Showing posts with label Tuberculosis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tuberculosis. Show all posts

Sunday, 31 December 2023

Her Left Shoe . . . E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Terrible Projectile of Semiotics

 New Year’s Eve 2023
 
‘Darkness had no effect upon my fancy . . .’ wrote Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, no doubt recalling the month in which she first drafted her Promethean fable whose ‘Abhorred monster!’ she had created in June 1816, the Year Without a Summer; or as her literary confrère, Lord Byron, described it in the bleak conclusion to his vatic, epoch-defining blank verse: ‘Darkness . . . was the Universe.’ 
 
The Birthplace of Frankenstein’s Monster? A short carriage drive from the heart of Geneva, Switzerland.
 
 
In 1816, following the thunderous volcantic eruption of Mount Tabora in the East Indies, the Northern Hemisphere was consumed by a sulphurous fog so dense that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. It was a time of famine, doubt and fear. ‘All was black. The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect . . .’
 
That darkness, too, had been shared by the Prussian fabulist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, himself a writer of transgressive grotesqueries, of fantastical humanoid automatons ‘endued with animation’, a sinister unhealthy preoccupation in the view of those stuffy contemporaries of his who branded him an ‘Outsider’ of a ‘lurid hue’, resistant to the intellectual gravitas expected of popular writers as proselytisers for a Greater Germany.
 
(Incidentally, the unfortunate Victor Frankenstein, a Genevese, would have been heartened and spared his traumatic guilt from his nights in Bavarian charnel-houses had he known that some 200 years later – this December 2023 – the ‘Greater Europe’ of the European Union agreed the proposed Regulation for the harvesting of Substances of Human Origin intended for human application.)

‘Wound Fever’ and Forbidden Light . . .
and a Beast named Blasphemy.
So . . . significantly, in 1816, Mary Shelley and Ernst Hoffmann, each a communicant with the spirit of the new Age of Galvanism, were neighbouring Romantics dwelling in Continental Europe and divided only by a distance no greater than London to John O’ Groats. Hence, over Berlin’s literary salons where the polymathic Hoffmann was feted, and over the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati where the Shelley/Byron coterie wrote, too, in Gothic script, there swirled morbid broodings on the outer reaches of metaphysics, adrift in the poisoned upper air, as if strangely convoluted sunless plants had grown twisted and found sustenance searching for forbidden light.

Beneath this overcast gloom, then, which presided in 1816, it is perhaps no coincidence that Hoffmann’s own nightmarish fable of uncanny anthropomorphisation, written in the same year, finds an echo in the despair of Mary’s monster: ‘The fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams.’
 
For in Hoffmann’ Nutcracker (Berlin 1816) we find another profoundly troubled Mary – the child Marie – who like the author of Frankenstein is also prey to an ‘acute mental vision’ of a monster . . . in this case, the seven-headed Mouse King, more terrifying than the beast named Blasphemy (cf. Revelation 13.1 ‘And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads.’)

Freudians, of course, no doubt have discovered a bonanaza of interpretations in Hoffmann’s Nussknacker und Mäusekönig, a box of delights that includes – surely voyeuristically? – the unfettered fevered imaginings of atavistic threat and the blood of young girls. Certainly, at whatever dark level of Hoffmann’s forty-year-old consciousness, there is some fixation that’s impenetrably troubling.

Atavistic threat and the blood of young girls? Well, of all the enigmatic dramas enacted in Hoffmann’s disconcerting Kinderfabel, one plot twist still retains its power to surprise us in the tale’s transformation from the printed page of 1816 to Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet-féerie of 1892, even now performed in centres of culture throughout the world. (Our traditional Christmas ballet season in London is incomplete without it).

Consider Act 1 of the ballet, which closes with the Battle to defeat the Mouse King when Marie (Clara in the ballet) famously defends her Nutcracker from attack and – mirroring the action of the book . . . she reacts without thought.  For the febrile girl of the Nussknacker could not ‘contain herself anymore . . . so grabbed her left shoe, without being clearly aware of what she was doing, and threw it at the King.’ (The original narrative in French, is faithfully rendered: ‘Et, en même temps, d’un mouvement instinctif, sans se rendre compte de ce qu’elle faisait, Marie détacha son soulier de son pied, et, de toutes ses forces, elle le jeta au milieu de la mêlée, et cela si adroitement, que le terrible projectile atteignit le roi des souris . . .’)
 
