A Nervous Breakdown Read online

  The woman with the white fur trimmings produced another loud laugh and called out something quite revolting. Overcome with disgust, Vasilyev blushed and left.

  ‘Wait a moment, we’re coming too!’ the art student shouted after him.

  IV

  ‘I had a little chat with my partner while we were dancing,’ the medical student told them when all three were out in the street. ‘It was about her first love affair. The hero was some book-keeper from Smolensk, with a wife and five children. She was seventeen and lived with her mother and father who sold soap and candles.’

  ‘How did he win her heart?’ Vasilyev asked.

  ‘He bought her fifty roubles’ worth of underwear. The devil only knows what!’

  ‘All the same, the medical student made his partner tell him all about her affair,’ Vasilyev thought. ‘But I didn’t manage to …’

  ‘Gentlemen, I’m going home,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t know how to behave in a place like this. Besides, I feel bored and disgusted. It doesn’t exactly cheer you up, does it? If only they were human, but they’re savages, animals. I’m off, do what you like!’

  ‘Oh, come on, dear Grigory, Grig …’ the art student said, trying to coax him and putting his arm around him. ‘Let’s visit just one more, then to hell with them. Please, Gregorius!’

  They persuaded Vasilyev and led him up some staircase. The carpet, gilt banisters, the porter who opened the door, the panelling in the hall were all in S— Street style, but elegant and imposing.

  ‘Really, I ought to go home,’ Vasilyev said, taking off his coat.

  ‘Come on, old man,’ the art student said, kissing his neck. ‘Don’t be childish, Grig-Grig, be a sport! Together we came, together we shall leave. You really are an ass, you know.’

  ‘I can wait in the street. Christ, it’s really disgusting here!’

  ‘Now, now, Grigory. If it disgusts you, then you can make some observations. Do you understand? Make observations!’

  ‘One should look at things objectively,’ the medical student said pompously.

  Vasilyev went into the lounge and sat down. Besides him and his friends there were several other visitors: two infantry officers, a balding, grey-haired man in gold-rimmed spectacles, two beardless young men from the Institute of Surveyors and one very drunken man with the face of an actor. The girls were all busy with them and paid no attention to Vasilyev. Only one of them, dressed as Aida, gave him a sidelong glance, smiled for some reason and said with a yawn, ‘Someone with dark hair has arrived.’

  Vasilyev’s heart pounded and his face burned. He was ashamed to face the other visitors, and it was a nasty, painful feeling. It was sheer agony to think that a respectable, loving person like himself (he had always looked upon himself as such) hated those women and felt only revulsion for them. He felt no pity for the women, nor the musicians, nor the servants.

  ‘It’s because I’m not trying to understand them,’ he thought. ‘They’re more like animals than human beings – all of them – but they are human beings nonetheless, they have souls. One must understand them first and then judge them.’

  ‘Grigory, don’t go, wait for us!’ the art student shouted and disappeared. The medical student soon disappeared too.

  ‘Yes, I must try and understand them, this is no good,’ Vasilyev kept thinking.

  He began staring intensely into each woman’s face, looking for a guilty smile. Either he was no good at reading expressions or not one of the women in fact felt guilty, but all he discovered on each face was a blank look of banal, workaday boredom and contentment. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, provocative movements – that was all. In the past every one of them had clearly had an affair with a book-keeper and had fifty roubles’ worth of underclothes, and now their only pleasures in life were the coffee, three-course dinners, wine, quadrilles and sleeping until two in the afternoon.

  Not finding one guilty smile, Vasilyev looked for an intelligent face. His attention was caught by one that was pale, rather sleepy and tired: this was a brunette, no longer young, with a dress covered in sequins. She was sitting in an armchair looking thoughtfully at the floor. Vasilyev paced up and down and then sat by her, as if by accident.

  ‘I must begin with something trite,’ he thought, ‘and then gradually move on to serious matters.’

