Short Fiction Vsevolod Garshin (best e reader for epub .txt) 📖

“and when I discovered it I felt reborn. My senses have become more acute, my brain works as it never did formerly. What was once attained by a long process of conjecture and reasoning I now know intuitively. I am an illustration of the great idea that space and time⁠—are fictions. I live in all centuries. I live outside of space, everywhere or nowhere, as you wish. And therefore it is all the same to me whether you detain me here or release me, whether I am free or bound. I have noticed that there are several such here. But for the remainder their position is appalling. Why do you not release them? To whom is it necessary?”

“You say,” interrupted the doctor, “that you live apart from time and space. But you cannot, however, deny that we are with you in this room, and that now”⁠—here the doctor pulled out his watch⁠—“it is half-past ten on May 6, 18⁠—. What are your views on this?”

“None. To me it is all the same where and when I live. If to me it is all the same, does it not mean that I am everywhere and always?”

The doctor laughed.

“Rare logic,” he said, rising. “Au revoir. Would you care for a cigar?”

“Thank you.” The patient stopped, took the cigar, and nervously bit off its end. “This will assist me to think,” he said. “This world is a microcosm. At one end alkali, at the other⁠—acid. Such is the equilibrium of the world in which opposing principles neutralize each other. Goodbye, doctor!”

The doctor went farther. The greater part of the patients awaited him standing to attention. No chief enjoys such respect from his subordinates as does the mental doctor from those placed under his care.

Our patient, left alone, continued to stride from corner to corner of his cubicle. They brought him a large mug of tea, which he emptied in two gulps without sitting down; and a large slice of white bread, which disappeared as if by magic. Then he left his room, and for several hours without cessation paced in his rapid and agitated manner from end to end of the whole building. It was a rainy day, and the patients were not allowed into the garden. When the “dresser” went to look for the new patient, the others pointed to him at the end of the corridor. He was standing there with his face pressed close to the pane of the glass door leading into the garden, and was staring fixedly at a flowerbed. An unusually bright scarlet blossom of the poppy variety had attracted his attention.

“Please come and be weighed,” said the “dresser,” touching him on the shoulder, and nearly falling down from fright when the patient turned round, such wild malice and hatred were burning in his imbecile eyes. But, seeing the “dresser,” his expression immediately changed, and he followed obediently behind the official without saying a word, apparently engrossed in profound thought. They entered the doctor’s room, and the patient of his own accord stood on the platform of the weighing-machine. The “dresser” entered his weight as 109 pounds. The following day he weighed only 107 pounds, and the day after 106 pounds.

“If he continues like this, he will not live,” said the doctor, and gave instructions that he was to be given the best dietary.

But, in spite of this, and notwithstanding his enormous appetite, the patient continued to lose weight, and grew thinner and thinner. He scarcely ever slept, and spent the whole and almost every day in uninterrupted movement.

IV

He understood that he was in a madhouse. He knew even that he was ill. Sometimes, as during the first night, he would awake in the quietness after a whole day of violent exercise, feeling exhaustion in every limb and a dreadful heaviness in his head, but fully conscious. Perhaps it was the absence of impressions in the stillness of the night and half-light. Perhaps it was the feeble working of the brain of a but just awakened being that caused him during such moments to understand fully his position, and made him apparently sane. But when morning arrived with the light and awakening of life in the Asylum, delusions again engulfed him as in a wave. The diseased brain could not grapple with them, and he once more became insane. His condition was a strange mixture of correct reasoning and nonsense. He understood that all around him were lunatics, but at the same time he saw in each of them somebody mysterious, a person hiding or hidden whom he had known previously, or of whom he had read or heard. The Asylum was inhabited by persons of all ages and nationalities, dead and living. Here there were the famed and strong of the world, and soldiers killed in the last war, but now resurrected. He saw himself in some magic enchanted circle, having collected to himself all the forces of the earth, and in proud delirium he deemed himself the centre of this circle. All his comrades in the Asylum were gathered there to perform a duty which, in a confused manner, appeared to him as a gigantic enterprise directed towards the extinction of evil on earth. He did not know in what the task would consist, but felt himself possessed of sufficient strength to execute it. He could read the thoughts of others. He saw in things their whole history. The large elms in the Asylum garden revealed whole legends of the past to him. The building, which really was of old construction, he considered a structure of Peter the Great, and was convinced that that Tsar had lived in it at the time of the Poltava battle. He read this in the walls, the plaster which had fallen, in the pieces of brick and Dutch tiles found by him in the garden. The whole history of the house and garden was written in them. He peopled the little building which did duty