He seemed to me to be surrounded by a limitless space. If one went closer to him, one seemed to be falling.
I felt in him some affinity to the stoker Shumov.
Although the shopman went into ecstasies over his cleverness, both to his face and behind his back, there were times when, like me, he wanted to provoke or offend the old man.
“You are a deceiver of men,” he would say, suddenly looking heatedly into the old man’s face.
The latter, smiling lazily, answered:
“Only the Lord lives without deceit, and we live among fools, you see. Can one meet fools, and not deceive them? Of what use would they be, then?”
The shopman lost his temper.
“Not all the peasants are fools. The merchants themselves came from the peasantry!”
“We are not talking about merchants.
Fools do not live as rogues do.
A fool is like a saint — his brains are asleep.”
The old man drawled more and more lazily, and this was very irritating.
It seemed to me that he was standing on a hillock in the midst of a quagmire.
It was impossible to make him angry. Either he was above rage, or he was able to hide it very successfully.
But he often happened to be the one to start a dispute with me. He would come quite close to me, and smiling into his beard, remark:
“What do you call that French writer — Ponoss?”
I was desperately angry at this silly way of turning the names upside down. But holding myself in for the time, I said:
“Ponson de Terrail.”
“Where was he lost?” 8 8 Terryat in Russian means “to lose.”
“Don’t play the fool. You are not a child.”
“That is true. I am not a child.
What are you reading?”
“‘Ephrem Siren.’”
“And who writes best. Your foreign authors? or he?”
I made no reply.
“What do the foreign ones write about most?”
“About everything which happens to exist in life.”
“That is to say, about dogs and horses — whichever may happen to come their way.”
The shopman laughed. I was enraged.
The atmosphere was oppressive, unpleasant to me. But if I attempted to get away, the shopman stopped me.
“Where are you going?”
And the old man would examine me.
“Now, you learned man, gnaw this problem. Suppose you had a thousand naked people standing before you, five hundred women and five hundred men, and among them Adam and Eve. How would you tell which were Adam and Eve”?”
He kept asking me this, and at length explained triumphantly:
“Little fool, don’t you see that, as they were not born, but were created, they would have no navels!”
The old man knew an innumerable quantity of these “problems.” He could wear me out with them.
During my early days at the shop, I used to tell the shopman the contents of some of the books I had read. Now these stories came back to me in an evil form. The shopman retold them to Petr Vassilich, considerably cut up, obscenely mutilated.
The old man skilfully helped him in his shameful questions. Their slimy tongues threw the refuse of their obscene words at Eugenie Grandet, Ludmilla, and Henry IV.
I understood that they did not do this out of ill-nature, but simply because they wanted something to do. All the same, I did not find it easy to bear.
Having created the filth, they wallowed in it, like hogs, and grunted with enjoyment when they soiled what was beautiful, strange, unintelligible, and therefore comical to them.
The whole Gostinui Dvor, the whole of its population of merchants and shopinen, lived a strange life, full of stupid, puerile, and always malicious diversions.
If a passing peasant asked which was the nearest way to any place in the town, they always gave him the wrong direction. This had become such a habit with them that the deceit no longer gave them pleasure.
They would catch two rats, tie their tails together, and let them go in the road. They loved to see how they pulled in different directions, or bit each other, and sometimes they poured paraffin-oil over the rats, and set fire to them.
They would tie an old iron pail on the tail of a dog, who, in wild terror, would tear about, yelping and growling, while they all looked on, and laughed.
There were many similar forms of recreation, and it seemed to me that all kinds of people, especially country people, existed simply for the amusement of the Gostinui Dvor.
In their relations to other people, there was a constant desire to make fun of them, to give them pain, and to make them uncomfortable.
It was strange that the books I had read were silent on the subject of this unceasing, deep-seated tendency of people to jeer at one another.
One of the amusements of the Gostinui Dvor seemed to me peculiarly offensive and disgusting.
Underneath our shop there was a dealer in woolen and felt footwear, whose salesman amazed the whole of Nijni by his gluttony. His master used to boast of this peculiarity of his employee, as one boasts of the fierceness of a dog, or the strength of a horse.
He often used to get the neighboring shopkeepers to bet.