“And what was he lying on?” “Well, there must have been something there. Or are you laughing?”
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange animation. He was listening now with unexpected curiosity. “Well, so is he still lying there?”
“The point is that he isn’t. He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking.”
“What an ass!” Ivan exclaimed, bursting into nervous laughter, still apparently trying hard to figure something out. “Isn’t it all the same whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion kilometers? It must be about a billion years’ walk!”
“Much more, even. If we had a pencil and paper, we could work it out. But he arrived long ago, and this is where the anecdote begins.”
“Arrived! But where did he get a billion years?”
“You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, let’s say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun—all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore...”
“Go on, what happened when he arrived?”
“The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds—and that by the watch, the watch (though I should think that on the way his watch would long ago have broken down into its component elements in his pocket)—before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang ‘Hosannah’ and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it’s a legend. Take it for what it’s worth. That’s the sort of ideas current among us on all these subjects.”
“Caught you!” Ivan cried out with almost childish glee, as if he had now finally remembered something. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years— I made it up myself! I was seventeen years old then, I was in high school ... I made up that anecdote then and told it to a friend of mine, his last name was Korovkin, it was in Moscow ... It’s such a typical anecdote that I couldn’t have gotten it from anywhere. I almost forgot it ... but now I’ve unconsciously recalled it—recalled it myself, not because you told it to me! Just as one sometimes recalls a thousand things unconsciously, even when one is being taken out to be executed ... I’ve remembered it in a dream. You are my dream! You’re a dream, you don’t exist!” “Judging by the enthusiasm with which you deny me,” the gentleman laughed, “I’m convinced that you do believe in me all the same.”
“Not in the least! Not for a hundredth part do I believe in you!”
“But for a thousandth part you do believe. Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest. Admit that you do believe, let’s say for a ten-thousandth part ...”
“Not for one moment!” Ivan cried in a rage. “And, by the way, I should like to believe in you!” he suddenly added strangely.
“Aha! Quite a confession, really! But I am kind, I will help you here, too. Listen, it is I who have caught you, not you me! I deliberately told you your own anecdote, which you had forgotten, so that you would finally lose faith in me.”
“Lies! The purpose of your appearance is to convince me that you are.”
“Precisely. But hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man like yourself, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I knew you had a tiny bit of belief in me, I let in some final disbelief, by telling you that anecdote. I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you’ve completely lost faith in me, then you’ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality—I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow—and such an oak that you, sitting in that oak, will want to join ‘the desert fathers and the blameless women’;[318] because secretly you want that verry, ver-ry much, you will dine on locusts, you will drag yourself to the desert to seek salvation!”
“So, you scoundrel, you’re troubling yourself over the salvation of my soul?”
“One needs to do a good deed sometimes, at least. But I see you’re angry with me, really angry!”
“Buffoon! And have you ever tempted them, the ones who eat locusts and pray for seventeen years in the barren desert, and get overgrown with moss?”
“My dear, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all worlds, and clings to such a one, because a diamond like that is just too precious; one such soul is sometimes worth a whole constellation—we have our own arithmetic. It’s a precious victory! And some of them, by God, are not inferior to you in development, though you won’t believe it: they can contemplate such abysses of belief and disbelief at one and the same moment that, really, it sometimes seems that another hair’s breadth and a man would fall in ‘heel-over-headed,’ as the actor Gorbunov says.”[319]
“So, what? They put your nose out of joint?” “My friend,” the visitor observed sententiously, “it’s sometimes better to have your nose put out of joint than to have no nose at all, as one afflicted marquis (he must have been treated by a specialist) uttered not long ago in confession to his Jesuit spiritual director. I was present—it was just lovely. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said, beating his breast. ‘My son,’ the priest hedged, ‘through the inscrutable decrees of Providence everything has its recompense, and a visible calamity sometimes brings with it a great, if invisible, profit. If a harsh fate has deprived you of your nose, your profit is that now for the rest of your life no one will dare tell you that you have had your nose put out of joint.’ ‘Holy father, that’s no consolation!’ the desperate man exclaimed. ‘On the contrary, I’d be delighted to have my nose put out of joint every day of my life, if only it were where it belonged!’ ‘My son,’ the priest sighed, ‘one cannot demand all blessings at once. That is to murmur against Providence, which even here has not forgotten you; for if you cry, as you have just cried, that you would gladly have your nose put out of joint for the rest of your life, in this your desire has already been fulfilled indirectly; for, having lost your nose, you have thereby, as it were, had your nose put out of joint all the same ...”
“Pah, how stupid!” cried Ivan.
“My friend, I merely wanted to make you laugh, but I swear that is real Jesuit casuistry, and I swear it all happened word for word as I’ve told it to you. That was a recent incident, and it gave me a lot of trouble. The unfortunate young man went home and shot himself that same night; I was with him constantly up to the last moment ... As for those little Jesuit confessional booths, that truly is my pet amusement in the sadder moments of life. Here’s another incident for you, from just the other day. A girl comes to an old priest, a blonde, from Normandy, about twenty years old. Beautiful, buxom, all nature—enough to make your mouth water. She bends down and whispers her sin to the priest through the little hole. ‘What, my daughter, can you have fallen again so soon ... ?’ the priest exclaims.’O Sancta Maria, what’s this I hear? With another man now? But how long will it go on? What shame! ‘ ‘Ah, mon père,’ the sinner replies, bathed in tears of repentance, ‘ça lui fait tant de plaisir, et à moi si peu de peine!’[320] Well, just imagine such an answer! At that even I backed off: it was the very cry of nature, which, if you like, is better than innocence itself. I remitted her sin on the spot and turned to leave, but I had to come back at once: I heard the priest arranging a rendezvous with her for that evening through the hole; the old man was solid as a rock, but he fell in an instant! It was nature, the truth of nature, claiming its own! What, are you turning your nose up again, are you angry again? I really don’t know how to please you . . .” “Leave me, you’re throbbing in my brain like a persistent nightmare,” Ivan groaned painfully, powerless before his apparition. “I’m bored with you, it’s unbearable, agonizing! I’d give a lot to be able to get rid of you!”