Novel (first 4 chapters)

I

A young man reads aboard a train

The young man ceased reading from his lofty book intermittently. It was only between feeble interest in the material and acute pain that he read well. The words were a strain on his feeble eyes and so after a page or so they began to simply slide past his mind without leaving the slightest impression. He looked up from the page and to the narrow aisle before him. The floor was carpeted with an elegant red fabric. His eyes turned to the windows lined with frost, and he noted a few blue birds flitting across the grey, somber sky. These windows were framed by violet silk drapes. Some passengers had left these drapes as they were before boarding, and some had already succumbed to slumber and therefore had undone the drapes to protect themselves from the piercing afternoon sunlight. The sunlight was, however, a boon of sorts; it had been a dastardly cold week-end and the sun, while doing little to ameliorate the overall and equally piercing cold, could be mildly enjoyed by some. Some of those that had already boarded stuffed their hands in the underarms of the overcoats with a pained look of what soon became thorough annoyance; the train had not departed. People of the lower rungs were just boarding the other cars after the privileged were given priority seating on this car. Many looked at their watches frequently with irritation and some of those guests already seated were woefully attempting to enjoy a first glass of wine or the daily journal. As more passengers, free of their luggage, clambered through the narrow passageway and found vacant seats aboard the Tsar Nikolai car, this young man could no longer be bothered to stare at the commotion. He had been staring for several minutes at the incoming passengers, as he was one of the first to be seated, but had now grown bored of the movement of people.

There was one woman, he noted, of about forty years sitting on the row ahead of his own and on the opposite side of the passageway. He oftentimes casually glanced over in her direction to observe as she chatted with a gentleman sitting to her left. He noted she wore a gold bracelet on her right arm and a slight tear on her dress near the hem of her pale green dress. He noted this very minute tear when she crossed her legs. And he observed, casually, that she had the habit of wiping her brow at regular times in her speech. He could not quite make out what she was speaking of exactly, but he did see, from the corner of his eye, as he very much did not want to be perceived as some strange observer, slight bends forming at her rosy lips every so often. She smiled now and then. The gentleman to her left was a little more interesting, he thought. He was not very old, but certainly did appear to be some ten years her senior. He wore a dazzling silver watch on his left wrist, which he often plunged into the air as a mannerism accompanying his speech. He had removed his cravat, revealing a small, old wound on his neck just below his ear. While casually surveying the contents of his field of vision, the young man also noticed that this man carried a firearm or knife; the man had reached to scratch his right side and revealed a holster of some sort attached to his waist. But this man and the woman she spoke with became boring soon, while he did pay quite a bit of attention to them.

“It’s just about time!” cried a hideously portly woman as she clutched a copy of the morning’s Sibirskaia Gazeta. She directed her gaze and speech at the young man seated to her right, who heard her, while ever so wanting not to have. But, deciding upon his gentlemanly manner, he acknowledged her with a slight bow of the head.

“Indeed, ma’am,” replied the young man courteously and without knowing or caring what he was in effect agreeing to. He took a look at the woman and decided that she was only interesting insofar as he did not have to actually interact with here. This was perhaps how he felt about most people. But he did like looking around. He attempted to turn back to his book, sitting squarely upon his lap. He had covered his legs with a warm extra coat he cleverly decided to bring on board with him. The words on the page produced too much of a strain, however, and so turned back to the woman who was now rudely slurping what seemed to be a fantastically miniature glass of liquor in her almost grotesque hands. They were gnarled and clearly overworked, but fat. The vermilion finish on her nails seemed to be a less-than-subtle reminder that this was in fact a woman with class and style, and not some hellish impersonator.

From her hands, his eyes squirmed to the bright lights above him. Beautifully delicate lights were hung along the ornate ridges of the ceiling, adjacent to the silver frames of the windows. Each bulb was meticulously veiled with a thin, white, velvety curtain in such a way so as to create slight creases and folds in the fabric. The light, as it fled from the crystal bulbs, created an iridescent halo which only slightly permeated the veils. The young man observed as these colors danced around the crests and dips of the creases and folds, creating splendid, and in fact, mesmerizing colors emanating from the dainty curtains. He had never before seen the ocean but imagined that it would leave a very similar impression.

The young man saw at the end of the carriage before him and placed over the door leading to the other cars, a wonderfully gilded plaque etched with the words Tsar Nikolai Korolevskiy Vagon. It lampooned magnificence, more so than mere decadence, in such a brazen manner. It seemed as though it had been freshly polished by an attendant.

“Monsieur,” the young man had raised his hand and a crew member promptly came to his seat at his behest. The portly woman beside him fell asleep while reading an article entitled “Peasants Grow Tired, Crops Grow Little”. She snored profusely and often gesticulated mid-snore, perhaps in attempt to waft away some imaginary pest in a dream. Her dazzling necklace, held precariously taut around her fat neck, forced him to lean to his right so as to avoid the glare while speaking with the attendant; it would befall on him heartily if he had to speak to the attendant while making an expression akin to a smirk. “Could I have a glass of wine?”

“Certainly, sir. What does the gentleman drink?” replied the attendant in the most obsequious manner possible, without appearing false.

The young man was immediately struck by this question. He looked back and forth from his right hand clutching the padded arm rest and to his left, which was still in the air. Awakening from this slight daze, he nearly had to force his hand down as he conjured up a subtle response to hide his naïveté: “I’ll have your best sort!” he said cheerily.

“Of course, sir,” he said, matching the cheeriness. He took a slight bow and left for the door standing in at the end of the aisle facing the young man, who began to stare intently at it. What a splendid door it was! The young man had observed attendants routinely walk through the door and into the other cars carrying the less-privileged peoples. He took out a pen and a few pieces of parchment from his sac sitting beside his feet. He noted, quite diligently:

The contours of the door are most interesting. They reflect the light in a particular manner, perhaps due to the door’s material and ornate paint. The colours bronze, azure, and

He briefly cursed at his inability to remember to write in French, and not Russian, and then continued listing off the very particular colors and their respective roles in the perception of the door, all in French. He had always been accustomed to speaking to his mother and sister and friends in Russian, back in the little village where he used to live not far from Moscow.

The young man had come to ignore the now smaller crowd of lords and ladies boarding the Tsar Nikolai Korolevskiy Vagon and their bustling to find vacant seats. It was, however, difficult to ignore the ghastly complaining of some of the guests. It was even more difficult to impede irritation from seeping into his being as he began to draw sketches of the door. To be noted, the sketching was soothing, and did much to help him forget everyone else in their collective entirety.

This seeping irritation had several sources. The young man cursed at the world, under his breathe, every single time an attendant opened this door in order to get through to the other cars on the train and every single time some attendant blocked the young man’s holy view of the exquisite door. At last he cried, in defeat and in something of a muffled squeal and after much such irritation, “Oh to hell with this all!” and drew nearly no attention from anyone except the crew member who had at last brought with him a platter with a fine little glass filled with some fine, crimson liquid.

The attendant approached his seat bearing an expression of solicitous servility. This was the expression that says I am sorry that I am late but I hope this is quite alright, sir. The young man immediately read this expression as such and tempered himself. “Thank-you,” he said as he reached for the glass from the platter. At this instant a calamity like no other occurred: a man, completely separate from this exchange altogether, traversed past the attendant so as to sit down nearby and it was in this motion that he pushed the attendant slightly. The glass came tumbling onto the young man’s lap.

