was young. She kisses me tenderly on the temple and on the hand, and says:
“Good morning, papa. Are you well?”
As a child she was very fond of ice cream, and I often took her to the pastry shop. For her, ice cream was the measure of all that was beautiful. If she wanted to praise me, she would say: “You’re ice cream, papa.” One little finger was named pistachio, another vanilla, another raspberry, and so on. Usually, when she came and said good morning to me, I would take her on my knee and, kissing her fingers, repeat:
“Vanilla … pistachio … lemon …”
And now, for old times’ sake, I kiss Liza’s fingers, murmuring: “Pistachio … vanilla … lemon …” but it turns out all wrong. I’m cold as ice cream and feel ashamed. When my daughter comes to me and brushes my temple with her lips, I give a start as if I’d been stung by a bee, smile tensely, and turn my face away. Ever since I began to suffer from insomnia, a question has been lodged in my brain like a nail: my daughter often sees me, an old man, a celebrity, blush painfully because I owe money to a servant; she sees how often the worry over petty debts makes me abandon my work and spend whole hours pacing back and forth, pondering, but why has she never once come to me, in secret from her mother, and whispered: “Father, here is my watch, my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses … Pawn it all, you need money …”? Why, seeing how her mother and I, surrendering to a false feeling, try to hide our poverty from people, does she not give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? Not that I’d accept any watch, or bracelets, or sacrifices, God forbid—I don’t need that.
And then I also remember my son, the officer in Warsaw. He’s an intelligent, honest, and sober man. But I don’t find that enough. I think if I had an old father and if I knew that he had moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I would give my officer’s post to someone else and go to do day labor. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What’s the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man. But enough of that.
At a quarter to ten I must go to my dear boys and give a lecture. I get dressed and follow a road that has been familiar to me for thirty years now and has its own history for me. Here is a big gray house with a pharmacy; a small house once stood there, and in it there was a beer parlor; in that beer parlor I thought over my dissertation and wrote my first love letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page with the heading “Historia morbi.”5 Here is the grocery shop; it was formerly run by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, then by a fat woman who loved students because “each of them has a mother”; now there’s a red-haired shopkeeper sitting there, a very indifferent man, who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy university gates, which have long needed repair; the bored caretaker in a sheepskin coat, his besom, the heaps of snow … Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a fresh boy, come from the provinces, who imagines that the temple of learning really is a temple. In the history of Russian pessimism, the general decrepitude of the university buildings, the gloomy corridors, the grimy walls, the inadequate light, the dismal look of the stairs, cloakrooms and benches, occupy one of the foremost places in the series of causes predisposing … And here is our garden. It seems to have become neither better nor worse since I was a student. I don’t like it. It would be much smarter if, instead of consumptive lindens, yellow acacias, and sparse trimmed lilacs, there were tall pines and handsome oaks growing here. The student, whose mood is largely created by the surroundings of his place of learning, should see at every step only the lofty, the strong, the graceful … God save him from scrawny trees, broken windows, gray walls, and doors upholstered with torn oilcloth.
When I come to my entrance, the door opens wide, and I am met by my old colleague, coeval, and namesake, the porter Nikolai. Letting me in, he grunts and says:
“Freezing, Your Excellency!”
Or else, if my coat is wet:
“Raining, Your Excellency!”
Then he runs ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the office, he carefully helps me off with my coat, and meanwhile manages to tell me some university news. Owing to the close acquaintance that exists among all university porters and caretakers, he knows everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the chancellery, in the rector’s office, in the library What doesn’t he know! For instance, when the latest news is the retirement of the rector or a dean, I hear him name the candidates as he talks with the young caretakers, and explain straight off that so-and-so will not be approved by the minister, that so-and-so will decline, and then go into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers received in the chancellery, about a secret talk that supposedly took place between the minister and a member of the board, and so on. Generally, apart from these details, he almost always turns out to be right. The character references he gives for each candidate are original, but also correct. If you need to know in which year someone defended his thesis, or took up his post, or retired, or died, avail yourself of the vast memory of this old soldier, and he will tell you not only the year, the month, and the day, but also the details that accompanied this or that circumstance. Only one who loves can remember so well.
He is the guardian of university tradition. From his porter predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life, has added to this wealth a considerable quantity of his own goods, acquired during his service, and, if you wish, will tell you many tales both long and short. He can tell of extraordinary wise men who knew
In our society all information about the world of scholars is summed up in anecdotes about the extraordinary absentmindedness of old professors and two or three quips ascribed to Gruber, or to me, or to Babukhin.6 For educated society that is not enough. If it loved learning, scholars and students as much as Nikolai does, its literature would long have had whole epics, sagas, and saints’ lives, such as it unfortunately does not have now.
Having told me the news, Nikolai puts a solemn expression on his face, and we begin to talk business. If at that moment some outsider should hear how freely Nikolai handles terminology, he might think that he was a scholar disguised as a soldier. Incidentally, the rumors about the learnedness of university caretakers are greatly exaggerated. True, Nikolai knows more than a hundred Latin names, can assemble a skeleton, prepare a slide on occasion, make the students laugh with some long, learned citation, but so unsophisticated a thing as the theory of the circulation of the blood is as obscure for him now as twenty years ago.
At the table in my office, bending low over a book or a slide, sits my prosector Pyotr Ignatievich, a hardworking, humble, but untalented man of about thirty-five, already bald and with a big stomach. He works from morning to night, reads voluminously, remembers everything he reads excellently—and in that respect he’s not a man, he’s pure gold; in all the rest he’s a cart horse, or, to put it differently, an educated dolt. The characteristic features that distinguish the cart horse from a talented man are these: his horizon is narrow and sharply limited by his profession; outside his profession he is as naive as a child. I remember coming into the office one morning and saying:
“Imagine, what a misfortune! They say Skobelev7 is dead.”
