I pace around in the vestibule, smoking the whole time.
“And you say that you’re lonely and misunderstood? You who have so much in your soul and beyond it? You who have someone like that in Petushik? And someone like the one beyond Petushki?… Lonely?”
“No, no, I’m not lonely any more, not misunderstood anymore. For twelve weeks I’ve been understood. All the past is gone. Why, I remember when I turned twenty – at that time, I was hopelessly lonely. And my birthday was a despondent one. Yuri Petrovich and Nina Vasilissvna came, they brought me a bottle of Stolichnaya and a can of vegetable-stuffed cabbage, and I felt so lonely, so
impossibly lonely, because of those cabbage rolls and the Stolichnaya so that, against my will, I started to cry.
“And when I turned thirty last fall? The day was dismal, like the day when I turned twenty. Borya came with some half-intelligent poetess, Vadya and Lida came, Ledik and Volodya. And they brought me? What? Two bottles of Stlichnaya and two cans of stuffed tomatoes. And such despair, such torment possessed me because of those tomatoes that I wanted to cry but now could not.
“Does this mean that in the course of those ten years I had become less lonely? No, it doesn’t mean that. Does it mean that my soul had become coarsened in those ten years? And my heart hardened? It doesn’t mean the either –more likely the opposite. But, all the same, I wanted to cry but couldn’t.
“Why? Very likely I’ll be able to explain that to you, if I can find some kind of analogy for it from the world of the beautiful. Let’s say, for instance, a quiet person drinks 750 grams and becomes boisterous and full of joy. If he adds another 700, will he become even more boisterous and full of joy? No, he’ll quiet down again. It’ll even seem on the surface that he has sobered up. But does this mean that he has, in fact? Never happens. He’s just gotten piggishly drunk and is quiet for that reason.”
It is just the same with me. I did not become less lonely in those thirty years and my heart did not become calloused – quite the contrary. But if you look at it on the surface…
No, take now – to live and live. Living is not at all boring. Only Nikolai Gogol was bored, and King Solomon. If we’ve already lived through thirty years, it’s necessary to try to live another thirty. “Man is mortal.” That’s my opinion. But if we’ve already been born, there’s nothing to be done about it, we must live for a little… “Life is beautiful” – that’s my opinion.
Really, do you know how many mysteries there are in the world, what an abyss of unstudied mysteries and what an expanse of space there is for those who draw these mysteries to themselves? Here is the simplest of examples:
What if yesterday you drank, let’s say, 750 grams but in the morning it was unthinkable to be hung over – work and the like – and only long after midday, having suffered through six or seven hours, you finally have something to drink in order to ease your soul? (So, how much do you drink? Well, let’s say, 150.) Why
isn’t your soul any easier? The queasiness which has accompanied you since morning, because of the 150 grams, has been replaced by a queasiness of a different category, a shy queasiness. Your cheeks get crimson like a whore’s and under your eyes such blue appears as if the day before you hadn’t drunk your 750 but had gotten your face kicked around instead. Why?
I’ll tell you why. Because you have fallen victim to your six or seven hours at work. You have to have the ability to choose your work; there aren’t any bad jobs or bad professions; one must respect every calling. It’s necessary, just after waking, to drink something right away, or, no, I’m lying, not “something” but precisely the same the same thing that you were drinking the day before – and drink it every forty or forty-five minutes so that toward evening you have drunk 250 grams more than the day before. Then there won’t be any queasiness or shyness and you will have such a white face it’ll look as though it hasn’t been kicked around for six months.
So you see how many puzzles there are in nature, how many blank spots everywhere.
But the empty-headed youth coming up to take our place doesn’t seem to see what had the mysteries of existence. He lacks vision and initiative, and I doubt that he – that any of them – have any brains in their heads. What could be more noble, for example, than experimenting on oneself? At their age I would do this: on Thursday evening I’d drink, all at one go, three and a half liters of beer and vodka mixed. I’d drink it and lie down to sleep without getting undressed and with one thought only – will I wake up on Friday or won’t I?
And, all the same, I wouldn’t wake up on Friday. I’d wake up on Saturday and not in Moscow either but under the railroad embankment in the Naro-Fominsk region. And later, I would, with effort, recollect and gather the facts. And having gathered them, I’d put them together. And having put them together, I would start again to recreate by straining my memory with the most penetrating analysis. And, later, I’d go from observation to abstraction; in other words, thoughtfully I would have a morning-after drink and, finally, find out what had happened to Friday.
Ever since childhood, since thumb-sucking days, my favorite word has been “dare,” and, as God is my witness, I took plenty of chances. If you took the chances I did, you’d either bust your gut or have a stroke. Or, actually, if at your
age you took the chances I did, one fine morning you’d wake up dead. But I woke up every morning and started taking chances again.
For example: approaching eighteen years of age, I noticed that from the first shot through the fifth I would ripen, but beginning with the sixth,