The Foundation Pit (Fragment)

“If you do not have the wherewithal to exist in peace, you might at least have respect for your child-it would be the better for you,” Voshchev continued.

“What business do you have here?” the highway supervisor asked with malicious delicacy of voice. “You are walking, so just keep on walking—the road was paved for the likes of you.”

Voshchev stood in the middle of the road, hesitating. The family was waiting for him to depart and keeping its anger on tap.

“I would leave, but I have nowhere to go. Is it far from here to some other city?”

“Close by,” replied the supervisor, “If you’ll just stop standing there the road will lead you to it.”

“Have some respect for your child,” said Voshchev.

“When you are dead he will still exist.”

After speaking these words Voshchev went on his way a verst beyond the supervisor’s house and sat down on the edge of a ditch; he felt doubt in his life and weakness of the body without truth; he could not go on working and keep taking step after step down the road without knowing the precise arrangement of the whole world and whither one must strive. Voshchev, weary of thinking, lay down in the dusty grass by the road. It was hot, a daytime wind was blowing, and off in the distance village roosters were crowing—everything was devoting itself to unresponding existence—and only Voshchev kept himself apart and separate in silence. A dead fallen leaf lay alongside Voshchev’s head, brought by the wind from a distant tree, and now this leaf had ahead of it resignation in the earth. Voshchev picked up the dried leaf and hid it away in a secret compartment of his bag where he used to keep all kinds of objects of unhappiness and obscurity.

“You had no meaning in life,” Voshchev imagined to himself with meagerness of sympathy. “Lie here, I will learn wherefore you lived and perished. Since no one needs you and you are straying about in the midst of the whole world, I will preserve you and remember you.”

“All live and suffer in the world without being conscious of anything,” said Voshchev at the roadside and got up so as to walk on, surrounded by universal, patiently suffering existence.

“Just as if some one person or a few had extracted from us our feeling of conviction and appropriated it to themselves.”