GOOSEBERRIES





Since early morning the whole sky had been covered with dark clouds; it was not hot, but still and dull, as usual on gray, bleak days, when clouds hang over the fields for a long time, you wait for rain, but it does not come. The veterinarian Ivan Ivanych and the high-school teacher Burkin were tired of walking, and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe were barely visible, to the right a line of hills stretched away and then disappeared far beyond the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the river, with meadows, green willows, country houses, and if you stood on one of the hills, from there you could see equally vast fields, telegraph poles, and the train, which in the distance looked like a crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather you could even see the town. Now, in the still weather, when all nature seemed meek and pensive, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were imbued with love for these fields, and both thought how great, how beautiful this land was.

"Last time, when we were in the headman Prokofy's shed," said Burkin, "you were going to tell some story."

"Yes, I wanted to tell about my brother."

Ivan Ivanych gave a long sigh and lit his pipe, so as to begin the story, but just then it started to rain. And about five minutes later a hard rain was pouring down and there was no telling when it would end. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin stopped and considered; the dogs, already wet, stood with their tails between their legs, looking at them tenderly.

"We'll have to take cover somewhere," said Burkin. "Let's go to Alekhin's. It's nearby"

"All right."

They turned aside and went on walking over the mowed fields, now straight, now bearing to the right, until they came to the road. Soon poplars appeared, a garden, then the red roofs of the barns; the river sparkled, and the view opened onto a wide pond with a mill and a white bathing house. This was Sofyino, where Alekhin lived.

The mill was working, drowning out the noise of the rain; the dam shook. Here by the carts stood wet horses, hanging their heads, and people walked about, their heads covered with sacks. It was damp, muddy, unwelcoming, and the pond looked cold, malevolent. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin felt thoroughly wet, dirty and uncomfortable, their feet were weighed down with mud, and when, after crossing the dam, they went up toward the master's barns, they were silent, as if angry with each other.

In one of the barns a winnowing machine was clattering; the door was open, and dust was pouring out of it. On the threshold stood Alekhin himself, a man of about forty, tall, stout, with long hair, looking more like a professor or an artist than a landowner. He was wearing a white, long-unwashed shirt with a braided belt, drawers instead of trousers, and his boots were also caked with mud and straw. His nose and eyes were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanych and Burkin and was apparently very glad.

"Please go to the house, gentlemen," he said, smiling. "I'll be with you in a moment."

It was a big, two-storied house. Alekhin lived downstairs, in two vaulted rooms with small windows, where the stewards once lived; the furnishings here were simple, and it smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He rarely went upstairs to the formal rooms, only when he received guests. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were met inside by a maid, a young woman of such beauty that they both stopped at once and looked at each other.

"You can't imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen," Alekhin said, coming into the front hall with them. "Quite unexpected! Pelageya," he turned to the maid, "give the guests something to change into. And, incidentally, I'll change, too. Only first I must go and bathe—I don't think I've bathed since spring. Why not come to the bathing house, gentlemen, while things are made ready here."

The beautiful Pelageya, such a delicate girl and with such a soft look, brought towels and soap, and Alekhin went with his guests to the bathing house.

"Yes, I haven't bathed for a long time," he said, undressing. "My bathing house is nice, as you see, my father built it, but I somehow never have time to bathe."

He sat down on the step, soaped his long hair and neck, and the water around him turned brown.

"Yes, I declare …" said Ivan Ivanych, looking significantly at his head.

"I haven't bathed for a long time …" Alekhin repeated bashfully and soaped himself once more, and the water around him turned dark blue, like ink.

Ivan Ivanych went outside, threw himself noisily into the water and swam under the rain, swinging his arms widely, and he made waves, and the white lilies swayed on the waves; he reached the middle of the pond and dove, and a moment later appeared in another place and swam further, and kept diving, trying to reach the bottom. "Ah, my God…" he repeated delightedly. "Ah, my God …" He swam as far as the mill, talked about something with the peasants there and turned back, and in the middle of the pond lay face up to the rain. Burkin and Alekhin were already dressed and ready to go, but he kept swimming and diving.

"Ah, my God …" he repeated. "Ah, Lord have mercy."

"That's enough!" Burkin shouted to him.

They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lit in the big drawing room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanych, in silk dressing gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs, and Alekhin himself, washed, combed, in a new frock coat, was pacing about the drawing room, obviously enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanness, dry clothes, light shoes, and when the beautiful Pelageya, stepping noiselessly over the carpet and smiling softly, served the tray with tea and preserves, only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story, and it seemed that not only Burkin and Alekhin, but also the old and young ladies, and the military men, who gazed calmly and sternly from their gilded frames, listened to him.

"We're two brothers," he began, "I'm Ivan Ivanych, and he's Nikolai Ivanych, some two years younger. I went in for studying and became a veterinarian, while Nikolai sat in a government office from the age of nineteen. Our father, Chimsha-Himalaysky, was a cantonist,1 but he earned officer's rank in the service and left us hereditary nobility and a small estate. After his death, the estate went to pay debts, but, be that as it may, we spent our childhood in the freedom of the countryside. Just like peasant children, we spent days and nights in the fields, in the woods, tending horses, stripping bast,2 fishing, and all the rest … And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day. My brother languished in the office. Years passed, and he was still sitting in the same place, writing the same papers and thinking about the same thing—how to get to the country. And this languishing slowly formed itself into a definite desire, the dream of buying himself a small country place somewhere on the bank of a river or a lake.

"He was a kind, meek man, and I loved him, but I never sympathized with this desire to lock himself up for life in his own country place. It's a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But it's a corpse that needs six feet, not a man. And they also say now that if our intelligentsia is drawn to the soil and longs for country places, it's a good thing. But these country places are the same six feet of earth. To leave town, quit the struggle and noise of life, go and hide in your country place, isn't life, it's egoism, laziness, it's a sort of monasticism, but a monasticism without spiritual endeavor. Man needs, not six feet of earth, not a country place, but the whole earth, the whole of nature, where he can express at liberty all the properties and particularities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolai, sitting in his office, dreamed of how he would eat his own shchi, the savory smell of which would fill the whole yard, eat on the green grass, sleep in the sun, spend whole hours sitting outside the gate on a bench, gazing at the fields and woods. Books on agriculture and all sorts of almanac wisdom were his joy, his favorite spiritual nourishment; he liked to read newspapers, too, but only the advertisements about the sale of so many acres of field and meadow, with a country house, a river and a garden, a mill and a mill pond. And in his head he pictured garden paths, flowers, fruit, birdhouses, carp in the pond—you know, all that stuff. These imaginary pictures differed, depending on the advertisements he came upon, but for some reason gooseberries were unfailingly present in each of them. He was unable to imagine a single country place, a single poetic corner, that was without gooseberries.

"'Country life has its conveniences,' he used to say. 'You sit on the balcony drinking tea, and your ducks swim in the pond, and it smells so good, and … and the gooseberries are growing.'

"He'd draw the plan of his estate, and each time it came out the same: a) the master's house, b) the servants' quarters, c) the kitchen garden, d) the gooseberries. He lived frugally: ate little, drank little, dressed God knows how, like a beggar, and kept saving money and putting it in the bank. He was terribly stingy. It was painful for me to see, and I used to give him money, and send him something on holidays, but he put that away, too. Once a man gets himself an idea, there's nothing to be done.

"Years went by, he was transferred to another province, he was already over forty, and he went on reading the advertisements in the newspapers and saving money. Then I heard he got married. Still with the same purpose of buying himself a country place with gooseberries, he married an ugly old widow for whom he felt nothing, only because she had a little money. He was tightfisted with her, too, kept her hungry, and put her money in the bank under his name. Earlier she had been married to the postmaster and had become used to pies and liqueurs, but with her second husband she didn't even have enough black bread; she began to pine away from such a life, and about three years later she gave up her soul to God. And, of course, my brother never thought for a moment that he was guilty of her death. Money, like vodka, does strange things to a man. A merchant was dying in our town. Before he died, he asked to be served a dish of honey and ate all his money and lottery tickets with it, so that nobody would get them. Once I was inspecting cattle at the station, and just then one of the dealers fell under a locomotive and his foot was cut off. We carried him to the hospital, blood was pouring out—a horrible business—and he kept asking us to find his foot and worrying: in the boot on his cut-off foot there were twenty roubles he didn't want to lose."

"That's from another opera," said Burkin.

"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanych went on, having reflected for half a minute, "my brother began looking for an estate to buy. Of course, you can look for five years and in the end make a mistake and not buy what you were dreaming of at all. Brother Nikolai bought, through an agent, by a transfer of mortgage, three hundred acres with a master's house, servants' quarters, a park, but no orchard, or gooseberries, or ponds with ducks; there was a river, but the water in it was coffee-colored, because there was a brick factory on one side of the estate and a bone-burning factory on the other. But my brother Nikolai Ivanych didn't lament over it; he ordered twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them, sat down and began living like a landowner.

"Last year I went to visit him. I'll go, I thought, and see how things are there. In his letters my brother called his estate: the Chumbaroklov plot, alias Himalayskoe. I arrived in 'alias Himalayskoe' past noon. It was hot. Ditches, fences, hedges, lines of fir trees everywhere—I didn't know how to get into the courtyard, where to put the horse. I walked toward the house, and a ginger dog met me, fat, looking like a pig. It would have liked to bark, but was too lazy. The cook came out of the kitchen, barefoot, fat, also looking like a pig, and said that the master was resting after dinner. I went into my brother's room, he was sitting in bed, his knees covered with a blanket; he had grown old, fat, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips thrust forward—he looked as if he were about to grunt into the blanket.

"We embraced and wept with joy and with the sad thought that we had been young once, and were now both gray-haired, and it was time to die. He got dressed and took me around to view his estate.

"'Well, how are you getting on here?' I asked.

"'Oh, all right, thank God, I live well.'

"He was no longer a timid and wretched little official, but a real landowner, a squire. He had settled in here, grown accustomed to it, relished it; he ate a lot, washed in a bathhouse, gained weight, was already at law with the commune and both factories, and was very offended when the peasants didn't call him 'Your Honor.' He took solid, squirely care of his soul, and did good deeds not simply but imposingly. And what were they? He treated the peasants for all ailments with soda and castor oil, and on his name day held a thanksgiving prayer service in the middle of the village, and then stood them all to a half-bucket of vodka, thinking it necessary. Ah, these horrible half-buckets! Today the fat landowner drags the peasant to the head of the zemstvo for poaching, and tomorrow, for the holiday, he treats them to a half-bucket, and they drink and shout 'hurrah,' and bow down drunk before him. A change of life for the better, good eating, idleness, develop the most insolent conceit in a Russian. Nikolai Ivanych, who, while in the government office, was afraid to have his own views even for himself personally, now uttered nothing but truths, and in the tone of a government minister: 'Education is necessary, but for the people it is premature,' 'Corporal punishment is generally bad, but on certain occasions it is useful and indispensable.'

"'I know the people and know how to handle them,' he said. 'The people like me. I have only to move a finger, and the people do whatever I want.'

"And, note, it was all said with a kindly, intelligent smile. He repeated twenty times: 'We, the nobility' 'I, as a nobleman'—obviously he no longer remembered that our grandfather was a peasant and our father a soldier. Even our family name, Chimsha-Himalaysky, which is essentially incongruous, now seemed sonorous, noble, and highly agreeable to him.

"But the point was not in him, but in myself. I want to tell you what a change took place in me during the few hours I spent at his place. In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook served a full plate of gooseberries. They weren't bought, they were his own gooseberries, the first picked since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanych laughed and gazed silently at the gooseberries for a moment with tears in his eyes—he couldn't speak for excitement; then he put one berry in his mouth, glanced at me with the triumph of a child who has finally gotten his favorite toy, and said:

"'How delicious!'

"And he ate greedily and kept repeating:

"'Ah, how delicious! Try them!'

"They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.'3 I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair. It was especially oppressive during the night. My bed was made up in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was not asleep and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking a berry. I thought: there are, in fact, so many contented, happy people! What an overwhelming force! Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies … Yet in all the houses and streets it's quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand people who live in town there is not one who would cry out or become loudly indignant. We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and only mute statistics protest: so many gone mad, so many buckets drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition … And this order is obviously necessary; obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a general hypnosis. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.

"That night I understood that I, too, was content and happy," Ivan Ivanych continued, getting up. "Over dinner or out hunting, I, too, gave lessons in how to live, how to believe, how to govern the people. I, too, said that knowledge is light, that education is necessary, but that for simple people literacy is enough for now. Freedom is good, I said, it's like air, we can't do without it, but we must wait. Yes, that was what I said, but now I ask: wait in the name of what?" Ivan Ivanych asked, looking angrily at Burkin. "Wait in the name of what, I ask you? In the name of what considerations? They tell me that it can't be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in due time. But who says that? Where are the proofs that it's so? You refer to the natural order of things, to the lawfulness of phenomena, but is there order and lawfulness in the fact that I, a living and thinking man, must stand at a ditch and wait until it gets overgrown or silted up, when I could perhaps jump over it or build a bridge across it? And, again, wait in the name of what? Wait, when you haven't the strength to live, and yet you must live and want to live!

"I left my brother's early the next morning, and since then it has become unbearable for me to live in town. I'm oppressed by the peace and quiet, I'm afraid to look in the windows, because there's no more painful spectacle for me now than a happy family sitting around a table and drinking tea. I'm old and not fit for struggle, I'm not even capable of hatred. I only grieve inwardly, become irritated, vexed, my head burns at night from a flood of thoughts, and I can't sleep … Ah, if only I were young!"

Ivan Ivanych paced the room in agitation and repeated:

"If only I were young!"

He suddenly went up to Alekhin and began pressing him by one hand, then the other.

"Pavel Konstantinych!" he said in an entreating voice, "don't settle in, don't let yourself fall asleep! As long as you're young, strong, energetic, don't weary of doing good! There is no happiness and there shouldn't be, and if there is any meaning and purpose in life, then that meaning and purpose are not at all in our happiness, but in something more intelligent and great. Do good!"

And Ivan Ivanych said all this with a pitiful, pleading smile, as if he were asking personally for himself.

Then all three sat in armchairs at different ends of the drawing room and were silent. Ivan Ivanych's story satisfied neither Burkin nor Alekhin. With generals and ladies gazing from gilded frames, looking alive in the twilight, it was boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries. For some reason they would have preferred to speak and hear about fine people, about women. And the fact that they were sitting in a drawing room where everything—the covered chandelier, the armchairs, the carpets under their feet—said that here those very people now gazing from the frames had once walked, sat, drunk tea, and that the beautiful Pelageya now walked noiselessly here, was better than any story.

Alekhin had a strong desire to sleep; farming got him up early, before three in the morning, and his eyes kept closing, but he was afraid that the guests would start telling something interesting without him, and he would not leave. Whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was intelligent or correct, he did not try to figure out; his guests were not talking of grain, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on …

"However, it's time for bed," said Burkin, getting up. "Allow me to wish you good-night."

Alekhin took leave of them and went to his room below, while the guests stayed upstairs. They were both put for the night in a big room with two old, carved wooden beds in it, and with an ivory crucifix in the corner. Their beds, wide and cool, made up by the beautiful Pelageya, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.

Ivan Ivanych silently undressed and lay down.

"Lord, forgive us sinners!" he said, and pulled the covers over his head.

His pipe, left on the table, smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin lay awake for a long time and still could not figure out where that heavy odor was coming from.

Rain beat on the windows all night.
AUGUST 1898






A MEDICAL CASE





A professor received a telegram from the Lialikovs' factory asking him to come quickly. The daughter of a certain Mrs. Lialikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was sick—nothing more could be understood from the long, witlessly composed telegram. The professor did not go himself, but sent his intern Korolev in his place.

He had to go two stations away from Moscow and then some three miles by carriage. A troika was sent to the station to pick Korolev up; the driver wore a hat with a peacock feather, and to all questions responded with a loud military "No, sir!" or "Yes, sir!" It was Saturday evening, the sun was setting. Crowds of workers came walking from the factory to the station and bowed to the horses that were bringing Korolev. And he was enchanted by the evening, and the country houses and dachas along the way, and the birches, and that quiet mood all around, when it seemed that, together with the workers, the fields, the woods, and the sun were preparing to rest on the eve of the holy day—to rest and perhaps to pray …

He was born and grew up in Moscow, did not know the countryside and had never been interested in factories or visited them. But he had chanced to read about factories and to visit factory owners and talk with them; and when he saw some factory in the distance or up close, he thought each time of how quiet and peaceful everything was outside, and how inside there must be the impenetrable ignorance and obtuse egoism of the owners, the tedious, unhealthy labor of the workers, squabbles, vodka, vermin. And now, as the workers deferentially and timorously stepped aside before the carriage, in their faces, caps, and gait he could discern physical uncleanness, drunkenness, nervousness, perplexity

They drove through the factory gates. On both sides flashed workers' cottages, women's faces, linen and blankets on the porches. "Watch out!" cried the driver, not reining in the horses. Then came a wide yard with no grass, and in it five huge buildings with smokestacks, standing separate from each other, warehouses, barracks, and over everything lay some sort of gray coating, as of dust. Here and there, like oases in the desert, were pathetic little gardens and the green or red roofs of the houses where the management lived. The driver suddenly reined in the horses, and the carriage stopped at a house newly painted gray; there was a front garden with dust-covered lilacs, and a strong smell of paint on the yellow porch.

"Come in, doctor," women's voices said from the hall and the front room, followed by sighs and whispers. "Come in, we've been waiting … it's very bad. Come in here."

Mrs. Lialikov, a stout, elderly lady in a black silk dress with fashionable sleeves, but, judging by her face, a simple and illiterate one, looked at the doctor with anxiety and hesitated, not daring to offer him her hand. Beside her stood a person with short hair and a pince-nez, in a bright multicolored blouse, skinny and no longer young. The servants called her Christina Dmitrievna, and Korolev figured that she was a governess. It was probably she, as the most educated person in the house, who had been charged with meeting and receiving the doctor, because she at once began hastily explaining the causes of the illness in minute, nagging detail, but without saying who was ill or what was the matter.

The doctor and the governess sat and talked, while the mistress stood motionless by the door, waiting. Korolev understood from the conversation that the ill person was Liza, a girl of twenty, Mrs. Lialikov's only daughter, the heiress; she had long been ill and had been treated by various doctors, and during the past night, from evening till morning, she had had such a pounding of the heart that no one in the house had slept for fear she might die.

"She's been sickly, you might say, from childhood," Christina Dmitrievna went on recounting in a sing-song voice, wiping her lips with her hand now and then. "The doctors say it's nerves, but when she was little, the doctors drove her scrofula inside, so I think it might come from that."

They went to see the patient. Quite grown-up, big, tall, but not pretty, resembling her mother, with the same small eyes and broad, overly developed lower face, her hair undone, the blanket drawn up to her chin, she gave Korolev the impression at first of a wretched, woebegone creature who had been taken in and given shelter here out of pity, and it was hard to believe that she was the heiress to five huge buildings.

"And so," Korolev began, "we've come to take care of you. How do you do."

He introduced himself and shook her hand—a big, cold, uncomely hand. She sat up and, obviously long accustomed to doctors, not caring that her shoulders and breast were uncovered, allowed herself to be auscultated.

"My heart pounds," she said. "All last night, it was so terrible … I nearly died of fright! Give me something for it!"

"I will, I will! Calm down."

Korolev examined her and shrugged his shoulders.

"Nothing's wrong with your heart," he said, "everything's well, everything's in order. Your nerves are probably acting up a bit, but that's not unusual. I assume the attack is over now. Lie down and sleep."

Just then a lamp was brought into the bedroom. The sick girl squinted at the light and suddenly clutched her head with her hands and burst into tears. And the impression of a woebegone and uncomely creature suddenly vanished, and Korolev no longer noticed either the small eyes or the coarsely developed lower face; he saw a soft, suffering look, which was both reasonable and touching, and the whole of her seemed shapely to him, feminine, simple, and he would have liked to comfort her now, not with medications, not with advice, but with a simple, tender word. Her mother embraced her head and pressed it to her. There was so much despair, so much grief in the old woman's face! She, the mother, had nourished and raised her daughter, sparing nothing, had given her whole life to teaching her French, dancing, music, had invited dozens of tutors, the best doctors, had kept a governess, and now she could not understand where these tears came from, why so much torment, could not understand and was at a loss, had a guilty, anxious, despairing look, as if she had missed something else very important, had failed to do something else, to invite someone else, but whom—she did not know.

"Lizanka, again … again," she said, pressing her daughter to her. "My dear, my darling, my child, what's wrong? Have pity on me, tell me."

They both wept bitterly. Korolev sat on the edge of the bed and took Liza's hand.

