The Last and the First by Nina Berberova

Author:Nina Berberova [Berberova, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Alexei Ivanovich Shaibin showed up at the hotel on Sunday evening around eight. No one asked where he’d spent the night. He had a stale, aged look. One glance at him and it was clear the man was running out of money. No mistake about it.

He went to his room, where his bed lay untouched from the previous day, where everything had a very unlived-in look, and lit his pipe. It was clear from everything how terribly he’d agonized over the last twenty-four hours, and yet he was calm, a little pompous even, so that from that aspect, and especially thanks to his five-o’clock shadow, it might seem that here sat a gentlemen of forty-five or so, maybe even more, contemplating not trivial but at the same time not overly lofty matters.

The ceiling light was on, rain ran quietly down the windows, the street wept. At that evening hour (Ilya knocked on Alexei Ivanovich’s door at about ten) all was decided for Shaibin, as he later admitted to Vera Kirillovna, although, of course, the decision he took at that time and which became the pivotal moment in our tale had been simmering inside him since somewhat before and was consciously clarified (with all its ramifications) only three days later.

It had been simmering—and this was impossible to conceal now—in Africa itself, when the name Ilya Gorbatov had been the most agonizing riddle, when Vera Kirillovna’s letters, revealing to him for the first time the hardships of the Gorbatov path, had prepared him for a harsh and serious life. It had been simmering the past two nights as well—the first on the train (more unconsciously) and the second in the small, clean, and quiet brothel where he had gone perfectly sober just before nightfall (straight from his political friend’s apartment) and where he drank a lot of cheap, strong wine and lay for several long, desolate hours alongside a taciturn and beautiful young woman.

For the first time in his life, this decision concerned his, Shaibin’s, personal fate. Wasn’t it time for him, a man who had grown up in “official comfort” and had found a second life in his recent “disappearance,” to pass stern and unforgiving judgement on himself? Hadn’t this second life been denigrated innumerable times in these past three days? Hadn’t all his arguments been smashed by Ilya Gorbatov’s mere existence and Vera Kirillovna’s gentle but insistent words?

With a certain condescension toward himself, he recalled his visit to his political friend yesterday. They had never been friends, really; they were distant, very distant relatives, but out of the delicacy characteristic of civilized people they had never attempted to calculate this relation. The year this political friend had first gone abroad under gendarme escort was the year Shaibin graduated from high school. At the time, his own fate seemed much more enticing.

He recalled the previous day and his words about Ilya, pronounced loftily for the sole purpose of hearing them again from his own lips. Politically, his friend still had doubts about Gorbatov’s ultimate correctness, and Shaibin tried to persuade him.

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