  ‘That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing!’ he said and touched the gilt fringe of her shawl.

  ‘Am I?’ the brunette said lifelessly.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Me? A long way away, from Chernigov.’

  ‘It’s nice there, very pleasant.’

  ‘The grass grows greener …’

  ‘A pity I’m no good at describing nature,’ Vasilyev thought. ‘I could move her with descriptions of the Chernigov countryside. She must have loved it if that’s where she was born.’

  ‘Don’t you find it boring here at times?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then why don’t you leave if you’re bored?’

  ‘Where could I go? Begging for charity?’

  ‘Begging would be easier than living here.’

  ‘How do you know? Have you ever tried it?’

  ‘Yes, I have, when I couldn’t pay my tuition fees. Even if I hadn’t, the thing should be obvious. Whatever you may say, a beggar is a free person, but you’re a slave.’

  The brunette stretched and sleepily watched a waiter carrying glasses and soda-water on a tray.

  ‘Get me some porter,’ she said, yawning again.

  ‘Porter?’ thought Vasilyev. ‘But what if your brother or mother were to come in right now? What would you say? What would they say? They’d give you porter all right!’

  Suddenly there was a sound of crying. Out of the adjoining room where the waiter had taken the soda-water rushed a fair-haired man with red face and angry eyes, followed by the tall, plump Madam.

  ‘No one gave you permission to slap girls’ faces,’ she screeched. ‘We have better-class clients than you and they don’t start fights! You lousy fraud!’

  A great racket ensued, startling Vasilyev and making him turn pale. In the next room someone was sobbing the deeply felt sobs of the cruelly abused. And he understood that here were real human beings who were being badly treated, who suffered, wept and cried out for help like people anywhere else. Intense loathing and disgust gave way to a feeling of acute pity and of anger with the offender. He rushed to the room where the sobs were coming from and between rows of bottles on a marble table top he could make out a martyred, tear-stained face. He stretched his hands towards this face, took one step towards the table, but immediately recoiled in horror. The weeping girl was drunk.

  As he forced his way through the noisy crowd that had gathered around the fair-haired man, his heart sank, he felt the terror of a child, imagining that the inhabitants of this alien, incomprehensible world wanted to chase him, beat him and shower him with obscenities. He grabbed his coat from the hook and dashed headlong downstairs.

  V

  Pressing himself to the fence, Vasilyev stood near the house and waited for his friends to come out. The cheerful, bold, impudent and melancholy sounds of pianos and fiddles blended into a musical jumble which again resembled an invisible orchestra tuning up in the darkness over the roofs. If one looked up at this darkness the entire black background was sprinkled with moving white dots – falling snow. When the flakes came into the light they circled lazily in the air, like down, and fell even more lazily to earth. A mass of them swirled around Vasilyev and clung to his beard, eyelashes, eyebrows. Cabmen, horses and passers-by were white all over.

  ‘How can snow fall in this street!’ Vasilyev wondered. ‘Damn these brothels!’

  His legs were giving way from the effort of running downstairs, he gasped as though he were climbing a hill, he heard his heart pounding, and he had an overwhelming desire to escape from that street as quickly as he c
ould and go home. But he felt an even stronger desire to wait for his friends and vent his spleen on them. There was a great deal that he did not understand about these houses, and the minds of those doomed women were just as much of an enigma as before. But things were far worse than he ever could have imagined – that was clear. If the guilty woman in the story could be called ‘fallen’ then it was difficult to find a suitable name for all those who were dancing now to that jumble of sounds, who were producing those long, obscene sentences. They were not merely doomed, they were ruined.

  ‘There is vice here,’ he thought, ‘but no awareness of guilt or hope of salvation. Those women are bought and sold, they are swamped with wine and all kinds of loathsome things, but they are just like sheep – unquestioning, complacent. Oh, good God!’

  He could also see that all that went under the name of human dignity, individuality, the image and semblance of God, was defiled – ‘down to the last drop’ as drunks put it, and that not only were the street and stupid women to be blamed for this.