I cast out my shoe.
A shoe as missile? It is a symbol of submission as long-established as the Old Testament, see Psalm 60:8, ‘Over Edom will I cast out my shoe.’ See also Joshua 10:24: ‘Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings.’ In both instances, the phrase conveys a meaning of The Downtrodden, a people brought to subjection by a shoe.
 
However, in Hoffmann’s fable, the young heroine’s defeat of the Mouse King’s is shortlived, even, one might suspect, she is moralistically punished for her daring. For, in the melee she crashes backwards into a glass cabinet of toys and . . . ‘At that moment . . . Marie felt an even sharper pain in her left arm than before and sank to the ground, unconscious.’ 

When she awakes, she is told, ‘Nutcracker was lying on your bleeding arm and not far from you was your left shoe.’ A little later, a surgeon arrives and ‘He felt Mary’s pulse and she heard that there was talk of a wound fever.’  

Surely it is not too fanciful for us to perceive Mary’s shattered display case and its scattered dolls and resultant blood as emblematic of shattered childish illusions?
 
I believe these authorial contrivances, from the culminating scene of Act 1, to be profoundly symbolic . . . for surely the young girl’s ‘Wundfieber’ (wound fever) is a sickly metaphor for her menarche?
 
In this belief I  would not be alone in evoking the pale consumptive heroines of the early 19th Century, a literary device that may be found even earlier in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, perhaps continental Europe’s most celebrated novel of the decadent aestheticisation of tuberculer maidenhood spiritualised by disease. (NB: the setting of Julie is Geneva). 
 
This fascination with blood is observable too in a 19th Century fashion cultivated by calculating women who positively sought to look tubercular – the ‘flattering malady’– whereby a courtesan would not only entice her male devotees by seeming to suffer from a phthisic cough but would dissimulate the blood in her sputum by pricking her gums with a pin.
 
(In this connection, it should be remarked that Hoffmann’s Nutcracker found its first translator in Alexandre Dumas père, the version in French that Tchaikovsky set to music for his ballet.  The son of Dumas,  Alexandre Dumas fils, of course, wrote that classic tale of love and consumption, La Dame aux Camélias, and, in this case, the clunking menstrual metaphor may be seen in the red camellias signposted by literature’s consumptive heroine nonpareil.)

Downtrodden . . . a footnote . . .
the perseveration of a ‘terrible projectile’ . . .
The following instances from myth and remembered times warn us that the shoe is a projectile to be genuinely feared . . . the ultimate defiant put-down, pancultural in meaning, when actions speak louder than words, and one’s antagonists must learn they are worthy only of subjection in the dirt under one’s heel. 
 
The basest insult that can never be unsaid.

 Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at 
United States president George W Bush on 14 December 2008
in protest against Occupation. Shoes  are considered
exceptionally unclean in the Arab World.
 
Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, allegedly banged his shoe on his delegate-desk
in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong
at UN General Assembly in New York City on 12 October 1960.

Norse god Vídar, son of Odin, famed for killing the wolf Fenrir
by crushing the monster’s lower jaw with his great shoe and
grabbing its upper jaw in one hand to tear its mouth apart.

 
See also Fragment: Hoffmann’s Pictogram 1821    
 
See also Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image?  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/ 

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
 
 
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 13 November 2018

Ur-Gumshoe? D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. The Unvarnished Truth.

 Tchékhov dreamt he was a thief of the back streets who collects coins and collar studs from the pavement with tarred shoe-soles to evade detection.

D-r Tchékhov mounted on Old Roarer (1888).
‘Her breath had frozen on leaving her nostrils so that there was
a horn of ice a foot long projecting through the steam, and
lumps of the hardest ice – of unequal sizes – had
become attached to her hoofs.’ 