“Goodness sir, I am appalled! Forgive me…” and such and such was said. The young man, quite unsurprised, took the place of the attendant in reaching for the glass, now shamelessly rolling to a halt on the floor, empty and all.

The man who had accidentally pushed the attendant, however, seemed deeply offended. “‘Désolé!’ You clumsy man, you! You must say ‘Je suis très désolé!’” he corrected.

The young man drank the second glass of wine, which the attendant had brought again, and resolved to continue his reading. This was after he attempted to resuscitate the wine-soaked sketches. He read from the beginning of some novel, perhaps a gift:

It is difficult to ascertain, with any reasonable amount of certainty, that which constitutes the character of a sensible man. It is indeed difficult to look upon a man, perhaps one who is quietly sitting at a chair. Perhaps he is skulking about some frivolous thought while maintaining a saturnine look of pensive distraction or perhaps he is merely enjoying the taste of the evening’s meal whilst a thin, silvery wisp of congealed thought escapes his cranium after every small, intriguing bite. Once we have looked upon this man, we may have acquired absolutely no knowledge of his persona. We may be mistaken, however, in assuming such a persona, for intelligent men have none. They have only themselves. This could certainly be elaborated. Delightful musing is the essence of those that sit quietly. This quietness of spirit, the sort that is absent in the buffoons, is difficult to observe and, so, do the passersby leave unwittingly yet most opinionated…

He turned the page, and instantly his heart sank, fallen, deep into his chest, too heavy to be bolstered by silliness and fantasy and art. The train had begun moving, slowly at first, and then quickly. At the spine of the book, lay a deceitfully small piece of parchment, folded twice. Twice like the tears in his heart, and two like the tears which wetted the page. He unfolded the paper, slowly at first, and then quickly.

Brother, come to us. Mother is dying.

The entirety of the world became clear. The delicious wine, the beautiful landscape out the window to his right, the regal décor, everything was very clear. He remembered what was forgotten in the red carpet, wine, and bright iridescence. He remembered purchasing a first-class ticket from St. Petersburg headed to Moscow, aboard the Tsar Nikolai Korolevskiy Vagon, and he remembered receiving this note a few days prior.

He closed the book and tilted his head towards the window. As the train passed the Petersburg station, with great speed, the snowy birch trees seemed like grey stains on the landscape, being swiftly wiped out of existence by the motion of the train. The young man ordered two more glasses of wine by the end of the hour. The woman to his left was at that moment engaging an elderly gentleman in a discussion of politics.

“The serfs…”

“Yes, and…”

“But so and so…”

Some time had passed. Many guests were asleep and some were ordering some liquor and some were reading. The young man observed as the young woman sitting ahead and in the opposite column of seats was removing her ornate felt bonnet. It was lined with a rosy silk veil. He noted the light as it reflected from the ribbon along the bonnet to the folded rim of the veil. And he saw her husband, at her left, make subtle attempts at his wife’s waist, and down to what would be her thigh, draped over by an exuberant dress. He saw the slight annoyance in her eyes, at her husband’s inability to contain himself in such a public setting. The young man even heard her say at one point “Not now!” in a muffled outburst. Nonetheless, most everyone around her was either asleep, thoroughly disinterested, or ignorant. Disgusting, he thought, as if he had witnessed an abhorrent sin. A deep irritation coalesced within him. How can it be possible? He gripped his cravat tightly with his right hand, as if loosening the hold of some fiend on his neck. The window to his right reflected his face, which he found intriguing. It was red, exasperated, and sweaty. His eyes bulged and, at last, he flagrantly tore the cravat from his neck and onto his lap. The young man drew absolutely no attention from anyone around him. He was a microcosm of unbridled anxiety amongst a vast cacophony of silence. Although it was not truly silence. It was a sea of little muffled conversations and indistinguishable little sounds. The clinging of glasses and the ruffling of coats rang so loudly in his mind. I am in hell. The train kept on course, regardless. And his mother also, regardless. The young man looked again at his reflection in the window, now with a calm manner, and as it seems, for the first time, he noticed the head rest on his seat. He cocked his head back, and slept.

Some time had passed and the young man, upon awaking, recalled his mother. He envisioned a frail elderly woman with long, stifled grey hair and hunched over a hearth. She nearly never failed to wear the same outfit everyday: the overcoat of a man, sturdy black boots and very masculine brown wool trousers. It was a comic sight to see these hefty garments weighing down such a small and thin person. She had always been small and thin, but the old age made these features particularly salient. It should be noted that he held her in the greatest esteem, and so any thinking of her was with great consideration and affection. He took out some more parchment paper and his pen and wrote:

Dearest Vera,

It is so enigmatic! I boarded my train thinking about how lovely the sky was on this particularly gloomy day, and thinking about the fine décor aboard this car, but I seemed to have left something, besides my glasses, at the station. It seems as though I could easily be going to some soirée in Moscow, perhaps even with a professor of university! I mean to say, that I did not find myself, even for a brief moment, in any state of grieving or sadness of any sort since the moment I bought my train ticket. I think only now of the moment I boarded this beautiful train and the moments I took in admiring it, and how completely incidentally the note from my sister was in my hand. It seemed to be a mere accident that I found it lying inside a book of mine, and this is when all memory flowed so viciously back into my consciousness. Even more incredible was the abruptness of the outpour of my emotion upon remembering. At this moment, as I remember the moment I received the damn note, I am only curious. Curious to see my sister and mother. My mother especially, though I’m not sure. This is itself so curious! In any case, I am more saddened, however, by my having to leave you, if only for a few days. The thought of being separated from you, your clothes and eyes, and the precious feel of your skin, and even your scent, is enough to haunt my dreams for days. Oh I should be very prepared for these dreams with you! I wish for you to know that I can find happiness only in our moments together, even if they have been until now, small. When I return to you, sweet Vera, we will have much to discuss. Your father has seriously undermined our love and I think that we should carefully consider what we ought to do. My regards to your dear mother, and even to your cruel father who loves you and is only blinded by antiquated tradition.

Love,

He thought about his words and what ought to go next. Instead of signing his name, he gently scrawled out the word “Love”, folded the paper, and tucked it in his coat pocket. At this point the portly woman with the vermilion finish on her nails, and the elderly gentleman sitting adjacent to them, had already settled their discussion of politics. He read the letter over again and once more after that. “The thought of being separated from you, your clothes and eyes, and the precious feel of your skin, and even your scent, is enough to haunt my dreams for days.” He had written this not a minute before this contemplation. It was in this moment of vague indecision that he felt the necessity to heavily scrutinize what he had just written, this sentence in particular. I do not love her? Ah, but this heavy thinking is indeed very heavy on the mind. He ordered two more glasses of wine, and took out another piece of parchment paper in order to resolve this issue. But, in reality, there was no resolution. He simply closed his eyes comfortably and thought about what love is, the essence of what this strange thing is, for a long while. How could it be that such a thing as the mere valediction to a letter, a perfunctory ending, stirred this much thought? And how interesting that there was in fact not much thought at all. On this piece of paper he drew love, as he thought it should look. He drew Vera.

