Netochka Nezvanova (Penguin ed.) Page 3

  Efimov listened to his comrade with deep feeling. While the latter spoke the pallor left his cheeks; they flushed red and his eyes sparkled with unaccustomed fire, courage and hope. But this noble courage soon turned into arrogance and then to his usual impertinence, so that by the time B. had reached the end of his admonitions Efimov was already distracted and impatient. He warmly shook B. by the hand and, ever rapid in his transitions from deep self-abasement and humiliation to extreme arrogance and defiance, declared confidently that his friend need not trouble himself on his behalf, that he was perfectly capable of managing his own affairs and that very soon he would be giving a concert that would bring him instant fame and money. B. shrugged his shoulders but did not contradict him. And thus they parted, although it was not for long. Efimov was quick to spend all the money that B. had given him and came back a second, a third, a fourth time until finally on the tenth occasion B. lost patience and did not answer the door. After that they no longer saw each other.

  Several years went by. Once, when B. was walking down a side-street on his way home from a rehearsal, in the entrance to a squalid tavern he bumped into a drunken, shabbily dressed man who called him by his name. It was Efimov. The man was greatly changed; his face was yellow and puffy and it was clearly visible that his dissipated life was leaving a permanent mark on him. B. was overjoyed to see him and before he had time to open his mouth he found himself being dragged into the tavern by Efimov. There, in a grimy little back-room, he started scrutinizing his friend more carefully. Efimov’s clothes were in tatters, his boots worn out and his frayed shirt front was covered in wine stains. His thin hair was greying.

  ‘What have you been doing? How did you end up here?’ asked B. Efimov seemed confused and even frightened at first. He answered so jerkily and incoherently that B. wondered if he were looking at a madman. Efimov confessed that he could not talk until he had drunk some vodka but that they had long since refused him credit in the tavern. He flushed as he spoke. He tried making a gesture of reassurance but the flamboyant hand movements only produced an effect of insolence, superficiality and importunity. B. found it pitiful and, full of compassion and sympathy, he realized that his fears were justified. Nevertheless he ordered the vodka. Efimov’s face was transformed with gratitude and he was so beside himself that, with tears in his eyes, he almost begged to kiss the hand of his benefactor. During dinner B. learnt that, to his great surprise, the pathetic man was married. But he was still further surprised to learn that his wife was the source of all his unhappiness and grief and that his marriage had completely destroyed his talent.

  ‘How is that?’ asked B.

  ‘My friend, it’s two years now since I’ve touched my violin,’ said Efimov. ‘She’s a peasant, a cook, a coarse uneducated thing. Damn her! We do nothing but quarrel.’

  ‘Why did you marry her, then?’

  ‘When I met her I was starving and she had about a thousand roubles, so I rushed headlong into marriage. Mind you, she was in love with me. She grabbed me by the neck. Who forced her? The money has all gone on food and drink, brother. Eaten it. And as for my talent, gone, gone!’

  B. noticed that Efimov was hurriedly trying to vindicate himself.

  ‘I’ve given it all up. I’ve lost everything,’ he added. He explained that not long before he had nearly reached perfection on the violin and that although B. might be said to be one of the finest violinists in town, he could outshine him completely.

  ‘Then what’s your problem?’ said B. ‘You should have found a good post.’

  ‘It’s not worth it!’ cried Efimov, waving his hands in the air. ‘Is there no one who can understand anything! What do you know? Rubbish! Nothing! That’s what you know! Strumming a dance tune for some ballet, that’s your kind of work. You’ve never seen or heard a decent violinist. What’s the point in talking to you? Carry on as you are!’ With this, Efimov gesticulated again and lurched forwards drunkenly in his chair. Then he began inviting B. to stay with him, but the latter declined, took his address and promised to come and see him the following day. Efimov, who had by this time eaten his fill, was glancing mockingly at his friend, trying his best to wound him. As they were leaving he grabbed hold of B.’s expensive fur coat and handled it like a grovelling servant. As they passed through the outer room he introduced him to the innkeeper and patrons as one of the first and foremost violinists in the capital. In short, his behaviour was extremely repulsive.

  B. did, however, seek him out the following morning, finding him in the one-roomed attic where we were living at this time in great poverty. I was four years old then and my mother had been married to Efimov for two years. She was an unhappy woman. Formerly she had worked as a governess, and she was well educated and attractive. She had married my father, an elderly government official, because she was poor. But she only spent a year with him. My father died suddenly, leaving a meagre inheritance which was divided among his heirs. My mother was left on her own with me and only a small sum of money, her share of the inheritance. With a small child to take care of, it was difficult for her to get another position as a governess. It was at this point that she happened to meet Efimov and she really did fall in love with him. She was an enthusiast and a dreamer, who saw in Efimov some kind of genius, and she believed his arrogant talk of a brilliant future. She was flattered by the glamorous image of becoming the firm guiding hand and support of a genius, and she married him.