"Come, is it worth crying?" he said tenderly. "There's nothing in the world that merits these tears. Let's not cry, now, there's no need to …"

And he thought to himself:

"It's time she was married …"

"Our factory doctor gave her potassium bromide," said the governess, "but I've noticed that it makes her even worse. I think, if it's for her heart, it should be those drops … I forget what they're called … Convallarin, or whatever."

And again there followed all sorts of details. She interrupted the doctor, prevented him from speaking; zeal was written all over her face, as if she assumed that, being the best-educated woman in the house, she had to engage the doctor in ceaseless conversation and about nothing but medicine.

Korolev became bored.

"I don't find anything in particular," he said, coming out of the bedroom and addressing the mother. "Since the factory doctor has been treating your daughter, let him continue. So far the treatment has been correct, and I see no need to change doctors. Why change? It's an ordinary illness, nothing serious …"

He spoke unhurriedly, putting on his gloves, while Mrs. Lialikov stood motionless and looked at him with tear-filled eyes.

"It's half an hour till the ten o'clock train," he said. "I hope I won't be late."

"Can't you stay with us?" she asked, and tears poured down her cheeks again. "It's a shame to trouble you, but be so kind … for God's sake," she went on in a low voice, glancing at the door, "stay with us overnight. She's my only … my only daughter … She frightened us last night, I can't get over it … Don't leave, for God's sake …"

He was about to tell her that he had much work in Moscow, that his family was waiting for him at home; it was hard for him to spend the whole evening and night needlessly in a strange house, but he looked at her face, sighed, and silently began taking off his gloves.

All the lamps and candles were lighted for him in the reception room and the drawing room. He sat at the grand piano and leafed through the scores, then examined the paintings on the walls, the portraits. The paintings, done in oils, with gilded frames, were views of the Crimea, a stormy sea with a little boat, a Catholic monk with a wineglass, and all of them dry, slick, giftless … Not a single handsome, interesting face among the portraits, everywhere wide cheekbones, astonished eyes; Lialikov, Liza's father, had a narrow forehead and a self-satisfied face, the uniform hung like a sack on his big, plebeian body, on his chest he had a medal and the badge of the Red Cross. The culture was poor, the luxury accidental, unconscious, ill at ease, like his uniform; the gleam of the floors was annoying, the chandelier was annoying, and for some reason brought to mind the story of the merchant who went to the bathhouse with a medal on his neck …

From the front hall came a whispering, someone quietly snored. And suddenly sharp, abrupt, metallic noises came from outside, such as Korolev had never heard before and could not understand now; they echoed strangely and unpleasantly in his soul.

"I don't think I'd ever stay and live here for anything …" he thought, and again took up the scores.

"Doctor, come and have a bite to eat!" the governess called in a low voice.

He went to supper. The table was big, well furnished with food and wines, but only two people sat down: himself and Christina Dmitrievna. She drank Madeira, ate quickly, and talked, looking at him through her pince-nez:

"The workers are very pleased with us. We have theatricals at the factory every winter, the workers themselves act in them, and there are magic-lantern lectures, a magnificent tearoom, and whatever you like. They're very devoted to us, and when they learned that Lizanka was worse, they held a prayer service for her. They're uneducated, and yet they, too, have feelings."

"It looks as if you have no men in the house," said Korolev.

"Not one. Pyotr Nikanorych died a year and a half ago, and we were left by ourselves. So there's just the three of us. In the summer we live here, and in the winter in Moscow, on Polianka Street. I've been with them for eleven years now. Like one of the family."

For supper they were served sterlet, chicken cutlets, and fruit compote; the wines were expensive, French.

"Please, doctor, no ceremony," said Christina Dmitrievna, eating and wiping her mouth with her fist, and it was obvious that her life there was fully to her satisfaction. "Please eat."

After dinner the doctor was taken to a room where a bed had been made for him. But he did not want to sleep, it was stuffy and the room smelled of paint; he put his coat on and went out.

It was cool outside; dawn was already breaking,1 and in the damp air all five buildings with their tall smokestacks, the barracks and warehouses were clearly outlined. Since it was Sunday, no one was working, the windows were dark, and only in one of the buildings was a furnace still burning; the two windows were crimson and, along with smoke, fire occasionally came from the smokestack. Further away, beyond the yard, frogs were croaking and a nightingale sang.

Looking at the buildings and at the barracks where the workers slept, he again thought what he always thought when he saw factories. There may be theatricals for the workers, magic lanterns, factory doctors, various improvements, but even so the workers he had met that day on his way from the station did not look different in any way from the workers he had seen back in his childhood, when there were no factory theatricals or improvements. As a physician, he could make correct judgments about chronic ailments the fundamental cause of which was incomprehensible and incurable, and he looked at factories as a misunderstanding the cause of which was also obscure and irremediable, and while he did not consider all the improvements in the workers' lives superfluous, he saw them as the equivalent of treating an incurable illness.

"This is a misunderstanding, of course …" he thought, looking at the crimson windows. "Fifteen hundred, two thousand factory hands work without rest, in unhealthy conditions, producing poor-quality calico, starving, and only occasionally sobering up from this nightmare in a pothouse; a hundred men supervise the work, and the whole life of those hundred men goes into levying fines, pouring out abuse, being unjust, and only the two or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don't work at all and scorn poor-quality calico. But what profits, and how do they enjoy them? Mrs. Lialikov and her daughter are unhappy, it's a pity to look at them, only Christina Dmitrievna, a rather stupid old maid in a pince-nez, lives to her full satisfaction. And so it turns out that all five of these buildings work, and poor-quality calico is sold on the Eastern markets, only so that Christina Dmitrievna can eat sterlet and drink Madeira."

Strange sounds suddenly rang out, the same that Korolev had heard before supper. Near one of the buildings someone banged on a metal bar, banged and stopped the sound at once, so that what came out were short, sharp, impure sounds, like "derr … derr … derr …" Then a half minute of silence, and then sounds rang out by another building, as sharp and unpleasant, but lower now, more bass—"drinn … drinn … drinn …" Eleven times. Evidently this was the watchman banging out eleven o'clock.

From near another building came a "zhak… zhak… zhak …" And so on near all the buildings and then beyond the barracks and the gates. And in the silence of the night it seemed as if these sounds were being produced by the crimson-eyed monster, the devil himself, who ruled here over both owners and workers and deceived the ones like the others.

Korolev went out of the yard to the fields.

"Who goes there?" a coarse voice called to him by the gates.

"Just like a prison …" he thought and did not answer.

Here the nightingales and frogs could be heard better, you could feel the May night. The noise of a train came from the station; sleepy cocks crowed somewhere, but even so the night was still, the world slept peacefully. In the field, not far from the factory, a house-frame stood, with building materials piled by it. Korolev sat on some planks and went on thinking:

"Nobody feels good here except the governess, and the factory works for her satisfaction. But it just seems so, she's only a straw man here. The main one that everything here is done for is—the devil."

And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe, and kept glancing back at the two windows gleaming with fire. It seemed to him that the devil himself was gazing at him through those crimson eyes, the unknown power that created the relations between strong and weak, the grave mistake that now could in no way be set right. It had to be that the strong hinder the life of the weak, such was the law of nature, but this thought could be clearly and easily formulated only in a newspaper article or a textbook, while in the mishmash that is everyday life, in the tangle of all the trifles of which human relations are woven, it was not a law but a logical incongruity, when strong and weak alike fell victim to their mutual relations, inadvertently obeying some controlling power, unknown, extraneous to life, alien to man. So thought Korolev as he sat on the planks, and the feeling gradually came over him that this unknown, mysterious power was in fact close by and watching. Meanwhile the east grew paler, the time passed quickly. Against the gray background of the dawn, with not a soul around, as if everything had died out, the five buildings and smokestacks had a peculiar look, different from in the daytime; the steam engines, electricity, telephones inside them left one's mind, and one somehow kept thinking of pile-dwellings, of the Stone Age, one sensed the presence of crude, unconscious power …

And again came the banging:

"Derr … derr … derr … derr …"

Twelve times. Then stillness, half a minute of stillness, and from the other end of the yard came:

"Drinn … drinn … drinn …"

"Terribly unpleasant!" thought Korolev.

"Zhak … zhak …" came from a third place, abruptly, sharply, as if in vexation, "zhak … zhak …"

And it took them about four minutes to strike twelve. Then it was still; and again the impression was as if everything around had died out.

Korolev sat a while longer and then went back to the house, but he did not go to bed for a long time. There was whispering in the neighboring rooms, a shuffling of slippers and bare feet.

"Is she having another fit?" thought Korolev.

He went to have a look at the patient. It was already quite light in the rooms, and on the walls and floor of the reception room sunlight trembled faintly, having broken through the morning mist. The door to Liza's room was open, and she was sitting in an armchair by the bed, in a robe, a shawl around her shoulders, her hair undone. The window blinds were drawn.

"How are you feeling?" asked Korolev.

"Well, thank you."

He took her pulse, then straightened the hair that had fallen across her forehead.

"You're not asleep," he said. "The weather is wonderful outside, it's spring, the nightingales are singing, and you sit in the dark and brood on something."

She listened and looked into his face; her eyes were sad, intelligent, and it was clear that she wanted to say something to him.

"Does this happen to you often?" he asked.

She moved her lips and answered:

"Often. I feel oppressed almost every night."

Just then the watchmen in the yard began striking two: "Derr … derr …" and she gave a start.

"Does this rapping upset you?" he asked.

"I don't know. Everything here upsets me," she said, and thought a little. "Everything. I hear sympathy in your voice, at the first sight of you I thought for some reason that I could talk with you about everything."

"Please do talk."

"I want to tell you my opinion. It seems to me that I'm not ill, but I'm upset and afraid because that's how it should be and it can't be otherwise. Even the healthiest person can't help being upset if, for instance, a robber is prowling under his windows. I've been treated often," she went on, looking into her lap and smiling bashfully. "I'm very grateful, of course, and I don't deny the benefits of the treatment, but I'd like to talk, not to a doctor, but to someone close to me, a friend who would understand me, who could convince me that I'm either right or wrong."

"You don't have any friends?" asked Korolev.

"I'm lonely. I have my mother, I love her, but still I'm lonely. Life has worked out this way … Lonely people read a lot, but talk little and hear little, life is mysterious for them; they're mystics and often see the devil where he's not. Lermontov's Tamara was lonely and saw the devil."2

"And you read a lot?"

"Yes. My time is all free, from morning till evening. During the day I read, but in the night my head is empty, there are some sort of shadows instead of thoughts."

"Do you see things at night?" asked Korolev.

"No, but I feel …"

Again she smiled and raised her eyes to the doctor, and looked at him so sadly, so intelligently; and it seemed to him that she trusted him, wanted to talk openly with him, and that she thought as he did. But she was silent, perhaps waiting for him to speak.

And he knew what to tell her. It was clear to him that she ought quickly to leave those five buildings and the million, if she had it, to leave that devil who watched at night; it was also clear to him that she herself thought so, too, and was only waiting for someone she trusted to confirm it.

But he did not know how to say it. How? It was mortifying to ask condemned people what they were condemned for; just as it was awkward to ask very rich people what they needed so much money for, why they disposed of their wealth so badly, why they would not abandon it, even when they could see it was to their own misfortune; and if such a conversation began, it usually turned out to be embarrassing, awkward, long.

"How to say it?" pondered Korolev. "And need I say it?"

And he said what he wanted to say, not directly, but in a roundabout way:

"You're not content in your position as a factory owner and a rich heiress, you don't believe in your right to it, and now you can't sleep, which, of course, is certainly better than if you were content, slept soundly, and thought everything was fine. Your insomnia is respectable; in any event, it's a good sign. In fact, for our parents such a conversation as we're having now would have been unthinkable; they didn't talk at night, they slept soundly, but we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we're right or not. But for our children or grandchildren this question—whether they're right or not—will be decided. They'll see better than we do. Life will be good in fifty years or so, it's only a pity we won't make it that far. It would be interesting to have a look."

"And what will the children and grandchildren do?" asked Liza.

"I don't know … They'll probably drop it all and leave."

"For where?"

"Where? … Why, wherever they like," said Korolev, and he laughed. "As if there weren't lots of places a good, intelligent person can go."

He glanced at his watch.

"The sun is up, however," he said. "It's time you slept. Get undressed and have a good sleep. I'm very glad to have met you," he went on, pressing her hand. "You are a nice, interesting person. Good night!"

He went to his room and slept.

Next morning, when the carriage drove up, everybody came out on the porch to see him off. Liza was festive in a white dress, with a flower in her hair, pale, languid; she looked at him, as yesterday, sadly and intelligently, smiled, talked, and all with an expression as if she would have liked to say something special, important—to him alone. One could hear the larks singing, the church bells ringing. The windows of the factory shone merrily, and, driving through the yard and then on the way to the station, Korolev no longer remembered the workers, or the pile-dwellings, or the devil, but thought about the time, perhaps close at hand, when life would be as bright and joyful as this quiet Sunday morning; and he thought about how nice it was, on such a morning, in springtime, to ride in a good carriage with a troika and feel the warmth of the sun.
DECEMBER 1898






THE DARLING





Olenka, daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyannikov, was sitting on the back porch in her courtyard, deep in thought. It was hot, the flies were naggingly persistent, and it was so pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were gathering from the east, and an occasional breath of moisture came from there.

Kukin, an entrepreneur and owner of the Tivoli amusement garden, who lodged there in the yard, in the wing, was standing in the middle of the yard and looking at the sky.

"Again!" he said in despair. "Again it's going to rain! Every day it rains, every day—as if on purpose! It's a noose! It's bankruptcy! Every day terrible losses!"

He clasped his hands and went on, addressing Olenka:

"There's our life for you, Olga Semyonovna. It could make you weep! You work, you do your utmost, you suffer, you don't sleep, thinking how to do your best—and what then? On the one hand, the public is ignorant, savage. I give them the very best in operetta, fairy pageants, excellent music-hall singers, but is that what they want? Do they understand anything about it? They want buffoonery! Give them banality! On the other hand, look at the weather. It rains almost every evening. It started on the tenth of May, and it's gone on nonstop all of May and June—simply awful! The public doesn't come, but don't I pay the rent? Don't I pay the artists?"

The next day towards evening the clouds gathered again, and Kukin said, laughing hysterically:

"Well, so? Let it rain! Let the whole garden be flooded out, and me along with it! Let me not have any happiness either in this world or in the next! Let the artists sue me! What, sue? Hard labor in Siberia! The scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!"

And the third day it was the same …

Olenka listened to Kukin silently, seriously, and tears occasionally came to her eyes. In the end, Kukin's misfortunes touched her, and she fell in love with him. He was small, skinny, with a yellow face and brushed-up temples; he spoke in a thin little tenor and when he spoke, his mouth went askew; and despair was always written on his face, but even so he aroused deep, true feeling in her. She forever loved someone, and could not live without it. Earlier she had loved her father, who now sat ill, in a dark room, in an armchair, and breathed heavily; she had loved her aunt, who occasionally, once or twice a year, had come from Briansk; and earlier still, while in high school, she had loved her French teacher. She was a quiet, good-natured, pitiful young lady, with meek, soft eyes, and very healthy. Looking at her plump pink cheeks, at her soft white neck with its dark birthmark, at the kind, naïve smile her face bore when she listened to something pleasant, men thought: "Yes, not bad at all …" and also smiled, and lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of the conversation and saying, in a burst of pleasure:

"You darling!"

The house, which she had lived in since the day she was born, and which had been put in her name in the will, stood at the edge of town, in the Gypsy quarter, not far from the Tivoli garden; in the evening and at night she could hear music playing in the garden; rockets burst and crackled, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin wrestling with his fate and taking by storm his chief enemy—the indifferent public; her heart sank with sweetness, she did not feel sleepy at all, and when he came home towards morning, she tapped softly on her bedroom window and, showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtains, smiled tenderly …

He proposed, and they were married. And when he had a proper look at her neck and her plump, healthy shoulders, he clasped his hands and said:

"You darling!"

He was happy, but since it rained on the day of the wedding and later that night, the look of despair never left his face.

After the wedding they had a good life. She sat in his box office, looked after things in the garden, recorded the expenses, handed out the pay, and her pink cheeks and sweet, naïve, radiant-looking smile flashed now in the box-office window, now backstage, now in the buffet. And she told her acquaintances that the most remarkable, the most important and necessary thing in the world was the theater, and that only in the theater could one find true pleasure and become educated and humane.

"But does the public understand that?" she said. "They want buffoonery! Yesterday we showed Faust Inside Out, and nearly all the boxes were empty, but if Vanechka and I produced some sort of banality, believe me, the theater would be packed. Tomorrow Vanechka and I are showing Orpheus in the Underworld.1 Do come."

And whatever Kukin said about the theater and actors, she repeated. She despised the public just as he did, for its ignorance and indifference to art; she interfered at rehearsals, corrected the actors, looked after the conduct of the musicians, and when the local newspaper spoke disapprovingly of the theater, she wept, and then went to the editorial offices for an explanation.

The actors loved her and called her "Vanechka and I" and "the darling." She felt sorry for them and would lend them small sums of money, and if they happened to cheat her, she merely wept quietly, but did not complain to her husband.

In the winter they also had a good life. They rented the town theater for the whole winter and leased it for short terms, now to a Ukrainian troupe, now to a conjuror, now to local amateurs. Olenka gained weight and was all radiant with contentment, while Kukin grew skinnier and yellower and complained about terrible losses, though business was not bad all winter. He coughed at night, and she gave him raspberry and linden-blossom infusions, rubbed him with eau de cologne, and wrapped him in her soft shawls.

"Aren't you my sweetie!" she said with complete sincerity, smoothing his hair. "Aren't you my pretty one!"

During Lent he went to Moscow to recruit a company, and without him she could not sleep, but sat all night at the window and looked at the stars. And during that time she compared herself to the hens, who also do not sleep all night and feel anxious when the cock is not in the chicken coop. Kukin was detained in Moscow and wrote that he would come for Easter, and in his letters gave orders concerning the Tivoli. But on the eve of Holy Monday, late at night, there suddenly came a sinister knocking at the gate; someone banged on the wicket as on a barrel: boom! boom! boom! The sleepy cook, splashing barefoot through the puddles, ran to open.

"Open up, please!" someone outside the gates said in a muted bass. "There's a telegram for you!"

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but now for some reason she went numb. With trembling hands she opened the telegram and read:

"Ivan Petrovich died unexpectedly today mirst awaiting orders huneral Tuesday."

That was how it was written in the telegram—"huneral" and also the incomprehensible word "mirst." It was signed by the director of the operetta troupe.

"My little dove!" wept Olenka. "My sweet Vanechka, my little dove! Why did I meet you? Why did I know and love you? How could you go and leave your poor Olenka, poor, wretched me? …"

Kukin was buried on Tuesday, in Moscow, at the Vagankovo cemetery; Olenka came back on Wednesday, and as soon as she entered her room, she collapsed on the bed and wept so loudly that it could be heard in the street and the neighboring courtyards.

"The darling!" said the neighbor women, crossing themselves. "Darling Olga Semyonovna, the dear heart, how she grieves!"

Three months later Olenka was returning from church one day, sad, in deep mourning. One of her neighbors, Vassily Andreich Pustovalov, manager of the merchant Babakaev's lumberyard, happened to be walking beside her, also returning from church. He was wearing a straw hat and a white waistcoat with a gold chain, and looked more like a landowner than a dealer.

"There is order in all things, Olga Semyonovna," he said gravely, with sympathy in his voice, "and if one of our relations dies, it means that it's God's will, and in that case we must recollect ourselves and bear it with submission."

Having accompanied Olenka to the gate, he said good-bye and went on. After that she heard his grave voice all day, and the moment she closed her eyes, she pictured his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently she had also made an impression on him, because shortly afterwards an elderly lady with whom she was barely acquainted came to have coffee with her, and had only just sat down at the table when she immediately began talking about Pustovalov, what a good, solid man he was, and how any bride would be pleased to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov himself came for a visit; he did not stay long, about ten minutes, and spoke little, but Olenka fell in love with him, so much so that she did not sleep all night and burned as in a fever, and in the morning sent for the elderly lady. The match was soon made, after which came the wedding.

Pustovalov and Olenka, once they were married, had a good life. He usually sat in the lumberyard till dinnertime, then left on business and was replaced by Olenka, who sat in the office till evening and there kept the accounts and filled orders.

"Nowadays the price of lumber goes up twenty percent a year," she would say to customers and acquaintances. "Gracious, before we dealt in local lumber, and now every year Vasechka has to go for lumber to Mogilev province. And the taxes!" she said, covering both cheeks with her hands in horror. "The taxes!"