The young man’s relationship with Vera was thought-provoking. He had met her back in Petersburg, about three months after he had stolen enough money from his mother to attend a small college there. Vera served him a coffee at a tavern while he sat drearily gazing into a summer afternoon’s sky through a window. The sky was abysmal, and so too, there was a response. The greyish sky, with dollops of wispy white here and there, returned the complimentary gazing, and the young man knew very well of it. He and Vera had long discussions all in silence. These discussions were purely using sight. Vera, daughter of a relatively wealthy merchant, saw this and he saw her, with bright eyes and a warm cup of coffee in her hands. Her bright eyes almost could have been outmatched by the brilliance of her expensive pendant, which always hung from her neck. She always wore the finest and most updated clothes. She always walked with a particular gait, and talked with a particular rhythm, and always swayed gently and heartily. They met, and talked a little, and fell in love, and surrendered themselves to each other. Her father, a grand Patriarch, refused to allow such a romantic relationship, between his beautiful and intelligent daughter and a runaway, from continuing. He could place blame on his own condition of being, indeed, something of a runaway, or her father’s sensible insensibility, or the stars in the sky.

~~~

II

Nikolai Levin is arrested

In the fall of 1865, Nikolai Mikhailovich Levin returned to the Zloyeserdtse Governorate for the first time in eighteen years. He stood in a pit, slathered in copious amounts of mud and blood, swinging a shovel back and forth, as his arms gradually tired. He had arrived at the graveyard three hours before he believed there would be any rain, but his rather lack of aptitude for such labor proved to be time consuming. I would say that his lack of aptitude in any labor at all proved time consuming. It was a pathetic sight: a man, verging on madness of about forty, digging up the grave of some old and forgotten soul who had the misfortune of being the subject of this man’s intrigues. I don’t myself, to this day, understand if any of this nonsense was justified in the end. As much as I understand, this man, Nikolai Mikhailovich Levin, was deeply under the impression that the grave of this poor soul was that of his grandfather, Sir Mikhail Teofilovich Levin. I say “Sir” because of how Levin referred to his esteemed grandfather. How he loved to boast and retell again and again the epics of his grandfather’s voyages and travails. Sir Mikhail Teofilovich Levin. I don’t myself pretend to know any better so whenever I heard him speak it, I didn’t bother contradicting.

Occasionally, Nikolai Mikhailovich Levin would take a short pause, in between hauls of dirt, get out of the pit, sit upon the pile of mud that he had created, and meditate. He thought of his wife, Utka, and how he ran away from their home in the Zloyeserdtse Governorate not two weeks after she had given birth to their second child. It was a girl by the name of Anastasya, I believe. If I remember correctly, he had been thoroughly disappointed and bored by domestic life. To him, his beautiful and brilliant wife was the dullest possible thing because she represented the dullest possible thing. She badgered him constantly to go to work every day, in protest of the frequent lack of food in the household. I would say that they nearly starved every month. The arguments they had were so scandalous. I remember very well everything they fought about, but I won’t go into it here, though I very well could! In the end, he left her, without notice of any kind. She was simply not entertaining; all the nagging was a constant reminder of the worst mistake of his life, but he was not about to let himself be condemned for the rest of his life. He was not going to be condemned to boredom, no, he fled far away one day. He left Utka some eighteen years before the mishap with the graveyard. It was certainly foolish, considering the buffoonish nature of Nikolai; he was an idiot, in the fullest sense of the word. But, I suppose, as the French have certainly taught us all, idiots too have the right to fulfillment and happiness. And, if not, there is a plethora of things to condemn. Above all, there is God, and His infinite grace. Below God, is His menagerie. That is what we are, collectively, and Nikolai Mikhailovich Levin hardly understood this. A villain is what he was, and this is why he has earned all of my spite. More so than the way he presented himself as childish and nearly apathetic to anything important around him, and more so than his disregard of himself, it was his disregard of God that troubled me the most.

It is easy, however, to misunderstand what I am saying. At present, I am able to recall a fond and earnest memory of Nikolai Mikhailovich Levin. This is surely a task of merit, since my memory has hitherto not been up to par. But this, along with the sad tale of Levin, I will remember till my death, which I’m sure is not far from now. I remember the house in which he used to live with his mother, dear Beatrice, before he married. I even visited once, upon hearing that dear Beatrice’s brother, his name escapes me, had died. On this occasion, one little girl from the village, whom Beatrice’s brother was very fond of, could not bring herself to accept his death with grace. She wept incessantly and, moreover, the girl’s own mother could not be bothered to aid in any way. The little girl’s mother was, as I remember, a useless whore. There are too many of those godless whores where I lived. And so Nikolai Levin took this little girl one afternoon, sat her on his lap, and recounted many fictitious stories, unbeknownst to the girl of course, of Beatrice’s brother. He talked with the little girl about Beatrice’s brother for nearly three hours, in a way similar to how he often spoke of his grandfather Sir Mikhail Teofilovich Levin. He spoke as such until the girl’s image of Levin’s uncle had been properly bolstered. Levin then walked her to her home and prepared her a snack. It was a very noble gesture. He was a noble man and I don’t doubt this. He told her quite imaginative stories. He always struck me as the creative sort, what with his way of dismissing the conventions of his village in favor of his own ideals. One of these ideals, tragically, was his inability to ever face the reality of his life. He lived to be titillated by the world. In and out at bars and hopping from skirt to skirt. And when the world didn’t titillate him as he expected, he became disappointed, and left the world. But this is not the real tragedy. The real tragedy comes later, and so I should not make haste.

Levin had been digging for nearly an hour when it began to rain. The rain was gentle at first, and then vicious. Dozens of minute drops of water speared his skin at any instant and, worse of all, the water that had collected in the pit had thawed the soil to produce a horrific muck whose flow he routinely battled against. When a ridiculous amount of this mud had made it into his overlarge, tawdry shoes, he cursed at the world. “God dammit to hell!” he cried. When he had slipped and fallen into the pit after a moment of brief meditation, he cursed his mother, only to then promptly and clumsily blurt out a solemn apology into the air. He was a silly man, and everyone I knew agreed with this fact. Many people, however, seemed to also add to this by noticing a profound streak of mysterious virtue within the man. Mysterious indeed! To me, it was a sort of buffoonish charm.

I should also not be misunderstood in why I find myself recounting the story of this ill-fated man. I am not the sort of bitter old man who sits in a dark corner of his luxurious home, bought of course by my many years of service to my great Motherland, and who ponders about those little people gifted with youth that I will never see again. And I certainly don’t sit in that dark corner of my house, quietly holding a steamy cup of coffee with both hands close to me face and with a disgustingly devilish grin appearing slowly on my gnarled face over the twirling steam of the coffee, as I think of the many ungodly flaws of the youth I have known in the past. The more flaws I can count in my head with a characteristic arrogance brought only by old age, the more delicious my contemptuous meditation becomes… Ah but this is certainly not why I recall such things, so I won’t be misunderstood in this respect.

Until the mishap with the graveyard, Levin had not known a true friend. He had only those who found him quite charming, and, more so, entertaining. This is the only reason why, during a night of drinking and mild indulgence of appetites, he could be found surrounding by a sizable crowd of odd fellows and pleasure-seekers. They spoke to him in a very detached manner, as if he was a circus animal of a sort. This language, of course, was inadvertently tremendously implicit. This is why he was never bothered by the attention and, rather, enjoyed it very much, although never as much as the curious, ridiculous, or simply senseless thing he was doing at the moment to earn such attention. Senseless! It is such an interesting word, since I would dare to say that Levin was, comparatively, the most sensible fellow of any other in a group in which he could have been found in. This is because of the nature of those who followed him around, not ideologically, but rather in the spirit of the drunken times. These people would all drink to the verge of madness and then watch as Levin performed some extraordinarily hilarious feat, whose comedic effect was amplified by their drunken state of course. These are the sort of terribly empty fellows who absolutely must live off of jesters. These people have no wives to make love to, and no children to educate, and no work that could merit any significant thought. They are simply catacombs, which hold, as prisoners, their desolate hearts. The Almighty is even lost upon them.

The matter of why Nikolai was digging up a grave is still untouched. Nikolai had, for some time before the mishap with the graveyard, believed that his grandfather, Sir Mikhail Levin, had left him some precious jewelry. I imagine that he had, for quite a long while in his youth, dreamt of his valiant grandfather and of this man’s promise and of the grandiloquence with which he described this heirloom, soon to be Levin’s possession. What a dreamer! This heirloom was perhaps a pair of gold cufflinks, or something of the like. I must say that this delusion is mind-boggling for a few reasons. Firstly, I cannot imagine that a peasant man would be buried with a pair of exquisite cufflinks. Secondly, it is unbelievable that a man such as Sir Mikhail Levin would keep such expensive jewelry to himself all his life, and, moreover, keep it with the intention of handing it down to his idiot grandson. The financial troubles of the Levin family were great, and so any sensible man would sell anything he could. I cannot at this moment recall under what drunken stupor Nikolai decided to succumb to the belief of the existence of these cufflinks, and actually act upon it. He had always, superficially at least, believed these cufflinks to exist, but something great must have overtaken him. This I know for certain: he was not actually drunk on the night of the graveyard mishap!

Something great, indeed, had occurred nearly four years prior to the graveyard mishap. Four years prior, it was 1861 and the peasants had just been emancipated by Tsar Alexander II, the great Liberator, who, aside from instituting great things, instituted greatness itself. I speak sarcastically of course. I remember feigning my ecstasy when a few peasants, who I had befriended, organized a humble banquet, not two days after news of the royal proclamation had reached the Zloyeserdtse Governorate. Some of these peasants were certainly foolish, but some of the elders were wiser and enjoyed the company and food rather than the news. At least, not in excess. While these elders savored pastries or some meat at the tip of their tongue, a bitter taste was fomenting at their gullet. It was certainly this drunken stupor, the much sought after so-called emancipation of the peasant class from the tyrannous landowners, which cradled many ludicrous thoughts. It was a drunken, chaotic mess, and one which I am not surprised to conclude contributed to Levin’s ghastly decision to disinter a corpse.

I laughed when I heard that Nikolai had hardly reached the corpse with his rusty shovel when local police officers had promptly arrived at the gravesite and promptly arrested the poor man. At one point, Nikolai fell into the pit and bashed his shoulder-blade against an icy rock. His thin shirt had been torn terribly and his skin heavily scarred. It was perhaps his howls of pain which drew attention from a patrolling party of police officers. Levin clung to a rock encrusted into the earth as the officers forced him from the pit and restrained him with ease.

“Unhand me!” he shouted. “These are my grandfather’s bones…I am only digging up what rightfully belongs to me, what is rightfully handed down to me…” and so and so was shouted. Levin had been significantly weakened up to this point, so I imagine it was very easy to detain him.

But, you may be wondering what it is about me that makes me a faithful story-teller. I am an old man. I lived in the Zloyeserdtse Governorate for nearly twenty years, often traveling across the entire district on bureaucratic assignments. I often had to travel back and forth between the central villages and the outskirts for days on end. The assignments were curious, as I never fully felt myself engaging in any sort of government. But, one can only be glad that one has the ability to look up at the sky, which often bore a pristine look of contemplative sorrow, and enjoy what one has. It was in those carriage rides across the countryside where one has true acquaintance with the world and God. The snowy hills and snowy trees are a sight that should never tire one’s eyes. I was certainly never tired. It was, indeed, a comfortable government position. It became even less so after 1861, but I kept working obediently.

The zemstvo system was first implemented in my town in the autumn of 1864. I lived on a private estate not far from the local congregation of villages. I oversaw the agriculture of three or four, I cannot remember now, mirya, where, in each, fourteen or so households worked collectively on grain fields. I never really knew what sorts of business was conducted at the villages but I was the overseer, nonetheless. The edge of the Zloyeserdtse Governorate where I worked is not very far from Moscow, so the implementation of the zemstvo system was relatively easy. Cooperation was good and plentiful. Many people welcomed the new system of municipal self-rule with enthusiasm: the assembly of justice was commissioned and created through novel democratic processes, for instance, in a timely fashion. The man who had lived in the Zloyeserdtse Governorate for nearly fifty years, longer than anyone else to date, Boris Nikolaivich Vasilyev, was unsurprisingly appointed as the Justice of Peace. Vasilyev was a natural choice for the position; all of the very few educated and literate men of the volost knew him and his abilities well. While I wish I could say that I am friends with Boris Vasilyev, I am afraid he moved out of the volost where I live some ten years ago, though still holds the position of Justice of Peace. I believe he lives now in Prachevya District, not far from the river. When I met Boris Vasilyev, he actually told me of Nikolai Levin. As it turns out, the man had worked on Levin’s case, and Vasilyev told me in passing that he had never before seen such a “boring trial

News of Nikolai’s arrest became widespread among the mirya, and, within a few days, the entire volost knew of his pending trial and the charges held against him. A document was redacted at the offices of the court of justice, where he was detained. The document contained the words:

NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH LEVIN, b. 1827

GRAVEROBBING

Nikolai’s hands were cuffed together and he was tied to a wooden stake, just outside the building of the offices of the court of justice. It was a dull, cream-colored building. Nikolai stood waiting at the very entrance, beside a great plain wall. The paint and concrete was chipped away in several parts of the wall. Modestly sized cracks and scratches ran throughout the whole façade. It was sunrise. A few homeless men were still deeply asleep, propped up against the building wall. The gashes on Levin’s shoulder blade had stopped bleeding, although he could feel an unyielding stinging sensation, mitigated only by the harsh cold. He looked at the wall behind him and cursed at it in a muffled whisper.

If there is a single thing I am certain of, it is of the nature of the almost transcendent reality of those things which we, as rational animals, hinge upon. Those little things we do on a daily basis, including those not so little things, such as the defilement of a grave, are subject to a perverse masquerade of ideology and symbolism. Likewise, those things which we as passersby may neglect, whether it be a piece of fruit or a dilapidated building, are symbols buried deep within our hearts. I cannot say how vital it is for us to take on the gruesome task of exhuming that which lies buried in our hearts. Nikolai, ever the idealist, presents us with a wonderful case. But more on this later, I think.