A number of extracts from the as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, have been posted here over recent years :
A Skirmish with Wolves, 
or Chekhov’s talking raven,
or Dead Wife, New Hat,
or Inductive Detection,
or D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel, 
or Problems of a Completist,

The transcription and restoration of a long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) has been a task requiring considerable cerebral vigour, which I confess demands a savviness I can no longer own.

 The novel relates the misadventures of the morphine-dependent D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, when investigating the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. 

So for Tchékhov’s perorated musings that colour the penultimate chapter, Pursued by Wolves, retailing this baffling affair, click on the first link above . . . or . . . continue here to read onwards to the conclusion of Part One, A Textbook Case . . 

•

 In three days, life in the garrison had robbed him of all self respect, and brought him to the utter degradation of institutional mindlessness, consumed, like the common soldiers, by a crude and bitter resentment.
  Around him he saw only darkness, barbarity, monotony and the dumb, brutish indifference of callous men stripped of all humanity.
  A melancholy whistle sounded like a chamade of defeat.
  In the far distance, a railway engine laboured on a curve, and then the railway lights came into view over the brow of a hill, and a high column of grey smoke and sparks shifted fretfully hither and thither, trapped in the cutting between the forest trees.
  As though at a familiar signal, the mare whickered and broke into a risyu — a military trot at a brisk, even pace towards the flaring funnel. 
  Below them, a long goods train passed, pulled by two panting engines that belched shafts of crimson flame from their funnels, respiring like the high blowers who filled the rear ranks for draught service alongside Old Roarer.
  Soon, the double yolk of a yellow approach-signal shimmered in a glair of mist.
  In another moment Anton had reached the track and crossed the line to enter the station yard.
  He patted the mare’s neck, smoothing a mane caparisoned by snow and, in places, standing in frozen quiffs.  Her flanks were streaked with frozen sweat.
  “She’s a regular sweetlin’,” he said to the waiting groom.
  He swung out his leg and dismounted smoothly, like a well-turned period.

•


The Unvarnished Truth


The ramassage train was a mixed goods wagons and passenger service with a vagon-restoran. On the platform, soldiers were rapidly unloading two box-cars of fresh horses under penalty of demurrage.  
  The remounts’ eyes were bright and their coats gleamed.
  “More unsuspecting candidates, like the conscripts, for the dread potions of that infernal médicin empirique,” Anton murmured sourly, and stroked their groomed flanks.
  He paused to watch a little bye-play between a thickset, compact chestnut gelding, with a broad breast, and a sturdy carabagh cob.
  “They say : ‘In the long run truth will triumph’, but it’s untrue,” he confided softly, fondling a velvet ear.
  At the rear of the train, he observed, was a railway car disguised to look like a mail-van, with opaque glass windows and four-plank cells to transport exiled political prisoners.
  He entered his own compartment, threw himself on the seat, and took up his private journal.
  He felt all of Russia was on the line harnessed to the lokomotiv and waiting for a signal whose annunciation they would never hear.
  “My visit has been a footling business,” he wrote, “the situation is hopeless, and it is impossible to change the course of things.”
  He gazed blankly out of the window, blinking his heavily lashed lids.
  “I have dissected with an ice-pick a frozen monument to romanticism, explored the aphotic regions of the General’s castelry, lingered in the haunts of pleasure, and buried a ghost.”
  Soon, he knew, all traces of the episode would be erased. 
  With much the same intention as Old Vańuška — when attempting the drive of deer to cover his tracks and overwrite, in the snow, the record of his misdeeds — so the Princess would sprinkle holy water on the scandal.                                 
      Yet the bowdlerized version of the events was written in the official record, for had not he, Tchékhov, so written it? [“No more equivocal or casuistical a letter have I ever written.”]
  The Princess emerged from the station-master’s room and boarded the train.
      He compared once more her delicate weak-looking neck and cernuous head with his own bowed shoulders.
      He was aware the shuba he was wearing — as long as a dressing-gown — was not comme il faut, and he was conscious that his raffish bowtie was not the correct thing, yet in these small matters, as in the greater ones, he vowed to resist his own embourgeoisement. 
     “My motto : ‘I don’t want anything.’ ”
  He had probed beneath the surface sheen, and under the varnish he had found nests of corruption and subterfuge which not even the magic of the old Tcheremis mediciner could conceal.
  At the front of the train, a door was flung open, and youthful male voices, resonant and assured, cried out : “Mariya! Mariushka! Manyusya! Mashenka!”

