There was a sudden gust of wind; it lifted the dust along the embankment, spun it around in a whirlwind, howled and drowned out the noise of the sea.
“Squall!” the deacon said. “We must go, or else the dust will get in our eyes.”
When they’d set off, Samoylenko sighed and said, holding on to his service cap:
“As it stands, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”
“Don’t you worry,” the zoologist laughed. “You can rest assured, the duel won’t end in anything. Laevsky will magnanimously shoot into the air, he’s incapable of doing otherwise, and I, in all likelihood, won’t shoot at all. To find myself in court over Laevsky, to waste time, the game’s not worth the candle. By the way, what are the legal ramifications of dueling?”
“Arrest, but in the event of an opponent’s death, incarceration in a fortress for up to three years.”
“In Petropavlovsk?
“No, in a military fortress, I think.”
“I really should teach that fine young man a lesson!”
Lightning flashed over the sea behind them and illuminated the rooftops and mountains for an instance. The friends parted company near the boulevard. When the doctor had disappeared into the darkness and the sound of his footsteps were already fading, Von Koren shouted out to him:
“The weather may impede us tomorrow!”
“That would be good! God willing!”
“Have a goodnight!”
“What—night? What are you saying?”
It was difficult to hear due to the noise of the wind and sea and the clap of thunder.
“Nothing!” the zoologist shouted, and hurried home.
XVII
… in my mind, oppressed by melancholy,
Cluster an abundance of burdensome thoughts;
Before me reminiscence mutely
Unfurls her long scroll;
And reading of my life with revulsion,
I quiver and I curse,
And bitterly bemoan, and shed bitter tears,
But I cannot wash away this woeful verse.
—Pushkin
Whether they killed him tomorrow morning or made a mockery of him, that is, sparing him his life, he was still done for. Whether this fallen woman killed herself in despair and shame or eked out her sorry existence, she was still done for …
This is what Laevsky thought, sitting at the table late in the evening and even now continuing to rub his hands. The window was thrown open suddenly with a bang, a strong wind tore into the room, and sheets of paper flew from the desk. Laevsky locked the window and bent down to pick the pages up off the floor. He felt something new in his body, a certain clumsiness, that had not been there prior, and he didn’t recognize his own movements, he walked about timidly, his elbows sticking out at his sides and jerking his shoulders, and when he sat down at the table, he again began rubbing his hands together. His body had lost dexterity.
On the eve of death it is necessary to write to loved ones. Laevsky remembered this. He picked up a pen and wrote in a shaking script:
“My Dear Mother!”
He wanted to write to his mother, so that in the name of the merciful God, in which she believed, she would shelter and grant tender warmth to the miserable woman he had dishonored, lonely, indigent and weak, that she should forget and forgive everything, everything, everything, and through her sacrifice at least partially redeem the frightful sins of her son; but he remembered the way his mother, a full-figured, unwieldy old woman, in a lace cap, walked out of the house each morning into the garden, as a concomitant with a lapdog trailed behind, the way Mother yelled in an imperious tone at the gardener and the servants and how proud and arrogant her face was—he remembered these things and scratched out the words he had written.
Lightning flashed brightly in all three windows, and on its heels the deafening, resounding clap of thunder was heard, muffled at first, but then roaring and with a crack, and so strong that the glass rattled in the windows. Laevsky stood, approached the window and pressed his forehead to the glass. There was an intense, beautiful thunderstorm beyond the yard. On the horizon white ribbons of lightning threw themselves uninterrupted from the darkness onto the sea and illuminated tall black waves along a broad expanse. And to the right, and to the left, and, most likely, above their home, lightning was flashing the same way.
“Thunderstorm!” Laevsky whispered; he felt the desire to pray to someone or something, at the very least to the lightning or stormclouds. “Dear thunderstorm!”
He remembered how as a child during a storm he would run out into the garden, his head uncovered, while two white-blond girls with blue eyes raced behind him, and the rain soaked them; they laughed in delight, but when a strong thunderclap was doled out, the girls would trustingly press against the boy, he would make the sign of the cross and quickly recite: “Holy, holy, holy …” Oh, where did you go, what sea did you drown in, vestiges of a beautiful pure life? He had no fear of thunderstorms and no love of nature, he had no God, all the unsuspecting girls that he’d once known had already been ruined by him and his peers, in his familial garden he had not planted one sapling in his entire life nor had he raised one shrub, as for being alive amongst the living, he had never rescued even a fly, but had only destroyed, ruined and lied, lied …
“What in my past isn’t vice?” he asked himself, trying to grab on to any bright memory at all, as a man falling from a precipice grasps at underbrush.
School? University? But that was deceit. He learned remedially and forgot what he was taught. Civil service? That too was deceit, because during his service he didn’t do a thing, the salary he received was wasted on him, and his service was an odious embezzlement of public funds, for which he hadn’t been brought before a court of law.
He had no use for the truth, and he did not seek it out, his reason, bewitched by wickedness and lies, either slept or kept silent; like an outsider or an alien from another planet, he did not participate in the collective life of people, was apathetic to their sufferings, ideas, religions, knowledge, pursuits, struggles, he never spoke one kind word to people, he’d never written one benevolent and non-vulgar line, he never contributed even a half-kopeck to anyone, but only ate their bread, drank their wine, swept away their wives, lived according to their impressions of him and, so as to justify his despicable, parasitic life to them and to himself, always attempted to graft onto himself the appearance that he was loftier and superior to them. A lie, a lie and a lie …
He remembered distinctly what he’d seen that evening in the home of Muridov, and he felt unbearably macabre from self-loathing and melancholy. Kirilin and Achmianov were repulsive, but it seemed they’d continued what he’d started; they were his accomplices and pupils. He’d taken a husband, a social circle and a homeland away from a weak, young woman, who’d trusted him more than she would have a brother, and brought her here—to heat, to fever and to ennui; day in and day out she, like a mirror, was expected to reflect his idleness, depravity and lie—and this, and only this, had filled her weak, languid, pathetic life; when he’d been satiated by her, he’d grown to hate her, but was not man enough to leave her, and tried to ensnare her ever tighter in more lies, as in a spider’s web … The rest was brought to fruition by those people.
Laevsky either sat down at the table, or again walked over to the window; he either extinguished the candle, or lit it again. He cursed himself aloud, wept, complained, asked forgiveness; in despair he ran over to the table several times and wrote: “My Dear Mother!”