At that time, a year ago, I was still writing short articles for journals, firmly convinced that eventually I’d manage to turn out something substantial and successful. I was also working on a long novel – but as it happens, I’ve ended up in hospital, and shall probably soon be dead. So if I am going to die soon, I ask myself, why should I bother to write anything at all?
I cannot stop myself constantly recalling the whole of that difficult past year in my life. I want to record everything now, and if I had not devised this occupation for myself I think I’d have died of misery. All these impressions from the past sometimes afflict me painfully, to the point of torment. But once they’ve been written down, they will take on a calmer, more orderly aspect; they will be less of a delirium and a nightmare to me. At least I believe so. The act of writing itself is such a relief. It will relax and calm me down, revive my writer’s instincts, transform my memories and feverish imaginings into something tangible, a task accomplished… Yes, it’s a splendid idea. Besides, I could always bequeath my notes to my doctor – who, if the worst came to the worst, could use them in winter to seal the cracks in his windows.
However, for some reason I’ve started my story in the middle. If I’m going to continue, I should begin again at the beginning. Yes, I’ll do that. First, some details about myself.
I wasn’t born locally, but far from here, in the district of ***. I’ve no reason to doubt that my parents were good people, but I was left an orphan at an early age, and brought up in the home of Nikolai Sergeich Ikhmenev, a small landowner who took me in out of compassion. He had one daughter, Natasha, who was three years younger than me. We grew up together as brother and sister. Oh, my glorious childhood! How futile it is to yearn for its return at the age of twenty-four, and to have nothing else to recall with gratitude and exhilaration on one’s deathbed! The sun shone so brightly then, so unlike what we see in the St Petersburg sky of today, and our young hearts beat with such vigour, such joy! We were surrounded by fields and forests then, not these lifeless piles of stone. There was such a wonderful park and orchard on Vasilevskoye Estate, where Nikolai Sergeich was steward! Natasha and I used to go for walks in the orchard, and beyond that there was a vast dank forest, where we once got lost… Unforgettable, golden days! Life was just beginning to assert itself, mysteriously and alluringly – and it was a sweet experience. It seemed then that behind every bush, every tree, some mysterious and unknowable being lurked; the fairy-tale world merged into the real one, and when the evening mist thickened in the deep valleys and its grey, sinuous wisps reached out towards the brambles clinging to the rocky ridges of our great gorge, Natasha and I would stand hand in hand on the edge, peering with bated breath into the depths, expecting at any moment to see someone emerge or call out to us from the mist at the bottom and turn our nursery stories into manifest reality. Once, much later, I reminded Natasha how on one occasion someone had given us a copy of The Children’s Reader,* and we had immediately dashed into the orchard to our favourite green bench, under the thick canopy of an old maple tree by the pond, and sat down together to read the magical tale of Alphonse and Dalinda. Even now, every time I think of this story my heart misses a beat, and when about a year ago I happened to remind Natasha of the first two lines, “Alphonse, the hero of my tale, was born in Portugal; Don Ramiro, his father…” and so on, I nearly burst into tears. I’m afraid it was very silly of me, which is probably why Natasha smiled so awkwardly at my display of emotion. Of course, she immediately checked herself – I remember that – and to comfort me started to reminisce too. Little by little she entered into the spirit of it. What a glorious evening that was! We went back over everything, from the time I was sent to boarding school in the provincial capital – God, how she wept then! – to our last farewell, when I was taking my leave of Vasilevskoye for ever. I had left boarding school and was about to set off for St Petersburg to prepare myself for university. I was seventeen at the time, and Natasha had just turned fourteen. I was so clumsy and ungainly, she said, that it was impossible for anyone to keep a straight face when they saw me. When the time came to say goodbye, I took her aside to say something very important to her, but became suddenly tongue-tied. Natasha remembered that I had been very agitated. Needless to say, our conversation floundered. I didn’t know what to say, and she probably wouldn’t have understood me anyway. I just burst into tears, and left without saying anything more. We met again, much later, in St Petersburg. That was two years ago. Ikhmenev had arrived on some business connected with his lawsuit, and I’d just managed to get myself into print.