  The whistle sounded. 

  Anton was just in time to see Mariya following her hat-box as she was handed into the compartment of the four bad captains.
  The train steamed out.
  Tchékhov glanced at his watch.  When Anton was sick as a child, or profoundly unhappy, he had played with a small oblong fragment of mirror to dart “sun hares” across the ceiling and on the faded paper of the wall.
  In the bright rays of the gaslamp the glass watch-lens sent out spinning discs of light on the carriage ceiling.
  He repeated under his breath his childhood’s secret chant : “The hare dances at night to seduce the moon.”  He had believed then that a selenogamous marriage was the fate of a poet, and his destiny was to be a flamen devoted to his muse.
  He sighed, and wrote : “It usually takes as much time to feel happy as to wind up one’s watch.” 
  He wound up his watch. 
  In those pages of his journal where he entered his imprest accounts, D-r Tchékhov drew a new line, and itemised his latest expenses – viz the handout to a battalion commander besieged by creditors.
  “In Act I,” he wrote, “a respectable man, ‘X’, borrows a hundred roubles from ‘A’, and in the course of all four acts he does not pay it back.” 
  He smiled, and added : “To make an enemy is to lend a man money, and ask it of him again.”
  To be spared the out-go, the yawning byurokrat then crossed out “expenses, sundry” and wrote “expenses, general”.
  The landscape flowing by looked inane.
  When he thought of the General’s penury Anton reckoned he had gone some way to make up the ullage.
  The General had played him for a fool. 
  The dark bulk of the General’s lofty quadrilateral fort disappeared below the treeline.  
  On balance, Anton felt sorry for the General whose domain had shrunk to a second-rate boarding school and four mountain batteries quartered in a snowbound cantonment patrolling a forgotten frontier.
  Anton gazed at the way the land tumbled, and saw the trees were planted anyhow, stupidly ; a land where prospered only zastoi — stagnation, stupidity and mediocrity.
  “The story I have begun,” he scribbled in a draft letter to Nicholai, “is a work de longue haleine — as complicated as it is deeply tedious.”   
  He sighed. “At this moment I see no good reason to live,” he confided to his brother, “but then I remembered an editor had commissioned a magazine article on the poor schools and I recognised that I could not die issueless.”
  The carriage lamp burned as fitfully as his own restlessness.
  His hæmmorhoids were afire with a formicary itching which circled his arse like a ring-burner. 
  He had added to his knowledge of enemata by experimenting with variants of Ivanishche’s instillation of opium and myrrh tinctures which had succeeded only in acting upon his guts like evacuants ; purgations each more dreadful than the last.
  To his remaining ampoule he sought relief ; and within the space of a few moments the allumé eyes of the unrepentant meconophagist had undergone their customary pupillary changes.
  At a level-crossing a team of oxen hauling coal slackened their pace.
  His stomach warmed and the abdominal spasms ceased.
  There remained a sickly, sticky sensation in his gullet, however, which was clearly the consequence of too much smoking so he swallowed a linctus of barbitonum – a hypnotic drug – he had mixed with drops of antitussive opianine. 
  He gazed from the window and scanned the horizon through a pair of opera glasses.
  The landscape flowing by looked phantasmagorical.
  A fantaziya.
  (He wrote,“And I dreamt that, as it were, I considered reality was a dream, and the dream was a reality.”)
  In many respects, he considered, the fact that the symptoms of a sufferer from tuberculosis are similar to the signs of morphinism should be regarded by fellow addicts as fortunate indeed.
  The similarities — the brittle nails, the axillary sweating, the dry heat in other regions, the weight loss, his fluctuating temperature night and day — had conveniently veiled his drug dependency from the prying intrusions of overofficious busybodies at the medical faculty in the past.
  “I am a superfluous man ; only the healthy and strong will remain,” he wrote. “Nature is straining to rid herself of debilitated organisms and those she doesn’t need . . . famines, typhus, diphtheria — kholera, tuberkulez, skarlatina — an epidemic whose only cure is a course of the natural sciences. But Death defies the doctor. For how can a doctor prevail over disease when his own brother is reluctant to change is underpants.”
  Since his sojourn in the fort his fæces had turned black, a sign which indicated, he believed, not only the presence of stomach blood as “coffee-grounds” in his stools but melæna wrought by an overdose of bismuth.
  He examined the granulating abscess on his lower left femur and removed an incrustation. To his surprise when he looked for the formerly sloughy floor he saw the lesion had healed to a healthy new pink carapace.
  “Cicatrix manet. Spasi'bo za poda'rok, Vańuška!” He laughed. “Thanks for the timely gift of spurious health, old man.” 
  Only one thought reconciled Tchékhov to the old feldsher : just as the Prince had suffered from the rascal’s ignorance, so perhaps Anton was benefiting from one of his mistakes.