It seemed to her that she had been dealing in lumber for a very, very long time, that lumber was the most important and necessary thing in life, and for her there was something dear and touching in the sound of the words beam, post, board, plank, batten, slat, lath, slab … At night, when she slept, she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, of long, endless lines of carts carrying lumber somewhere far out of town; she dreamed of a whole regiment of ten-yard-long, ten-inch-thick logs marching upended against the lumberyard, of beams, posts, and slabs striking together, making the ringing sound of dry wood, all falling and rising up again, piling upon each other. Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said tenderly to her:

"Olenka, dear, what's the matter? Cross yourself!"

Whatever her husband thought, she thought, too. If he thought the room was hot or business was slow, she thought the same. Her husband did not like entertainment of any sort and stayed at home on Sundays, and so did she.

"You're always at home or in the office," her acquaintances said. "You should go to the theater, darling, or to the circus."

"Vasechka and I have no time for going to theaters," she replied gravely. "We're working people, we can't be bothered with trifles. What's the good of these theaters?"

On Saturdays she and Pustovalov went to the evening vigil, on Sundays to the early liturgy, and returning from church, they walked side by side, looking moved, a nice smell came from both of them, and her silk dress rustled pleasantly; and at home they had tea with fancy bread and various preserves, and then ate pastry. Each day at noon, in the yard and in the street outside the gates, there was a savory smell of borscht and roast lamb or duck, or, on fast days, of fish, and one could not pass the gate without feeling hungry. The samovar was always boiling in the office, and customers were treated to tea and bagels. Once a week the spouses went to the baths and came back side by side, both bright red.

"Still, we have a good life," Olenka said to her acquaintances, "thank God. God grant everyone a life like Vasechka's and mine."

When Pustovalov left for Mogilev province to buy lumber, she missed him very much and at night did not sleep but wept. Sometimes in the evening the regimental veterinarian Smirnin, a young man who was renting her wing, came to visit her. He told her some story or played cards with her, and that diverted her. Especially interesting were his stories about his own family life; he was married and had a son, but he was separated from his wife, because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her and sent her forty roubles every month for his son's keep. And, listening to that, Olenka sighed and shook her head, and felt sorry for him.

"Well, God save you," she said, seeing him to the stairs with a candle as he took his leave. "Thank you for sharing my boredom, God grant you good health, and may the Queen of Heaven …"

And she always spoke so gravely, so sensibly, imitating her husband; the veterinarian was already disappearing through the door below when she called out to him and said:

"You know, Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make peace with your wife. Forgive her, if only for your son's sake! … The boy must understand everything."

And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about the veterinarian and his unhappy family life, and they both sighed and shook their heads, and talked about the boy, who probably missed his father, and then, by some strange train of thought, they both stood before the icons, bowed to the ground, and prayed to God to send them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived quietly and placidly, in love and perfect harmony, for six years. Then one winter day Vassily Andreich, after drinking hot tea in the lumberyard, went out to deliver some lumber, caught cold, and fell ill. He was treated by the best doctors, but the disease took its toll, and after four months of illness, he died. And Olenka was widowed again.

"Why did you go and leave me, my little dove?" she wept, having buried her husband. "How am I to live without you now, wretched and unhappy as I am? Good people, have pity on me, an orphan …"

She went about in a black dress with weepers, and forever gave up wearing a hat and gloves, rarely left the house, except to go to church or visit her husband's grave, and lived at home like a nun. And only when six months had passed did she remove the weepers and begin opening the shutters of her windows. Occasionally she was seen in the morning, going to market for provisions with her cook, but how she lived now and what went on in her house could only be guessed. Guessed, for instance, from the fact that she was seen having tea in the garden with the veterinarian, while he read the newspaper aloud to her, or that, on meeting a lady of her acquaintance in the post office, she said:

"There's no proper veterinarian supervision in our town, and that results in many diseases. You keep hearing of people getting sick from milk or catching infections from horses and cows. In fact, the health of domestic animals needs as much care as the health of people."

She repeated the veterinarian's thoughts, and was now of the same opinion as he about everything. It was clear that she could not live without an attachment even for one year, and had found her new happiness in her own wing. Another woman would have been condemned for it, but no one could think ill of Olenka, and everything was so clear in her life. She and the veterinarian told no one about the change that had occurred in their relations and tried to conceal it, but they did not succeed, because Olenka could not keep a secret. When he had guests, his colleagues from the regiment, she would start talking about cattle plague, or pearl disease, or the town slaughterhouses, while she poured the tea or served supper, and he would be terribly embarrassed and, when the guests left, would seize her by the arm and hiss angrily:

"I asked you not to talk about things you don't understand! When we veterinarians are talking among ourselves, please don't interfere. It's tedious, finally!"

But she would look at him in amazement and alarm and ask:

"Volodechka, what then am I to talk about?"

And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, beg him not to be angry, and they would both be happy

However, this happiness did not last long. The veterinarian left with his regiment, left forever, because his regiment was transferred to somewhere very far away, almost to Siberia. And Olenka was left alone.

Now she was completely alone. Her father had died long ago; his armchair was lying in the attic, dusty, one leg missing. She lost weight and lost her looks, and those who met her in the street no longer looked at her as before and no longer smiled at her; obviously, the best years were already past, left behind, and now some new life was beginning, unknown, of which it was better not to think. In the evenings Olenka sat on the back porch, and could hear music playing in the Tivoli and rockets bursting, but that called up no thoughts in her. She gazed indifferently at her empty courtyard, thought of nothing, wanted nothing, and later, when night fell, went to sleep and dreamed of her empty courtyard. She ate and drank as if against her will.

But chiefly, which was worst of all, she no longer had any opinions. She saw the objects around her and was aware of all that went on around her, but she was unable to form an opinion about anything and did not know what to talk about. And how terrible it was to have no opinions! You see, for instance, that a bottle is standing there, or that it is raining, or that a peasant is driving a cart, but why the bottle, the rain, or the peasant are there, what sense they make, you cannot say and even for a thousand roubles you could not say anything. With Kukin and Pustovalov, and later with the veterinarian, Olenka had been able to explain everything and give her opinion on anything you like, but now in her thoughts and in her heart there was the same emptiness as in her courtyard. And it felt as eerie and bitter as if she had eaten wormwood.

The town was gradually expanding on all sides; the Gypsy quarter was already called a street, and houses grew up and many lanes appeared where the Tivoli garden and the lumberyard used to be. How quickly time flies! Olenka's house darkened, the roof rusted, the shed slumped, and the whole courtyard was overgrown with weeds and prickly nettles. Olenka herself aged and lost her looks. In summer she sits on her porch, and as usual in her soul it is empty, and tedious, and smells of wormwood, and in winter she sits at the window and looks at the snow. There is a breath of spring, the ringing of the cathedral bells is borne on the wind, and suddenly a flood of memories from the past comes, her heart is sweetly wrung, and abundant tears flow from her eyes, but this lasts only a minute, and then again there is emptiness, and she does not know why she is alive. The little black cat Bryska rubs against her and purrs softly, but Olenka is not touched by the cat's tenderness. Is that what she needs? She needs such love as would seize her whole being, her whole soul and mind, would give her thoughts, a direction in life, would warm her aging blood. And she shakes the black Bryska off her lap and says to her in vexation:

"Go, go … You've no business here!"

And so it went, day after day, year after year—and not one joy, and no opinions of any sort. Whatever the cook Mavra said was good enough.

One hot July day, towards evening, when the town herd was being driven down the street and the whole yard was filled with clouds of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the gate. Olenka herself went to open, looked, and was dumbstruck: outside the gate stood the veterinarian Smirnin, gray-haired now and in civilian dress. She suddenly remembered everything, could not help herself, burst into tears, and laid her head on his chest without saying a word, and was so shaken that she did not notice how they both went into the house then, how they sat down to tea.

"My little dove!" she murmured, trembling with joy. "Vladimir Platonych! Where did God bring you from?"

"I want to settle here for good," he told her. "I've retired and am here to try my luck on my own, to live a sedentary life. And it's time my son went to school. He's a big boy. You know, I made peace with my wife."

"Where is she?" asked Olenka.

"She's in the hotel with my son, and I'm going around looking for lodgings."

"Lord, dear heart, take my house! Isn't that lodgings? Oh, Lord, I won't even take anything from you," Olenka became excited and again began to cry "Live here, and I'll be content with the wing. Lord, what joy!"

The next day the roof of the house was being painted and the walls whitewashed, and Olenka, arms akimbo, strode about the yard giving orders. The former smile lit up on her face, and she became all alive, fresh, as if she had awakened after a long sleep. The veterinarian's wife came, a thin, plain lady with short hair and a capricious expression, and with her came Sasha, small for his years (he was going on ten), plump, with bright blue eyes and dimples on his cheeks. And as soon as the boy came into the yard, he ran after the cat, and immediately his merry, joyful laughter rang out.

"Auntie, is that your cat?" he asked Olenka. "When she has kittens, please give us one. Mama's very afraid of mice."

Olenka talked with him, gave him tea, and the heart in her breast suddenly warmed and was wrung sweetly, as if this boy were her own son. And when he sat in the dining room that evening repeating his lessons, she looked at him with tenderness and pity and whispered:

"My little dove, my handsome one … My little child, you came out so smart, so fair!"

"An island," he read, "is a piece of dry land surrounded on all sides by water."

"An island is a piece of dry land …" she repeated, and this was the first opinion she uttered with conviction after so many years of silence and emptiness in her thoughts.

And she had her own opinions now and over dinner talked with Sasha's parents about how difficult it was for children to study in school, but that all the same classical education was better than modern, because after school all paths are open: if you wish, you can be a doctor, if you wish, an engineer.

Sasha started going to school. His mother went to Kharkov to visit her sister and did not come back; his father went somewhere every day to inspect the herds, and sometimes was away from home for three days, and it seemed to Olenka that Sasha was completely abandoned, that he was not wanted in the house, that he was starving to death; and she moved him to her wing and set him up in a little room there.

And for six months now Sasha has been living with her in the wing. Each morning Olenka goes into his room; he is fast asleep, his hand under his cheek, breathing lightly. She is sorry to wake him up.

"Sashenka," she says sadly, "get up, dear heart! It's time for school."

He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, then sits down to tea. He drinks three cups of tea and eats two big bagels and half a French roll with butter. He has not quite recovered from sleep and is therefore cross.

"You haven't learned your fable well, Sashenka," says Olenka, looking at him as if she were seeing him off on a long journey. "You worry me so. You must do your best, dear heart, study … Listen to your teachers."

"Oh, leave me alone, please!" says Sasha.

Then he marches down the street to school, a little boy, but in a big visored cap, with a satchel on his back. Olenka noiselessly follows him.

"Sashenka-a!" she calls.

He turns around, and she puts a date or a caramel in his hand. When they turn down the lane where his school is, he gets embarrassed that this tall, stout woman is following after him; he turns around and says:

"Go home, auntie, I can get there myself now."

She stops and looks after him without blinking, until he disappears through the doors of the school. Ah, how she loves him! Of all her former attachments, none was so deep, never before had her soul submitted so selflessly, so disinterestedly, and with such delight as now, when the maternal feeling burned in her more and more. For this boy who was not her own, for the dimples on his cheeks, for his visored cap, she would give her whole life, give it joyfully, with tears of tenderness. Why? Who knows why?

Having seen Sasha off to school, she slowly returns home, so content, so calm, so full of love; her face, which has grown younger in the last six months, smiles and beams; meeting her, looking at her, people feel pleasure and say to her:

"Good morning, darling Olga Semyonovna! How are you, darling?"

"School studies are getting difficult nowadays," she says at the market. "It's no joke, yesterday they gave the first-year students a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation, and a problem … It's hard for a little boy!"

And she starts talking about teachers, lessons, textbooks—saying all the same things that Sasha says about them.

Between two and three they have dinner together, in the evening they do his homework together and weep. As she puts him to bed, she spends a long time making the cross over him and whispering a prayer. Then, going to sleep, she dreams of the far-off, misty future when Sasha has finished his studies, has become a doctor or an engineer, has his own big house, horses, a carriage, gets married, has children … She falls asleep and keeps thinking about the same thing, and from her closed eyes tears flow down her cheeks. And the little black cat lies beside her and purrs:

"Purr … purr … purr …"

Suddenly there is a loud knocking at the gate. Olenka wakes up, breathless with fear; her heart pounds hard. Half a minute goes by and there is more knocking.

"It's a telegram from Kharkov," she thinks, beginning to tremble all over. "Sasha's mother wants him in Kharkov … Oh, Lord!"

She is in despair; her head, her feet, her arms go numb, and it seems that no one in the whole world is unhappier than she. But another minute goes by, she hears voices: it is the veterinarian coming home from the club.

"Well, thank God," she thinks.

The weight gradually lifts from her heart, she feels light again; she lies down and thinks about Sasha, who is fast asleep in the next room and occasionally murmurs deliriously:

"I'll sh-show you! Get out! No fighting!"
JANUARY 1899






ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS





The acting coroner and the district doctor were driving to the village of Syrnya for an autopsy On the way they were caught in a blizzard, wandered in circles for a long time, and reached the place not at noon, as they had wanted, but only towards evening, when it was already dark. They put up for the night in the zemstvo1cottage. And right there in the zemstvo cottage, as it happened, also lay the corpse, the corpse of the zemstvo insurance agent Lesnitsky, who had come to Syrnya three days earlier and, having settled in the zemstvo cottage and ordered a samovar, had shot himself, quite unexpectedly for everyone; and the circumstance that he had put an end to his life somehow strangely, over the samovar, with food laid out on the table, gave many the occasion to suspect murder; an autopsy became necessary.

The doctor and the coroner stamped their feet in the front hall, shaking off the snow, and the beadle Ilya Loshadin, an old man, stood beside them holding a tin lamp and lighted the place for them. There was a strong smell of kerosene.

"Who are you?" asked the doctor.

"The biddle …" answered the beadle.

He also signed it that way at the post office: the biddle.

"And where are the witnesses?"

"Must've gone to have tea, Your Honor."

To the right was the clean room, the "visiting" or master's room, to the left the black room, with a big stove and a stove bench. The doctor and the coroner, followed by the beadle holding the lamp above his head, went into the clean room. There on the floor, by the legs of the table, the long body lay motionless, covered with a white sheet. Besides the white sheet, a pair of new rubber galoshes was clearly visible in the weak light of the lamp, and everything there was disturbing, eerie: the dark walls, and the silence, and the galoshes, and the immobility of the dead body. On the table was a samovar, long cold, and around it were some packets, probably of food.

"To shoot oneself in a zemstvo cottage—how tactless!" said the doctor. "If you're so eager to put a bullet in your head, shoot yourself at home, somewhere in the barn."

Just as he was, in his hat, fur coat, and felt boots, he lowered himself onto the bench; his companion, the coroner, sat down facing him.

"These hysterical and neurasthenic types are great egoists," the doctor went on bitterly. "When a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he makes a scene with his wife, not embarrassed by your presence; and when he decides to shoot himself, he goes and shoots himself in some village, in a zemstvo cottage, to cause more trouble for everybody. In all circumstances of life, these gentlemen think only of themselves. Only of themselves! That's why the old folks dislike this 'nervous age' of ours so much."

"The old folks dislike all sorts of things," said the coroner, yawning. "Go and point out to these old folk the difference between former and present-day suicides. The former so-called respectable man shot himself because he'd embezzled government funds, the present-day one because he's sick of life, in anguish … Which is better?"

"Sick of life, in anguish, but you must agree, he might have shot himself somewhere else than in a zemstvo cottage."

"Such a dire thing," the beadle began to say, "a dire thing—sheer punishment. Folks are very upset, Your Honor, it's the third night they haven't slept. The kids are crying. The cows need milking, but the women won't go to the barn, they're afraid … lest the master appear to them in the dark. Sure, they're foolish women, but even some of the men are afraid. Once night comes, they won't go past the cottage singly, but always in a bunch. And the witnesses, too …"

Dr. Starchenko, a middle-aged man with a dark beard and spectacles, and the coroner Lyzhin, blond, still young, who had finished his studies only two years before and looked more like a student than an official, sat silently, pondering. They were vexed at being late. They now had to wait till morning, stay there overnight, though it was not yet six, and they were faced with a long evening, then the long, dark night, boredom, uncomfortable beds, cockroaches, the morning cold; and, listening to the blizzard howling in the chimney and in the loft, they both thought how all this was unlike the life they would have wished for themselves and had once dreamed of, and how far they both were from their peers, who were now walking the well-lit city streets, heedless of the bad weather, or were about to go to the theater, or were sitting in their studies over a book. Oh, how dearly they would have paid now just to stroll down Nevsky Prospect, or Petrovka Street in Moscow, to hear some decent singing, to sit for an hour or two in a restaurant…

"Hoo-o-o!" sang the blizzard in the loft, and something outside slammed spitefully, probably the signboard on the zemstvo cottage. "Hoo-o-o!"

"Do as you like, but I have no wish to stay here," Starchenko said, getting up. "It's not six yet, too early for bed, I'll go somewhere. Von Taunitz lives nearby, only a couple of miles from Syrnya. I'll go to his place and spend the evening. Beadle, go and tell the coachman not to unharness. What about you?" he asked Lyzhin.

"I don't know. I'll go to bed, most likely."

The doctor wrapped his coat around him and went out. One could hear him talking to the coachman and the little bells jingling on the chilled horses. He drove off.

"It's not right for you to spend the night here, sir," said the beadle. "Go to the other side. It's not clean there, but for one night it won't matter. I'll fetch a samovar from the peasants and get it going, and after that I'll pile up some hay for you, and you can sleep, Your Honor, with God's help."

A short time later the coroner was sitting in the black side, at a table, drinking tea, while the beadle Loshadin stood by the door and talked. He was an old man, over sixty, not tall, very thin, bent over, white-haired, a naïve smile on his face, his eyes tearful, his lips constantly smacking as if he were sucking candy. He wore a short coat and felt boots, and never let the stick out of his hands. The coroner's youth evidently aroused pity in him, and that may have been why he addressed him familiarly

"The headman, Fyodor Makarych, told me to report to him as soon as the police officer or coroner came," he said. "So, in that case, I'll have to go now … It's three miles to town, there's a blizzard, a terrible lot of snow has piled up, I may not make it before midnight. Listen to that howling."

"I don't need the headman," said Lyzhin. "There's nothing for him to do here."

He gave the old man a curious glance and asked:

"Tell me, grandpa, how many years have you been going around as a beadle?"

"How many? Thirty years now. I started about five years after the freeing,2 so you can count it up. Since then I've gone around every day. People have holidays, and I go around. It's Easter, the bells are ringing, Christ is risen, and I'm there with my bag. To the treasury, to the post office, to the police chief's house, to a zemstvo member, to the tax inspector, to the council, to the gentry, to the peasants, to all Orthodox Christians. I carry packages, summonses, writs, letters, various forms, reports, and nowadays, my good sir, Your Honor, they've started having these forms for putting down numbers—yellow, white, red—and every landowner, or priest, or rich peasant has to report without fail some ten times a year on how much he sowed and reaped, how many bushels or sacks of rye, how much oats and hay, and what the weather was like, and what kinds of bugs there were. They can write whatever they want, of course, it's just a formality, but I have to go and hand out the papers, and then go again and collect them. There's no point, for instance, in gutting this gentleman here, you know yourself it's useless, you're just getting your hands dirty, but you took the trouble and came, Your Honor, because it's a formality; there's no help for it. For thirty years I've been going around on formalities. In summer it's all right, warm, dry, but in winter or autumn it's no good. I've drowned, frozen—everything's happened. And bad people took my bag from me in the woods, and beat me up, and I was put on trial …"

"For what?"

"Swindling."

"What kind of swindling?"

"The clerk Khrisanf Grigoryev sold somebody else's lumber to a contractor—cheated him, that is. I was there when the deal was made, they sent me to the tavern for vodka; well, the clerk didn't share with me, didn't even offer me a glass, but since, poor as I am, I was seen as an unreliable, worthless man, we both went to trial; he was put in jail, but I, thank God, was justified in all my rights. They read some paper in court. And they were all in uniforms. There in the court. I'll tell you what, Your Honor, for a man who's not used to it, this work is a sheer disaster—God forbid—but for me it's all right. My legs even hurt when I don't walk. And it's worse for me to stay home. In the office in my village it's nothing but light the clerk's fire, fetch the clerk's water, polish the clerk's boots."

"And how much are you paid?" asked Lyzhin.

"Eighty-four roubles a year."

"You probably make a little something on the side, don't you?"

"What little something? Gentlemen rarely give tips nowadays. Gentlemen are strict these days, they keep getting offended. You bring him a paper—he gets offended. You take your hat off before him—he gets offended. 'You came in by the wrong entrance,' he says, 'you're a drunkard,' he says, 'you stink of onions, you're a blockhead, a son of a bitch.' Some are kind, of course, but you can't expect anything from them, they just make fun of you with all sorts of nicknames. Mr. Altukhin, for instance. He's kind and sober, and sensible enough, but when he sees me he shouts, and doesn't know what himself. He's given me this nickname. Hey, he says, you …"

The beadle mumbled some word, but so softly that it was impossible to make it out.

