Chapter 18 "Duel" Seventeen

seventeen . . . in my troubled heart, With many painful thoughts welling up; memories in front of me Silently unfolds its lengthy chapter. I look back on my life with disgust, I curse, I tremble, I grieve and complain, and shed bitter tears, Yet I cannot erase these sad memories. Whether Pushkin is shot tomorrow morning, or ridiculed (that is, saved), he is finished.Whether that disgraced woman committed suicide out of despair and shame, or lived miserably, she was finished anyway. ... In the dead of night, Laevsky thought as he sat at the table, still rubbing his hands together.The window suddenly opened, with a bang, a gust of wind blew into the room, and the papers on the table flew away.Laevsky closed the window, bent down, and picked up the scraps of paper from the floor.He felt that there seemed to be something new in him, an awkward feeling that he didn't have before, and he felt that his movements had changed.He moved frightenedly, with elbows thrown out to the sides, shoulders shrugged.When he sat down at the table, he started rubbing his hands again.His body is not so flexible.

On the eve of death, one should write letters to relatives.Laevsky remembered this.He picked up the pen and wrote in trembling handwriting: "Dear mother!" He wanted to write to his mother, begging her for the sake of the merciful God in whom she believed, to take that unfortunate woman, who had been disgraced by him, and was now alone, to be warmed by her caresses. Alone, poor, weak; he begged his mother to forget and forgive everything, everything, everything, to make up, more or less, for her son's terrible crime by her sacrifice.But he remembered how his mother, a fat, heavy old woman, in her lace cap, came out of the front house in the morning, and went into the garden, followed by the diners and the little poodle; Yelling at the servants, remembering how haughty and contemptuous she looked.When he thought of this, he crossed out the words he had written.

There was a flash of lightning in the sky, and all three windows lit up, and then there was a deafening thunder, muffled at first, then booming, and then a thunderbolt with such force that the panes of the windows trembled. Ding Ling rings.Laevsky got up, went to the window, and leaned his forehead against the glass.Outside, the thunderstorm is majestic and beautiful.In the sky, like long white bands of lightning, they kept coming out of the dark clouds and throwing themselves into the ocean, illuminating the tall black waves on the vast sea in the distance.Whether it's on the left or the right, probably even in the sky above this house, there are lightning flashes.

"A thunderstorm!" Laevsky muttered in a low voice.He had a desire to pray to someone or something, even to lightning or dark clouds. "A lovely thunderstorm!" He remembered that when he was a child, during heavy thunderstorms, he would always run into the garden without his hat on, and two little girls with fair hair and light blue eyes were chasing after him.They are often drenched by the rain, laughing happily.However, whenever there was a loud thunder from the sky, the two little girls always leaned close to the little boy trustingly. As for him, he crossed himself on his chest and said hastily: "Holy, holy, holy!" of..." Ah, germ of a pure and good life, where have you been?In what ocean are you drowning?Now he is no longer afraid of thunderstorms, he no longer likes nature, and he has no God in his heart.The trusting little girls he'd known in the past had been ruined by him and his peers.He has never planted a tree or grass in his garden in his life.He lived among creatures, but he didn't save a fly, just destroy, destroy, and hypocrisy, hypocrisy. ... "Is there anything I've done in the past that wasn't bad?" he asked himself, trying to hold on to a little bit of bright memory, like a man in an abyss trying to hold on to grass.

Middle school?University?But that's all a lie.His academic performance is very poor, and he has forgotten everything he has learned.Serving the community?That too was a fraud, because while he was serving in the agency he did nothing and was paid for nothing, and his so-called service amounted to a vile crime of theft, for which he was not punished by the courts. He has never needed the truth, nor has he pursued the truth.His conscience, clouded by vice and hypocrisy, was dormant, or silent.He is like an outsider, or a person hired from other planets, who has not participated in the common life of people at all, and is completely indifferent to people's pain, ideas, religion, knowledge, exploration, struggle, etc.He never said a kind word to the people, nor wrote a line that was wholesome and not vulgar, nor did he do anything for them, but ate their bread, drank their wine, and stole their wives , live by their thoughts.To justify his despicable parasitic life before them and himself, he always tried to look as if he were nobler and superior to them.Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy... He vividly remembered the scene he saw at Mulidov's house, disgusted and desolate, and his heart beat unbearably.Kirilin and Atchmianov are detestable, but they are only continuing what he has begun; they are his accomplices and disciples.He, the young and feeble woman who trusted him more than her brother, had deprived her of a husband, of all her acquaintances, of her native land, and had brought her here to heat, fever, and boredom.Every day she had to reflect his laziness, depravity, and hypocrisy like a mirror, and she used these, just these, to fill her weak, slack, and pitiful life.Later he got tired of her and hated her, but he didn't have enough courage to let her go, so he tried his best to wrap her up with hypocrisy like a cobweb, and the more he entangled. ... Those people continued to do the rest.