  All her hopes and dreams vanished within a month and she was forced to face the pitiful reality. Efimov, who had more than probably married her because she had a thousand roubles, sat back and folded his arms after the money was spent, and, as if glad of an excuse, declared to all and sundry that marriage was the death of talent, that he could not work in a stuffy room face to face with a starving family, that these surroundings were not conducive to inspiration and that it was clear that he was destined for this kind of misfortune. It seems that he himself had come to believe in the truth of what he was saying and was only too pleased to find another line of defence. The unhappy, ruined genius was searching for an inner cause on which to put the blame for his misfortune and disaster.

  He did not seem capable of accepting the fact that he had long ago irreversibly lost his chance of becoming an artist. He struggled convulsively with this terrible conviction, as with a deadly nightmare, and when at last reality overwhelmed him, when his eyes were opened for just a minute, he almost went crazy with fear. It was not easy for him to forget everything that had for so long given a meaning to his life and until the final moment he believed that all hope was not yet lost. In times of doubt he gave himself up to drunkenness, which drove away his grief, drowning his sorrows with intoxicating fumes. I do not think he ever realized how necessary his wife was to him at that time. She was a living pretext and, in truth, my stepfather never moved from his conviction that once he had buried his wife, who had ruined him,everything would be put right. My poor mother did not understand him. Like the true dreamer, she broke down at the first contact with reality. She became hot-tempered, irritable and shrewish, and was always quarrelling with her husband, who in his turn delighted in tormenting her; and she was continually badgering him to work. But my stepfather’s blind obsession, his irrationality and his mental wanderings made him almost inhuman and unfeeling. He used to laugh and swear that he would not touch his violin again until his wife was dead, and he even told her this with a cruel frankness. My mother, who loved him despite everything right up to her death, simply could not endure this life. She became chronically ill, lived in perpetual torment and suffering, and on top of all this misery the anxiety of maintaining a family rested on her shoulders alone. She began preparing food at home and started a kind of service whereby people could come and collect their food, but Efimov stole her money on the sly and she often found herself compelled to send her customers’ dishes back empty. When B. visited us she was busy washing linen and remaking old clothes. In this way we managed to live, from hand to mouth, in ou
r attic.

  B. was struck by our poverty.

  ‘Listen, you’re talking utter nonsense,’ he said to my step-father. ‘Where is this destroyed talent? She’s keeping you, what are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing!’ answered my stepfather.

  B. had yet to learn of all my mother’s troubles. Her husband often brought home whole gangs of drunkards and ragamuffins and then all hell was let loose!

  B. spent a long time trying to persuade his old friend; finally he told him that if he would do nothing to mend his ways there was no point in trying to help him. He told him quite bluntly that he was not going to give him any money because it would only be spent on drink. He asked him to play something on the violin so that he might see what could be done for him on that level. While my stepfather was fetching his violin, B. secretly handed some money to my mother, but she would not take it. She had never before been asked to accept charity! B. then gave it to me and my poor mother burst into tears. My stepfather returned with the violin but instantly demanded some vodka, saying that he could not play without it. The vodka was sent for. He drank it and mellowed.

  ‘I’ll play you something of my own, since you’re a friend,’ he said to B., pulling a thick, dusty exercise book out from the chest of drawers.

  ‘I wrote all that myself,’ he said, pointing at the book. ‘There, you see, my friend, it’s very different from your ballets.’

  B. studied a few pages in silence and then unfolded the music he had brought with him and asked my stepfather to forget his own compositions and to play something he had brought instead.

