Oblomov (25 page)

‘Wait, wait! What’s the hurry?’ the caretaker cried. ‘Zakhar Trofimych! Let’s go and have a drink – come on!’

Zakhar stopped, turned back quickly, and, without looking at the other servants, rushed out into the street. He reached the door of the inn opposite the gate without paying heed to any of them, then he turned round, cast a sombre glance at the company, and motioning them even more sombrely to follow him, disappeared inside.

The others dispersed, too: some went into the inn, others went home: only the valet remained.

‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully and phlegmatically to himself, slowly opening his snuff-box, ‘what if he tells his master? You can see from everything that his master is a kind man – he’d only swear! There’s no harm in that, is there? Now, another one will just stare at you and then grab you by the hair.…’

11

S
OON AFTEB YOUR
Zakhar carefully and noiselessly opened the front door of his master’s flat and tiptoed to his room; then he walked up to the door of his master’s study, put his ear to it and, bending down, peeped through the key-hole.

From the study came the sound of regular snoring.

‘Asleep,’ he whispered. ‘I must wake him – it’ll be half-past four soon.’

He cleared his throat and went into the study.

‘Sir! sir!’ he began quietly, standing at the head of the bed. The snoring continued.

‘Oh, he’s fast asleep!’ said Zakhar. ‘Like a regular bricklayer! Sir!’

Zakhar touched Oblomov’s sleeve lightly.

‘Get up, sir! It’s half-past four!’

Oblomov just mumbled something, but did not wake.

‘Get up, sir! It’s disgraceful!’ Zakhar said, raising his voice.

No answer.

‘Sir!’ Zakhar repeated, touching his master on the sleeve.

Oblomov turned his head a little, with difficulty opened one eye and looked at Zakhar as though he had been stricken with paralysis.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked hoarsely.

‘It’s me, sir. Get up, please.’

‘Go away!’ Oblomov muttered and sank into heavy sleep again. Instead of snoring, he began whistling through the nose. Zakhar pulled him by his dressing-gown.

‘What do you want?’ Oblomov asked sternly, opening both eyes suddenly.

‘You told me to wake you, sir.’

‘I know. You’ve done your duty and now clear out! Leave the rest to me.…’

‘I won’t go,’ Zakhar said, touching him again by the sleeve.

‘There now,’ Oblomov said gently, ‘leave me alone.’ And burying his face in the pillow, he was about to start snoring again.

‘You mustn’t, sir,’ said Zakhar. ‘I’d gladly leave you be, but I can’t.’

And he touched his master once more.

‘Now, do me a favour and don’t disturb me,’ Oblomov said earnestly, opening his eyes.

‘Aye, and if I did you the favour, you’d be angry with me for not waking you.’

‘Oh dear, what a man!’ said Oblomov. ‘Just let me sleep for one more minute – just one minute! I know myself – –’

Oblomov suddenly fell silent, overcome by sleep.

‘You know how to sleep all right!’ said Zakhar, convinced that his master did not hear him. ‘Look at him – sleeping like a log! What’s the good of a man like you? Get up, I tell you!’ Zakhar roared.

‘What’s that? What’s that?’ Oblomov said menacingly, raising his head.

‘Why don’t you get up, sir?’ Zakhar answered gently.

‘Yes, but what did you say, eh? How dare you talk to me like this – eh?’

‘Dare what, sir?’

‘Speak so rudely.’

‘You must have dreamt it, sir. I swear, you dreamt it.’

‘You thought I was asleep, did you? Well, I wasn’t. I heard everything.’

And he dropped off again.

‘Well,’ Zakhar said in despair, ‘what is one to do? What are you lying about like a log for? It makes one sick to look at you. Just look at him! Damn!

‘Get up! Get up!’ he suddenly said in a frightened voice. ‘Sir, look what’s happening!’

Oblomov quickly raised his head, looked about him, and lay down again with a deep sigh.

‘Leave me alone!’ he said gravely. ‘I told you to wake me and now I cancel my order – you hear? I’ll wake when I like.’

Sometimes Zakhar left him alone, saying: ‘Oh, sleep if you like, damn you!’ But sometimes he insisted on having his way, and he did that this time.

‘Get up, get up!’ he roared at the top of his voice, seizing Oblomov with both hands by the skirt of his dressing-gown and by the sleeve.

Oblomov suddenly jumped out of bed and rushed at Zakhar.

‘You wait,’ he said, ‘I’ll teach you how to disturb your master when he wants to sleep!’