Sometimes Laevsky sat down at the table, and sometimes he went away to the window. Now he blew out the candle, now lit it again.He cursed himself, wept, complained, begged for forgiveness.Several times he ran to the table in despair and wrote: "Dear mother!" Apart from his mother, he has no relatives or friends.But how could his mother help him?And where is she?He wanted to run to Nadezhda Fyodorovna, throw himself at her feet, kiss her hands and feet, and beg her to forgive him.But she was his victim, and he dreaded seeing her as if she were dead. "My life is ruined!" he murmured, rubbing his hands. "But why am I alive, my God! . . . " He had plucked his dim star from the sky, the star had fallen, and its trail was mingled with the darkness of the night.It will never return to the sky, because life is only once, and there will be no second time. If the past years can come back, then he will replace the hypocrisy of the past with truth, laziness with labor, and laziness with labor. If he replaces his former tedium with joy, he will give back to himself the purity he has wrested from others, and he will find God and justice.

However, this is no longer possible, just as it is impossible for a falling star to return to the sky. Just because it was impossible, he despaired. When the thunderstorm had passed, he sat down by the open window and calmly thought about what was before him.Von Koren would probably have shot him dead.The man's clear and relentless worldview allows him to destroy the weak and useless.If at the critical moment his opinion changed, the hatred and loathing which Laevsky usually aroused in him would come to his aid.But what if he misses, or merely wounds a foe he hates, or shoots the air in order to taunt an opponent he hates?Where should he go?

"To Petersburg?" Laevsky asked himself. "But it's tantamount to starting over the old life I'm currently cursed with. Whoever hopes to be saved by changing places like a migratory bird will always find nothing, because to him the earth is the same everywhere. Find salvation among people What? So who to look for, and how? Samoylenko's kindness and generosity are no more saving power than the deacon's mirth or von Koren's hatred. You should look for a savior within yourself, if you can't find it, then don't waste your time, just commit suicide..." There was the sound of a carriage.It was daylight.A carriage passed by his house, then turned, its wheels creaking in the wet sand, and stopped near his house.In the carriage sat two persons.

"Wait, please, I'll be right there!" Laevsky told them from the window. "I didn't sleep. Is it time?" "Yes. It's four o'clock. When we get there..." Laevsky put on his overcoat and hat, put his cigarettes in his pocket, stopped, and fell into thought.He felt as if there was something else that needed to be done.In the street, the two witnesses talked softly, and the horse snorted.At dawn on this damp morning, when everyone was asleep, these sounds filled Laevsky with melancholy, like a premonition.He stood in thought for a while, then walked towards the dormitory.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna lay flat on the bed, stretched out, covered from head to toe with a checkered rug.She didn't move at all, the way she looked, especially her head, reminded one of an Egyptian mummy.Laevsky looked at her silently, begged her forgiveness in his heart, and thought at the same time: If the sky is not empty, and there is a God there, then he will protect her; if there is no God, then let her die. , she no longer needs to live. Suddenly, she jumped up and sat down on the bed.She raised her pale face, looked at Laevsky in horror, and asked: "Is that you? The thunderstorm is over?"

"It's over." When she thought of the past, she put her head in her hands and trembled all over. "How sorry I am!" she said. "If only you knew how sad I am! I was expecting," she went on, narrowing her eyes, "that you'd kill me, or throw me out of this house, into the rain, into the thunderstorm, but you kept quiet, . . . There has been no movement. ..." He suddenly hugged her tightly and kept kissing her knees and hands. Later, she murmured something to him, trembling at the memory of the past, and he stroked her hair and looked at her carefully. Looking at his face, he realized in his heart that this unfortunate, unruly woman was the only person who was close, intimate, and irreplaceable to him. When he got out of the house and got into the carriage, he hoped to come back alive. "Notes" ① Excerpted from Pushkin's poem "Memories", ——Russian text editor's note