No, he could not go back home, to the emptiness of his room, and the Bible’s sullen presence.
It was all Gorshkov’s fault, no doubt. The words that man had said to him. ‘How dare he?’ Who did he think he was? Could Ferfichkin be blamed for the other’s improvidence? These people would bleed him dry if he let them.
‘I have to live!’ he called out.
The image of the man who had thrown himself off the Tuchkov Bridge came back to him. He too was probably some feckless wastrel like Gorshkov, a fool who blamed others for the consequences of his own sinful ways. Ferfichkin was not ready to follow him into the Neva, not yet at least.
As he rounded the tip of Vasilevsky Island he repeated the words of the twenty-third Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.’
Without pausing in his stride along the University Embankment, he took out a battered pewter flask from the inside of his frock coat. The squeak of the cork released a whiff of harsh spirit. He lifted it quickly to his lips, eager for the fierce communion, but also not wishing to spill any of the vodka through the jog of his step.
‘He restores my soul!’ Although his eye was eager now, and his voice enlivened by bravado, there was an edge of desperation to the words. It was more a plea than an assertion.
He was stitching his way across the city, west to east to west again, moving south all the time, and quaffing from the flask with almost every step.
There were tavern doors along his way, with steps leading down to them, but he resisted their beckoning wafts. He had no need of them, not while he had vodka of his own. Besides, he could hide from his enemies in a dark cellar but not from the eyes of the Lord.
He remembered, and recited in Church Slavonic, the words of the twenty-sixth Psalm. He believed he saw wonder in the eyes of those he passed. ‘Yes! I have the word of God within me!’ He shouted a Russian equivalent of the text after them as they fled his excitement: ‘I have not sat down with the vain, neither will I go in with those who dissemble. I have hated the company of evildoers; I will not sit with the wicked.’
He found himself crossing a great sea of paving stones, blue whorls that swam beneath his staggering feet. He thought of Jesus walking on the water. The blasphemy of the connection, to compare himself in a state of inebriation to the Son of God performing a miracle, both frightened and liberated him.
He looked up and saw the angel on top of the towering Alexander Column. ‘Come down from there if you have something to say to me,’ shouted Ferfichkin. But the heaven-distracted figure ignored him.
Ferfichkin stumbled on; the stone waters of the Palace Square grew turbulent and treacherous. The Winter Palace, recently painted red ochre, shimmered like a distant shore; the sky’s soft glow seemed to draw the substance from it and from everything around it. He looked again at the angel, almost fearfully now, as if he expected the statue to take flight, drawn by the weightless night. A leaden feeling gripped his heart, halfway between the dread of belief and the terrible loneliness of atheism.
The only thing left to him was the vodka. But it wasn’t long before he had drained that. A misery, a grief worse than the loss of his God, voided him.
His listing trajectory took him into the arms of passing strangers, who pushed him away in disgust. ‘Have I never believed, then?’ he demanded of them.
From one to the other he was passed, in a wilder mazurka than any danced inside the palace ballrooms.
‘In that case, what was it all for?’ But at the same time as he formed the question, the answer came to him, an answer he struggled to suppress, overlaying protestations of his piety: ‘No one, not even the holy brothers who clothe themselves in the Scriptures, the monks of Optina Pustyn, no one has immersed themselves in the word of God more than I. The hours of my life I have given to that book! And why? If I did not believe? You cannot tell me I do not believe,’ he shouted into the face of a cavalry officer who evidently had no such intention.
He hurried from the square on to Millionnaya. Between the gaudy millionaires’ palaces and the stinking Moika, a pack of wild dogs roamed. The dogs were of all sizes, the products of unimaginablemiscegenations, absurdly mismatched as a group, and yet bound together by some instinct of canine community. Restless and excitable, they sniffed the air and each other’s arses, nipping, yelping, circling, the smallest ones somehow seeming to be the most aggressive. No doubt they were animated by hunger. However, their banding together against it, their ragged solidarity, amazed him. He almost envied them. Ferfichkin had known hunger. But it had never occurred to him to seek its alleviation by associating with others in the same plight. ‘It’s every man for himself, ’ he shouted at the dogs, as if remonstrating with them. ‘Dog eat dog!’ It was a command, or at least an encouragement.
Ferfichkin stood and swayed. The pack of dogs paid him no regard but ran howling up Millionnaya towards the Field of Mars. He felt an instant nostalgia at their departure and realised in that moment how alone he was. He hungered after company, even though the whole basis of his life was self-sufficiency.
‘No man is my master,’ he shouted up the empty street, after the baying dogs. ‘God is my master.’ But the words rang hollow.
He set off at a run after the dogs; somehow it seemed important not to let them out of his sight. He was chasing not a pack of wild dogs, but the idea of kinship.
The idea took him across the empty parade ground, where the unseen ghosts of dead battalions were marshalled, into the Summer Garden.
As he entered the enclosure he had the sense of crossing over into a place of magic and awe, a grotto. The dumbstruck, sightless men and women that lined the criss-crossing avenues slowed his step and cowed him. Naked allegories, fabulous pagan beings, they inspired an irrational dread in him. He had a sense of them moving behind his back, but whenever he turned, they were frozen in their original positions, the lyre unplucked, the sweep of concealing drapery still miraculously in place.
In amongst the statuary, people of flesh and blood moved, a congregation of sinners, for the most part eschewing the formal paths, the women undoubtedly whores, the men drunks. Ferfichkin slurringly repeated the words of the Psalm: ‘I have hated the company of evildoers.’ There was laughter from the trees. He threw out a hand towards it and stumbled on, his step unsteady as much from exhaustion as from the drink now.
He lurched from statue to statue, passed now between a different set of strangers, who showed their disgust by keeping their stony heads averted from him.
He could no longer see the dogs but the din of their hunt was louder than ever.
He staggered into one of the sinners, who had wandered on to the path.
Ferfichkin looked into this man’s face. ‘You!’ he cried.
The man pushed him away, with the same disgust that those on Millionnaya had shown. Ferfichkin fell to the ground. The man stepped over him and went on his way.
Ferfichkin did not stir. No one troubled themselves about the drunk fallen to the ground. No doubt they had themselves slept in places just as strange.
Morning came more stealthily than usual. With infinite gradation, the soft etiolated light became emboldened. The old drunk was still there. He had not changed his position. The politseisky who found him couldn’t rouse him and when he turned the man over, he saw why.
The fine, long handle of a bladed weapon protruded from a circle of blood on the man’s chest, exactly where you might estimate his heart to be.
2
The day grew heavy with the humidity of a storm held back. The sweltering pressure affected the flies in Porfiry’s room badly. They became reckless, crazed, hurling themselves at the panes of the window and into the faces of the men who came and went. As for the men, a short-tempered impatience characterised their dealings as they awaited barometric release. The morning was a series of obstacles they had to move through.