Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [106]
What was the first step towards it? What had he to start with?’ I don’t know, I can’t – no! – I’m trying to deceive myself, I do know and – besides, Stolz is here and he will tell me at once.’ But what would he say?’ He would say that during the week I should write detailed instructions to my agent and send him to the country, mortgage Oblomovka, buy some more land, send down a plan of the buildings to be erected, give up my flat, take out a passport and go abroad for six months, get rid of my superfluous fat, throw off my heaviness, refresh my soul with the air of which I once dreamed with my friend, live without a dressing-gown, without Zakhar and Tarantyev, put on my socks and take off my boots myself, sleep at night only, travel where everyone else is travelling, by rail or steamer, then – then – go to live in Oblomovka, learn what sowing and harvesting means, why a peasant is rich or poor; go out into the fields, journey to the district town for the elections, visit the factory, the mill, the landing stage. And at the same time read the newspapers, books, and worry about why the English have sent a man-of-war to the Far East.… That’s what he would say! That is what going forward means. And so all my life! Good-bye, poetic ideal of life! That is a sort of smithy, and not life; it’s continuous flame, heat, noise, clatter – When is one to live? Had one not better stay? To stay meant to wear your shirt inside out, to listen to Zakhar jumping off the stove, to dine with Tarantyev, to think as little as possible about everything, not to finish The Journey to Africa, to grow peacefully old in the house of Tarantyev’s friend.…
‘Now or never!’ ‘To be or not to be!’ – Oblomov raised himself from his chair a little, but failing to find his slippers with his feet at once, sat down again.
About a fortnight later Stolz left for England, having made Oblomov promise to come straight to Paris. Oblomov had even got his passport ready, he had even ordered a coat for travelling and bought a cap. That was how far things had advanced. Zakhar had been arguing with a wise air that it was enough to order one pair of boots and have the other re-soled. Oblomov had bought a blanket, a jersey, a travelling-bag, and was about to buy a bag for provisions when about a dozen people told him that one did not carry provisions abroad. Zakhar had been rushing about from one workshop and shop to another, perspiring copiously, and though he pocketed a good many five- and ten-copeck pieces out of the change in the shops, he cursed Stolz and all those who had invented travel.
‘And what will he do there by himself?’ he said in the shop. ‘I hear that in them parts it’s girls what attend on gentlemen. How can a girl pull off a gentleman’s boots? And how is she going to put socks on the master’s bare feet?’
He grinned so that his whiskers moved sideways, and shook his head. Oblomov was not too lazy to write down what he had to take with him and what had to be left at home. He asked Tarantyev to take the furniture and other things to his friend’s house in Vyborg, to lock them up in three rooms and keep them there till his return from abroad. Oblomov’s acquaintances were already saying – some incredulously, some laughingly, and some with a kind of alarm: ‘He’s going. Just fancy, Oblomov has actually budged from his place!’
But Oblomov did not go either after a month or after three months.
On the eve of his departure his lip became swollen during the night. ‘A fly has bitten me,’ he said. ‘I can’t possibly go on board ship with a lip like that!’ and he decided to wait for the next ship.
It was already August. Stolz had been in Paris for some time, writing furious letters to Oblomov, who did not reply. Why? Was it because the ink had gone dry in the inkwell and there was no paper? Or was it perhaps because that and which jostled each other too frequently in Oblomov’s style? Or was it because, hearing the stern call: