Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [269]
‘We’ve discussed everything, Ilya Ilyich. I’ve nothing more to tell you,’ Alexeyev replied.
‘Nothing more? Why, you always go about and meet people. Are you sure there isn’t any news? You read the papers, don’t you!’
‘Yes, sir, I do sometimes – or other people read and talk and I listen. Yesterday at Alexey Spiridonovich’s his son, a university student, read aloud.’
‘What did he read?’
‘About the English, who seem to have sent rifles and gunpowder somewhere. Alexey Spiridonovich said there was going to be a war.’
‘Where did they send it to?’
‘Oh, to Spain or India – I don’t remember, but the ambassador was very much displeased.’
‘What ambassador?’ asked Oblomov.
‘Sorry, I’ve clean forgotten!’ said Alexeyev, raising his nose to the ceiling in an effort to remember.
‘With whom is the war going to be?’
‘With a Turkish pasha, I believe.’
‘Well,’ Oblomov said after a pause, ‘what other news is there in politics?’
‘They write that the earth is cooling down: one day it will be all frozen.’
‘Will it indeed? But that is not politics, is it?’ said Oblomov.
Alexeyev was completely put out.
‘Dmitry Alexeyich,’ he said apologetically, ‘first mentioned politics and then went on reading without saying when he had come to an end with them. I know that after that he went on reading about literature.’
‘What did he read about literature?’ asked Oblomov.
‘Well, he read that the best authors were Dmitriyev, Karam-zin, Batyushkov, and Zhukovsky.’
‘What about Pushkin?’
‘Never mentioned him. I, too, wondered why he wasn’t mentioned. Why, he was a genius!’ said Alexeyev, pronouncing the g in genius hard.
There was a silence. Agafya Matveyevna brought her sewing and began plying her needle busily, glancing now and then at Oblomov and Alexeyev, and listening with her sharp ears for any commotion or noise in the house, to make sure Zakhar was not quarrelling with Anisya in the kitchen, that Akulina was washing up, that the gate in the yard had not creaked – that is, that the porter had not gone out to the ‘tavern’ for a drink.
Oblomov slowly sank into silence and a reverie: he was neither asleep nor awake, but let his thoughts roam at will light-heartedly, without concentrating them on anything, listening quietly to the regular beating of his heart and blinking from time to time like a man who was not looking at anything in particular. He fell into a vague, mysterious state, a sort of hallucination. There are rare and brief and dream-like moments when a man seems to be living over again something he has been through before at a different time and place. Whether he dreams of what is going on before him now, or has lived through it before and forgotten it, the fact remains that he sees the same people sitting beside him again as before and hears words that have already been uttered once: imagination is powerless to transport him there again and memory does not revive the past, and merely brings on a thoughtful mood. The same thing happened to Oblomov now. A stillness he had experienced somewhere before descended upon him; he heard the ticking of a familiar clock, the snapping of a bitten-off thread; the familiar words were repeated once more, and the whisper: ‘Dear me, I simply can’t thread the needle: you try it, Masha, your eyes are sharper!’ Lazily, mechanically, almost unconsciously he looked into Agafya Matveyevna’s eyes, and out of the depths of his memory there arose a familiar image he had seen somewhere before. He tried to think hard where and when he had heard it all… and he saw before him the big, dark drawing-room in his parents’ house, lighted by a tallow candle, and his mother and her visitors sitting at a round table; they were sewing in silence; his father was walking up and down the room in silence. The present and the past had merged and intermingled. He dreamt that he had reached the promised land flowing with milk and honey, where people