grigory

“Sir, what would you liked done with your suitcase?”

As was his habit Grigory, our writer’s manservant, had intervened at precisely the inopportune moment. Our writer, who had been pacing his small study for a number of hours attempting to solve some theoretical problem, had been on the precipice of discovery and now all was lost, despair resurgent. Staring confusedly at his manservant, this shining light of man, our writer lowered himself into the chair behind his desk and sighed. Such was his disbelief that even anger seemed to him absurd, and he managed in a squeak to answer, 

“Leave it downstairs.” 

Grigory blushed crimson and withdrew his head, gently closing the door behind him, managing, again a habit as constant as dawn, to let the spring of the handle slip at the last moment so as to make a powerful noise, thereby shocking our beloved writer back into sensory reality. 

The rain was inconstant. A fly struggled to reason with an opaque surface. It was dark, but not yet late, and the street outside the window of the study was busy with carriages and persons- some hurrying home, others hurrying away- all trying to avoid the groups of young men whose idea of ecstasy was to torment strangers.

In the moment after Grigory had exited scene, in fact, one healthy and beaming young man, accompanied by two less healthy-looking droogs, went toward a woman who was passing in a hurry and said, 

“Madam, can I speak with you a moment? You see, I’m terribly in need of a chat with somebody.” 

(Whether the words were in fact heard or constructed from silent gesticulation we will never know.)

“incredible…” our writer muttered to himself, watching this closely through the window of his second-floor apartment. To his disbelief the prey did not squirm or try to flee. As if already dead, this woman- well dressed, with a gentle and unassuming demeanour, her face hidden beneath a large hat- simply collapsed in on herself, blushed (if a body can blush), and began, or so it seemed to our writer, to entertain the vagrant. 

“incredible!” Our writer coughed, scratching his beard.

For five minutes our writer watched as the unsuspecting prey was gently lowered into the delinquent’s jaws. First laughter, then whispers.

“Corruption of virtue. Corruption of a woman’s virtue! That’s how it goes!” Our writer puffed in distress. He could not tear himself away from the scene; one more minute, he was sure to begin pulling out his own hair. This little fragment of city-life sparked such disgust in his soul that over the course of the next few minutes he convinced himself that this scene- not in a sense abstract, not as a synecdoche- was the whole problem of our species. Here was a chaste little mother, probably alone in the city for the first time, probably near frightened to death, probably married too young to some modestly successful bore who did not see and so did not love her… in short, the fine whisker’s of our writer’s fine jaw brushed the antique rug of his muggy study as he watched innocent youth herself walk ignorantly into the heart of evil. He even felt the oncoming of tears. The precipice of total ruin! But it was also him, he, the vagrant, who furnished his moral pandemonium. Spurred on by the ugly vultures on the opposite side of the street, this agonisingly handsome man with a smile that would pacify even the most severe Russian woman, there was no trace of guilt or questioning to be found on him. Secret even to himself, our writer held the belief that you have to be supremely stupid or otherwise ignorant of your own consciousness to commit such a vile act as was surely in the works here. But there was also the belief, somewhere far down inside of his soul, that no human being would go unpunished on earth. That is, though he believed in God, he also believed that all men who do evil are tormented until their last breath by such pangs of guilty conscience as to make life either unliveable or totally devoid of beauty. However we know that’s not the case, and imagine, then, the measure of his perplexing when before him came a man immune to morality itself, like a stone breaching some holy river. 

There he- the assailant- sat, already having succeeded in coercing his prey to sit with him on the steps of some closed-up establishment. He reached to replace a lock of hair to its proper place behind the delicate ear, and then allowed his hand to loiter like some fantasy of a future, neither promissory nor completely elusive; an invitation to that unknown but rumoured world which our little mother had been forced to believe in to make sense of her unhappiness. She saw a cottage; an honest man with dirt under his fingernails; children- their children; a gooseberry tree. Confronted with such a scene, our writer wondered whether saving the world was really impossible. Action was required. 