  A crowd of students passed by, white with snow and cheerfully talking and laughing. One of them, tall and thin, stopped, peered into Vasilyev’s face and said in a drunken voice, ‘He’s from our year! Sloshed are you, old chap? Aha! Never mind, enjoy yourself! Let yourself go! Don’t be down in the dumps, old man!’

  He took Vasilyev by the shoulders, pressed his cold wet moustache to his cheek, then slipped and staggered. Throwing up both arms he shouted, ‘Hold on, mind you don’t fall!’

  In fits of laughter he ran off to catch up with his friends.

  Through all the noise the art student’s voice could be heard: ‘How dare you strike a woman! I won’t stand for it, blast you! You rotten swine!’

  The medical student appeared in the doorway. He looked to both sides and when he saw Vasilyev he said anxiously, ‘So here you are. Listen to me, you can’t take Yegor anywhere! I don’t understand him. He’s made a real scene! Yegor, can you hear?’ he shouted into the doorway. ‘Yegor!’

  The art student’s shrill voice rang out from above: ‘I won’t allow you to strike a woman!’

  Something heavy and cumbersome rolled down the stairs. It was the art student, flying head over heels: evidently he was being thrown out.

  He struggled to his feet, shook his hat and brandished his fist upwards with a spiteful, outraged look.

  ‘Bastards!’ he shouted. ‘Crooks! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow beating! Striking a defenceless, drunken woman! Oh, you …’

  ‘Yegor! Come on, Yegor!’ the medical student pleaded. ‘I give you my word of honour that I’ll never go out with you again. Word of honour!’

  The art student gradually calmed down and the friends went home.

  ‘Unwilling to these sad shores

  A mysterious force is drawing me …’

  sang the medical student.

  ‘See the windmill now in ruins’

  the art student joined in a little later. ‘God, how it’s snowing! Grigory, why did you leave? You’re a coward, an old woman, that’s what!’

  Vasilyev walked behind his friends and looked at their backs. ‘It’s one thing or another,’ he thought. ‘Either we only imagine prostitution’s an evil and we exaggerate it. Or else, if it is in fact such a great evil as is commonly thought, then my dear friends are slave-owners, rapists and murderers just as much as those inhabitants of Syria and Cairo whose pictures one sees in Niva.* Now they’re singing away, roaring with laughter, soberly arguing, but haven’t they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance and stupidity? What they did … well, I saw it. What became of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The learning, fine arts and elevated feelings of those murderers reminds me of the story of the bacon. Two robbers cut a beggar’s throat in a forest. They start sharing out his clothes and find a piece of bacon in his bag. “That’s good,” one of them says. “Let’s eat it.” “Have you gone crazy?” the other asks, horrified. “Have you forgotten today’s Wednesday, a fast day?” So they left it. Two men cut someone’s throat and then emerge from the forest convinced they are devout Christians! Those two are the same; they buy women and go around thinking what fine artists and scholars they are …’

  ‘Now listen!’ he snapped. ‘Why do you come here? Can’t you see what horrors lie here? Medicine tells you that every single one of these women dies prematurely from tuberculosis or some other illness. The arts tell us that, morally, she’s dead long before that. Let’s suppose one of these women dies from entertaining an average of five hundred men in her life. Each of them is killed by five hundred men. Now, if you were each to visit this or similar places two hundred and fifty times during your lives, then the two of you would be responsible for the murder of one woman. Do you understand? Isn’t it terrible? Two, three, five of you ganging together to kill one stupid, hungry woman! God, doesn’t that horrify you?’