  My stepfather was a little offended but, fearing to lose his new benefactor, he complied. B. realized that his friend really had been studying and had made considerable progress since the last parting, despite his boast of not having touched his violin since he married. It was such joy to see my poor mother’s face. She looked at my stepfather and felt proud of him again. B. too was genuinely pleased and resolved to try to fix him up with a job. He already had a great many connections and he promptly began getting in touch with them, recommending his poor friend from whom he had obtained a promise to behave. Meanwhile, at his own expense, he equipped Efimov with proper clothes and took him to see several prominent people upon whom the appointment could depend. The truth was that Efimov’s bravado was nothing but empty talk and he was only too pleased to follow his friend’s proposals. B. told me that the flattery and cringing obsequiousness with which my stepfather tried to conciliate him for fear of losing his good fortune was embarrassing. Aware that he was being set on the right path, Efimov even gave up drinking and finally managed to get a position in the theatre orchestra. He made good use of the opportunity and after one month of hard work and diligence he regained all that he had lost in a year and a half’s worth of laziness. He promised that from then onwards he would be honest and meticulous in the performance of his duties. But our family situation did not improve at all. My stepfather did not give my mother a copeck out of his salary; he spent it all on himself, eating and drinking with his new companions, of which he soon had a regular circle. He mostly mixed with theatre people: attendants, chorus singers and extras – in other words with those among whom he felt superior and not with people of any talent. He succeeded in inspiring them with a special kind of respect for himself; he immediately impressed upon them that he was a neglected man, that he had enormous talent but that his wife had destroyed it, and, finally, that their conductor knew absolutely nothing about music. He laughed at all the other members of the orchestra, at the selection of plays produced and even at the composers of the operas performed. Finally he began to propound a new theory of music and succeeded in boring everyone around him. He quarrelled with his colleagues and with the conductor; he was rude to the manager and generally acquired a reputation for being the most troublesome, the most cantankerous and the most worthless of men. Everyone found him insufferable.

  Indeed it was very strange to see such an insignificant man, such a stupid and useless performer, such a negligent musician full of such vast pretences, boasts, conceits and ugly manners.

  It ail came to an end when he quarrelled with B. Efimov had concocted and circularized some very ugly gossip and horrible slander concerning him. After six months of unsatisfactory service he was dismissed from the orchestra on charges of drunkenness and laziness. But it proved more difficult to get rid of him. He soon reappeared, dressed in his former rags, for his decent clothes were all sold or pawned. He started loafing about with his former workmates, indifferent to whether they were pleased to see him or not. He spread spiteful gossip, babbled nonsense, wept over his miserable predicament and invited them all to come and see for themselves what a diabolical wife he had.

  Of course he found an audience, those who took pleasure in offering a drink to a dismissed colleague, and they made him talk all kinds of rubbish. Moreover he always spoke poignantly and wittily, filling his talk with caustic quips and cynical digressions, which pleases a certain type of listener. He was taken for a crackpot fool who could at times be made to chatter if there was nothing better to do. They enjoyed provoking him by talking about some new violinist about to arrive in Petersburg. Whenever he heard this, Efimov’s face would fall; he would grow diffident and try to discover who it was that was coming and whether or not he was talented. He always became very envious. I believe it was at this time that his real, permanent madness set in; he had an unshakeable belief that he was the finest violinist in Petersburg but was persecuted by ill luck and that owing to various intrigues he had been misunderstood and left in obscurity. He flattered himself with this notion because he was one of those people who are very fond of seeing themselves among the insulted and injured, of complaining aloud about it and finding secret comfort in gloating over their unrecognized genius. He knew the names of all the violinists in Petersburg and he did not consider one of them to be a rival. Connoisseurs and dilettantes who knew the unfortunate madman enjoyed talking in front of him about some respected violinist, simply to see his reactions. They enjoyed his malicious, impertinent remarks and they liked the apt and rather clever things he said in criticism of his imaginary rivals. They were frequently unable to understand him, but they were convinced that no one else could so audaciously and smartly caricature the musical celebrities of the day. Even the musicians he mocked were a little afraid of him, for they knew his biting wit. They recognized the pertinence of his attacks and the aptness of his judgements in the instances where criticism was valid. And they grew accustomed to seeing him in the corridors of the theatre and behind the scenes. The attendants allowed him to wander around as freely as if he were indispensable and he became something of a household Thersites. This continued for two or three years until finally everyone grew bored with him again. He was completely ostracized, and during the last two years of his life he disappeared like a fish in the ocean, never to be seen again. B., however, stumbled across him a couple of times but in such a pitiful plight that again his compassion prevailed over repugnance. He called out his name, but my stepfather felt so mortified that he pretended not to hear, pulled his battered hat down over his eyes and passed by. At last, on the morning of an important holiday B. was informed that his former friend, Efimov, had come with his greetings. B. went out to see him. Efimov stood there drunk and began making extremely low bows, almost to the ground, and – murmuring something inaudibly – refused to enter the house. It was as if he were saying: ‘How can the likes of me mix with important people like you? The lackey’s place will do for us. We can greet you and be off.’ The whole affair was very obscene, silly and revoltingly offensive. After that B. did not see him again, not until the time of the catastrophe that ended this miserable, morbid, delirious life.

  It all ended in a very strange way. The catastrophe is closely related not only to my first childhood impressions, but also to all the rest of my life. This is what happened… But first I must explain the sort of childhood I had and what sort of person it was who lef
t such a torturous mark on my early memories and was also the cause of my poor mother’s death.