Zakhar took to his heels, but at the third step Oblomov shook off his sleep and began stretching and yawning.

‘Give me – some
kvas
,’ he said, between his yawns.

At this moment someone behind Zakhar’s back burst into a peal of laughter. Both looked round.

‘Stolz! Stolz!’ Oblomov shouted joyfully, rushing towards his visitor.

‘Andrey Ivanich!’ Zakhar said with a grin. Stolz went on roaring with laughter; he had witnessed the whole scene.

PART TWO

1

S
TOLZ
was only half German; on his father’s side. His mother was Russian; he was of the Eastern Orthodox faith; his native tongue was Russian; he learnt it from his mother and from books, in the University lecture-rooms, in his games with the village children, in conversations with their fathers and in the Moscow markets. The German language he inherited from his father and learnt from books.

Stolz had been brought up in the village of Verkhlyovo, where his father was steward. Ever since he was a boy of eight he had sat with his father over maps, spelt out the verses of Herder, Wieland, and the Bible, cast up the badly written accounts of the peasants, artisans, and factory hands, and read with his mother the stories from the sacred books, learnt by heart Krylov’s fables, and spelt out the verses of
Télémaque
. When his lessons were over he went bird-nesting with the village boys, and quite often the squeaking of young jackdaws came from his pocket during a lesson or at prayers. Sometimes when his father was sitting under a tree in the garden in the afternoon, smoking a pipe, and his mother was knitting a jersey or embroidering, a noise and shouts were heard from the street and a whole crowd of people would break into the house.

‘What’s the matter?’ his mother asked in alarm.

‘I expect they have brought Andrey again,’ his father replied calmly.

The doors burst open, and a crowd of peasants, women and boys, rushed into the garden. And, indeed, they had brought Andrey, but in what a state! Without his boots, his clothes torn, and his nose bleeding – or the nose of some other boy. His mother was always worried when Andrey disappeared for a day, and had not her husband positively forbidden her to interfere with the boy, she would have always kept him at her side. She washed him, changed his clothes, and for a whole day Andrey walked about looking such a clean and well-behaved little boy, but in the evening and sometimes in the morning someone again brought him home dirty, dishevelled, and unrecognizable, or the
peasants would bring him back on the top of a hay-cart, or he would return with the fishermen, asleep on a net in their boat.

His mother cried, but his father did not mind at all – he actually laughed.

‘He’ll be a good
Bursch –
a good
Bursch
,’ he said sometimes.

‘But really, dear,’ his mother complained, ‘not a day passes without his coming home with a bruise, and the other day he came back with his nose bleeding.’

‘What kind of a child would he be if he never made his nose bleed – or someone else’s?’ his father said with a laugh.

His mother would burst into tears, but after a little while she would sit down at the piano and forget her troubles over Herz, her tears dropping on the keys. But soon Andrey came back or was brought home, and he began recounting his adventures so vividly and with such animation that he would make her laugh; and he was so quick too! Soon he was able to read
Télémaque
as well as she, and to play duets with her. Once he disappeared for a whole week. His mother cried her eyes out; his father did not seem to mind at all – he just walked in the garden smoking his pipe.

‘Now if Oblomov’s son had disappeared,’ he said in reply to his wife’s suggestion to go and look for him, ‘I’d have roused the whole village and the rural police, but Andrey will come back. He’s a good
Bursch
.’

Next morning Andrey was discovered sleeping peacefully in his bed. Under the bed lay a gun and a pound of powder and shot.

‘Where have you been?’ His mother began firing questions at him. ‘Where did you get the gun? Why don’t you speak?’

‘Oh, nowhere!’ was all he would say.

His father asked whether he had prepared the translation of Cornelius Nepos into German. ‘No,’ he replied.

His father took him by the collar, led him out of the gate, put his cap on his head and gave him such a kick from behind that he fell down.

‘Go back to where you’ve come from,’ he added, ‘and come back with a translation of two chapters instead of one, and learn the part from the French comedy for your mother – don’t show yourself until you have done it.’ Andrey returned in a week, bringing the translation and having learnt the part.

When he grew older, his father took him in the trap with him, gave him the reins, and told him to drive to the factory, then to the fields, and to the town, to the shops and to the Government offices, or to have a look at some special clay which he took in his fingers, sniffed, sometimes licked, and gave to his son to sniff,
explaining what kind of clay it was and what it was good for. Or they would go to see how potash or tar was made or how lard was refined.