~~~

III

The Kolmogorov family

I currently find myself seated near my fireplace. I have served myself a glass of vodka and have set it on the mantelpiece, where I’ve also left the bottle. I plan on keeping it close by. My mother and father have gone into town to attend a funerary service for Grigori Kolmogorov. I am alone in this fabulous manor. I have no brothers or sisters, or friends of any kind. But I am twenty, and I plan on leaving this place soon. At the moment, I do have much to keep myself preoccupied. I don’t have enough vodka at hand, however, and I am very tired, so I don’t think I will be leaving this seat for some time. When I run out of vodka, I will stop thinking. I will stop remembering. And I think I will go to sleep. And when I wake up, I wish to never again remember such things that I will remember now, because hopefully I will have forgotten all about them. I don’t know where I’ll go, but it will not be where I wanted to go when I was younger. When I was younger, I wanted to go to the river, but I certainly can’t go back there now. While I sit here and reminisce, it may also be a good idea to entertain myself, to not be too much of a dastardly masochist. I am thinking about that wretched crying that’s sounding from the crib in the next room. But I like to think it sounds like a tune which has captivated me for a while. I don’t recall exactly what it is, but it is a very precious one to me, much like the very wretched crying. At the highest voice, there is a dainty little melody, which could hardly be called genius at all, if it were alone and unaccompanied. It is a very light and airy melody. It streams seamlessly in the air as it leaves behind, in its tracks, delightful sounds. But this melody is in fact also accompanied by some deep, heartily-struck chords in the bass. They are struck slowly and with utmost grace. But, as one chord follows the other, there is a diminution: each chord is a semitone from the last and so on until eventually there is complete harmonic chaos and one is left stranded amidst a tenebrous sea of dissonance. A sea of noises, all individually lost to the ear. There is never any resolution. One is left stranded. I think before I leave this place, I shall go listen to another performance. All this thinking about it has left me urging for it once again. But for now I will begin my reminiscing, and hope that the wretched crying of that child won’t bother me too much.

The Kolmogorov Estate was built nearly a hundred years ago. Its power and dominion had peaked only about two decades ago when it, by order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, assumed control of an entire new volost near the outskirts of the Zloyeserdtse Governorate, of which the estate was a part of. This new volost, Prachevya District, consists of eight villages scattered within a short distance of each other and all about equidistant to a small river where many townsmen gather to discuss politics or collect water for their families. But it is a terrible place for recreational fishing, since there are very few fish there in the water, although I’ve seen many old men standing there in the river with their instruments out, fishing. And I’m sure they know full well that it is a terrible river for fishing. Everyone knows this. But no old man every talks about it. No old man ever turns to his fellow man, also fishing, and says “What a terrible catch today, isn’t it? There aren’t any fish. Why do we fish here? We know there aren’t any. Why do we fish here?” No, they don’t say that. They stay silent and fish, like eerie, lifeless statues.

I’ve been there, at the river bank, with Casimir on several occasions. It is only on these occasions, when we are far from his father, Monsieur Grigori Kolmogorov, the “Great Patriarch”, when we can truly enjoy each other’s company. Although this was impossible in the last few months.

My own father is a huntsman. No, no, he was a huntsman. That’s right, he injured himself a few years ago and ceased all such activity afterwards. He often used to go on short hunting excursions with his friend Monsieur Grigori Kolmogorov and Casimir and I. I recall the first time, several years ago, when the four of us went out hunting game in some forest near the Kolmogorov chateau. Casimir was elated at the fact that his father had finally invited him to accompany him in the sport. My friend had lived his entire childhood, after the age of six, without a mother (it seems to me that the details of this should be discussed later on), so it seems natural that he had been overly attached to his father, while in a distant sense, if only in his very early adolescence.

One quite riveting detail I remember is how we played on that day, and on subsequent hunting expeditions until we attained a sensible age and ceased such little things. Sensible age…Ha! We all outgrow childhood, of course, but I cannot accept this as it is. People don’t understand it. People end up outgrowing more clothes than they have to wear in the first place. Or perhaps this is the norm. I daresay I am the only person on this planet that has ever known a friend and I would gladly stand alone against the norm to protect this. The most disturbing trouble with growing old, is that little things are left behind. As if little things were really little! They are in fact big things with the tenderness and glint of little things. Like the glint in the eyes of a small child. But I have digressed… Nonetheless, I, in this childhood game of ours, would pretend to be some European explorer, and Casimir would pretend to be a madman with a rifle. My job was to run from the madman. It was never, of course, a perfect reenactment of the situation, for we both laughed the entire time. When he’d catch me, we’d pretend to shoot at each other wildly, making grunting noises in between laughs.

On the first hunting excursion, I remember that at one point I was sitting at a flat rock observing my rifle with the childlike wonder that only children have. Under my bare feet was a course moistness. I could hear only the singing here and there of little birds, and, the distance, the rustling of leaves. A shot was fired in the midst of silence and a quick, pained outburst resounded through the wood. I turned my head almost instantly. Some twenty meters ahead of me, Casimir, a then smallish boy with bony arms, had fired his rifle and the recoil had naturally sent the weapon flying towards his poor face. I ran to him initially, but my father stopped me from behind. Monsieur Grigori tended to him, first scolding him for holding the weapon improperly. “It’s quite alright, my boy,” Monsieur Grigori said, in a collected and almost cold manner. He looked into my friend’s eyes, which were enlarged, red, and wet with tears. “God will heal you in the manner he thinks best. It’s best not to even think about this, Casimir. Do you understand?” He clutched my friend firmly, and spoke in an odd almost ritualistic manner. The boy nodded fervently while at the same time holding his father’s hand as only a child can and without breaking his gaze. “Don’t fret. None of any of these things in this world are important at all, my boy!” The father smiled slightly. “You must keep a firm watch on God and Him alone, do you understand? The world will disappear behind you when you ascend into His Kingdom. Do you feel your pain subsiding now…?” I remember that Monsieur Grigori spoke with such passion. Casimir stopped crying after this, and followed his father home. I remember that I stayed in the wood with my father, wondering for the rest of the day why my friend didn’t stay. I had to make due with my terribly boring father.

Years later, I followed Casimir on an excursion of our own. This was about two years ago, when we were both sixteen. We went to the river bank in the very south end of Prachevya District. This is one memory that I remember particularly clearly: it was quite cloudy and colder than usual. The river bank was unusually devoid of any townsmen. This was one of the first times Casimir had gotten into a very heavy dispute with his father. He had ran away from his towering estate to seek some sort of refuge. I was initially walking along a vegetable garden near my family’s own estate, not far from the Kolmogorov manor, when I saw him romping through the garden, to come see me. It was such a splendid sight at first: he wore his characteristic charcoal-black coat and slacks. They were simple garments. They always were. And then I saw his brilliantly golden unkempt hair and that he bore the expression of a frightened child. This was only instants after I had first spotted him, and this was when I knew he was not well. We didn’t talk there though; I followed him to the river, where he insisted on going. So we ran together to the very south end of Prachevya District, and sat on a large, flat rock by the water. I can very easily recall the scent of the fresh, cold running water, being carried up by the air. And I can hear the gentle cascading of the water as it ran across smooth rocks embedded in the river floor. This river separated the town from a vast forest. Ah, the sweet scent of umber foliage and pine. It was refreshing. There was not much snow. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked him. He didn’t respond, but was trembling slightly. I held his hand tightly when he began telling me about the dispute, which is far too lengthy and convoluted to begin retelling. I doubt I even remember a good deal of it.