"How's that?" asked Lyzhin. "Repeat it."

"Administration!" the beadle repeated loudly. "He's been calling me that for a long time, some six years. Greetings, administration! But let him, I don't mind, God bless him. Some lady may happen to send me out a glass of vodka and a piece of pie, so then I drink to her health. It's mostly peasants that tip me; peasants have heart, they're more god-fearing; they give me bread, or cabbage soup, or sometimes even a drink. The elders treat me to tea in the tavern. Right now the witnesses have gone for tea. 'Loshadin,' they said, 'you stay here and watch for us,' and they gave me a kopeck each. They're scared because they're not used to it. And yesterday they gave me fifteen kopecks and treated me to a little glass."

"And you're not afraid?"

"I am, sir, but it's part of the work—the job, there's no getting away from it. In the summer I was taking a prisoner to town, and he starts hitting me—whack! whack! whack! All fields and forest around—nowhere to run to. It's the same here. I remember Mr. Lesnitsky when he was just so high, and I knew his father and mother. I'm from the village of Nedoshchotovo, and the Lesnitsky family is no more than half a mile from us, maybe less, we have a common boundary. And old Mr. Lesnitsky had a maiden sister, a god-fearing and merciful lady. Remember, O Lord, the soul of your servant Yulia, of eternal memory. She never got married, and before she died, she divided up all her property; she left two hundred and fifty acres to the monastery and five hundred to us, the peasant community of the village of Nedoshchotovo, for the memory of her soul. But her brother, the squire, hid the paper, burned it in the stove, they say, and took all the land for himself. Meaning he hoped to profit from it, but—no, hold on, brother, you can't live by injustice in the world. The squire didn't go to confession for some twenty years after that, he kept away from church, meaning he died without confession, just popped. He was fat as could be. Just popped open. After that the young squire—Seryozha, that is—had it all taken from him for debts, all there was. Well, he didn't get far in his studies, couldn't do anything, so his uncle, the chairman of the zemstvo council, thought, 'Why don't I take Seryozha to work for me as an agent, he can insure people, it's not complicated.' But the young squire was a proud man, he would have liked a broader life, fancier, with more freedom, he resented having to drive around the area in a little cart and talk to peasants; he always went about looking at the ground, looking and saying nothing; you'd shout, 'Sergei Sergeich!' right by his ear, and he'd turn and say, 'Eh?' and look at the ground again. And now, see, he's laid hands on himself. It makes no sense, Your Honor, it's not right. Merciful God, you can't tell what's happening in the world. Say your father was rich and you're poor—that's too bad, of course, but you have to get used to it. I, too, had a good life, Your Honor, I had two horses, three cows, some twenty head of sheep, but the time came when I was left with nothing but a little bag, and it's not mine at that, it comes with the job, and now, in our Nedoshchotovo, my house is the worst of all, truth to tell. Four lackeys had Moky, now Moky's a lackey. Four workers had Burkin, now Burkin's a worker."

"What made you so poor?" asked the coroner.

"My sons are hard drinkers. They drink so hard, so hard, I can't tell you, you wouldn't believe me."

Lyzhin listened and thought that while he, Lyzhin, would sooner or later go back to Moscow, this old man would stay here forever and keep on walking and walking; and how many of these old men he would meet in his life, tattered, disheveled, "worthless," in whose hearts a fifteen-kopeck piece, a glass of vodka, and the profound belief that you cannot live by injustice in this world were somehow welded fast together. Then he became bored with listening and ordered some hay brought for his bed. There was an iron bed with a pillow and blanket in the visitors' side, and it could have been brought over, but the deceased had been lying next to it for almost three days (had, perhaps, sat on it before he died), and now it would be unpleasant to sleep on it …

"It's only seven-thirty," thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch. "How terrible!"

He did not want to sleep, but having nothing to do and needing to pass the time somehow, he lay down and covered himself with a plaid. Loshadin, as he cleared the dishes away, came in and out several times, smacking his lips and sighing, kept shuffling about by the table, finally took his lamp and left; and, looking at his long gray hair and bent body from behind, Lyzhin thought: "Just like a sorcerer in the opera."

It grew dark. There must have been a moon behind the clouds, because the windows and the snow on the window frames were clearly visible.

"Hoo-o-o!" sang the blizzard. "Hoo-o-o!"

"Oh, Lo-o-ord!" a woman howled in the loft, or so it seemed. "Oh, my Lo-o-ord!"

"Bang!" Something hit the wall outside. "Crash!"

The coroner listened: there was no woman, it was the wind howling. He was chilly and covered himself with his coat as well, on top of the plaid. While he was making himself warm, he thought of how all this—the blizzard, and the cottage, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room—how all this was far from the life he wanted for himself, and how foreign it all was to him, how petty and uninteresting. If this man had killed himself in Moscow or somewhere near Moscow, and he were conducting the investigation there, it would be interesting, important, and perhaps even frightening to sleep next to the corpse; but here, a thousand miles from Moscow, all this seemed to appear in a different light, all this was not life, not people, but something that existed only "on formality," as Loshadin had said, all this would leave not the slightest trace in his memory and would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, left Syrnya. The motherland, the true Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg, and this was a province, a colony; when you dream of playing a role, of being popular, of being, for instance, an investigator in cases of special importance or a prosecutor for the district court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. To live means to live in Moscow, whereas here you wanted nothing, easily became reconciled with your inconspicuous role, and hoped for only one thing from life—to leave, to leave soon. And Lyzhin mentally raced about the Moscow streets, entered familiar houses, saw his family, his friends, and his heart was wrung sweetly at the thought that he was now twenty-six years old, and if he escaped from here and got to Moscow in five or ten years, even then it would not be too late and there would still be a whole life ahead of him. And as he fell into oblivion, when his thoughts were already becoming confused, he imagined the long corridors of the Moscow court, himself giving a speech, his sisters, an orchestra which for some reason kept howling:

"Hoo-o-o! Hoo-o-o!"

"Bang! Crash!" came again. "Bang!"

And he suddenly remembered how once in the zemstvo office, when he was talking with an accountant, a gentleman came over to the desk, dark-eyed, dark-haired, thin, pale; he had an unpleasant look in his eyes, as people do when they have taken a long after-dinner nap, and it spoiled his fine, intelligent profile; and the high boots he wore were unbecoming and seemed crude on him. The accountant introduced him: "This is our zemstvo agent."

"So that was Lesnitsky … this same one …" Lyzhin now realized.

He remembered Lesnitsky's soft voice, pictured his way of walking, and it seemed to him that someone was now walking around him, walking in the same way as Lesnitsky.

He suddenly became frightened, his head felt cold.

"Who's there?" he asked in alarm.

"The biddle."

"What do you want here?"

"To ask your permission, Your Honor. Earlier you said there was no need for the headman, but I'm afraid he may get angry He told me to come. So maybe I'll go."

"Ah, you! I'm sick of it…" Lyzhin said in vexation and covered himself up again.

"He may get angry … I'll go, Your Honor, you have a good stay."

And Loshadin left. There was coughing and half-whispered talk in the front hall. The witnesses must have come back.

"Tomorrow we'll let the poor fellows go home earlier …" thought the coroner. "We'll start the autopsy as soon as it's light."

He was beginning to doze off when suddenly there came someone's steps again, not timid this time, but quick, loud. The slamming of a door, voices, the scrape of a match …

"Are you asleep? Are you asleep?" Dr. Starchenko asked hurriedly and angrily, lighting one match after another; he was all covered with snow, and gave off cold. "Are you asleep? Get up, let's go to von Taunitz. He's sent horses to fetch you. Let's go, you'll at least get supper there, and sleep like a human being. You see, I came for you myself. The horses are excellent, we'll be there in twenty minutes."

"And what time is it now?"

"A quarter past ten."

Sleepy and displeased, Lyzhin put on his boots, fur coat, hat, and hood, and went outside with the doctor. It was not too freezing, but a strong, piercing wind was blowing, driving billows of snow down the street, which looked as if they were fleeing in terror; high drifts were already piled up by the fence and near the porches. The doctor and the coroner got into the sleigh, and the white driver leaned over them to button up the flap. They both felt hot.

"Drive!"

They went through the village. "Turning up fluffy furrows …"3the coroner thought listlessly, watching the outrunner working his legs. There were lights in all the cottages, as on the eve of a great feast: the peasants had not gone to bed for fear of the dead man. The driver was glumly silent; he must have grown bored standing by the zemstvo cottage, and now was also thinking of the dead man.

"When they learned at Taunitz's that you were spending the night in the cottage," said Starchenko, "they all fell on me for not bringing you along."

As they drove out of the village, at a bend, the driver suddenly shouted at the top of his lungs:

"Clear the way!"

Some man flashed by; he had stepped off the road and was standing knee-deep in the snow, looking at the troika; the coroner saw the crook-topped stick, the beard, the bag at his side, and it seemed to him that it was Loshadin, and it even seemed to him that he was smiling. He flashed by and disappeared.

The road first ran along the edge of the forest, then down the wide forest cutting; old pines flashed by, and young birches, and tall, young gnarled oaks, standing solitarily in the recently cleared openings, but soon everything in the air became confused in the billows of snow; the driver claimed he could see the forest, but the coroner could see nothing but the outrunner. The wind blew in their backs.

Suddenly the horses stopped.

"Well, what now?" Starchenko asked crossly.

The driver silently got down from the box and began running around the sleigh, stepping on his heels; he made wider and wider circles, moving further and further from the sleigh, and it looked as if he were dancing; finally he came back and began turning to the right.

"Have you lost the way, or what?" asked Starchenko.

"Never mi-i-ind …"

Here was some little village with not a single light. Again the forest, the fields, again they lost the way, and the driver got down from the box and danced. The troika raced down a dark avenue, raced quickly, and the excited outrunner kicked the front of the sleigh. Here the trees made a hollow, frightening noise, it was pitch-dark, as if they were racing into some sort of abyss, and suddenly their eyes were dazzled by the bright light of a front entrance and windows, they heard loud, good-natured barking, voices … They had arrived.

While they were taking off their coats and boots downstairs, someone upstairs was playing Un petit verre de Cliquot4 on the piano, and the stamping of children's feet could be heard. The visitors were immediately enveloped in warmth, the smell of an old manor house, where, whatever the weather outside, life is so warm, clean, comfortable.

"That's splendid," said von Taunitz, a fat man with an incredibly thick neck and side-whiskers, shaking the coroner's hand. "That's splendid. Welcome to my house, I'm very glad to meet you. You and I are almost colleagues. I was once the assistant prosecutor, but not for long, only two years; I came here to look after the estate and I've grown old on the place. An old coot, in short. Welcome," he went on, obviously controlling his voice so as not to speak loudly; he and the guests were going upstairs. "I have no wife, she died, but here, let me introduce my daughters." And turning around, he shouted downstairs in a thunderous voice: "Tell Ignat there to have the horses ready by eight o'clock!"

In the reception room were his four daughters, young, pretty girls, all in gray dresses and with their hair done in the same way, and their cousin with children, also a young and interesting woman. Starchenko, who was acquainted with them, immediately started asking them to sing something, and two of the girls spent a long time assuring him that they could not sing and that they had no music, then the cousin sat down at the piano and in trembling voices they sang a duet from The Queen of Spades.5Un petit verre de Cliquot was played again, and the children started hopping, stamping their feet in time with the music. Starchenko started hopping, too. Everybody laughed.

Then the children said good-night before going to bed. The coroner laughed, danced a quadrille, courted the girls, and thought to himself: was all that not a dream? The black side of the zemstvo cottage, the pile of hay in the corner, the rustling of cockroaches, the revolting, beggarly furnishings, the voices of the witnesses, the wind, the blizzard, the danger of losing the way, and suddenly these magnificent, bright rooms, the sounds of the piano, beautiful girls, curly-headed children, merry, happy laughter—it seemed to him like a fairy-tale transformation; and it was incredible that such transformations could take place in the space of some two miles, in one hour. And dull thoughts spoiled his merriment, and he kept thinking that this was not life around him, but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, it was impossible to draw any conclusions; and he even felt sorry for these girls who lived and would end their lives here in this backwoods, in the provinces, far from any cultivated milieu where nothing was accidental, everything made sense, was right, and where every suicide, for example, could be understood and one could explain why and what its significance was in the general course of life. He supposed that if the life hereabouts, in this backwater, was incomprehensible to him and if he did not see it, that meant that it was not there at all.

Over dinner the conversation turned to Lesnitsky.

"He left a wife and child," said Starchenko. "I would forbid neurasthenics and generally people whose nervous system is in disorder to get married; I would deprive them of the right and opportunity to breed more of their kind. To bring children with nervous ailments into the world is a crime."

"An unfortunate young man," said von Taunitz, quietly sighing and shaking his head. "How much one must think and suffer before finally taking one's own life … a young life. Such misfortunes can happen in any family, and that is terrible. It's hard to endure it, unbearable …"

And all the girls listened silently, with serious faces, looking at their father. Lyzhin felt that, for his part, he also ought to say something, but he could not think of anything, and said only:

"Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon."

He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed, covered by a fine, fresh sheet and a blanket, but for some reason he did not feel comfortable; perhaps it was because the doctor and von Taunitz spent a long time talking in the neighboring room, and above the ceiling and in the stove the blizzard made the same noise as in the zemstvo cottage, and howled just as pitifully:

"Hoo-o-o!"

Taunitz's wife had died two years ago, and he was still not reconciled to it, and whatever the talk was about, he always came back to his wife; and there was nothing of the prosecutor left in him.

"Can it be that I, too, will reach such a state some day?" thought Lyzhin as he was falling asleep, hearing the man's restrained, as if orphaned, voice through the wall.

The coroner slept restlessly. It was hot, uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not in Taunitz's house and not in a soft, clean bed, but still in the zemstvo cottage, on hay, hearing the witnesses talking in half-whispers; it seemed to him that Lesnitsky was nearby, fifteen steps away. Again in his sleep he remembered the zemstvo agent, dark-haired, pale, in tall, dusty boots, coming up to the accountant's desk. "This is our zemstvo agent …" Then he imagined Lesnitsky and the beadle Loshadin walking over the snow in the fields, side by side, holding each other up; the blizzard whirled above them, the wind blew in their backs, and they walked on and sang:

"We walk, walk, walk."

The old man looked like a sorcerer in the opera, and they were both indeed singing, as if in the theater:

"We walk, walk, walk… You live in warmth, in brightness, in softness, and we walk through the freezing cold, through the blizzard, over the deep snow … We know no rest, we know no joy … We bear the whole burden of this life, both ours and yours, on ourselves … Hoo-o-o! We walk, walk, walk …"

Lyzhin awoke and sat up in bed. What a disturbing, unpleasant dream! And why were the agent and the beadle together in his dream? What nonsense! And now, when Lyzhin's heart was pounding hard, and he sat in bed holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him this insurance agent and the beadle really had something in common in life. Had they not gone side by side in life, too, holding on to each other? Some invisible but significant and necessary connection existed between the two men, even between them and Taunitz, and between everyone, everyone; in this life, even in the most desolate backwater, nothing was accidental, everything was filled with one common thought, everything had one soul, one purpose, and to understand it, it was not enough to think, not enough to reason, one probably had to have the gift of penetrating into life, a gift which apparently was not given to everyone. And the unfortunate, overstrained "neurasthenic," as the doctor called him, who had killed himself, and the old peasant, who every day of his life had been going from one man to another, were accidents, scraps of life, for someone who considered his own existence accidental, but were parts of one wonderful and reasonable organism for someone who considered his own life, too, a part of this common thing and was aware of it. So thought Lyzhin, and this had long been his secret thought, and only now did it unfold broadly and clearly in his mind.

He lay down and began to fall asleep; and suddenly they were walking together and singing again:

"We walk, walk, walk … We take what's hardest and bitterest from life, and leave you what's easy and joyful, and you, sitting over your supper, can reason coolly and soberly about why we suffer and perish, and why we're not as healthy and contented as you."

What they sang had occurred to him before, but this thought had somehow sat behind other thoughts in his head and flashed timidly, like a distant lantern in misty weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant's grievances lay on his conscience, too; to be reconciled with the fact that these people, submissive to their lot, heaped on themselves what was heaviest and darkest in life—how terrible it was! To be reconciled with that, and to wish for oneself a bright, boisterous life among happy, contented people, and to dream constantly of such a life, meant to dream of new suicides by overworked, careworn people, or by weak, neglected people, whom one sometimes talked about with vexation or mockery over dinner, but whom one did not go to help … And again:

"We walk, walk, walk …"

As if someone were beating on his temples with a hammer.

In the morning he woke up early, with a headache, roused by noise; in the neighboring room von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:

"You can't go now. Look what it's doing outside. Don't argue, just ask the driver: he won't take you in such weather even for a million roubles."

"But it's only two miles," the doctor said in a pleading voice.

"Even if it was half a mile. When you can't, you can't. The moment you go out the gate, it will be sheer hell, you'll instantly lose your way. Say what you like, I won't let you go for anything."

"It's sure to quiet down towards evening," said the peasant who was lighting the stove.

And the doctor in the neighboring room started talking about the influence of the harshness of nature on the Russian character, about the long winters which, by restricting freedom of movement, hampered people's mental growth, and Lyzhin listened vexedly to these arguments, looked out the windows at the snowdrifts heaped up by the fence, looked at the white dust that filled all visible space, at the trees bending desperately to the right, then to the left, listened to the howling and banging, and thought gloomily:

"Well, what sort of moral can be drawn here? It's a blizzard, that's all …"

At noon they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house, going up to the windows.

"And Lesnitsky's lying there," thought Lyzhin, gazing at the whirls of snow spinning furiously over the drifts. "Lesnitsky's lying there, the witnesses are waiting …"

They talked of the weather, saying that a blizzard usually lasts two days, rarely longer. At six o'clock they had dinner, then played cards, sang, danced, ended with supper. The day was over, they went to bed.

Between night and morning everything quieted down. When they got up and looked out the windows, the bare willows with their weakly hanging branches stood perfectly motionless, it was gray, still, as if nature were now ashamed of her rioting, of the insane nights and the free rein she had given to her passions. The horses, harnessed in a line, had been waiting by the porch since five o'clock in the morning. When it was fully light, the doctor and the coroner put on their coats and boots, and, after taking leave of their host, went out.

At the porch, beside the driver, stood their acquaintance, the biddle Ilya Loshadin, hatless, with an old leather bag over his shoulder, all covered with snow; and his face was red, wet with sweat. The servant who came out to help the guests into the sleigh and cover their legs gave him a stern look and said:

"What are you standing here for, you old devil? Away with you!"

"Your Honor, folks are worried…" Loshadin began, with a naïve smile all over his face, obviously pleased to see the ones he had been waiting for so long. "Folks are very worried, the kids are crying … We thought you'd gone back to town, Your Honor. For God's sake, take pity on us, dear benefactors …"

The doctor and the coroner said nothing, got into the sleigh, and drove to Syrnya.
JANUARY 1899






THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG








I




The talk was that a new face had appeared on the embankment: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent two weeks in Yalta and was used to it, also began to take an interest in new faces. Sitting in a pavilion at Vernet's, he saw a young woman, not very tall, blond, in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white spitz.

And after that he met her several times a day in the town garden or in the square. She went strolling alone, in the same beret, with the white spitz; nobody knew who she was, and they called her simply "the lady with the little dog."

"If she's here with no husband or friends," Gurov reflected, "it wouldn't be a bad idea to make her acquaintance."

He was not yet forty, but he had a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons in school. He had married young, while still a second-year student, and now his wife seemed half again his age. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows, erect, imposing, dignified, and a thinking person, as she called herself. She read a great deal, used the new orthography, called her husband not Dmitri but Dimitri, but he secretly considered her none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless, was afraid of her, and disliked being at home. He had begun to be unfaithful to her long ago, was unfaithful often, and, probably for that reason, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence, he would say of them:

"An inferior race!"

It seemed to him that he had been taught enough by bitter experience to call them anything he liked, and yet he could not have lived without the "inferior race" even for two days. In the company of men he was bored, ill at ease, with them he was taciturn and cold, but when he was among women, he felt himself free and knew what to talk about with them and how to behave; and he was at ease even being silent with them. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature there was something attractive and elusive that disposed women towards him and enticed them; he knew that, and he himself was attracted to them by some force.

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people—especially irresolute Muscovites, who are slow starters—grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman, this experience somehow slipped from his memory, and he wanted to live, and everything seemed quite simple and amusing.

