely out of them: not out of the senatorial head; this stranger proved to have idle thoughts too; and those idle thoughts possessed the same qualities.

They escaped and acquired substance.

And one such escaped thought of the stranger’s was the thought that he, the stranger, really existed; from the Nevsky Prospect this thought fleeted back into the senatorial brain and there strengthened his awareness, as though the stranger’s very existence in that head had been an illusory existence.

Thus was the circle closed.

Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: hardly had the Stranger–Pallas, armed with a small bundle, been born out of his head, than out clambered another Pallas exactly like it.

This Pallas was the senator’s house.

The stone colossus has escaped from his brain; and now the house opens its hospitable door – to us.

The lackey was going up the staircase; he suffered from breathlessness, though we are not concerned with that now, but with … the staircase: a beautiful staircase! And it has steps – as soft as the convolutions of the brain. But the author does not have time to describe to the reader that same staircase, up which ministers have climbed more than once (he will describe it later), because the lackey is already in the reception hall …

And again – the reception hall: beautiful! Windows and walls: the walls somewhat cold … But the lackey was in the drawing-room (we have seen the drawing-room): We have glanced over the beautiful abode, guided by the general characteristic which the senator was in the habit of allotting to all objects.

Thus: –

– when, once in a blue moon, he ended up in the flowering bosom of nature, Apollon Apollonovich saw the same thing here as we did; that is: he saw – the flowering bosom of nature; but for us this bosom instantly disintegrated into characteristics: into violets, buttercups, dandelions and pinks; but the senator reduced these particulars once more to a unity. We, of course, would say:

‘There is a buttercup!’

‘There is a forget-me-not! …’

Apollon Apollonovich said simply, and briefly:

‘Flowers …’

‘A flower …’

Let it be said between ourselves: Apollon Apollonovich for some reason considered all flowers to be bluebells … –

He would even have characterized his own house with laconic brevity, a house which for him consisted of walls (forming squares and cubes), cut-through windows, parquets, chairs, tables; after that – the details began.

The lackey entered the corridor …

And here it will do no harm to remember: the things that fleeted past (the pictures, the grand piano, the mirrors, the mother-of-pearl, the incrustation of the small tables), – in a word, everything that had fleeted past, could have no spatial form: it was all of it a mere irritation of the cerebral membrane, if not a chronic indisposition … perhaps, of the cerebellum.

The illusion of a room took form; and then it would fly apart without trace, erecting beyond the limit of consciousness its misty planes; and when the lackey slammed behind him the heavy doors to the drawing-room, when his boots hammered along the small, resonant corridor, it was only a hammering in the temples: Apollon Apollonovich suffered from haemorrhoidal rushes of blood.

Behind the slammed door there turned out to be no drawing-room: there turned out to be … cerebral spaces: convolutions, grey and white matter, the pineal gland; while the heavy walls, that consisted of sparkling spray (caused by the rush of blood) – the bare walls were only a leaden and painful sensation: of the occipital, frontal, temporal and sincipital bones belonging to the respected skull.

The house – the stone colossus – was not a house: the stone leviathan was the senatorial head: Apollon Apollonovich sat at the desk, over dossiers, depressed by migraine, with the sensation that his head was six times larger than it ought to be, and twelve times heavier than it ought to be.

Strange, highly strange, exceedingly strange qualities!

Our Role

Petersburg streets possess an indubitable quality: they turn passers-by into shadows; while Petersburg streets turn shadows into people.

We have seen this in the example of the mysterious stranger.

He, having arisen like a thought in the senatorial head, was for some reason also connected with the senator’s own house; there he had surfaced in the memory; but most of all he assumed substantial form on the prospect, immediately following the senator in our modest story.

From the crossroads to the little restaurant on Millionnaya Street we have described the stranger’s route; we have described, further, his sitting in the little restaurant until the notorious word ‘suddenly’, which interrupted everything; suddenly something happened to the stranger there; some unpleasant sensation visited him.

Let us now investigate his soul; but first let us investigate the little restaurant; we have a reason for doing so; after all, if we, the author, mark out with pedantic exactitude the route of the first person who comes along, the reader will believe us: our action is justified in the future. In the natural investigation we have undertaken we have merely anticipated Senator Ableukhov’s wish that an agent of the Secret Political Police Department should steadfastly follow the stranger’s steps; the good senator would himself take up the telephone receiver in order by means of it to convey his thought to the proper quarters; fortunately for him, he did not know the stranger’s abode (while we do know that abode).