After a few moments of silence, I looked at his hand, wrapped by mine. It was still bony, like when he was a child, but no longer very cold. “Seryozh,” he said, looking at the river.

“Yes, Kazik?” It was always exciting when he called out for me, regardless of how trivial the matter. It was only in this moment, in which he called out for me as a faithful chasm which contained his wails and cries, that I found it relatively easy to contain my enthusiasm when he spoke my name.

“There is something quite horrible about God. I refute Him, and I banish Him.” His voice faltered at moments. I was so incredibly distraught to see him like this. He usually spoke so eloquently and with great, shall I say, intellectual conviction. Perhaps a streak of arrogance here or there, but that’s not important. But then, by the river, he had trouble speaking. As if every word he uttered fought some bloody battle within him first, in order to escape his mouth.

“You have spoken about this a few times in the past, Kazik. But I don’t think I ever understand what you mean to say,” I said, honestly.

“I have thought about it a few times in the past. If we are to believe in such a God as my father, I should say, the God of my father, then we are to surrender ourselves. We are to be slaves to the whim of a mystical being. I cannot permit myself to do this because if I don’t have freedom, I am worth nothing.” He spoke so seriously and starkly. Devoid of emotion. These were thoughts that had fermented for quite a while in his mind already.

“You have always, in the past, spoken to me about this in the same poetic manner. I am here to hear what you have to say, of course but--”

“I can’t begin to say how I would even be if I didn’t have someone to mention this to, even if in passing.” He took my other hand and spoke softly. He always initially had three modes of speaking to me: softly, playfully, and sarcastically. “But I don’t expect you to see this matter in the same way as I. Your family is of prestige. My family is of prestige also. But we are different and even so you’ve always talked with me faithfully. But now this is different. I am free, and I won’t allow anything to corrupt this precious thing I have.” He turned to me and I saw his green eyes. They were a very particular green. It was a color that could not be captured without thorough understanding: this was not solely green, but also tinted with somber grey. It was, however, his oftentimes impenetrable countenance which often made me fear him, if only for a brief moment. This fear would come to consume me, identically as fire consumes wood.

At that moment, I surely must have given him something to think about. Something to easily read, and he had read whatever it was. I had become careless in how much I let go from only my eyes, and he also had great ability when it came to people and their eyes. My hold on him abruptly loosened when he pulled his hand away from mine, as if I had disturbed him, or as if warming his hand was unlawful. He said nothing, but nothing was necessary. He gave an extremely subtle expression, but one with infinite insight. It told me to do nothing, to say nothing, to be cautious, to let it pass. At that moment, I felt, quite oddly, violated. I felt violated in the sense that some extremely deep feature of my being had been exposed so suddenly and without warning.

“I must tell you, among other things,” he said, after a few excruciatingly silent moments. He turned to the river again. “If there were a God, life would be meaningless.”

We spoke with words, and without. “I suppose then that, to you, a life with no god would be the most fruitful.”

He nodded slowly. I did not, naturally, think much of what he said at all. I attempted to merely be of any consolation and make myself of the disposition that would tolerate and play along with this blasphemy. I needed only to sit quietly and stare at him intently while he spoke so seriously and sometimes passionately. don’t exactly remember how religious I was at the time. I do know that I had a slight sensitivity to the topic whenever he berated God. Certainly, however, I am a God-fearing man today.

This was the first time we talked by the river. We talked some more, and he had a happier disposition afterwards. Although, it was not really happiness. We returned to his chateau about an hour later, where I often liked to join him for nearly hours on end, chatting about little things and enjoying the company of his many dogs. At one point, when we were both around fifteen or so, I’d spend many consecutive days at his chateau. Now that I recall, we often did a number of curious things together, such as sit down by his fireplace and stare at the popping embers. Very often, we would bring out empty wine glasses and place them on the floor before the fireplace, in order to see the firelight through the glass. When we returned to his manor on this occasion, we found his older sister in the process of preparing another ludicrously extravagant soirée, as usual. Her name was Lola Kolmogorovna. But more on her later.

Casimir never allowed himself to weep, even for a little while, and even when he had that first dispute with his father. When we returned to his home, I fell asleep on Casimir’s bed. It was pitch black out when I awoke and found my friend across the room, engrossed in a book. His bedroom in his family’s chateau in Prachevya District is very large but modestly draped. His bed lay right below a window. I heard gentle tapping from outside along the roof and window. “What are you reading?” I asked with a slight and intentional grogginess, pretending to have just awoken.

“Finally the king has awoken,” he said looking up from his book and bowing his head slightly.

I smiled. “The king demands to know what his subject is reading.”

He got up on his feet, holding the book, and sat on the bed beside me. “Your majesty’s subject would first like to petition for your majesty’s most humble abdication.”

I laughed, still groggily. “What treachery! Why is this, my faithful subject? Why would I allow anyone as cold-hearted and lazy as yourself to take over my place as king?”

“I never said I’d take over, my king.”

“Oh you didn’t. Perhaps I know my subjects too well, then,” I smiled provocatively.

“No, indeed, I don’t want to take over. Kingship is for strong men only.” He shrugged and feigned humility so endearingly. “I’m just a peasant. I think it’s your insecurity, and the fact that you know I would make such better ruler, that leads you to such nonsensical conclusions, majesty. But no, I prefer to be the gentle little bird that flies over the castle.”

“Gentle bird? Well, that way you’d have the freedom of a little bird. You should not fly too much though; I can easily see you as one of those clumsy birds that crashes into a tree, to fly never again. Oh, the tragedy!”

“Ah, when will you stop teasing?”

“Only when you crash into a tree, of course.” I pushed him playfully. “The fact remains: you’d be a terrible king. Lazy and all…Did you even prepare for lessons tomorrow?”

Casimir had fallen onto his back and cried aloud, as if I had fatally wounded him with a sword or dagger. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, my friend.” He leapt to his feet on the bed, resuscitated, and struck a gallantly triumphant pose while still holding the book. “You mistake my contemplative nature for laziness.” He cleared his throat and read from the book: “…This quietness of spirit, the sort that is absent in the buffoons, is difficult to observe and, so, do the passersby leave unwittingly yet most opinionated. Ah and, by the way, I have prepared for lessons tomorrow, you fiend.”

“I see, my dear subject. So I am a mere passerby and you are now a quiet, innocent little spirit?” I burst into laughter.

“I suppose I am.” He followed suit, clutching his side as he laughed.

“And what about your cold-heartedness?”

There was a silent pause. He sat down and thought for a moment. “Maybe I wouldn’t make such a good king after all!” We laughed. And laughed and laughed…

Downstairs, Monsieur Kolmogorov was speaking with Miss Bissette. There was a knock at the door and, shortly afterwards, Leti entered holding a silver platter with both hands. Yes, how could I forget Leti, the head of the Kolmogorov kitchen staff? Ah damn memory, what a trickster it is: no, no, that’s wrong! She used to be the head of the Kolmogorov kitchen staff. It seems as though it’s been so long, when it really hasn’t been all that long ago when she was dismissed…The entire staff was dismissed. Such a tragedy it’s all been! I loved and had a deep fondness for little Leti. She’s a short old lady, God I hope she’s still out and about, who always wound her wispy white hair tightly behind her head. Not a single strand ever fell out of place. She entered and almost immediately, Casimir jumped to his feet to go and embrace her. “Ah Kazik darling, be careful!” she cried, blushing endearingly and smiling. “Here, here,” she set the tray down on a table by the bed. “I brought you two something to stall hunger for a little bit.”