  ‘I knew it would come to this,’ the art student said, frowning. ‘We should never have got mixed up with this imbecile. You think your head’s full of great thoughts and ideas, don’t you? Damned if I know what they are, but they’re not ideas! You look at me now with loathing and disgust, but in my opinion you’d do better busying yourself building another twenty brothels like these than going around with a face like that. There’s more depravity in that look of yours than in the whole street! Let’s go, Volodya, to hell with him! He’s nothing more than a moron, a complete imbecile …’

  ‘We human beings do kill each other,’ the medical student said. ‘Of course that’s immoral, but all these theories won’t help. Goodbye!’

  On Trubny Square the friends said goodbye and went their ways. Left to himself, Vasilyev strode down the boulevard. He was frightened of the dark, of the snow that was falling in large flakes, wanting to blanket the whole world, it seemed. He was afraid of the lamplight dimly glimmering through the snow clouds. An inexplicable, cowardly fear gripped him. Now and again he met passers-by, but he timidly kept out of their way, under the illusion that women, only women, were coming towards him from all directions and staring at him from all sides. ‘It’s starting,’ he thought. ‘I’m having a nervous breakdown.’

  VI

  At home he lay on his bed, shaking all over. ‘They’re alive, alive!’ he said. ‘God, they’re alive!’

  He indulged in every kind of fantasy, imagining himself first as a prostitute’s brother, then as her father, then as the woman herself with her thickly powdered cheeks, and all of it horrified him.

  For some reason he felt that he just had to solve the problem there and then, and at all costs. He felt that it was his problem and no one else’s. He strained every nerve, overcame the despair inside him and sat on the bed, head clasped, trying to think how he could save all the women he had seen that day. Being an educated man, he was very familiar with the correct procedure for solving all kinds of problems. And for all his agitation he strictly adhered to that routine. He recalled the history of the problem, its literature, and between three and four o’clock in the morning he paced his room trying to remember all the modern methods of saving women. He had many good friends and acquaintances living in rooms at Falzstein’s, Galyashkin’s, Nechayev’s, Yechkin’s. Among them were quite a number of honest, selfless men. Some of them had tried to save women.

  ‘These few attempts,’ thought Vasilyev, ‘can be divided into three groups. Some have ransomed a woman from a brothel, rented a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine and she has become a seamstress. Whether he wanted to or not, her rescuer has made her his mistress and then departed the scene after graduating, handing her over to another decent chap as though she were some object. And the woman has remained fallen. Others, having redeemed a woman and also rented a separate room for her, have bought the obligatory sewing-machine and started her on reading and writing, given her moral tuition and supplied books. As long as this was interesting and novel for the woman, she has stayed with the man and got on with her sewing. But later, growing bored, she has started entertain
ing men behind the moral tutor’s back. Or else she has run back to the place where she could sleep until three in the afternoon, drink coffee and eat as much as she liked. A third group, the most zealous and selfless of all, have taken a bold, decisive step. They have married the girl. And when that shameless, downtrodden, spoilt or stupid animal has become a wife, mistress of the house and then a mother, this has so transformed her life and outlook that it has become hard to recognize a former prostitute in this wife and mother. Yes, marriage is the best and perhaps the only way.’

  ‘But that’s impossible!’ Vasilyev said out loud and slumped on to the bed. ‘I’m the last kind of person to marry! One has to be a saint for that, incapable of hatred or revulsion. But let’s suppose that the medical student, the art student and myself overcame our apprehension and married. Supposing they all married? What would be the outcome? The outcome would be, while they were getting married here, in Moscow, the Smolensk book-keeper would be corrupting a new batch of them, and this other batch would come pouring into this place to fill the vacancies, together with girls from Saratov, Nizhny-Novgorod, Warsaw … And what about those hundred thousand prostitutes from London? And from Hamburg?’

  The oil in his lamp had burnt down and it had begun to smoke. Vasilyev did not notice. Once again he paced backwards and forwards, still deep in thought. Now he framed the question differently: how could one remove the need for prostitutes? To achieve this, the men who bought and murdered these women should be made to realize the whole immorality of their role as slave-owners and be duly horrified. It was the men who had to be saved.