  “The hour is late afternoon and dark,” he wrote. “Only the evening will show what day it has been.”
  He turned the page, and resumed writing.
  “I think more and more of death. I dreamt that Court kammerjunkers were  present at the opening of my grave, and I was preserved like a saint, the skin uncrackt, the odour sweet. Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the thought that you might live forever and never die. To live one must have something to hang on to. In this country only the body works, not the spirit.”
  Above the rattle of the wheels, at the head of the train, he heard the melodiya of Mariya singing. 
  The ballada told of dukes and counts, like those in novels, not ordinary people. The song was not sensual but yearning ; a romanticheskoye yearning to rhyme Ideal and Love with Repentance and purest Sacrifice.
  Mariya sang with a pathos to capture men’s souls, and on his lips he tasted  the sacrament of that first warm kiss which had melted his heart.
  Ahead of him, her singing faded. 
  He wanted to race and overtake her, and it seemed to him as if it were life itself he wanted to overtake, that life which one cannot bring back or overtake or catch, just as one cannot overtake one’s own shadow.
  “To die innominate, unperpetuated — as the Great Anon — should be our early resolve,” he continued. 
  When he thought of his death he would recall the words of Cato ; for he would rather people should enquire why he had not a tablet erected to his memory, than why he had. 
  He unfolded his travelling rug, bunched his coat into a pillow, and laid his head in readiness for rest.
  “Nevertheless, the power and salvation of a people lie in its intelligentsyia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.”
  A laconic smile lurked under his beard.
  “At my death destroy these notebook writings as the demented ramblings of a drivelling scribbler, one of the cackling literati.” 
  There was no doubt but that he meant it.
  “In truth, it seems to me that we uncultured, worn-out, money-grubbing people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life we neither know nor notice. The dawn of a new life is breaking. Great events will take us unawares, and we shall turn into sinister old men and women ; and we shall be the first who, in that hatred of that new dawn, will calumniate it.”   
  He closed his eyes.
  He could not forget the Prince monumentalised in the snow.
  He could not forget Mariya imperatrix.  
  Her vivacious amoral'nyi smile. 
  He thought of her complex gamey odour of hairwash and perfumery. 
  “Essentially this chronicle of woe is crude and meaningless. Romantic love, like Mariya’s song appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people.” 
  He opened his eyes and reread the scrap of paper on which he had copied the Prince’s love letter.
  He shook his head in wonderment.
  That the Prince had truly loved Mariya there could be no doubt. For Anton had preserved the scrap like holy writ.
  No love letter should be read au pied de la lettre.
  Just as D-r Tchékhov had struggled to find a way to conclude his Report to the General ; so the Prince had striven in the composition of his duplicitous last words.
  As regards the psychogenesis of the Prince’s neuroses, the psycho-analytical school would continue to proffer the glib formula, “morbid anxiety and depressiya mean unsatisfied love.” 
  But was this diagnosis wholly true when Anton applied it to himself?
  When depersonalisation was manifest, as was the case of the Prince, sometimes, the subjects of these inner stresses or mental conflicts, instead of feeling that they themselves are changed, discover their outer world appears different.
  But surely derealisation was the very condition which sustained the writer’s inner life — was its essence?
  There was no denying that the opium-eating scribbler shared many of the textbook symptoms — and perceptions. 
  “Subjects of depersonalisation appear different from what they used to be ; strange, lifeless, detached, automatic.  In derealisation, the outer world looks dead or macabre.  Such subjects exhibiting manic-depressive psychoses (melankholiya) must be regarded as suicide risks.”
  Definitely spot on!  Korsakov knew his stuff all right!
  The ends of each pencil (there were five) he had found in the Prince’s study were, like the cadet’s finger nails, chewed to the quick. 
  The hands were crossed when Anton had last seen them.
  For repose in his coffin, the bodkin-women had removed the Prince’s gloves.
  Anton dwelt on the darker purposes of such women, prodding and dosing young wronged girls with filthy homegrown deobstruents. 
  He prayed Mariya had remained faithful to her promise.
  At last, he sank into a deep opiated sleep and dreamt of Goshen — a great shining celestial city — velikii gorod — and dreamt he was a thief of the back streets who collects coins and collar studs from the pavement with tarred shoe-soles to evade detection.
  He could not wait to be enclosed once more within the white heart of Moscow.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, 18 March 2015

Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux.

Another excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya.  
     In this extract we catch up with him as he leaves the garrison ballroom late at night in answer to the General’s order for the attendance of a doctor at the duelling ground.
-----------------

In the lobby Anton saw Mariya’s shoulders shake in solitary weeping. 
     He would very much have liked to take her in his arms ; to relive even for one second the breathless span of their mis-tryst.   
     Tears stained the dark red silk of her basquine ; the skirt’s belt was studded with bright rivets like a prison door. 
     He felt a quickening of the pulse, instinct with desire.
     The General brought his guest the adjutant’s polushubok – a short sheepskin coat – which Anton hastily buttoned on, pausing only to cover his dancing pumps with his galoshes.
     The gasoliers effloresced as the General opened the door.

Winter Rules
To a hungry man with a drunken headache whose every nerve shatters at the sound of breaking glass, the moon can appear, after a banquet, as an unbroken dish of slops above the rooftops. 
     So the moon appeared to D-r Tchékhov.
     Anton stood where he was bid – en prise – a hired hand waiting to be taken.
     A meteor fell and he winced as shooting pains attacked his right arm, but whether this was due to the tightness of the adjutant’s coat or his hacking cough he could not be sure.
     The General shouted for escorts to form an undertaker squad. Odd to see the General in ancient felt top-boots yet still cutting a dash in his swagger uniform.
     Shivering in third-wear uniforms and government-issue camelhair hooded bashlyki, two young ensigns, and the two bruised angel-faced recruits relieved from punishment fatigues – now thoroughly shorn and chastened – unstrapped a stretcher from the ambulance wagon’s kit of nosilki.
     Supreme in his vicegerency, the General beckoned to Tchékhov to fall into line.
     The two ensigns formed the vanguard, each carrying a bull’s-eye kerosin lantern with a reflector which sent lampblack shadows swinging in the moonlight.
     The party advanced through an inner archway and across a court towards an embattled parapet between two gun embrasures where, by a snow-covered merlon, a dark robed penitent stood with bowed head awaiting their approach.
     At the sight of a priest, Anton – as ever – shivered in apprehension. His right shoulder continued to twinge, and a new pain gnawed at his left subclavicular region ; all the conclusive signs, in truth, of the incipient tuberculosis his conscious mind had dismissed.*
     However, he could not fail to be aware of the fact that the inflammation of his leg had not subsided and, in consequence, his limp was, to his burning shame, growing hourly more pronounced.  
     To be outrun by a priest was more than he could bear.
     The General had called for the college chaplain as soon as they were clear of the ballroom, with precise orders to seal a vow from him of absolute discretion.