“Leti,” I said. “Is Miss Bissette still downstairs?”

She sat down at the foot of Casimir’s. The three of us were huddled on the bed. “She is, darling. Master Kolmogorov is still speaking with her in his study.”

“It’s been nearly an hour,” Casimir noted. “Leti, Leti!” he said, abruptly excited.

“Kazik, settle down,” she giggled. “What is it?”

“I wonder if you might have a little bit of gossip. Do you?”

“Oh,” I said, smiling slyly to my friend. “Yes, Leti you don’t visit us here too often. Why don’t you tell us something interesting?”

Little Leti, with her narrow little mouth, smiled at the two of us. “Oh, you two are such little devils…But alright, I may have something interesting to tell you,” she said with a bit of tender, playful malice.

“What are my father and Miss Bissette speaking of?” Casimir inquired.

Leti frowned playfully. “Ah that I don’t know. And, even if I did, I wouldn’t for the name of the motherland tell you two. This whole gossiping is very unnerving in any case. I stopped by to bring a platter of food and see my two young men. But I must get back down into the kitchen; those two other buffoons don’t know how to prepare a proper stew.”

“Come now,” I said. “Don’t be like this to us.”

“I think we have a right to know,” Casimir added.

Little Leti bit her lips and looked at us both. She succumbed, flinging her hands in the air in surrender. It seems that everything she did, she did endearingly. She grasped her frilly apron and shook it vigorously as if removing some dirt. All the while, she looked at us with raised eyebrows and taut cheeks. “Alright, alright, but the last thing I want is for Monsieur Kolmogorov to hear a word of this, though I think it should all be fine…Now, I don’t know for sure, but I believe that the Master is thinking of hiring Miss Bissette as Casimir’s new governess.” At this, I looked at my friend and he looked at me. We jeered, embracing each other, while Leti smiled at us. “Don’t get ahead of yourselves, please. It’s not certain, but I think there is good reason to celebrate. I think that as of very soon, you two will be able to meet in the garden by the East Side of the chateau and wait for Miss Bissette together. I should say though,” she raised a forefinger in caution. “That this does not mean you two can take turns skipping classes. The whole purpose of this arrangement is so that you two can have lessons together while Seryozh’s father and mother are on the clock in some faraway district.”

