“What Platon Nikolaevich? Don’t mumble, get to the point.”

“Platon Nikolaevich, our local homegrown philosopher, natural scientist, and magister. He put out several books on philosophy, but it’s three months now and he’s falling quite asleep, so it’s no longer possible to shake him out of it. Once a week he mutters a few words that are quite beside the point.”

“To the point, to the point!…”

“He explains it all with the most simple fact—namely, that up there, while we were still alive, we mistakenly regarded death there as death. Here the body revives again, as it were, the remnants of life concentrate, but only in the consciousness. It’s—I don’t know how to put it—life continuing as if by inertia. Everything is concentrated, in his opinion, somewhere in the consciousness, and goes on for another two or three months… sometimes even half a year… There’s one here, for instance, who is almost entirely decomposed, but once in six weeks, say, he suddenly mutters some little word, a meaningless one, of course, about some bobok: ‘Bobok, bobok’—which means that in him, too, an imperceptible spark of life is still glimmering…”

“Rather stupid. Well, and how is it that I have no sense of smell, but can feel the stench?”

“That’s… heh, heh… Well, here our philosopher got himself into a fog. He observed precisely about smelling that here the stench one can feel is, so to speak, a moral one—heh, heh! A stench as if of the soul, so that one has time in these two or three months to reconsider… and that it is, so to speak, the last mercy… Only it seems to me, Baron, that this is all mystical raving, quite excusable in his position…”

“Enough, and the rest, I’m sure, is all nonsense. The main thing is two or three months of life, and in the final end—bobok. I suggest that we all spend these two months as pleasurably as possible, and for that we should all set things up on a different basis. Gentlemen! I propose that we not be ashamed of anything!”

“Ah, let’s not be, let’s not be ashamed of anything!” many voices were heard, and strangely, even quite new voices, meaning that in the interim new ones had awakened. With especial readiness, the now completely recovered engineer thundered his consent in a bass voice. The girl Katie giggled joyfully.

“Ah, how I want not to be ashamed of anything!” Avdotya Ignatievna exclaimed with rapture.

“Do you hear, if even Avdotya Ignatievna wants not to be ashamed of anything…”

“No, no, no, Klinevich, I was ashamed, I was ashamed there even so, but here I want terribly, terribly not to be ashamed of anything!”

“I gather, Klinevich,” the engineer bassed, “that you suggest setting up the—so to speak—life here on new and now reasonable principles.”

“Well, that I spit on! Regarding that, let’s wait for Kudeyarov, who was brought yesterday. He’ll wake up and explain everything to you. He’s such a person, such a gigantic person! Tomorrow I expect they’ll drag yet another natural scientist here, another officer probably, and, in three or four days, if I’m not mistaken, some feuilletonist and, I think, his editor along with him. Anyhow, to hell with them, it’s just that we’ll have our little crew assembled here and it will all get set up by itself. But meanwhile I want there to be no lying. That’s the only thing I want, because it’s the main thing. It’s impossible to live on earth and not lie, for life and lie are synonymous; but here, just for the fun of it, we won’t lie. Devil take it, the grave does mean something after all! We’ll all tell our stories aloud and not be ashamed of anything now. I’ll tell about myself first of all. I’m one of the carnivorous ones, you know. Up there it was all tied with rotten ropes. Away with the ropes, and let’s live for these two months in the most shameless truth! Let’s strip and get naked!”

“Get naked, get naked!” voices shouted all around.

“I want terribly, terribly to get naked!” Avdotya Ignatievna squealed.

“Ah… ah… ah, I see it’s going to be fun here; I don’t want to go to Ecke!”

“No, I could live a little, no, you know, I could live a little!”

“Hee, hee, hee!” Katie giggled.

“The main thing is that no one can forbid us, and though I can see that Pervoedov is angry, he still can’t reach me with his hand. Grand-père, do you agree?”

“I fully, fully agree, and with the greatest pleasure, provided Katie is the first to start her bi-og-raphy.”

“I protest! I protest with all my strength,” General Pervoedov stated firmly.

“Your Excellency!” the blackguard Lebezyatnikov, in hasty agitation and with lowered voice, babbled and persuaded, “Your Excellency, it’s even more profitable for us if we agree. There’s this girl here, you know… and, finally, all these different antics…”

“Granted there’s the girl, but…”

“It’s more profitable, Your Excellency, by God it’s more profitable for you! Well, at least as a little sample, at least for a try…”

“Even in the grave they won’t let me rest!”

“First of all, General, you play cards in the grave, and, second of all, we spit on you,” Klinevich scanned out.

“My dear sir, I beg you all the same not to forget yourself.”

“What? You can’t reach me, and I can tease you from here like Yulka’s lapdog. And first of all, gentlemen, what sort of general is he here? It’s there that he was a general, but here—pfft!”

“No, not pfft… here, too, I’m…”

“Here you’ll rot in your coffin and there’ll be only six brass buttons left!”

“Bravo, Klinevich, ha, ha, ha!” voices bellowed.

“I served my sovereign… I wear a sword…”

“Your sword’s good for skewering mice, and besides you never drew it.”

“It’s all the same, sir; I constituted part of the whole.”

“We know these parts of the whole.”

“Bravo, Klinevich, bravo, ha, ha, ha!”

“I don’t understand what a sword is,” the engineer declared.

“We’ll run like mice from the Prussians,¹⁶ they’ll make mincemeat of us!” a voice farther away and unknown to me cried out, literally spluttering with rapture.

“A sword, sir, is honor,” came the general’s cry, but that was the last I heard of him. A long and furious bellowing, uproar, and racket arose, and only Avdotya Ignatievna’s squeals, impatient to the point of hysterics, could be made out.

“Quicker, be quicker! Ah, when are we going to start not being ashamed of anything!”

“Oh, woe, woe! Truly my soul is visiting the torments!” came the voice of the simple man, and …

And here I suddenly sneezed. It happened unexpectedly and unintentionally, but the effect was striking: all became still, just like a cemetery, vanished like a dream. A true graveyard silence fell. I don’t think they were ashamed before me: they had decided not to be ashamed of anything! I waited for about five minutes but—not a word, not a sound. It was also impossible to suppose that they feared a denunciation to the police; for what could the police do here? I’m forced to conclude that they must after all have some secret unknown to mortals, and which they carefully conceal from every mortal.

“Well, my dears,” I thought, “I’ll be visiting you again,” and with those words I left the cemetery.

No, this I cannot allow; no, I truly cannot! It’s not bobok that bothers me (so here’s that bobok!).

Depravity in such a place, the depravity of last hopes, the depravity of flabby and rotting corpses and—not even sparing the last moments of consciousness! They’re given, they’re made a gift of these moments and… And, above all, above all in such a place! No, this I cannot allow…

I’ll visit other classes, I’ll listen everywhere. The point is that I must listen everywhere, and not just at one end, to form an idea. Perhaps I’ll bump into something com forting.

And I’ll certainly go back to those ones. They promised their biographies and various little anecdotes. Pah! But I’ll go, I’ll certainly go; it’s a matter of conscience!