And so one time, towards evening, he was having dinner in the garden, and the lady in the beret came over unhurriedly to take the table next to his. Her expression, her walk, her dress, her hair told him that she belonged to decent society, was married, in Yalta for the first time, and alone, and that she was bored here … In the stories about the impurity of local morals there was much untruth, he despised them and knew that these stories were mostly invented by people who would eagerly have sinned themselves had they known how; but when the lady sat down at the next table, three steps away from him, he remembered those stories of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a quick, fleeting liaison, a romance with an unknown woman, of whose very name you are ignorant, suddenly took possession of him.

He gently called the spitz, and when the dog came over, he shook his finger at it. The spitz growled. Gurov shook his finger again.

The lady glanced at him and immediately lowered her eyes.

"He doesn't bite," she said and blushed.

"May I give him a bone?" and, when she nodded in the affirmative, he asked affably: "Have you been in Yalta long?"

"About five days."

"And I'm already dragging through my second week here."

They were silent for a while.

"The time passes quickly, and yet it's so boring here!" she said without looking at him.

"It's merely the accepted thing to say it's boring here. The ordinary man lives somewhere in his Belevo or Zhizdra and isn't bored, then he comes here: 'Ah, how boring! Ah, how dusty!' You'd think he came from Granada."

She laughed. Then they went on eating in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked off together—and a light, bantering conversation began, of free, contented people, who do not care where they go or what they talk about. They strolled and talked of how strange the light was on the sea; the water was of a lilac color, so soft and warm, and over it the moon cast a golden strip. They talked of how sultry it was after the hot day. Gurov told her he was a Muscovite, a philologist by education, but worked in a bank; had once been preparing to sing in an opera company, but had dropped it, owned two houses in Moscow … And from her he learned that she grew up in Petersburg, but was married in S., where she had now been living for two years, that she would be staying in Yalta for about a month, and that her husband might come to fetch her, because he also wanted to get some rest. She was quite unable to explain where her husband served—in the provincial administration or the zemstvo council—and she herself found that funny. And Gurov also learned that her name was Anna Sergeevna.

Afterwards, in his hotel room, he thought about her, that tomorrow she would probably meet him again. It had to be so. Going to bed, he recalled that still quite recently she had been a schoolgirl, had studied just as his daughter was studying now, recalled how much timorousness and angularity there was in her laughter, her conversation with a stranger—it must have been the first time in her life that she was alone in such a situation, when she was followed, looked at, and spoken to with only one secret purpose, which she could not fail to guess. He recalled her slender, weak neck, her beautiful gray eyes.

"There's something pathetic in her all the same," he thought and began to fall asleep.




II




A week had passed since they became acquainted. It was Sunday. Inside it was stuffy, but outside the dust flew in whirls, hats blew off. They felt thirsty all day, and Gurov often stopped at the pavilion, offering Anna Sergeevna now a soft drink, now ice cream. There was no escape.

In the evening when it relented a little, they went to the jetty to watch the steamer come in. There were many strollers on the pier; they had come to meet people, they were holding bouquets. And here two particularities of the smartly dressed Yalta crowd distinctly struck one's eye: the elderly ladies were dressed like young ones, and there were many generals.

Owing to the roughness of the sea, the steamer arrived late, when the sun had already gone down, and it was a long time turning before it tied up. Anna Sergeevna looked at the ship and the passengers through her lorgnette, as if searching for acquaintances, and when she turned to Gurov, her eyes shone. She talked a lot, and her questions were abrupt, and she herself immediately forgot what she had asked; then she lost her lorgnette in the crowd.

The smartly dressed crowd was dispersing, the faces could no longer be seen, the wind had died down completely, and Gurov and Anna Sergeevna stood as if they were expecting someone else to get off the steamer. Anna Sergeevna was silent now and smelled the flowers, not looking at Gurov.

"The weather's improved towards evening," he said. "Where shall we go now? Shall we take a drive somewhere?"

She made no answer.

Then he looked at her intently and suddenly embraced her and kissed her on the lips, and he was showered with the fragrance and moisture of the flowers, and at once looked around timorously— had anyone seen them?

"Let's go to your place …" he said softly.

And they both walked quickly.

Her hotel room was stuffy and smelled of the perfumes she had bought in a Japanese shop. Gurov, looking at her now, thought: "What meetings there are in life!" From the past he had kept the memory of carefree, good-natured women, cheerful with love, grateful to him for their happiness, however brief; and of women— his wife, for example—who loved without sincerity, with superfluous talk, affectedly, with hysteria, with an expression as if it were not love, not passion, but something more significant; and of those two or three very beautiful, cold ones, in whose faces a predatory expression would suddenly flash, a stubborn wish to take, to snatch from life more than it could give, and these were women not in their first youth, capricious, unreasonable, domineering, unintelligent, and when Gurov cooled towards them, their beauty aroused hatred in him, and the lace of their underwear seemed to him like scales.

But here was all the timorousness and angularity of inexperienced youth, a feeling of awkwardness, and an impression of bewilderment, as if someone had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeevna, the "lady with the little dog," somehow took a special, very serious attitude towards what had happened, as if it were her fall—so it seemed, and that was strange and inopportune. Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly on both sides of her face, she sat pondering in a dejected pose, like the sinful woman in an old painting.

"It's not good," she said. "You'll be the first not to respect me now."

There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergeevna was touching, she had about her a breath of the purity of a proper, naïve, little-experienced woman; the solitary candle burning on the table barely lit up her face, but it was clear that her heart was uneasy.

"Why should I stop respecting you?" asked Gurov. "You don't know what you're saying yourself."

"God forgive me!" she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "This is terrible."

"It's like you're justifying yourself."

"How can I justify myself? I'm a bad, low woman, I despise myself and am not even thinking of any justification. It's not my husband I've deceived, but my own self! And not only now, I've been deceiving myself for a long time. My husband may be an honest and good man, but he's a lackey! I don't know what he does there, how he serves, I only know that he's a lackey. I married him when I was twenty, I was tormented by curiosity, I wanted something better. I told myself there must be a different life. I wanted to live! To live and live … I was burning with curiosity … you won't understand it, but I swear to God that I couldn't control myself any longer, something was happening to me, I couldn't restrain myself, I told my husband I was ill and came here … And here I go about as if in a daze, as if I'm out of my mind … and now I've become a trite, trashy woman, whom anyone can despise."

Gurov was bored listening, he was annoyed by the naïve tone, by this repentance, so unexpected and out of place; had it not been for the tears in her eyes, one might have thought she was joking or playing a role.

"I don't understand," he said softly, "what is it you want?"

She hid her face on his chest and pressed herself to him.

"Believe me, believe me, I beg you …" she said. "I love an honest, pure life, sin is vile to me, I myself don't know what I'm doing. Simple people say, 'The unclean one beguiled me.' And now I can say of myself that the unclean one has beguiled me."

"Enough, enough …" he muttered.

He looked into her fixed, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke softly and tenderly, and she gradually calmed down, and her gaiety returned. They both began to laugh.

Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the embankment, the town with its cypresses looked completely dead, but the sea still beat noisily against the shore; one barge was rocking on the waves, and the lantern on it glimmered sleepily.

They found a cab and drove to Oreanda.

"I just learned your last name downstairs in the lobby: it was written on the board—von Dideritz," said Gurov. "Is your husband German?"

"No, his grandfather was German, I think, but he himself is Orthodox."1

In Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked down on the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves of the trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer here. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection. Sitting beside the young woman, who looked so beautiful in the dawn, appeased and enchanted by the view of this magical décor—sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov reflected that, essentially, if you thought of it, everything was beautiful in this world, everything except for what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher goals of being and our human dignity

Some man came up—it must have been a watchman—looked at them, and went away And this detail seemed such a mysterious thing, and also beautiful. The steamer from Feodosia could be seen approaching in the glow of the early dawn, its lights out.

"There's dew on the grass," said Anna Sergeevna after a silence.

"Yes. It's time to go home."

They went back to town.

After that they met on the embankment every noon, had lunch together, dined, strolled, admired the sea. She complained that she slept poorly and that her heart beat anxiously, kept asking the same questions, troubled now by jealousy, now by fear that he did not respect her enough. And often on the square or in the garden, when there was no one near them, he would suddenly draw her to him and kiss her passionately. Their complete idleness, those kisses in broad daylight, with a furtive look around and the fear that someone might see them, the heat, the smell of the sea, and the constant flashing before their eyes of idle, smartly dressed, well-fed people, seemed to transform him; he repeatedly told Anna Sergeevna how beautiful she was, and how seductive, was impatiently passionate, never left her side, while she often brooded and kept asking him to admit that he did not respect her, did not love her at all, and saw in her only a trite woman. Late almost every evening they went somewhere out of town, to Oreanda or the cascade; these outings were successful, their impressions each time were beautiful, majestic.

They were expecting her husband to arrive. But a letter came from him in which he said that his eyes hurt and begged his wife to come home quickly. Anna Sergeevna began to hurry.

"It's good that I'm leaving," she said to Gurov. "It's fate itself."

She went by carriage, and he accompanied her. They drove for a whole day. When she had taken her seat in the express train and the second bell had rung, she said:

"Let me have one more look at you … One more look. There."

She did not cry, but was sad, as if ill, and her face trembled.

"I'll think of you … remember you," she said. "God be with you. Don't think ill of me. We're saying good-bye forever, it must be so, because we should never have met. Well, God be with you."

The train left quickly, its lights soon disappeared, and a moment later the noise could no longer be heard, as if everything were conspiring on purpose to put a speedy end to this sweet oblivion, this madness. And, left alone on the platform and gazing into the dark distance, Gurov listened to the chirring of the grasshoppers and the hum of the telegraph wires with a feeling as if he had just woken up. And he thought that now there was one more affair or adventure in his life, and it, too, was now over, and all that was left was the memory … He was touched, saddened, and felt some slight remorse; this young woman whom he was never to see again had not been happy with him; he had been affectionate with her, and sincere, but all the same, in his treatment of her, in his tone and caresses, there had been a slight shade of mockery, the somewhat coarse arrogance of a happy man, who was, moreover, almost twice her age. She had all the while called him kind, extraordinary, lofty; obviously, he had appeared to her not as he was in reality, and therefore he had involuntarily deceived her …

Here at the station there was already a breath of autumn, the wind was cool.

"It's time I headed north, too," thought Gurov, leaving the platform. "High time!"




III




At home in Moscow everything was already wintry, the stoves were heated, and in the morning, when the children were getting ready for school and drinking their tea, it was dark, and the nanny would light a lamp for a short time. The frosts had already set in. When the first snow falls, on the first day of riding in sleighs, it is pleasant to see the white ground, the white roofs; one's breath feels soft and pleasant, and in those moments one remembers one's youth. The old lindens and birches, white with hoarfrost, have a good-natured look, they are nearer one's heart than cypresses and palms, and near them one no longer wants to think of mountains and the sea.

Gurov was a Muscovite. He returned to Moscow on a fine, frosty day, and when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves and strolled down Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the bells ringing, his recent trip and the places he had visited lost all their charm for him. He gradually became immersed in Moscow life, now greedily read three newspapers a day and said that he never read the Moscow newspapers on principle. He was drawn to restaurants, clubs, to dinner parties, celebrations, and felt flattered that he had famous lawyers and actors among his clients, and that at the Doctors' Club he played cards with a professor. He could eat a whole portion of selyanka from the pan2…

A month would pass and Anna Sergeevna, as it seemed to him, would be covered by mist in his memory and would only appear to him in dreams with a touching smile, as other women did. But more than a month passed, deep winter came, and yet everything was as clear in his memory as if he had parted with Anna Sergeevna only the day before. And the memories burned brighter and brighter. Whether from the voices of his children doing their homework, which reached him in his study in the evening quiet, or from hearing a romance, or an organ in a restaurant, or the blizzard howling in the chimney, everything would suddenly rise up in his memory: what had happened on the jetty, and the early morning with mist on the mountains, and the steamer from Feodosia, and the kisses. He would pace the room for a long time, and remember, and smile, and then his memories would turn to reveries, and in his imagination the past would mingle with what was still to be. Anna Sergeevna was not a dream, she followed him everywhere like a shadow and watched him. Closing his eyes, he saw her as if alive, and she seemed younger, more beautiful, more tender than she was; and he also seemed better to himself than he had been then, in Yalta. In the evenings she gazed at him from the bookcase, the fireplace, the corner, he could hear her breathing, the gentle rustle of her skirts. In the street he followed women with his eyes, looking for one who resembled her …

And he was tormented now by a strong desire to tell someone his memories. But at home it was impossible to talk of his love, and away from home there was no one to talk with. Certainly not among his tenants nor at the bank. And what was there to say? Had he been in love then? Was there anything beautiful, poetic, or instructive, or merely interesting, in his relations with Anna Sergeevna? And he found himself speaking vaguely of love, of women, and no one could guess what it was about, and only his wife raised her dark eyebrows and said:

"You know, Dimitri, the role of fop doesn't suit you at all."

One night, as he was leaving the Doctors' Club together with his partner, an official, he could not help himself and said:

"If you only knew what a charming woman I met in Yalta!"

The official got into a sleigh and drove off, but suddenly turned around and called out:

"Dmitri Dmitrich!"

"What?"

"You were right earlier: the sturgeon was a bit off!"

Those words, so very ordinary, for some reason suddenly made Gurov indignant, struck him as humiliating, impure. Such savage manners, such faces! These senseless nights, and such uninteresting, unremarkable days! Frenzied card-playing, gluttony, drunkenness, constant talk about the same thing. Useless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one's time, the best of one's powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life, some sort of nonsense, and it was impossible to get away or flee, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or a prison camp!

Gurov did not sleep all night and felt indignant, and as a result had a headache all the next day. And the following nights he slept poorly, sitting up in bed all the time and thinking, or pacing up and down. He was sick of the children, sick of the bank, did not want to go anywhere or talk about anything.

In December, during the holidays, he got ready to travel and told his wife he was leaving for Petersburg to solicit for a certain young man—and went to S. Why? He did not know very well himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeevna and talk with her, to arrange a meeting, if he could.

He arrived at S. in the morning and took the best room in the hotel, where the whole floor was covered with gray army flannel and there was an inkstand on the table, gray with dust, with a horseback rider, who held his hat in his raised hand, but whose head was broken off. The hall porter gave him the necessary information: von Dideritz lives in his own house on Staro-Goncharnaya Street, not far from the hotel; he has a good life, is wealthy, keeps his own horses, everybody in town knows him. The porter pronounced it "Dridiritz."

Gurov walked unhurriedly to Staro-Goncharnaya Street, found the house. Just opposite the house stretched a fence, long, gray, with spikes.

"You could flee from such a fence," thought Gurov, looking now at the windows, now at the fence.

He reflected: today was not a workday, and the husband was probably at home. And anyhow it would be tactless to go in and cause embarrassment. If he sent a message, it might fall into the husband's hands, and that would ruin everything. It would be best to trust to chance. And he kept pacing up and down the street and near the fence and waited for his chance. He saw a beggar go in the gates and saw the dogs attack him, then, an hour later, he heard someone playing a piano, and the sounds reached him faintly, indistinctly. It must have been Anna Sergeevna playing. The front door suddenly opened and some old woman came out, the familiar white spitz running after her. Gurov wanted to call the dog, but his heart suddenly throbbed, and in his excitement he was unable to remember the spitz's name.

He paced up and down, and hated the gray fence more and more, and now he thought with vexation that Anna Sergeevna had forgotten him, and was perhaps amusing herself with another man, and that that was so natural in the situation of a young woman who had to look at this cursed fence from morning till evening. He went back to his hotel room and sat on the sofa for a long time, not knowing what to do, then had dinner, then took a long nap.

"How stupid and upsetting this all is," he thought, when he woke up and looked at the dark windows: it was already evening. "So I've had my sleep. Now what am I to do for the night?"

He sat on the bed, which was covered with a cheap, gray, hospital-like blanket, and taunted himself in vexation:

"Here's the lady with the little dog for you … Here's an adventure for you … Yes, here you sit."

That morning, at the train station, a poster with very big lettering had caught his eye: it was the opening night of The Geisha. He remembered it and went to the theater.

"It's very likely that she goes to opening nights," he thought.

The theater was full. And here, too, as in all provincial theaters generally, a haze hung over the chandeliers, the gallery stirred noisily; the local dandies stood in the front row before the performance started, their hands behind their backs; and here, too, in the governor's box, the governor's daughter sat in front, wearing a boa, while the governor himself modestly hid behind the portière, and only his hands could be seen; the curtain swayed, the orchestra spent a long time tuning up. All the while the public came in and took their seats, Gurov kept searching greedily with his eyes.

Anna Sergeevna came in. She sat in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her, his heart was wrung, and he realized clearly that there was now no person closer, dearer, or more important for him in the whole world; this small woman, lost in the provincial crowd, not remarkable for anything, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, now filled his whole life, was his grief, his joy, the only happiness he now wished for himself; and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, with its trashy local violins, he thought how beautiful she was. He thought and dreamed.

A man came in with Anna Sergeevna and sat down next to her, a young man with little side-whiskers, very tall, stooping; he nodded his head at every step, and it seemed he was perpetually bowing. This was probably her husband, whom she, in an outburst of bitter feeling that time in Yalta, had called a lackey. And indeed, in his long figure, his side-whiskers, his little bald spot, there was something of lackeyish modesty; he had a sweet smile, and the badge of some learned society gleamed in his buttonhole, like the badge of a lackey.

During the first intermission the husband went to smoke; she remained in her seat. Gurov, who was also sitting in the stalls, went up to her and said in a trembling voice and with a forced smile:

"How do you do?"

She looked at him and paled, then looked again in horror, not believing her eyes, and tightly clutched her fan and lorgnette in her hand, obviously struggling with herself to keep from fainting. Both were silent. She sat, he stood, alarmed at her confusion, not venturing to sit down next to her. The tuning-up violins and flutes sang out, it suddenly became frightening, it seemed that people were gazing at them from all the boxes. But then she got up and quickly walked to the exit, he followed her, and they both went confusedly through corridors and stairways, going up, then down, and the uniforms of the courts, the schools, and the imperial estates flashed before them, all with badges; ladies flashed by, fur coats on hangers, a drafty wind blew, drenching them with the smell of cigar stubs. And Gurov, whose heart was pounding, thought: "Oh, Lord! Why these people, this orchestra …"

And just then he suddenly recalled how, at the station in the evening after he had seen Anna Sergeevna off, he had said to himself that everything was over and they would never see each other again. But how far it still was from being over!

On a narrow, dark stairway with the sign "To the Amphitheater," she stopped.

"How you frightened me!" she said, breathing heavily, still pale, stunned. "Oh, how you frightened me! I'm barely alive. Why did you come? Why?"

"But understand, Anna, understand …" he said in a low voice, hurrying. "I beg you to understand …"

She looked at him with fear, with entreaty, with love, looked at him intently, the better to keep his features in her memory.

"I've been suffering so!" she went on, not listening to him. "I think only of you all the time, I've lived by my thoughts of you. And I've tried to forget, to forget, but why, why did you come?"

Further up, on the landing, two high-school boys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov did not care, he drew Anna Sergeevna to him and began kissing her face, her cheeks, her hands.

"What are you doing, what are you doing!" she repeated in horror, pushing him away from her. "We've both lost our minds. Leave today, leave at once … I adjure you by all that's holy, I implore you … Somebody's coming!"

Someone was climbing the stairs.

"You must leave …" Anna Sergeevna went on in a whisper. "Do you hear, Dmitri Dmitrich? I'll come to you in Moscow. I've never been happy, I'm unhappy now, and I'll never, never be happy, never! Don't make me suffer still more! I swear I'll come to Moscow. But we must part now! My dear one, my good one, my darling, we must part!"

She pressed his hand and quickly began going downstairs, turning back to look at him, and it was clear from her eyes that she was indeed not happy … Gurov stood for a little while, listened, then, when everything was quiet, found his coat and left the theater.




IV




And Anna Sergeevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once every two or three months she left S., and told her husband she was going to consult a professor about her female disorder—and her husband did and did not believe her. Arriving in Moscow, she stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar3 and at once sent a man in a red hat to Gurov. Gurov came to see her, and nobody in Moscow knew of it.

Once he was going to see her in that way on a winter morning (the messenger had come the previous evening but had not found him in). With him was his daughter, whom he wanted to see off to school, which was on the way. Big, wet snow was falling.

"It's now three degrees above freezing, and yet it's snowing," Gurov said to his daughter. "But it's warm only near the surface of the earth, while in the upper layers of the atmosphere the temperature is quite different."

"And why is there no thunder in winter, papa?"

He explained that, too. He spoke and thought that here he was going to a rendezvous, and not a single soul knew of it or probably would ever know. He had two lives: an apparent one, seen and known by all who needed it, filled with conventional truth and conventional deceit, which perfectly resembled the lives of his acquaintances and friends, and another that went on in secret. And by some strange coincidence, perhaps an accidental one, everything that he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, which constituted the core of his life, occurred in secret from others, while everything that made up his lie, his shell, in which he hid in order to conceal the truth— for instance, his work at the bank, his arguments at the club, his "inferior race," his attending official celebrations with his wife—all this was in full view. And he judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always supposed that every man led his own real and very interesting life under the cover of secrecy, as under the cover of night. Every personal existence was upheld by a secret, and it was perhaps partly for that reason that every cultivated man took such anxious care that his personal secret should be respected.