At fourteen or fifteen the boy went by himself in a trap or on horseback with a bag strapped to the saddle to carry out some commission for his father in the town, and he never forgot, or misinterpreted, or overlooked or missed anything.

‘
Recht gut, mein lieber Junge!
’ his father said, after hearing his report, patting him on the shoulder with his large hand, and gave him two or three roubles, according to the importance of the commission.

His mother spent a long time afterwards washing the soot, dirt, clay, and oil off her darling. She was not altogether pleased with this business-like, practical education. She was afraid that her son would become the same kind of middle-class business man as his father’s people. She regarded the whole German nation as a crowd of patented middle-class tradesmen, and she disliked the coarseness, independence, and self-conceit with which the German masses everywhere asserted the civic rights they had acquired in the course of centuries, just like a cow that always carries her horns about with her and does not know where to hide them. In her opinion there was not and there could not be a single gentleman in the whole German nation. She could not discover any softness, delicacy, or true understanding in the German character, nothing that makes life so agreeable in good society, which makes it possible to infringe some rule, violate some generally accepted custom, or refuse to obey some regulation. No, those boorish fellows insisted on carrying out whatever had been assigned to them or what they happened to take into their heads – they were determined to act according to the rules if they had to knock through a wall with their heads.

She had been a governess in a rich family and had had an opportunity of going abroad, travelled all over Germany, and gained the impression that all Germans were just one mass of shop assistants, artisans, and store-keepers, smoking short pipes and spitting through their teeth; army officers straight as sticks with faces of common soldiers; and ordinary-looking officials – men who were capable only of hard work, of earning a living by the sweat of their brows, of keeping commonplace order, living dull lives and fulfilling their duties in a pedantic manner – all of them middle-class citizens with angular manners, large, coarse hands, plebeian freshness of complexion, and coarse speech. ‘However well you dress a German,’ she thought, ‘even if he wears the
finest and whitest shirt, patent-leather boots and even yellow gloves, he still looks as though he had been made of boot leather; his rough, red hands would protrude from the white cuffs, and however elegant the clothes he wears, he looks always, if not like a baker, then like a barman. His rough hands seem to be asking for an awl or at least for a fiddle in an orchestra.’ In her son she hoped to see an ideal gentleman, for though he was the son of a middle-class German and a parvenu, his mother was a Russian lady, and he was a fair-skinned, well-built boy, with small hands and feet, a clear face and bright, alert eyes, such as she had often seen in rich Russian families and abroad, too, though not of course among the Germans. And this son of hers would be turning the mill-stones in the flour-mill, return home from the factory and the fields, like his father, covered in oil and manure, with rough, red, filthy hands and a wolfish appetite! She began cutting her son’s nails, curling his hair, making him elegant collars and cuffs, ordering his coats in the town; she taught him to listen to the wistful melodies of Herz, sang to him about flowers, about the poetry of life, whispered to him about the brilliant calling of a soldier or a writer, and dreamed with him of the exalted part some men are destined to play. And all these prospects were to be ruined by the clicking of an abacus, the sorting out of the greasy receipts of the peasants, his dealings with factory workers! She grew to hate even the trap in which her darling Andrey drove to the town, and the oilskin cap his father had given him, and the green chamois-leather gloves – all of them coarse attributes of a life of labour. Unfortunately, Andrey was a good scholar, and his father made him coach the other boys in his small boarding-school. But this perhaps would not have mattered so much if he did not pay him a salary, just like a German, as if he were some artisan, often roubles a month, and made him sign a receipt for it.

Be comforted, good mother: your son has grown up on Russian soil and not in a crowd of humdrum people with middle-class bovine horns and hands turning mill-stones. Oblomovka was nearby: there it was a perpetual holiday! There they looked upon work as a heavy burden; there the master did not get up at dawn and go to factories and spend his time near oily wheels and springs. In Verkhlyovo itself there was a big mansion, shut up for most of the year, and the high-spirited boy often found his way in, and there he saw large halls and galleries hung with dark portraits of people who did not have fresh, plebeian complexions and big, rough hands – he saw languid, light-blue eyes,
powdered hair, delicate faces, full bosoms, lovely, blue-veined hands in lace cuffs, resting proudly on the hilt of a sword; he saw a whole succession of generations that had lived uselessly-noble lives in luxury, clad in brocades, velvet, and lace. These portraits told him the story of glorious days, battles and famous names, a story of old times which was very different from the one his father had told him a hundred times, spitting and smoking his pipe, of his life in Saxony spent between turnips and potatoes, between the market and the kitchen garden.