MAHOGANY
437
through a tap into glasses and thence to human throats,
the liquor enabled one to journey on the frigate through the
world of fantasy. The frigate was an eighteenth-century object.
It was filled with cognac. Pavel Feodorovich sat in silence. Yakov
Karpovich fussed around him, strutting like a pigeon and holding
his hernia through the slit in his trousers.
"Yes, h'm," he was saying, "what
is
it then in your opinion
that makes the world go round, and civilization and science and
steamships? Well, what?"
"Well, what?" Pavel Feodorovich repeated the question.
"Well, what do you think? Labor? Knowledge? Hunger?
Love? No! The prime mover of civilization is memory! Just
think what it would be like if tomorrow morning men were to
lose their memory. They still have their instincts and their reason,
but no memory. I wake up in bed and fall out of it, because I
know of space only from memory and without memory I am
ignorant of it. My trousers are lying on a chair and I feel cold,
but I don't know what to do with my trousers. I don't know
how to walk-on my hands or on all fours. I do not remember
the previous day and since I am ignorant of it, I have no fear of
death. The engineers have forgotten the whole of their higher
mathematics, and all the tramcars and locomotives are at a
standstill. Priests don't know the way to their churches and they
remember nothing of Jesus Christ. Yes, h'm! ... I have my in–
stincts left, and it's true that they' re a sort of memory, but sup–
pose I don't know whether to eat the chair or the bread left on
it
overnight and suppose, when I see a woman, I take my daugh–
ter for my wife?"
With northeast winds the alcohol-laden frigate on the table
was blowing the cobwebs from Yakov Karpovich's mind. Amidst
the mahogany of the sitting-room, this Russian Voltaire and his
frigate were relics of the eighteenth century. A provincial Soviet
night held sway outside these eighteenth-century windows.
An hour later the Skudrin house was asleep. And then, in
the musty silence of his bedroom, Yakov Karpovich shuffled in