After taking his daughter to school, Gurov went to the Slavyansky Bazaar. He took his fur coat off downstairs, went up, and knocked softly at the door. Anna Sergeevna, wearing his favorite gray dress, tired from the trip and the expectation, had been waiting for him since the previous evening; she was pale, looked at him and did not smile, and he had barely come in when she was already leaning on his chest. Their kiss was long, lingering, as if they had not seen each other for two years.

"Well, how is your life there?" he asked. "What's new?"

"Wait, I'll tell you … I can't."

She could not speak because she was crying. She turned away from him and pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.

"Well, let her cry a little, and meanwhile I'll sit down," he thought, and sat down in an armchair.

Then he rang and ordered tea; and then, while he drank tea, she went on standing with her face turned to the window… She was crying from anxiety, from a sorrowful awareness that their life had turned out so sadly; they only saw each other in secret, they hid from people like thieves! Was their life not broken?

"Well, stop now," he said.

For him it was obvious that this love of theirs would not end soon, that there was no knowing when. Anna Sergeevna's attachment to him grew ever stronger, she adored him, and it would have been unthinkable to tell her that it all really had to end at some point; and she would not have believed it.

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to caress her, to make a joke, and at that moment he saw himself in the mirror.

His head was beginning to turn gray. And it seemed strange to him that he had aged so much in those last years, had lost so much of his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembled. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably already near the point where it would begin to fade and wither, like his own life. Why did she love him so? Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met women, became intimate, parted, but not once did he love; there was anything else, but not love.

And only now, when his head was gray, had he really fallen in love as one ought to—for the first time in his life.

He and Anna Sergeevna loved each other like very close, dear people, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as if they were two birds of passage, a male and a female, who had been caught and forced to live in separate cages. They had forgiven each other the things they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.

Formerly, in sad moments, he had calmed himself with all sorts of arguments, whatever had come into his head, but now he did not care about any arguments, he felt deep compassion, he wanted to be sincere, tender …

"Stop, my good one," he said, "you've had your cry—and enough … Let's talk now, we'll think up something."

Then they had a long discussion, talked about how to rid themselves of the need for hiding, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long periods. How could they free themselves from these unbearable bonds?

"How? How?" he asked, clutching his head. "How?"

And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.
DECEMBER 1899






AT CHRISTMASTIME








I




What'll I write?" asked Yegor, and he dipped the pen.

Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years now. After the wedding, her daughter Yefimia had left for Petersburg with her husband, had sent two letters, and then seemed to have dropped from sight: not a sound, not a breath. And whether the old woman was milking the cow at dawn, or lighting the stove, or dozing at night, she kept thinking of one thing: how was Yefimia, was she alive? She would have liked to write a letter, but the old man did not know how to write, and there was nobody to ask.

But now Christmastime had come, and Vasilisa could not help herself and went to Yegor, the tavernkeeper's brother, who, once he came home from the army, just stayed around the tavern all the time and did nothing; they said he was good at writing letters, if you paid him properly. Vasilisa spoke with the cook in the tavern, then with the tavernkeeper, then with Yegor himself. They agreed on fifteen kopecks.

And now—this was in the tavern, in the kitchen, the day after the feast—Yegor was sitting at the table and holding the pen in his hand. Vasilisa stood before him, deep in thought, with an expression of care and grief on her face. Her old man, Pyotr, very thin, tall, with a tanned bald spot, had come with her; he stood and gazed fixedly ahead of him, like a blind man. Pork was being fried in a pan on the stove; it hissed and spat and even seemed to say "flu-flu-flu." It was stuffy.

"What'll I write?" Yegor asked again.

"Wait!" said Vasilisa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously. "Don't rush me! You're not writing for free, you're getting money for it! Well, so write. To our gentle son-in-law, Andrei Khrisanfych, and our beloved only daughter, Yefimia Petrovna, we send with our love a low bow and our parental blessing forever inviolable."

"Got it. Keep shooting."

"And we also wish you a happy feast of the Nativity of Christ, we are alive and well and wish you the same from the Lord … the Heavenly King."

Vasilisa pondered and exchanged glances with the old man.

"And wish you the same from the Lord… the Heavenly King …" she repeated and began to cry.

She could not say anything more. And before, when she used to lie thinking at night, it had seemed to her that even ten letters would not have held everything. Since her daughter had left with her husband much water had flowed under the bridge, the old people had lived like orphans and sighed deeply at night, as if they had buried their daughter. And so many things had happened in the village during that time, so many weddings, so many deaths. Such long winters! Such long nights!

"It's hot!" said Yegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. "Must be a hundred degrees. What else?" he asked.

The old people were silent.

"What does your son-in-law do?" asked Yegor.

"He used to be a soldier, my dear, you know that," the old man answered in a weak voice. "He came home from the army the same time you did. He was a soldier, and so now he's in Petersburg, in some water-curing institution. The doctor treats his patients with water. So he's doorkeeper at the doctor's."

"It's written here …" the old woman said, taking a letter out of her handkerchief. "We got it from Yefimia, God knows how long ago. Maybe they're no longer in this world."

Yegor thought a little and began writing quickly.

"In this present time," he wrote, "since your fate has destinned you out for a Military Cureer, we advise You to open the Code of Disciplinery Measures and the Criminal Laws of the Department of War and You will perceive in the said Law the civilizaytion of the Ranks of the Department of War."

He was writing and reading aloud what he had written, and Vasilisa reflected that they ought to write about the want of the past year, when they had not had grain enough to last even till Christmastime, and they had been forced to sell the cow. They ought to ask for some money, to write and say that the old man was often sick and probably would soon give up his soul to God … But how to put it into words? What to say first and what after?

"Pay atention," Yegor went on writing, "to Volume 5 of the Military Decrees. Soldier is a commun noun, a Well-nown one. The Soldier is called the Farmost General and the leest Private …"

The old man moved his lips and said quietly:

"It wouldn't be a bad thing to see the grandchildren."

"What grandchildren?" asked the old woman, and she gave him an angry look. "Maybe there aren't any!"

"No grandchildren? And maybe there are. Who knows!" "And thereby You can judge," Yegor was rushing along, "who is the Forin enemy and who is the Inturnal one. Our Farmost Inturnal Enemy is: Bacchus."

The pen scratched away, making flourishes that looked like fish hooks on the paper. Yegor hurried and re-read every line several times. He was sitting on a stool, his legs spread wide under the table, well-fed, stalwart, beefy-faced, ruddy-necked. This was vulgarity itself, crude, arrogant, invincible, proud of having been born and raised in a tavern, and Vasilisa understood very well that this was vulgarity, but she could not put it into words, and only glared angrily and suspiciously at Yegor. His voice, his incomprehensible words, the heat and stuffiness gave her a headache, confused her thoughts, and she did not say or think anything more, but only waited until he finished his scratching. But the old man looked on with complete trust. He trusted both in the old woman who had brought him there and in Yegor; and earlier, when he had mentioned the water-curing institution, his face had shown clearly that he trusted both in the institution and in the curative power of water.

When he finished writing, Yegor stood up and read out the whole letter from the beginning. The old man did not understand it, but he nodded his head trustfully.

"Nice job, smooth …" he said. "God bless you. Nice job …"

They put three five-kopeck pieces on the table and left the tavern; the old man looked straight ahead of him fixedly, like a blind man, and complete trust was written on his face, but Vasilisa shook her fist at the dog as they left the tavern, and said angrily:

"Ugh, you pest!"

The old woman did not sleep all night, troubled by thoughts, but she got up at dawn, said her prayers, and went to the station to mail the letter.

The station was seven miles away.




II




The water-curing clinic of Dr. B. O. Moselweiser was open on New Year's Day, just as on ordinary days, only the doorkeeper Andrei Khrisanfych was wearing a uniform with new galloons, his boots shone somehow specially, and he wished everyone who came in a Happy New Year.

It was morning. Andrei Khrisanfych stood by the door and read a newspaper. At exactly ten o'clock a general came in, a familiar figure, one of the regular clients, and after him the postman. Andrei Khrisanfych helped the general out of his overcoat and said:

"Happy New Year, Your Excellency!"

"Thank you, my good man. And the same to you."

And, going up the stairs, the general nodded towards a door and asked (he asked every day and then forgot each time):

"What's in this room?"

"That is the massage room, Your Excellency!"

When the general's steps died away, Andrei Khrisanfych looked through the mail and found a letter addressed to him. He opened it, read a few lines, then, while looking into his newspaper, went unhurriedly to his room, which was right there, downstairs, at the end of the corridor. His wife Yefimia was sitting on the bed nursing a baby; another child, the eldest, stood beside her, resting his curly head on her lap, and the third was asleep on the bed.

Going into his little room, Andrei handed the letter to his wife and said:

"Must be from the village."

Then he went out, without taking his eyes off the newspaper, and stopped in the corridor not far from his door. He could hear Yefimia reading the first lines in a trembling voice. She read and could not go on; those lines were enough for her, she dissolved in tears and, embracing her eldest boy and kissing him, began to talk, and it was impossible to tell whether she was crying or laughing.

"It's from grandma and grandpa …" she said. "From the village … Queen of Heaven, saints above. There's snow there now, up to the roofs … the trees are all white. Children on tiny sleds … And dear, bald-headed grandpa on the stove … and the little yellow dog … My dear darlings!"

Andrei Khrisanfych, listening to that, remembered that his wife had given him letters three or four times, asking him to send them to the village, but some important business had prevented him: he had not sent the letters and they had gotten lost somewhere.

"There are little hares running in the field," Yefimia went on chanting, bathed in tears, kissing her boy. "Grandpa is quiet, kind, grandma is kind, too, pitiful. It's a soulful life in the village, a god-fearing life … And there's a church there, the peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven, our mother and helper, take us away from here!"

Andrei Khrisanfych went back to his little room to smoke until someone came, and Yefimia suddenly fell silent, quieted down, and wiped her eyes, and only her lips quivered. She was very afraid of him, oh, how afraid! She trembled, she was terrified by his step, his glance; she did not dare say a single word in his presence.

Andrei Khrisanfych lit a cigarette, but just then there came a ring from upstairs. He put the cigarette out and, making a very serious face, ran to his front door.

The general was coming down, pink and fresh after his bath.

"And what's in this room?" he asked, pointing to a door.

Andrei Khrisanfych drew himself to attention and said loudly:

"Charcot showers,1 Your Excellency!"
JANUARY 1900






IN THE RAVINE








I




The village of Ukleyevo lay in a ravine, so that from the highway and the railroad station all you could see was the belfry and the smokestacks of the cotton mills. When passersby asked what village it was, they would be told:

"The one where the verger ate all the caviar at the funeral."

Once, at the memorial dinner for the factory-owner Kostiukov, the old verger spotted black caviar among the hors d'oeuvres and greedily began to eat it; they pushed him, pulled him by the sleeve, but he was as if frozen with pleasure; he felt nothing and simply ate. He ate all the caviar, and there were about four pounds of it in the jar. And much time had passed since then, the verger was long dead, but the caviar was still remembered. Either the life there was so poor, or the people were unable to notice anything except this unimportant event that had happened ten years ago, but nothing else was ever told about the village of Ukleyevo.

It was a place of ever-present fever, and there was swampy mud even in summer, especially under the fences, over which old pussywillows hung, casting broad shadows. There was always a smell of factory waste and the acetic acid used in the treatment of the cotton. The factories—three cotton mills and one tannery—were situated not in the village itself but on the outskirts and further away. They were small factories, and in all employed about four hundred workers, not more. The water in the river often stank on account of the tannery; the waste contaminated the meadows, the peasants' cattle suffered from anthrax, and the factory was ordered closed. It was considered closed, but went on working secretly, with the knowledge of the district police officer and the district doctor, to each of whom the owner paid ten roubles a month. There were only two decent houses in the whole village, brick, with iron roofs: one housed the rural administration; in the other, a two-story house just opposite the church, lived Grigory Petrovich Tsybukin, a tradesman from Epifanyevo.

Grigory kept a grocery store, but that was only for appearances; in reality he traded in vodka, cattle, leather, grain, pigs, traded in whatever there was, and when, for instance, there was a demand abroad for magpie feathers for ladies' hats, he made thirty kopecks a pair; he bought up woodlots for cutting, lent money on interest, was generally a shrewd old man.

He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, served with the police, in the criminal investigation department, and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, went into trading and helped his father, but no real help was expected of him, because he was of weak health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a beautiful, shapely woman, who went about on Sundays in a hat and with a parasol, got up early, went to bed late, and, with her skirts held up and her keys jangling, raced about all day long, now to the barn, now to the cellar, now to the shop, and old Tsybukin watched her merrily, his eyes glowed, and at such moments he regretted that it was not the elder son who had married her but the younger, the deaf one, who obviously had little understanding of feminine beauty.

The old man had always had an inclination for family life, and he loved his family more than anything in the world, especially his elder son, the detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya had no sooner married the deaf son than she showed an extraordinary business sense and knew at once who could be given credit and who could not, kept the keys herself, not trusting them even to her husband, clicked on the abacus, looked horses in the teeth like a peasant, and was forever laughing or shouting; and, no matter what she did or said, the old man only went soft and murmured:

"Ah, what a daughter-in-law! What a beauty …"

He was a widower, but a year after his son's wedding he could no longer stand it and got married himself. Twenty miles from Ukleyevo a girl was found for him, Varvara Nikolaevna, from a good family, no longer young, but beautiful, imposing. As soon as she settled in the little upstairs room, everything brightened in the house, as if new glass had been put in the windows. The icon lamps were lit, the tables were covered with snow-white tablecloths, red-eyed flowers appeared on the windowsills and in the front garden, and at dinner they no longer ate from one bowl, but a plate was set in front of each person. Varvara Nikolaevna smiled pleasantly and gently, and it seemed as if everything in the house were smiling. Beggars, wayfarers, and pilgrims began coming into the yard, something that had never happened before; the plaintive, sing-song voices of Ukleyevo peasant women and the guilty coughing of weak, wasted men dismissed from the factories for drunkenness, were heard under the windows. Varvara Nikolaevna helped out with money, bread, old clothes, and later, once she felt at home, also began pilfering from the shop. Once the deaf son saw her take two packets of tea, and that puzzled him.

"Mother took two packets of tea," he said later to his father. "Where should I write it down?"

The old man did not answer, but stood thinking, moving his eyebrows, and then went upstairs to his wife.

"Varvarushka, dearest," he said tenderly, "if you ever need anything from the shop, take it. You're welcome to take it, don't think twice."

And the next day the deaf son, running across the yard, called out to her:

"Mother, if you need anything—take it!"

In her giving of alms there was something new, something cheerful and light, as with the icon lamps and red flowers. When, on the eve of a fast or a major feast that lasted three days, they sold rotten corned beef to the peasants, which gave off such a strong stench that it was hard to stand near the barrel, and took scythes, hats, and their wives' shawls as pledges from drunken men, when factory workers stupefied by bad vodka lay about in the mud, and sin, condensing, seemed to hang like murk in the air, then it came as something of a relief to think that there, in the house, was a quiet, neat woman who had nothing to do with corned beef or vodka; in those oppressive, murky days her alms worked like a safety valve on an engine.

The days were busy in Tsybukin's house. The sun was not up yet, and Aksinya was already snorting as she washed in the front hall, the samovar was boiling in the kitchen and humming, boding something ill. Old Grigory Petrovich, dressed in a long black frock coat and cotton trousers, with tall, shiny boots, so clean and small, walked through the rooms, tapping his heels like the dear father-in-law in the famous song. The shop was opened. When day came, a light droshky was drawn up to the porch and the old man dashingly climbed into it, pulling his big visored cap down to his ears, and nobody looking at him would have said he was fifty-six years old. His wife and daughter-in-law would see him off, and at that time, when he was wearing a fine, clean frock coat and the droshky was harnessed to a huge black stallion worth three hundred roubles, the old man did not like to have peasants approach him with their petitions and complaints; he hated the peasants and scorned them, and if he saw some peasant waiting at the gate, he would shout wrathfully:

"No standing there! Move on!"

Or, if it was a beggar, he would shout:

"God will provide!"

He would drive off on business; his wife, in a dark dress with a black apron, would tidy the rooms or help in the kitchen. Aksinya tended the shop, and from the yard came the clink of bottles and money, Aksinya's laughter and shouting, or the angry voices of customers she had offended; at the same time it could be noted that the secret sale of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man also sat in the shop, or else walked around outside, hatless, his hands in his pockets, gazing distractedly now at the cottages, now up at the sky. Six times a day they had tea in the house; four times they sat down to eat. In the evenings they counted the receipts and wrote them down, then slept soundly.

In Ukleyevo, all three cotton mills were connected by telephone with the quarters of the owners, the Khrymin Seniors, the Khrymin Juniors, and Kostiukov. A telephone was also installed in the local administrative office, but there it soon stopped working, because it got infested with bedbugs and cockroaches. The local headman was barely literate and began every word in official documents with a capital letter, but when the telephone broke down, he said:

"Yes, it'll be hard for us now without a telephone."

The Khrymin Seniors were constantly taking the Khrymin Juniors to court, the Juniors also sometimes quarreled with each other and went to court, and then their factory would stop working for a month or two, until they made peace, and this entertained the populace of Ukleyevo, because there would be much talk and gossip on the occasion of each quarrel. On holidays Kostiukov and the Khrymin Juniors organized drives and raced around Ukleyevo, running down calves. Aksinya, her starched skirts rustling, all dressed up, would stroll outside near her shop; the Juniors would pick her up and drive away with her as if by force. Then old Tsybukin would also drive out, to show off his new horse, and take Varvara with him.

In the evening, after the drives, when everyone was in bed, an expensive accordion would begin to play in the Juniors' yard, and if the moon was out, these sounds would disturb and delight the heart, and Ukleyevo would no longer seem like a hole.




II




The elder son Anisim came home very rarely, only on major feasts, but to make up for it he often sent presents home with his fellow villagers and letters written in someone else's hand, a very beautiful one, each time on a sheet of writing paper, with the look of a petition. The letters were full of expressions such as Anisim never used in conversation: "My gentle mama and papa, I am sending you a pound of chamomile tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs."

At the bottom of each page "Anisim Tsybukin" was scrawled, as if with a broken pen, and below it, in the same beautiful hand: "Agent."

The letters would be read aloud several times, and the old man, moved, flushed with excitement, would say:

"See, he didn't want to live at home, he got into the learned line. So, let him! Each to his own place."

Once just before Lent there was a heavy rain with hail; the old man and Varvara went to the window to look, and—lo and behold, Anisim was driving up in a sledge from the station. They were not expecting him at all. He came in uneasy and alarmed at something; and so he remained all the while afterwards; and his behavior was somehow casual. He was in no hurry to leave, and it looked as if he had been dismissed from his job. Varvara was glad he had come; she kept glancing at him somehow slyly, sighing and shaking her head.

"How can it be, dear hearts?" she said. "Why, the lad's nearly twenty-eight and he's still going around a bachelor—oh, tush, tush …"

From the other room all that could be heard of her soft, even speech was: "Oh, tush, tush." She began to whisper with the old man and Aksinya, and their faces, too, acquired a sly and mysterious expression, as with conspirators.

They decided to get Anisim married.

"Oh, tush, tush! … The younger brother's been married a long time," said Varvara, "and you go on without a mate, like a cock at the market. What sort of thing is that? You'll get married, God willing, then go to work if you like, and the wife can stay home and help us. There's no order in your life, lad, and I can see you've forgotten all order. Oh, tush, tush, there's nothing but sin with you townsfolk."

When the Tsybukins married, the most beautiful brides were chosen for them, since they were rich. For Anisim, too, a beautiful girl was found. He himself was of uninteresting, unremarkable appearance; along with his weak, sickly build and small stature, he had full, plump cheeks, as if he puffed them out; his eyes never blinked, and their gaze was sharp; he had a sparse red beard, and when he pondered, he kept putting it in his mouth and chewing it; besides, he drank often, and it showed in his face and gait. But when he was told that they had a very beautiful bride for him, he said:

"Well, and I'm not so lopsided myself. All of us Tsybukins are handsome, I must say."

Just below the town was the village of Torguyevo. Half of it had recently been incorporated into the town, the other half remained a village. In the first half, in her own little house, lived a certain widow; she had a sister, completely poor, who did day labor, and this sister had a daughter, Lipa, a young girl who also did day labor. Lipa's beauty was already being talked about in Torguyevo, only everybody was disheartened by her terrible poverty; they reasoned that some older man or widower would marry her, overlooking her poverty, or would take her for himself "just so," and her mother would be fed along with her. Varvara found out about Lipa from the matchmakers and paid a visit to Torguyevo.