     Father Abiathar (so named† with forlorn expectations by his Bishop) had all the bored manner of a priest who was feeling Mondayish even though it was a Saturday, and his eyes (Anton thought) had the cunning look of a mendicant prior dismissed for simony who had been driven to peddle indulgences in bulk.
     His cincture was tight over his grain-sack belly and he smelled of pickled herring. His breath declared the buffet had allowed him a skinful of the chasse-cousin rotgut they reserved for the clergy.
     ‘Nowadays our fellows crawl out from all sorts of unexpected holes,’ said the General, sotto voce. 
     The General spoke gravely of their special mission and ordered the priest to bless his six-man snatch-squad. 
      As the only two non-combatants present, Father Abiathar and D-r Tchékhov were assigned to the rear of the column.
      Anton thought : ‘Like flies, a doctor or a priest can enter any house. Just as the the First Functionary of the Empire, the Secret Police Chief Count Shuvalov, had a right of Audience, by day and night, with the Tsar and could walk into the Emperor’s cabinet or bedchamber at any hour without risking his imperial displeasure. In this we share the advantage of the house-fly. We enter unannounced and roam at will.’
      Anton had learned from the General that the priest was called Brimstone by the students and most of the Camp. 
     He was tolerated yet heartily loathed.
     ‘It’s as useless as shooting at ravens as clergy,’ the General had said.
     To augment his meagre salary of one hundred and fifty roubles a year there were innumerable fees this Levite could exact, and he fined soldiers fifteen kopecks who had not communicated in Lent, and likewise extracted dues from the Old Ritualists.
      After he pocketed his fee the priest would wring his hands and lower his eyes like a monk who held the Chair for Abjectness. 
      ‘He speaks as though he would creep into one’s mouth,’ the General had added in disgust.
      The Levitical caste was a subject of continuing fascination for Anton and he committed to memory the details of Brimstone’s broad-brimmed, wideawake hat, his large heavy boots, the patched, dingy brown cassock and coarse hodden-gray over-mantle attached to a worn capuche which clung to his head to protect his ears.  
      Within these fuscous robes Father Abiathar concealed his priestcraft : a portable altar in a satchel, a miracle-working triptych from his collection of tchudotvornikh icons, and a crucifix wrapped in his stole, which he clutched for warmth, his hands thrust up his sleeves.
      A series of steps descended the ramparts to a path leading to the forest edge.
      They stepped out on to a tableland laid with linen-white snow.
      Under the soaring revetment the soldiers’ lamps guided them to the first of the raised logging roads covered in impacted snow.
      To keep his spirits up (and to terrify the body-snatching crew) the General sang, in his staunchest basso profundo, a verse by Nekrasov :

             In the sepulchres, King Winter said,
            With flowers of ice I deck the dead ;
            I freeze the blood in the living veins,
            And in living heads I freeze the brains.

