A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [35]
“What? I’ll order cartridges to be made of them.”
“You’d do better to give them to me.” He looked at me with surprise, muttered something through his teeth and started to rummage in a valise. He then pulled out a book of diaries and threw it with contempt onto the ground. Then there was a second, a third and a tenth, all given the same treatment. There was something puerile in his vexation. It incited amusement, but my compassion too . . .
“That’s the lot,” he said, “I congratulate you on your find . . .”
“And may I do what I like with them?”
“Publish them in the newspapers if you like. What business is it of mine?! . . . Who am I to him—some kind of friend, a relative? . . . True, we lived under one roof for a long while . . . But there’s many a person I have shared roofs with!”
I grabbed the papers and quickly took them away, fearing that the staff captain might regret it. Soon after that we were told that the Opportunity would set off an hour later. I ordered the horses harnessed. The staff captain came into my room just as I had put on my hat. He, it seemed, was not getting ready for the departure. He had a tense and cold look to him.
“And you, Maxim Maximych, are you not coming?”
“No, sir.”
“And why not?”
“Well, I still haven’t seen the commandant, and I need to hand over some State property . . .”
“But weren’t you just with him?”
“I was, of course,” he said, stumbling over his words, “he wasn’t at home . . . and I didn’t wait.”
I understood him. The poor old man, for perhaps the first time since his birth, had abandoned official business for personal necessity—in the parlance of paper-pushing people—and look how he was rewarded!
“It’s a real pity,” I said to him, “a real pity, Maxim Maximych, that we must part sooner than originally planned.”
“What do you need with the likes of an ill-educated old man running behind you! You young folk are fashionable and pompous: it’s all right when you’re here under Circassian bullet-fire . . . but meet you later, and you’re too ashamed to even hold out your hand to a person like me.”
“I don’t deserve these reproaches, Maxim Maximych.”
“No, I was just talking by the by, as it were; but, anyway, I wish you every happiness and pleasant travels.”
We said our farewells with a certain dryness. The kind Maxim Maximych had turned into a stubborn, quarrelsome staff captain! And why? Because Pechorin, in his distraction or for some other reason, shook his hand when the staff captain would have liked to throw his arms around Pechorin’s neck! It is sad to see a youth lose his best hopes and aspirations, when the pink chiffon in front of him—through which he had seen the matters and feelings of humankind—is pulled aside. However, there is at least the hope that they will exchange their old misgivings for new ones, which are no less temporary yet no less sweet . . . But what can a man of Maxim Maximych’s years replace them with? The heart will harden without wishing to, and the soul will take cover . . .
I departed alone.
PECHORIN’S DIARIES
Foreword
I learned not long ago that Pechorin had died upon returning from Persia. This news made me very glad: it gave me the right to publish these notes, and I took the opportunity to put my name on someone else’s work. God grant that readers won’t punish me for this innocent forgery.
Now I must give some explanation of the motives that have induced me to deliver to the public the secrets of a heart belonging to a person whom I didn’t know. It would be fine if I had been his friend: everyone understands the treacherous indiscretions of a true friend. But I had only seen him once in my life on the highway. Hence I cannot attempt that inexpressible hatred, which, hiding under the guise of friendship, awaits only the death or misfortune of its beloved object to unleash a torrent of reproach, counsel, mockery and pity on its head.
As I read these notes again, I am convinced by the sincerity of this man who so relentlessly displayed his personal weaknesses and defects for all to see. The story of a man’s soul, even the