Then a showing was arranged in the aunt's house, quite properly, with food and wine, and Lipa wore a new pink dress specially made for the occasion, and a crimson ribbon shone like a flame in her hair. She was thin, frail, wan, with fine, tender features, darkened from working in the open air; a sad, timid smile never left her face, and her gaze was childlike—trusting and full of curiosity

She was young, still a girl, with barely noticeable breasts, but she could already marry, since she was of age. She was indeed beautiful, and the only thing that could be found displeasing in her was her big, mannish hands, which now hung down idly like two big claws.

"There's no dowry, but we don't mind," the old man said to the aunt, "we also took one from a poor family for our son Stepan, and now we can't praise her enough. Around the house, or at work—a golden touch."

Lipa stood by the door and it was as if she wanted to say: "Do what you like with me, I trust you," but her mother Praskovya, the day laborer, hid in the kitchen, dying from timidity. Once, when she was still young, a merchant whose floors she used to scrub stamped his feet at her in anger, and she was so badly frightened, so mortified, that the fear remained in her soul for the rest of her life. And from fear her hands and feet always trembled, her cheeks trembled. Sitting in the kitchen, she tried to overhear what the guests were talking about and kept crossing herself, pressing her fingers to her forehead and glancing at the icon. Anisim, slightly drunk, opened the kitchen door and said casually:

"What are you sitting in here for, precious mother? We miss you."

And Praskovya, turning shy, pressing her hands to her skinny, emaciated breast, answered:

"Ah, mercy, sir … We're much pleased with you, sir."

After the showing, the day of the wedding was set. Then, at home, Anisim kept pacing the rooms, whistling, or, suddenly remembering something, would lapse into thought and stare at the floor, fixedly, piercingly, as if he wanted to penetrate deep into the ground with his gaze. He expressed neither pleasure at getting married, married soon, on Krasnaya Gorka,1 nor any desire to see his fiancée, but simply whistled. And it was obvious that he was getting married only because his father and stepmother wanted it and because it was a village custom: a son should marry so that there would be a helper in the house. Going away, he was in no hurry and generally behaved differently than on his previous visits—was somehow especially casual and said things that were out of place.




III




In the village of Shikalovo lived two dressmakers, sisters, who belonged to the Flagellants.2 They were hired to make new dresses for the wedding, and they often came for fittings and lingered a long time over tea. Varvara had a brown dress made, with black lace and bugles, and Aksinya a light green dress with a yellow front and train. When the dressmakers were done, Tsybukin paid them not in cash but in goods from his shop, and they went away from him sadly, carrying bundles of stearine candles and sardines, which they did not need at all, and when they got out of the village into the fields, they sat down on a knoll and began to cry.

Anisim came three days before the wedding in all new clothes. He wore shiny rubber galoshes and a red string tipped with beads instead of a tie, and over his shoulders hung a coat, also new, his arms not in the sleeves.

After gravely saying a prayer, he greeted his father and gave him ten silver roubles and ten half roubles; he gave the same amount to Varvara, and to Aksinya twenty quarter roubles. The main charm of this present was precisely that all the coins, as if specially chosen, were new and glittered in the sun. Trying to look grave and serious, Anisim strained his face and puffed his cheeks, and he gave off a smell of drink—he had probably rushed out to the buffet at every station. And again there was some sort of casualness, something superfluous in the man. Later Anisim and the old man had tea and a bite to eat, while Varvara fingered the new roubles and asked about local people who were living in town.

"It's all right, thank God, they have a good life," said Anisim. "Only Ivan Yegorov had something happen in his family: his old woman, Sofya Nikiforovna, died. Of consumption. They ordered a memorial dinner for the repose of her soul at a confectioner's, two roubles fifty a person. And there was grape wine. Peasants came— our locals—it was two-fifty for them, too. They didn't eat anything. What does a peasant know about sauce!"

"Two-fifty!" said the old man and shook his head.

"And so what? It's not a village. You stop at a restaurant to have a bite to eat, you order this and that, a company gathers, you have a drink—lo and behold, it's daybreak and three or four roubles each, if you please. And when it's with Samorodov, he likes to top it all off with coffee and cognac, and cognac's sixty kopecks a glass, sir."

"And it's all a pack of lies," the old man said admiringly. "A pack of lies!"

"I'm always with Samorodov now. It's that same Samorodov who writes my letters. He writes magnificently. And if I was to tell you, mother," Anisim went on merrily, addressing Varvara, "what sort of man that same Samorodov is, you wouldn't believe it. We all call him Mukhtar,3 because he's got the looks of an Armenian—all dark. I can see through him, I know all his dealings like the palm of my hand, mother, and he feels it and keeps following me, never leaves me, and now we're inseparable. He seems a little scared, but he can't live without me. Wherever I go, he goes. I've got a true and trusty eye, mother. I see a peasant selling a shirt at the flea market. 'Stop! That's a stolen shirt!' And it turns out to be so: the shirt's stolen."

"But how do you know?" asked Varvara.

"No idea, I've got that sort of eye. I don't know anything about this shirt, only for some reason I'm just drawn to it: it's stolen and that's that. They say in the department: 'Well, Anisim's gone hunting woodcock!' That means looking for stolen goods. Yes … Anybody can steal, but how to hold on to it! It's a big world, but there's nowhere to hide stolen goods."

"And in our village the Guntorevs had a ram and two ewes stolen last week," Varvara said and sighed. "And there's nobody to go looking for them … Oh, tush, tush …"

"So what? It could be done. Nothing to it."

The day of the wedding came. It was a cool but bright and cheerful April day. From early morning troikas and pairs, bells jingling, drove around Ukleyevo, their manes and yokes decorated with multicolored ribbons. The rooks, disturbed by this driving, squawked in the pussywillows, and the starlings sang incessantly, straining their voices, as if rejoicing that there was a wedding at the Tsybukins'.

In the house the tables were already laid with long fish, hams, and stuffed fowl, tins of sprats, various salted and pickled things, and numerous bottles of vodka and wine, and there was a smell of smoked sausage and spoiled lobster. And around the table, tapping his heels and sharpening one knife against another, walked the old man. Someone was calling Varvara all the time, asking for something, and she, with a lost look, breathing hard, kept running to the kitchen, where a chef sent by Kostiukov and a kitchen maid from the Khrymin Juniors had been working since dawn. Aksinya, her hair curled, with no dress on, in a corset and creaking new boots, rushed about the yard like a whirlwind, and only her bare knees and breast kept flashing. It was noisy, oaths and curses were heard; passersby stopped at the flung-open gates, and it all felt as if something extraordinary was being prepared.

"They've gone for the bride!"

Harness bells rang out and faded away far beyond the village … Between two and three o'clock people came running: again the bells were heard, they were bringing the bride! The church was packed, the big chandelier was lit, the choir, at old Tsybukin's wish, sang from books. The shining lights and bright dresses dazzled Lipa, it seemed to her that the loud voices of the choir were beating on her head with hammers; her corset, which she was wearing for the first time in her life, and her high shoes squeezed her, and she looked as if she had just come out of a swoon—her eyes wide and uncomprehending. Anisim, in a black frock coat, with a red string instead of a tie, stared pensively at one spot, and each time the choir gave a loud cry, he quickly crossed himself. He was moved in his heart, he felt like weeping. This church had been familiar to him from childhood; his late mother had brought him there for communion; he had sung in the choir with the other boys; for him every little corner, every icon had its memories. Now he was getting married, he had to have a wife for propriety's sake, but he no longer thought about that, he somehow did not remember, he completely forgot the wedding. Tears prevented him from seeing the icons, something pressed on his heart; he prayed and asked God that the inevitable misfortunes which were ready to break over him any day might somehow pass him by, as storm clouds in a time of drought pass by a village without giving a drop of rain. And so many sins had already been heaped up in the past, so many sins, and everything was so inextricable, irreparable, that it somehow even made no sense to ask forgiveness. Yet he did ask forgiveness, and even sobbed loudly, but nobody paid attention to it, thinking he was drunk.

An anxious child's crying was heard:

"Mummy dear, take me home!"

"Quiet there," shouted the priest.

As they returned from church, people ran after them; by the shop, by the gates, and under the windows in the yard there was also a crowd. Peasant women came to chant praises. The young couple had barely crossed the threshold when the choir, already standing in the front hall with their books, struck up loudly, with all their might; musicians, specially invited from town, began to play. Sparkling Don wine was brought in tall glasses, and the carpenter-contractor Yelizarov, a tall, lean old man with such thick eyebrows that his eyes were barely visible, said, addressing the young couple:

"Anisim, and you, little girl, love each other, lead a godly life, my little ones, and the Queen of Heaven will not abandon you." He fell on the old man's shoulder and sobbed. "Grigory Petrovich, let us weep, let us weep for joy!" he said in a high little voice and straightaway suddenly guffawed and went on loudly, in a bass voice: "Ho, ho, ho! And this daughter-in-law of yours is a fine one, too! She's got everything in the right place, I'd say, all smooth, no rattling, the whole mechanism's in order, plenty of screws."

He was a native of the Yegoriev district, but from an early age he had been working in Ukleyevo at the factories and around the district and was at home there. He had long been known as the same tall and lean old man he was now, and had long been called Crutch. For over forty years he had done nothing but repair work at the factories, and that was perhaps the reason why he judged every person or object from the point of view of sturdiness alone: by whether or not it needed repair. And before sitting down at the table he tried several chairs to see if they were sturdy, and also poked the white-fish.

After the sparkling wine they all began to sit down at the table. The guests talked, moved chairs. The choir sang in the front hall, the music played, and at the same time the peasant women were singing in the courtyard, all as one voice—and the result was some terrible, wild mixture of sounds, which made one's head spin.

Crutch fidgeted in his chair and nudged his neighbors with his elbows, preventing them from talking, and now wept, now laughed.

"Little ones, little ones, little ones …" he muttered quickly. "Aksinyushka dear, Varvarushka, let's all live in peace and harmony, my gentle little hatchets …"

He drank rarely, and now became drunk from one glass of English bitters. This disgusting bitters, made of God knows what, stupefied everyone who drank it, as if it hit them on the head. Tongues became confused.

The clergy were there, the factory managers and their wives, merchants and tavernkeepers from other villages. The local headman and the local clerk, who had been serving together for fourteen years and in all that time had never signed a single paper nor allowed a single person to leave their office without having cheated and insulted him, were now sitting side by side, both fat, well fed, and it seemed they were so saturated with falsehood that even the skin of their faces was of some special fraudulent sort. The clerk's wife, an emaciated, cross-eyed woman, had brought all her children with her, and, like a bird of prey, cast sidelong glances at the plates, snatched everything she could lay her hands on, and hid it in her own and her children's pockets.

Lipa sat petrified, with the same look that she had in church. Since making her acquaintance, Anisim had not said a single word to her, so that he did not know to that day what her voice was like; and now, sitting beside her, he still kept silent and drank English bitters, but when he got drunk he began to speak, addressing her aunt, who was sitting opposite him:

"I have a friend whose last name is Samorodov. He's a special man. A personally honorable citizen and a capable speaker. But I can see through him, auntie, and he feels it. Allow me, auntie, to drink with you to Samorodov's health!"

Varvara, tired and confused, walked around the table offering things to the guests, and was clearly pleased that there was so much food and all of it so high-class—now no one could find fault with them. The sun set and the dinner went on; they no longer knew what they were eating, what they were drinking, it was impossible to hear anything that was said, and only from time to time, when the music died down, could some peasant woman in the yard be heard shouting:

"You've sucked enough of our blood, you Herods, a plague upon you!"

In the evening there was dancing to the music. The Khrymin Juniors came with their wine, and one of them, during the quadrille, held a bottle in each hand and a glass in his mouth, and that made everyone laugh. In the middle of the quadrille, someone would start a squatting dance; the green Aksinya only flitted about, and a breeze blew from her train. Someone stepped on her flounce, and Crutch shouted:

"Hey, the plinth got torn off below! Little ones!"

Aksinya had gray, naïve eyes that seldom blinked, and a naïve smile constantly played over her face. And there was something snakelike in those unblinking eyes, and in that small head on its long neck, and in her shapely build; green with a yellow front, smiling, she gazed the way a viper in springtime, stretched out and head up, gazes from the young rye at someone going past. The Khrymins behaved freely with her, and it was quite obvious that she had a long-standing intimacy with the older one. And her deaf husband, who understood nothing, did not look at her; he sat with his legs crossed eating nuts, and cracked them so loudly that it was as if he were firing a pistol.

But now old man Tsybukin himself stepped out to the middle and waved his handkerchief, giving a sign that he, too, wanted to dance a Russian dance, and a hum of approval ran through the whole house and the crowd in the courtyard:

"Himself stepped out! Himself!"

Varvara danced, while the old man just waved the handkerchief and shifted from one heel to the other, but those who were hanging over each other there in the yard, peeking through the windows, were delighted and for a moment forgave him everything—his wealth and his offenses.

"Good boy, Grigory Petrovich!" came from the crowd. "Keep it up! So you can still go to it! Ha, ha!"

It all ended late, past one o'clock in the morning. Anisim went around unsteadily to all the singers and musicians and gave each of them a new half rouble. And the old man, not swaying but somehow favoring one foot, saw the guests off and told each of them:

"The wedding cost two thousand."

As people were leaving, somebody exchanged the Shikalovo tavernkeeper's good vest for an old one, and Anisim suddenly flared up and started shouting:

"Stop! I'll find him at once! I know who stole it! Stop!"

He ran outside, chasing after someone; they caught him, took him under the arms, brought him home, shoved him, drunk, flushed with anger, wet, into the room where the aunt was already undressing Lipa, and locked the door.




IV




Five days passed. Anisim got ready to leave and went upstairs to say good-bye to Varvara. She had all the icon lamps burning, there was a smell of incense, and she herself was sitting by the window knitting a red woolen stocking.

"You didn't spend long with us," she said. "Boring, was it? Oh, tush, tush … We have a good life, there's plenty of everything, and your wedding was celebrated properly, the right way. The old man says two thousand went into it. In short, we live like merchants, only it's boring here. We do people much wrong. My heart aches, my friend—oh, God, how we wrong them! We trade a horse, or buy something, or hire a workman—there's cheating in all of it. Cheating and cheating. The vegetable oil in the shop is bitter, rancid, the people's tar is better. Tell me, for pity's sake, isn't it impossible to sell good oil?"

"Each to his own place, mother."

"But don't we all have to die? Ah, no, really, you should talk with your father! …"

"Why don't you talk with him yourself."

"Well, well! I tell him what I think, and he says the same as you, word for word: each to his own place. In the other world they're not going to sort out who had which place. God's judgment is righteous."

"Of course, nobody's going to sort it out," Anisim said and sighed. "And anyhow God doesn't exist, mother. What's there to sort out!"

Varvara looked at him with astonishment and laughed and clasped her hands. Because she was so sincerely astonished at his words and looked at him as if he were a freak, he became embarrassed.

"Or maybe God does exist, only there's no faith," he said. "As I was being married, I felt out of sorts. Like when you take an egg from under a hen and there's a chick peeping in it, so my conscience suddenly peeped in me, and all the while I was being married, I kept thinking: God exists! But as soon as I stepped out of the church—there was nothing. And how should I know if God exists or not? We weren't taught that when we were little, but here's a baby still at his mother's breast, and he's taught just one thing: each to his own place. Papa doesn't believe in God either. You told me that time that the Guntorevs had their sheep stolen … I found out: it was a Shikalovo peasant who stole them; he stole them, but papa got the skins … There's faith for you!"

Anisim winked an eye and shook his head.

"And the headman doesn't believe in God either," he went on, "neither does the clerk or the beadle. If they go to church and keep the fasts, it's so that people won't speak ill of them, and in case there may really be a Judgment Day. Now they say the end of the world has come, because people have grown weak, don't honor their parents, and so on. That's nonsense. My understanding, mother, is that all troubles come from people having too little conscience. I can see through things, mother, and I understand. If a man's wearing a stolen shirt, I see it. A man's sitting in a tavern, and it looks to you like he's having tea and nothing else, but, tea or no tea, I can also see that he's got no conscience. You walk around the whole day, and there's not a single person with any conscience. And the whole reason is that they don't know whether God exists or not … Well, good-bye, mother. Keep alive and well, and think no evil of me."

Anisim bowed to the ground in front of Varvara.

"I thank you for everything, mother," he said. "You've been a great benefit to our family. You're a very decent woman, and I'm much pleased with you."

Feeling moved, Anisim went out, but came back again and said:

"Samorodov got me involved in a certain business: I'll be rich or I'll perish. If anything happens, mother, you must comfort my father."

"Well, now! Oh, tush, tush … God is merciful. And you, Anisim, you should be more tender with your wife—the two of you just look at each other and pout. You could at least smile, really."

"Yes, she's sort of a strange …" Anisim said and sighed. "She doesn't understand anything, keeps silent. She's too young, let her grow up."

At the porch a tall, sleek white stallion already stood hitched to a charabanc.

Old Tsybukin made a run, leaped up dashingly on the box, and took the reins. Anisim kissed Varvara, Aksinya, and his brother. Lipa also stood on the porch, stood motionless and looked aside, as though she had not come out to say good-bye but just so, for no reason. Anisim went up to her and brushed her cheek with his lips, barely, lightly.

"Good-bye," he said.

And she smiled somehow strangely, without looking at him; her face quivered, and for some reason everyone felt sorry for her. Anisim also hopped up and sat arms akimbo, because he considered himself a handsome man.

As they drove up out of the ravine, Anisim kept looking back at the village. It was a warm, clear day. The cattle were being taken out to pasture for the first time, and girls and women walked beside the herd in their Sunday dresses. A brown bull bellowed, rejoicing in his freedom, and dug his front hooves into the earth. Larks were singing all around, above and below. Anisim looked back at the church, shapely, white—it had recently been whitewashed—and remembered praying in it five days ago; he turned to look at the school with its green roof, at the river, where he once used to swim and fish, and joy leaped in his breast, and he wished that a wall might suddenly grow up from the ground and keep him from going further, so that he could remain only with his past.

At the station they went to the buffet and drank a glass of sherry each. The old man went to his pocket for his purse, in order to pay.

"It's on me!" said Anisim.

The old man went soft, slapped him on the shoulder, and winked at the bartender: See what a son I've got.

"Why don't you stay home, Anisim," the old man said, "you'd be priceless in the business! I'd shower you with gold, sonny."

"I just can't, papa."

The sherry was sourish and smelled of sealing wax, but they drank another glass each.

When the old man came back from the station, for the first moment he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law. As soon as her husband drove out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly became cheerful. Barefoot, in an old, tattered skirt, her sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, she was washing the stairs in the front hall and singing in a high, silvery little voice, and when she carried the big tub of dirty water outside and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile, it seemed that she, too, was a lark.

An old workman who was passing by the porch shook his head and grunted:

"Yes, Grigory Petrovich, what daughters-in-law God sent you!" he said. "Not women, but pure treasures!"




V




On July 8, a Friday, Yelizarov, nicknamed Crutch, and Lipa were coming back from the village of Kazanskoe, where they had gone on a pilgrimage, the occasion being the feast of the church there— the Kazan Mother of God.4 Far behind them walked Lipa's mother Praskovya, who could never keep up, because she was ill and short of breath. It was getting towards evening.

"A-a-ah! …" Crutch was surprised as he listened to Lipa. "A-ah! … We-e-ll?"

"I'm a great lover of preserves, Ilya Makarych," said Lipa. "I sit myself down in a little corner and drink tea with preserves. Or I drink together with Varvara Nikolaevna, and she tells me some touching story. They've got lots of preserves—four jars. 'Eat, Lipa,' they say, 'don't have any second thoughts.'"

"A-a-ah! … Four jars!"

"It's a rich man's life. Tea with white bread, and as much beef as you like. A rich man's life, only it's scary there, Ilya Makarych. It's so scary!"

"What are you scared of, little one?" asked Crutch, and he turned around to see how far Praskovya was lagging behind.

"First, right after the wedding, I was afraid of Anisim Grigoryich. He was all right, he never hurt me, only as soon as he comes near me I get chills all over, in every little bone. I didn't sleep a single night, I kept shivering and praying to God. And now I'm afraid of Aksinya, Ilya Makarych. She's all right, she just smiles, only sometimes she looks out the window, and her eyes are so angry and they burn green, like with a sheep in the barn. The Khrymin Juniors keep egging her on: 'Your old man has a lot in Butyokino,' they say, 'about a hundred acres, and there's sand and water there,' they say, 'so you build yourself a brickworks, Aksiusha, and we'll go shares with you.' Bricks now cost twenty roubles a thousand. It's a going trade. So yesterday at dinner Aksinya says to the old man, 'I want to build a brickworks in Butyokino, to be a merchant in my own right.' She says it and smiles. But Grigory Petrovich goes dark in the face; obviously he doesn't like it. 'As long as I'm alive,' he says, 'we can't do things separately, it must be all together.' And she flashed her eyes at him, ground her teeth … They served pancakes—she didn't eat!"

