“My friend, I still want to be a gentleman, and to be accepted as such,” the visitor began in a fit of some sort of purely spongerish, good-natured, and already-yielding ambition. “I am poor, but ... I won’t say very honest, but ... in society it is generally accepted as an axiom that I am a fallen angel. By God, I can’t imagine how I could ever have been an angel. If I ever was one, it was so long ago that it’s no sin to have forgotten it. Now I only value my reputation as a decent man and get along as best I can, trying to be agreeable. I sincerely love people—oh, so much of what has been said about me is slander! Here, when I move in with people from time to time, my life gets to be somewhat real, as it were, and I like that most of all. Because, like you, I myself suffer from the fantastic, and that is why I love your earthly realism. Here you have it all outlined, here you have the formula, here you have geometry, and with us it’s all indeterminate equations! I walk about here and dream. I love to dream. Besides, on earth I become superstitious—don’t laugh, please: that is precisely what I like, that I become superstitious. Here I take on all your habits: I’ve come to love going to the public baths, can you imagine that? I love having a steam bath with merchants and priests. My dream is to become incarnate, but so that it’s final, irrevocable, in some fat, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant’s wife, and to believe everything she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and light a candle with a pure heart—by God, it’s true. That would put an end to my sufferings. I’ve also come to love getting medical treatment here: there was smallpox going around this spring, so I went to the foundling hospital and had myself inoculated against smallpox—if only you knew how pleased I was that day: I donated ten roubles for our brother Slavs ... ![306] But you’re not listening. You know, you seem rather out of sorts tonight,” the gentleman paused for a moment. “I know you went to see that doctor yesterday ... well, how is your health? What did the doctor say?”
“Fool!”snapped Ivan.
“And aren’t you a smart one! So you’re abusing me again? I’m just asking, not really out of sympathy. You don’t have to answer. And now this rheumatism’s come back ...”
“Fool,” Ivan repeated.
“You keep saying the same thing, but I caught such rheumatism last year that I still remember it.”
“The devil with rheumatism?”
“Why not, if I sometimes become incarnate? Once incarnate, I accept the consequences. Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto.”[307]
“How’s that? Satan sum et nihil humanum ... not too bad for the devil!”
“I’m glad I’ve finally pleased you.”
“And you didn’t get that from me,” Ivan suddenly stopped as if in amazement, “that never entered my head—how strange...”
“C’est de nouveau, n’est-ce pas?[308] This time I’ll be honest and explain to you. Listen: in dreams and especially in nightmares, well, let’s say as a result of indigestion or whatever, a man sometimes sees such artistic dreams, such complex and real actuality, such events, or even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details, beginning from your highest manifestations down to the last shirt button, as I swear even Leo Tolstoy couldn’t invent; and, by the way, it’s not writers who occasionally see such dreams, but quite the most ordinary people, officials, journalists, priests. . . There’s even a whole problem concerning this: one government minister even confessed to me himself that all his best ideas come to him when he’s asleep. Well, and so it is now. Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more.”
“Lies. Your goal is precisely to convince me that you are in yourself and are not my nightmare, and so now you yourself assert that you’re a dream.” “My friend, today I’ve adopted a special method, I’ll explain it to you later. Wait, where was I? Oh, yes, so I caught a cold, only not here, but there ...”
“There where? Tell me, are you going to stay long, couldn’t you go away?” Ivan exclaimed almost in despair. He stopped pacing, sat down on the sofa, rested his elbows on the table again, and clutched his head with both hands. He tore the wet towel off and threw it aside in vexation: obviously it did not help.
“Your nerves are unstrung,” the gentleman remarked, with a casually familiar and yet perfectly amiable air, “you’re angry with me even for the fact that I could catch cold, whereas it happened in the most natural way. I was then hurrying to a diplomatic soirée at the home of a most highly placed Petersburg lady, who had designs on a ministry. Well, evening dress, white tie, gloves—and yet I was God knows where, and to get to your earth I still had to fly through space ... of course it only takes a moment, but then a sun’s ray takes a full eight minutes, and, imagine, in a dinner jacket, with an open vest. Spirits don’t freeze, but when one’s incarnate, then ... in short, it was flighty of me, I just set out, and in those spaces, I mean, the ether, the waters above the firmament,[309] it’s so freezing cold ... that is, don’t talk about freezing— you can’t call it freezing anymore, just imagine: a hundred and fifty degrees below zero! You know how village girls amuse themselves: they ask some unsuspecting novice to lick an axe at thirty degrees below zero; the tongue instantly sticks to it, and the dolt has to tear it away so that it bleeds; and that’s just at thirty below, but at a hundred and fifty, I suppose, if you just touched your finger to an axe, there would be no more finger, that is ... that is, if there happened to be an axe ...”
“And could there happen to be an axe?” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly interrupted, absently and disgustedly. He was trying with all his might not to believe in his delirium and not to fall into complete insanity.
“An axe?” the visitor repeated in surprise.
“Yes, what would an axe be doing there?” Ivan Fyodorovich cried with a sort of fierce and persistent stubbornness.
“What would an axe be doing in space? Quelle idée! If it got far enough away, I suppose it would begin flying around the earth, without knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising and setting of the axe, Gattsuk would introduce it into the calendar,[310] and that’s all.”
“You are stupid, you are terribly stupid!” Ivan said cantankerously. “Put more intelligence into your lies, or I won’t listen. You want to overcome me with realism, to convince me that you are, but I don’t want to believe that you are! I won’t believe it!!”
“But I’m not lying, it’s all true; unfortunately, the truth is hardly ever witty. You, I can see, are decidedly expecting something great from me, and perhaps even beautiful.[311] That’s a pity, because I give only what I can...”
“Stop philosophizing, you ass!”
“How philosophize, when my whole right side was numb, and I was moaning and groaning. I called on the entire medical profession: they diagnose beautifully, they tell you all that’s wrong with you one-two-three, but they can’t cure you. There happened to be one enthusiastic little student: even if you die, he said, at least you’ll have a thorough knowledge of what disease you died of! Then, too, they have this way of sending you to specialists: we will give you our diagnosis, they say, then go to such and such a specialist and he will cure you. I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there’s a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don’t treat left nostrils, it’s not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there’s a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril. What is one to do? I resorted to folk remedies, one German doctor advised me to take a steam bath and rub myself with honey and salt. I did it, only for the chance of having an extra bath: I got myself all sticky, and to no avail. In desperation I wrote to Count Mattei in Milan; he sent me a book and some drops, God help him. And imagine, what cured me was Hoff ‘s extract of malt! I accidentally bought some, drank a glass and a half, and could even have danced—everything went away. I was absolutely determined to thank him publicly in the newspapers, the feeling of gratitude was crying out in me, but, imagine, that led to another story: not one publisher would take it! ‘It would be too retrograde, no one will believe it, le diable n’existe point.’[312] They advised me to publish it anonymously. Well, what good is a ‘thank you’ if it’s anonymous? I had a laugh with the clerks: ‘In our day,’ I said, ‘what’s retrograde is believing in God; but I am the devil, it’s all right to believe in me. ‘ ‘We understand,’ they said, ‘who doesn’t believe in the devil? But all the same we can’t do it, it might harm our tendency. Or perhaps only as a joke?’ Well, I thought, as a joke it wouldn’t be very witty. So they simply didn’t publish it. And would you believe that it still weighs on my heart? My best feelings, gratitude, for example, are formally forbidden solely because of my social position.”