“Sir, the cabbie says he’s charging every minute the suitcase keeps him there.” 

“You monster!” Our writer hissed, suddenly spinning around and making straight for the ajar door.

Grigory wailed and like a parrot under stress was jellified on the spot, so that his collapsed body even functioned as quite an effective doorstop. 

“Move! Move you fool!” Our writer wailed, tugging violently on the stuck door. Grigory did manage to scramble away after a moment, hiding himself under a small oak trestle upon which the portrait of our writer’s late wife rested. But to the manservant’s relief, our writer marched straight passed him, collected his overcoat from its hook, and like a man insane hurried down the staircase (jumping two or three steps at a time) and rushed out into the street, nearly colliding with an old woman with the fear of God in her eyes.

A man can go his entire life almost physically invalid- a weak conglomerate of fats and tissues, supported by a musculature of absolute necessity, hiding from danger wherever it might emerge, running and tripping when threatened, cowering and crying when confronted- and then one day, for no reason at all, he decides to put his no-longer young body to work with a rigour and determination unknown to even the strongest among us. In word, he is transformed into something fearless, even reckless, and imagines (though truthfully in this moment his mind is inevitably not working at all) that he is invincible in combat. Who’s to explain such a phenomenon? There are likely as many explanations as there are instances. In some cases, the opponent is stultified by the force of the persona, and submits before a single blow is traded. In other cases, the opponent recovers from his initial shock, looks his foe once over, and determines that he is quite plainly mad and poses no real threat. Thereupon, the fantasy world of the hero is shattered on first contact, the entire world laughs at him, and to cope he will either subsequently train himself in the art of combat or reject material wealth completely and become a monk. And then, of course, there are the infinite variations between, and perhaps even one or two more extreme responses available. But of the spectrum our writer leans toward the latter; that is, having crossed the road not exactly sure of what he was going to do once he reached the assailant, there was a crack, and then the multiplication of the stars ad infinitum.

With a single blow, our writer had been reduced to ashes. He lay supine for a good few minutes, here and there twitching like a felled cockroach, while above him muffled words and shapes moved about like magnificent clouds. There was an argument which, to his surprise, had a somewhat soothing effect. He sensed that his fate was once more relevant to the lives of others, as once it had been to his parents. He smiled. 

“look, the fool’s smiling!” The woman- the prey- laughed.
“That’s enough from you” “witch!” “she’s killed him!” A chorus of cries came in response. 

It was, in fact, almost half an hour before our writer moving about, and another half hour before he was cognisant again. He found himself in a tavern seated across from the assailant, his droogs, while Grigory, seated next to our writer, was plainly beside himself with excitement as he explained how he had subdued the wicked woman without causing her damage by employing a trick that his son had developed for use on his wife. 

“you must hug her from the front, so’s as not to disrepute her honour, you see.”
And the men nodded and grinned their immaculate white teeth. 

It was only now that our writer began to understand that he had been felled not by the vagrant but by the woman he was attempting to save. 

“but… how?” He interjected.

“he speaks!” The vagrant laughed merrily, “your Grigory was worried you’d been permanently fixed.”
“I never….” Grigory erupted, his eyes brimming, now overwhelmed with the variance of emotion, the impossibility of circumstance. 

“but… how?” Our writer stammered again. 

To the rest of the night I cannot testify, for this is the natural terminus of the material provisioned to me. I will only note that three days later, when I visited our writer to discuss a matter of business, Grigory interrupted us to report that a policeman was at the front door, wanting impatiently to speak with our writer about certain events that transpired in that sitting at the tavern.

“Impatiently? Why, are you deaf? Did you leave him to wither?”
“Er, no sir, not exactly…”
“explain yourself!” Our writer fumed, looking to me and rolling his eyes. 

“well, the cabbie and the policeman are nearly at blows sir… he’s saying it aint proper to take a man’s house as considerations for undeliverable luggage.”
“Christ in heaven! The luggage!” 

Our writer snatched his overcoat from his hook and made for the street, leaping two or three stairs at a time.