Valerie Bissette is a Frenchwoman from who vacationed in Moscow and Kazan. Apparently, she decided to settle in the middle-ground, Prachevya District, and teach year-round. It was my father who recommended Miss Bissette’s service as governess to Casimir’s father, and, shortly thereafter, the Patriarch did away with the former instructor. I don't doubt at all that it’s very possible that Monsieur Kolmogorov had sufficiently incentivized Miss Bissette in order to keep her in Russia. I liked Miss Bissette very much; she was kind and gentle in her treatment of schoolwork and subject areas. She did not seem herself very knowledgeable, but compensated greatly by commanding great patience. She always had a gleeful disposition. This should not be mistaken to mean that she was silly and vacuous, for she wasn’t. Even more than how well she lectured and tutored, however, it was her supple frame which most fascinated Casimir and I. Being a very beautiful woman, it should also not be mistaken how we treated her and the material. We were very diligent!

~~~

IV

A young man reads aboard a train

“Tell me, good sir,” the fat lady spoke to the young man, who was placidly flipping through pages of his novel, hardly minding the prose at all. He had propped up some sketches he had made in the past few hours against the window to his right. Around him, many passengers had shed themselves onto their seats, as custom would have it; many kept their excess coats under their seats or on their arm rests. Other such little things had made the Tsar Nikolai car seem thoroughly well lived-in. “We have been traveling for nearly two hours now, and I’ve been asleep, awake, amused, bored, hungry, and satisfied,” she chuckled. “But I turn to you and find you buried in these pieces of paper or staring blankly at that car door for such lengthy moments! It is such a beautiful door, one of the best I’ve seen, but surely it isn’t that interesting, is it? My boy, tell me what it is that runs through your mind. Surely it is entertaining, yes? I cannot stand these long trips and I am afraid I’ve exhausted what little creativity I was born with. I cannot stand boredom!” Indeed, the young man also could not stand boredom, but found much distraction in thought. Pensive distraction, as it were.

The young man had been horrified in the past by the fat woman’s mere voice. Now, she spoke to him directly. Luckily, the woman’s speech was quite unexpected, and so the young man’s anxiety had not had time to build up and become very conspicuous when he, reflexively, blurted out as a response, “well”. “Well, madam, I have been for a long time contemplating this fantastic book.” He pointed at the book, sitting on his lap, while trying not to sustain eye contact with the woman for more than a slight second.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, I must recommend it, madam. It’s beautifully written.”

She scratched her chin, with a purely skeptical look drawn over her. “And what are those papers over there?” Her eyes glared at the papers propped lazily against the man’s window.

“These are sketches, ma’am. I am an artist, you see.”

“Oh!” she said with a tepid attempt at masking condescendence. It was actually quite strange; in the past two hours, this woman had attempted to entertain herself with other passengers in the vicinity without such kind and humble attempts: in one conversation she had with the adjacent madam to her left, all was said, except the explicit “you, my dear, are a whore”. She made every other passenger she engaged with appear to be a tacit barn animal. However, she was desperate this time, perhaps.

“I’ve been drawing to keep myself from sleeping too much.”

“You’ve drawn quite a bit. From where do you come from? Petersburg?”

The man was surprised by the question. He had been sitting by the woman since the train departed from Petersburg. “Yes, from Petersburg.”

“Splendid. I come from there also.” The young man had been staring at his feet. The woman stopped with the chatter abruptly, and tried to go back to sleep.

The young man turned to his sketches. He lingered and decided to pull out a piece of parchment paper from his sac, along with a pen. He wrote.

Dearest Vera,

I have resolved to writing you multiple letters throughout the course of my journey. I feel that it will be more romantic this way. Oh but please don’t think badly of me in the end. I don’t know how bored or lonesome I shall feel in a few hours when I will be only barely entering Moscow. I hope I don’t end up writing some great collection of boring memoirs that you will feel forced to read. In any case, I write now because I cannot wait to tell you in person my thoughts on our current predicament. I know that your family, has, in general been very kind to me. Good God, I would not to this day be a proper artist if it wasn’t for your father’s extremely gracious generosity! From the start, he seemed to me to be the sort of successful man who goes about helping those he befriends. And I am very glad that he befriended me. He saw, in me, a prospective and decent suitor for his beautiful daughter. I am a decent man and I deserve to be with you. But, nothing in the world could possibly justify his attitude now. How outrageous it is! But what strikes me as most incredible and awful is how he treated me and thought of me only a few weeks ago. Do you remember when he invited me to have dinner with you all? I think you can agree that he absolutely adored me. I even had the nerve to show him some of my work. Ah, and he was so stunned by my work. He loved it. And he loved me. And now, he wants nothing with me and, most infuriatingly, he wants you to have nothing with me. What does he expect me to do? Does he want me to grow ridiculously wealthy overnight and simply come back and justifiably claim his daughter? Does he think that I can just match him overnight and then rightfully ask him for your hand? How disgusting. I know that it is hard for you to read this but from the moment I met your father, he seemed to me to be the most upright and virtuous man. But now I am filled with disgust.

He paused for a moment. His pen trembled in his hand. He struggled to keep his breathe steady and calm.

No, I don’t think I can say that. I am not solely filled with disgust. What sort of person would I be if that were the case? No, no, I am only confused. Your father was charmed by me. If you would have asked for his opinion of me several weeks ago, I am sure you would be surprised. And I am sure that you agree. This is so confusing to me! Does your father despise me? I need to know this. Did he at some point actually believe me to be a decent gentleman? If so, doesn’t it stand to reason that he still feels this way about me? I am certain that this is true, but you must confirm this. As I write this, I still do not know what to do about any of this. It vexes me deeply to even think about it. What do you think we should do about all of this?

Yours forever,

He left this letter unsigned, folded it carefully, and tucked it into his sac.

The money the young man had ran away with from his family in Moscow was hardly enough to keep him alive for a couple of months. Some sort of job was out of the question. He despised labor. Those of talent and with the natural tenacity to pursue a greatness should not be called upon to work at all, was a thought that oftentimes roamed through his mind. He felt exactly that at times: tenacious. It was a tenacious thing to leave his family. He had achieved greatness, perhaps. His sketches were perhaps great. But nothing could help explain the sentiment he felt buried within himself. He looked out through the window to his right and at the wholly Russian landscape. The train moved so quickly! As quickly as these sentiments may have arisen if only for brief elusive moments within this young man’s mind, like silvery wisps of congealed thought, lingering in time and only time. Not his mind. Nowhere else. For, surely, this man was contemplating these sentiments with as much effort and care as he was contemplating the lofty book lying comfortably on his lap.

Naturally, and quite maliciously, the young couple refrained from informing Vera’s father, or anyone else, of the man’s unfortunately lackluster financial situation. It was inevitable however, and, when the father learned of this, became horrendously furious. He symbolically cut ties between the young man and Vera. After that, they saw each other intermittently. Only a few times each month.

On one such time, the two enamored souls sat together clasping each other’s hands at a pub. The clandestine nature of their activity made it all very riveting and stirred passion within them. It is, however, a tragic thing to be stirred only by circumstance, and by only circumstance. The young always looked at her in such a perplexingly ambiguous manner. The way he regarded her could be mistaken as the final gaze a vast lion has before prancing for a fantastically minute doe, trembling before the grandiosity and prowess of the beast. But it could certainly not be mistaken as the gaze one has before an infant, while cradling the small thing tenderly and with care. They talked little. But when they did talk, it was only about international politics or such affairs of grandiose nature. They never talked about small things. He loved her with ferocity. But it seems that a fleeting stare of carnal desire in between the steps of an impassioned dance, like a single dainty rose petal in a windstorm, perishes. Love is a little thing.

It was not long after Vera’s father ceased bolstering the young man that the latter decided to return to his little village in Moscow and return to his family, even though he had received his sister’s note a considerable while before deciding upon it. Love is not indestructible.

After a failed attempt at sleeping, the fat woman once again began speaking to an adjacent passenger after the latter failed to appear preoccupied with something. “Are you married, dear?”

“Yes, my husband is back in Petersburg.”

“Oh! Yes I am also married,” the fat woman spoke obnoxiously and with a horrid timbre. “I’ve been married with my husband for nearly thirty years, yes, and he’s delightful. He’s also of good company though he’s so dull sometimes that it’s almost maddening!” she cackled. “It’s almost maddening that we often go on for hours talking of some trivial little thing. But at least we talk; some people can only sit around each other without speaking of a single little thing. Yes and so and so and so…”

The young man slept, as only one can on a train. A few times, in the process of falling asleep, he quickly ricocheted from a nascent dream and back into reality, as if shocked by a surge of electricity. He drew attention from no one, but he instinctively looked around at the surrounding passengers when we awoke each time. Damn everyone, he thought. He kept his cold hands in his coat underarms, holding himself tightly, as he was the only one in hell. If there is a hell, it is surely not hot or fiery at all, but crowded. Crowded and crowded. He felt the sensation of becoming asleep, of becoming unconscious, of falling through a deep, black pit in the earth. And he felt the eyes of those gathered round the pit, following him keenly and persistently. As he slept, he conjured, within the fleshy blackness of his eyelids, thousands of horridly disembodied eyes. They floated around, perfectly spherical and clutched by grotesque veins and nerves, parading themselves in and out of his vision. And he saw fire. And burning. And he began to relive the scene which had so tormented him:

He sat at a wooden table, which creaked at the slightest change in pressure on it. A small, haggard woman of about sixty sat opposite to him. Her hair was tightly wound behind her head, wrapped by a veil. Her pale face was emaciated by sickness. “Son,” she spoke, softly, as if recounting a story to a child. She spoke softly enough and he heard the fireplace behind her crackle. “You are free to do as you please.” She coughed, and attempted to get up from the chair and walk to the boy. “Who am I to encroach on the freedom of my son?”

“Please mother, don’t move much,” he began, annoyed.

The frail woman, upon reaching for the stone ground with her leg, collapsed onto the floor, silently. The boy quickly ran to her side, and held her hand tenderly. She looked up at him and saw his dull eyes. But this is why the old woman loved them so. They were plain, like herself.

“Don’t grovel, mother. I love you and couldn’t bear to see you grovel on the ground.”

This woman, in all of her smallness and frailness, commanded such power. As she spoke every word in short little whispers carried by the gelid air, the boy felt his heart crust over a bit. And, bit by bit, his heart froze, but could not die; he thought of painting and drawing. He thought of creation. He is to create himself. He is to represent himself. His art is the grandest form of self-elucidation and representation. And yet his heart burns at the thought that one cannot be without the other. That this grandiosity cannot be without the sickness of his mother. And he thought of the moon, and how its radiant light seemed to just lightly tap his mother’s grey hair. As the light ran down her cheeks and to her wrinkly neck, he saw it finally mix with the light of the fireplace. He saw the luster of moonlight against her veil.

She cupped his face in her hands, and the young man felt instantly bogged down. Bogged down by these little hands! His whole future had frozen at that instant. He would not die a death of guilt and regret, but he would never actually live either. He could not possible leave. But he did. He could not possibly feel regret, having learnt his art. But he did. He felt a thrill and the scene became watery, as if his heart were drowning in the tears he had formed unconsciously, within a black pit in the earth. But his heart was in fact speeding up, beating faster, as if matching the train’s swiftness. Suddenly, and like a swift blow to the head, he awoke, perspiring madly and gasping for much deprived air. Yet, he drew attention from no one. The fat woman, however, turned to him and gasped melodramatically.

“Dear boy are you alright?” she said.

The young man said nothing. He could tolerate many things, including a wretched trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow in a train filled with peering eyes, but to be seen or, rather, perceived in this state was nearly overwhelming. But he contained himself quickly. “Yes, yes. It was just a bad dream,” he finally replied.