And, as he sang, Anton’s blood, too, seemed to turn to ice as the party struck out from the shelter of the garrison and stepped into the teeth of a north wind.
     ‘In cold like this it’s Winter Rules!’ the General shouted grimly.
      Anton painfully limped ahead, outstripped the column, and drew abreast of the General who linked arms.  The two men put their heads down to face the whip of the wind.
     ‘Ten paces is the minimum but the Prince would have been perfectly within his rights to shoot at eight. At minus twenty degrees your hand’s so palsied by the chills, and the light’s so dim, that – even if you were to find a line of sight to guide your aim – you’d be more likely to wing the other fella’s second!’
     The path – lined with stunted birch and pine – began to fall away sharply. Tchékhov realised the solid going underfoot was due to successive squads of cadets beating a path to the exercise grounds which lay ahead. A deceptive surface was sprinkled with a powdering of diamond-glinting snow.  
     Beneath his feet was a skin of trodden ice which covered the tangled dead sedges, dried cotton grass and other reliquiæ of a muskeg.
     They crossed a boundary rail polished by friction from generations of Academy cadets. Anton noticed the General’s eyes never ceased to search the snow for signs of the duellists’ trail.
     The General found his second wind and, to pass the time, began to tell of sporting contests he had witnessed when he was a cadet. 
     ‘There was young Nezlobin – a very small youth – who had a dispute with his classmate Mychetzky, who was very stout. Words ran high on both sides, so little Nezlobin calls him out. Mychetzky, however, won’t have it. ‘You are so little,’ he said, ‘that I might fire at you a dozen times without hitting, whereas, the chance is that you may shoot me at the first fire.’ ‘To convince you I don’t want to take advantage of you,’ says little Nezlobin, ‘you shall chalk my size upon your body, and all hits out of the ring shall go for nothing!’ 
     Anton laughed with delight. The General paused and offered a swig from his hip-flask which Anton declined.
     ‘My God, you’re an incorporated temperance society!’ exploded the General. 
     But, under the pretext of coughing into his handkerchief, Anton managed to take a deep pull from Old Vańuška’s berézovka.  
      Soon his veins were on fire.
      ‘They were always sparring,’ resumed the General. ‘Mychetzky broke his ankle once, falling off his horse. Blamed Nezlobin for crossing his path on an exercise so they set to wrangling once more. So Nezlobin challenges him and Mychetzky accepted.  But being very lame, Mychetzky requests that he might have a prop. ‘Suppose,’ says he, ‘I lean against this road sign.’ Nezlobin, then points to a farther sign at a cross-roads a verst distant and says, ‘With pleasure, on condition that I may lean against the next.’  The joke settled the quarrel. A pity the same could not be said of the Prince.’

Le Diable Boiteux.

Curiously, at that moment, they, too, reached a junction where their path joined a corduroy road from the forest which led to the garrison by a lower route. Here, at last, two sets of footprints were visible, entering and leaving a gate giving on to the exercise grounds.   
     The old frontier scout released a grunt of satisfaction.
     ‘The Prince’s footsteps. Small heels. Impression of spurs in the deeper places. Let’s follow the scent.’
      The single set of tracks leading to the butts was regularly paced yet the returning tracks were of a different character, suggesting the dragging left foot of a limping man, so the General concluded.
     ‘Le Diable Boiteux!’ Anton whispered.
     Most fascinating of all, the two sets of tracks became three at a point where they passed close to a prostrate pine and other fagotage and led beyond, across a terrain broken by hairy tussocks and the fallen shafts of reed clumps. 
     To Anton, the springiness of their prints on the quaggy snow suggested the mossy ground and slippery pine needles underneath.
     ‘Ahah!’ exclaimed the General. ‘Enter Kulikov.’
     ‘How can you be so sure?’ urged Tchékhov, immediately rushing to the defence of the young Class-Lance-Corporal Pomidorchik.  
     The bearer party halted.
     ‘Understand this, Antosha,’ the General knelt beside the meeting place, ‘the first set of tracks pauses here, heels close together, then continues in the same direction, suggesting the acknowledgement by a senior of a junior officer’s salute.’ 
     ‘And...?’
     He straightened, stiffly, and continued.
     ‘Do-ye-see? Kulikov takes the shortcut through the forest, meets up with his adversary, salutes, crosses the tracks from the rear and joins the Prince on the lefthand side.’
     ‘I don’t see how...’
     ‘Regulations. Quote : ‘When officers are walking together, the junior officer should at all times position himself on the left so the senior officer’s saluting arm is disengaged.’ See?’
     ‘Perfectly. Our Imperial Table of Ranks is even written on the remotest Russian snow.’
     Anton rubbed his eyes. He saw only – imperfectly – that the muddle of the tracks in the snow was like a profusion of those slovenly typographical misprints on a galley proof with which he was so familiar – and which he was too fatigued to correct. 
     And Kulikov?  Where was he?
     ‘In quod. Under lock and key.’

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*    In fact, as was later proved, the right lung was badly affected, and emphysema was found to have spread to the left lung. At the end of Tchékhov’s life a relapse of pleurisy was complicated by an intestinal catarrh which indicated that the tuberculosis had spread to the abdominal region.

†    ‘Father of Excellence” - see Samuel xxiii, 9.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)