"A-a-ah! …" Crutch was astonished. "She didn't eat!"

"And tell me, please, when does she sleep?" Lipa went on. "She sleeps a wee half hour, then pops up, walks around, walks around all the time, checking whether the peasants are setting fire to something or stealing … It's scary with her, Ilya Makarych! And the Khrymin Juniors didn't even go to bed after the wedding, they went to court in town, and people say it's all because of Aksinya. Two of the brothers promised to build her the brickworks, but the third took it wrong, and the factory has stood still for a month, and my uncle Prokhor is out of work and goes from door to door begging for a crust. 'Uncle,' I say to him, 'don't shame yourself, go and do plowing meanwhile, or cut lumber!' 'I've lost the feel for peasant work, Lipynka,' he says, 'I can't do anything …'"

They stopped near a grove of young aspens to rest and wait for Praskovya. Yelizarov had been a contractor for a long time, yet he did not keep a horse, but went about the whole district on foot, with nothing but a little sack in which he kept bread and onion, and he took long strides, swinging his arms. It was hard to keep up with him.

At the entrance to the grove stood a boundary post. Yelizarov touched it to see if it was sturdy. Praskovya came up, out of breath. Her wrinkled, perpetually frightened face was radiant with happiness: she had been in church today, like other people, then had gone to the fair, and there she had drunk pear kvass! That rarely happened to her, and it even seemed to her now that she had lived for her own pleasure for the first time in her life. After resting, all three went on together. The sun was setting, and its rays penetrated the grove, shone on the tree trunks. Loud voices rang out ahead. The Ukleyevo girls had gone ahead long ago, but had tarried there in the grove, probably picking mushrooms.

"Hey, gi-i-irls!" shouted Yelizarov. "Hey, you beauties!"

He was answered with laughter.

"Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old coot!"

And the echo laughed, too. Now the grove was behind them. They could already see the tops of the factory smokestacks; the cross on the belfry flashed: this was the village, "the one where the verger ate all the caviar at the funeral." They were almost home; they only had to go down into the big ravine. Lipa and Praskovya, who went barefoot, sat down on the grass to put their shoes on; the contractor sat down with them. Looked at from above, Ukleyevo, with its pussywillows, white church, and river, seemed beautiful, peaceful, an impression only spoiled by the factory roofs, painted a gloomy, savage color for the sake of economy. On the opposite slope one could see rye—stacked up, or in sheaves here and there, as if scattered by a storm, or in just-cut rows; the oats, too, were ripe and gleamed in the sun now, like mother-of-pearl. It was harvest time. Today was a feast day, tomorrow, a Saturday, they had to gather the rye and get the hay in, then Sunday was a feast day again; every day distant thunder rumbled; the weather was sultry, it felt like rain, and, looking at the fields now, each one hoped that God would grant them to finish the harvest in time, and was merry, and joyful, and uneasy at heart.

"Mowers cost a lot these days," said Praskovya. "A rouble forty a day!"

And people kept on coming from the fair in Kazanskoe; peasant women, factory workers in new visored caps, beggars, children … A cart drove past, raising dust, with an unsold horse running behind it, looking as if it were glad it had not been sold; then a resisting cow was led past by the horns, then came another cart carrying drunken peasants, their legs dangling down. An old woman led a boy in a big hat and big boots; the boy was exhausted from the heat and the heavy boots, which did not let him bend his knees, but even so he kept blowing with all his might on a toy trumpet; they had already gone down and turned off on a side street, and the trumpet could still be heard.

"And our factory-owners are a bit out of sorts …" said Yelizarov. "It's bad! Kostiukov got angry with me. He said, 'Too much lumber went into the cornices.' Too much? 'As much as was needed, Vassily Danilych,' I say, 'that's how much went into them. I don't eat it with my kasha, your lumber.' 'How can you speak to me like that?' he says. 'A blockhead, that's what you are! Don't forget yourself! It was I,' he shouts, 'who made you a contractor!' 'Some feat,' I say. 'Before I was a contractor,' I say, 'I still drank tea every day' 'You're all crooks,' he says … I kept quiet. We're crooks in this world, I thought, and you'll be crooks in the next. Ho, ho, ho! The next day he softened. 'Don't be angry with me for my words, Makarych,' he said. 'If I said something unnecessary, still there's the fact that I'm a merchant of the first guild, superior to you—you ought to keep quiet.' 'You're a merchant of the first guild,' I say, 'and I'm a carpenter, that's correct. And Saint Joseph,' I say, 'was also a carpenter. Our business is righteous, pleasing to God, and if,' I say, 'you want to be superior, go ahead, Vassily Danilych.' And later—that is, after the conversation—I thought: but who's the superior one? A merchant of the first guild or a carpenter? Turns out it's the carpenter, little ones!"

Crutch thought briefly and added:

"So it is, little ones. He who labors, he who endures, is the superior one."

The sun had set, and a thick mist, white as milk, was rising above the river, in the churchyard and the clearings around the mills. Now, when darkness was falling quickly and lights flashed below, and when it seemed that the mist concealed a bottomless abyss beneath it, Lipa and her mother, who were born destitute and were prepared to live out their days that way, giving everything to others except their meek, frightened souls, might have imagined for a moment that in this vast, mysterious world, among an endless number of lives, they, too, were a force and were superior to someone else; it felt good to sit up there, they smiled happily and forgot that they had to go back down all the same.

Finally they returned home. Mowers were sitting on the ground by the gates and near the shop. Ordinarily the local Ukleyevo people did not work for Tsybukin, and he had to hire outsiders, and now in the darkness it looked as if people with long black beards were sitting there. The shop was open, and through the doorway the deaf man could be seen playing checkers with a boy. The mowers sang softly, in barely audible voices, or loudly demanded to be paid for the past day's work, but they were not paid, so that they would not leave before the next day. Old Tsybukin, without a frock coat, in just his waistcoat, sat with Aksinya under a birch tree by the porch and drank tea; and a lamp burned on the table.

"Grandpa-a-a!" a mower repeated outside the gates, as if teasing him. "Pay us at least half! Grandpa-a-a!"

And at once laughter was heard, and then barely audible singing … Crutch also sat down to have tea.

"So we were at the fair," he began telling them. "We had a good time, little ones, a very good time, thank the Lord. And this thing happened, not very nice: the blacksmith Sashka bought some tobacco and so he gave the shopkeeper a half rouble. And the half rouble was false," Crutch went on and glanced around; he meant to speak in a whisper, but instead spoke in a hoarse, muffled voice, and everybody could hear him. "And it turned out the half rouble was false. They ask him: 'Where'd you get it?' And he says, 'Anisim Tsybukin gave it to me. When I was making merry at his wedding,' he says … They called a policeman and took him away … Watch out, Petrovich, or something may come of it, some talk …"

"Grandpa-a-a!" the same teasing voice came from outside the gate. "Grandpa-a-a!"

Silence ensued.

"Ah, little ones, little ones, little ones …" Crutch muttered rapidly and got up; drowsiness was coming over him. "Well, thanks for the tea and the sugar, little ones. It's time for bed. I've gone crumbly, the beams are all rotten in me. Ho, ho, ho!"

And, walking off, he said:

"Must be time I died!"

And he sobbed. Old Tsybukin did not finish his tea, but went on sitting, thinking; he looked as if he were listening to Crutch's footsteps far down the street.

"Sashka the blacksmith lied, I expect," said Aksinya, guessing his thoughts.

He went into the house and came back a little later with a package; he unwrapped it—roubles gleamed, perfectly new. He took one, tried it with his teeth, dropped it on the tray; tried another, dropped it …

"It's a fact, the roubles are false …" he said, looking at Aksinya as if in perplexity. "They're the ones … Anisim brought that time, they're his present. You take them, daughter," he whispered and shoved the package into her hands, "take them, throw them down the well … Away with them! And watch yourself, don't go talking about it. Or something may happen … Take the samovar away, put out the lamp …"

Lipa and Praskovya, sitting in the shed, saw the lights go out one after another; only Varvara's blue and red icon lamps shone upstairs, and from there came a breath of peace, contentment, and unawareness. Praskovya could not get used to the fact that her daughter had married a rich man, and when she came, she huddled timidly in the front hall, smiled entreatingly, and had tea and sugar sent out to her. Lipa could not get used to it either, and after her husband left, she slept not in her own bed but wherever she happened to be—in the kitchen or the shed—and every day she washed the floors or did the laundry, and it seemed to her that she was doing day labor. And now, on returning from the pilgrimage, they had tea in the kitchen with the cook, then went to the shed and lay down on the floor between the sledges and the wall. It was dark there and smelled of horse collars. The lights went out around the house, then the deaf man was heard locking up the shop and the mowers settling down to sleep in the yard. In the distance, at the Khrymin Juniors, someone was playing the expensive accordion … Praskovya and Lipa began to doze off.

And when someone's footsteps awakened them, it was bright with moonlight; at the entrance of the shed stood Aksinya, holding her bedding in her arms.

"Maybe it's cooler here …" she said, then came in and lay down almost on the threshold itself, and the moon cast its light all over her.

She did not sleep and sighed heavily, tossing about from the heat and throwing almost everything off—and in the magic light of the moon, what a beautiful, what a proud animal she was! A short time passed and again footsteps were heard: the old man appeared in the doorway, all white.

"Aksinya!" he called. "Are you here or what?"

"Well?" she replied angrily.

"I told you earlier to throw the money down the well. Did you do it?"

"What an idea, throwing goods into the water! I gave it to the mowers …"

"Oh, my God!" said the old man in amazement and fright. "Mischievous woman … Oh, my God!"

He clasped his hands and left, muttering something as he went. A little later Aksinya sat up, sighed heavily and vexedly, then got up and, collecting her bedding, went out.

"Why did you give me to them, mama?" said Lipa.

"You had to be married, daughter. It's not we who set it up that way."

And a feeling of inconsolable grief was about to come over them. But it seemed to them that someone was looking down from the heights of the sky, from the blue, from where the stars are, saw everything that went on in Ukleyevo, and was watching over them. And, however great the evil, the night was still peaceful and beautiful, and there still was and would be righteousness in God's world, just as peaceful and beautiful, and everything on earth was only waiting to merge with righteousness, as moonlight merges with the night.

And the two women, comforted, pressed close to each other and fell asleep.




VI




The news had come long ago that Anisim had been put in prison for making and passing counterfeit money. Months went by, more than half a year went by, the long winter was over, spring came, and at home and in the village they got used to the fact that Anisim was in prison. And when anyone passed the house or the shop at night, they remembered that Anisim was in prison; and when the cemetery bell tolled, they also remembered for some reason that he was in prison and awaiting trial.

It was as if a shadow had been cast over the yard. The house became darker, the roof rusted, the ironclad door of the shop, heavy, painted green, became discolored, or, as the deaf man said, "got gristled"; and it was as if old man Tsybukin himself grew darker. He had long ceased cutting his hair and beard, was all overgrown, no longer leaped as he got into the tarantass, nor shouted "God will provide!" to the beggars. His strength was waning, and that was noticeable in everything. People were less afraid of him now, and the local policeman drew up a report on the shop, though he still collected what was owed him; and three times he was summoned to court in town for secret trading in vodka, but the hearing kept being postponed owing to the non-appearance of the witnesses, and this wore the old man out.

He visited his son frequently, hired someone, petitioned someone, donated somewhere for a church banner. He offered the warden of the prison in which Anisim was kept the gift of a silver tea-glass holder with "The soul knows moderation" inscribed on the enamel and with a long teaspoon.

"There's nobody, nobody to intervene properly for us," said Varvara. "Oh, tush, tush … You should ask someone of the gentry to write to the head officials … At least they'd release him till the trial! Why torment the lad?"

She, too, was upset, but she grew plumper, whiter, lit the icon lamps in her room as before, and saw to it that the house was clean, and treated guests to preserves and apple comfit. The deaf son and Aksinya tended the shop. They started a new business—a brickworks in Butyokino—and Aksinya went there almost every day in the tarantass; she drove herself and on meeting acquaintances stretched her neck like a snake from the young rye and smiled naïvely and mysteriously. And Lipa played all the time with her baby, who was born to her just before Lent. He was a small baby, skinny and pitiful, and it was strange that he cried, looked about, and that he was considered a person and was even named Nikifor. He would lie in his cradle, Lipa would go to the door and say, bowing:

"How do you do, Nikifor Anisimych!"

And she would rush headlong to him and kiss him. Then she would go to the door, bow, and say again:

"How do you do, Nikifor Anisimych!"

And he would stick up his little red legs, and his crying was mixed with laughter, as with the carpenter Yelizarov.

At last the day of the trial was set. The old man left five days ahead of time. Then it was heard that peasants called as witnesses had been sent from the village; the old hired workman also received a summons, and he left.

The trial was on a Thursday. But Sunday had already passed, and the old man had still not come back, and there was no news. On Tuesday, before evening, Varvara sat by the open window listening for the old man coming. In the next room Lipa was playing with her baby. She tossed him in her arms and said in admiration:

"You'll grow so-o-o big, so-o-o-big! You'll be a man, we'll do day labor together! Day labor together!"

"We-e-ell!" Varvara became offended. "What kind of day labor have you thought up, silly girl? He'll be a merchant for us! …"

Lipa started to sing softly, but a little later forgot herself and began again:

"You'll grow so-o-o big, so-o-o big, you'll be a man, we'll go to day labor together!"

"We-e-ell! You're at it again!"

Lipa stood in the doorway with Nikifor in her arms and asked:

"Mama, why do I love him so? Why do I pity him so?" she went on in a quavering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. "Who is he? How is he? Light as a feather, a crumb, and I love him, I love him like a real person. He can't do anything, can't speak, but I understand everything he wishes with his dear eyes."

Varvara listened: there was the sound of the evening train coming into the station. Was the old man on it? She no longer heard or understood what Lipa was saying, did not notice the time going by, but only trembled all over, and that not with fear but with intense curiosity. She saw a cart filled with peasants drive past quickly, with a rumble. It was the returning witnesses coming from the station. As the cart drove past the shop, the old workman jumped off and came into the yard. One could hear him being greeted in the yard, being questioned about something …

"Loss of rights and all property," he said loudly, "and six years' hard labor in Siberia."

Aksinya could be seen coming out the back door of the shop; she had just been selling kerosene and was holding a bottle in one hand and a funnel in the other, and there were silver coins in her mouth.

"And where's papa?" she asked, lisping.

"At the station," the workman replied. "'When it gets darker,' he says, 'then I'll come.'"

And when it became known in the yard that Anisim had been sentenced to hard labor, the cook in the kitchen began to wail as over a dead man, thinking that propriety demanded it:

"Why have you abandoned us, Anisim Grigoryich, our bright falcon …"

The dogs barked in alarm. Varvara ran to the window and in a flurry of anguish began shouting to the cook, straining her voice as much as she could:

"Eno-o-ough, Stepanida, eno-o-ough! Don't torment us, for Christ's sake!"

They forgot to prepare the samovar, they were no longer thinking well. Only Lipa could not understand what was the matter and went on fussing over her baby.

When the old man came home from the station, they did not ask him about anything. He greeted everyone, then walked silently through all the rooms; he ate no supper.

"There's nobody to intercede …" Varvara began, when they were left alone. "I said to ask the gentry—you didn't listen then … A petition might…"

"I interceded myself!" said the old man, waving his hand. "When they sentenced Anisim, I went to the gentleman who defended him. 'Impossible to do anything now, it's too late.' And Anisim says so himself: it's too late. But all the same, as I was leaving the court, I made an arrangement with a lawyer, gave him an advance … I'll wait a week and then go back. It's as God wills."

The old man walked silently through all the rooms again, and when he came back to Varvara, he said:

"I must be sick. Something in my head … A fog. My thoughts are clouded."

He shut the door so that Lipa would not hear and went on softly:

"I don't feel right about money. Remember, Anisim brought me new roubles and half roubles before the wedding, on St. Thomas's Sunday?5 I stashed one package away then, and the rest I mixed in with my own … When my uncle Dmitri Filatych, God rest his soul, was still alive, he used to go for goods all the time, now to Moscow, now to the Crimea. He had a wife, and that same wife, while he went for goods, as I said, used to play around with other men. There were six children. So my uncle would have a drink and start laughing: 'I just can't sort out which are mine and which aren't.' An easygoing character, that is. And so now I can't figure out which coins are real and which are false. And it seems like they're all false."

"Ah, no, God help you!"

"I'm buying a ticket at the station, I hand over three roubles, and I think to myself, maybe they're false. And it scares me. I must be sick."

"What can I say, we all walk before God … Oh, tush, tush …" said Varvara, and she shook her head. "You ought to give it some thought, Petrovich … What if something bad happens? You're not a young man. You'll die, and for all I know they may wrong our grandson. Aie, they'll do Nikifor wrong, I'm afraid they will! His father can be counted as not there, his mother's young, foolish … You ought at least to leave that land to him, to the boy, that Butyokino, Petrovich, really! Just think!" Varvara went on persuading him. "A nice little boy, it's a pity! Go tomorrow and draw up the paper. Why wait?"

"And here I was forgetting about my grandson …" said Tsybukin. "I must go and say hello. So you say he's a nice boy? Well, let him grow up. God grant it!"

He opened the door and beckoned to Lipa with a bent finger. She came up to him with the baby in her arms.

"If you need anything, Lipynka, just ask," he said. "And eat whatever you like, we won't begrudge it, as long as you're healthy …" He made a cross over the baby. "And take care of my grandson. The son's gone, at least the grandson is left."

Tears ran down his cheeks; he sobbed and turned away. A little later he went to bed and fell fast asleep, after seven sleepless nights.




VII




The old man made a short trip to town. Somebody told Aksinya that he had gone to the notary to write a will, and that he was leaving Butyokino, the same place where she baked bricks, to his grandson Nikifor. She was told of it in the morning, when the old man and Varvara were sitting under the birch tree by the porch drinking tea. She locked up the shop front and back, collected all the keys she had, and flung them down at the old man's feet.

"I won't work for you anymore!" she cried loudly, and suddenly began to sob. "It turns out I'm not your daughter-in-law, but a hired worker! Everybody laughs: 'Look,' they say, 'what a worker the Tsybukins found for themselves!' I'm not your charwoman! I'm not a beggar, not some kind of slut, I've got a father and mother."

Without wiping her tears, she turned her eyes, tear-flooded, spiteful, crossed with anger, on the old man; her face and neck were red and strained, because she was shouting with all her might.

"I don't want to serve you anymore!" she went on. "I'm worn out! When it's work, when it's sitting in the shop day after day, and sneaking out at night to get vodka—then it's me, but when it's giving away land—then it's the convict's wife with her little devil! She's the mistress, she's the lady here, and I'm her servant! Give her everything, the jailbird's wife, let her choke on it, I'm going home! Find yourselves another fool, you cursed Herods!"

Never in his life had the old man scolded or punished his children, and he could not admit even the thought that anyone in the family could say rude words to him or behave disrespectfully; and now he got very frightened, ran into the house, and hid behind a wardrobe. And Varvara was so taken aback that she could not get up from her place, but only waved both arms as if warding off a bee.

"Ah, saints alive, what is this?" she murmured in horror. "Why is she shouting? Oh, tush, tush … People will hear! Not so loud … Ah, not so loud!"

"You gave Butyokino to the jailbird's wife," Aksinya went on shouting, "so give her everything now—I don't need anything from you! Perish the lot of you! You're all one gang here! I've had enough of looking at you! You've robbed everybody walking or riding by, you've robbed them old and young! Who sold vodka without a license? And the false money? You've stuffed your coffers with false money—now you don't need me anymore!"

A crowd had already gathered by the open gates and was looking into the yard.

"Let people stare!" Aksinya shouted. "I'll disgrace you! You'll burn with shame! You'll grovel at my feet! Hey, Stepan!" she called the deaf man. "Let's go home this very minute! Let's go to my father and mother, I don't want to live with criminals! Get ready!"

Laundry was hanging on lines stretched across the yard; she tore down her still-wet skirts and blouses and flung them into the deaf man's arms. Then she rushed furiously about the yard, tearing down all the laundry, hers or not hers, flinging it to the ground and trampling on it.

"Ah, saints alive, calm her down!" Varvara groaned. "What's the matter with her? Give her Butyokino, give it to her for the sake of Christ in Heaven!"

"Well, some wo-o-oman!" people were saying by the gate. "There's a wo-o-oman for you! Got herself going—something awful!"

Aksinya ran to the kitchen where the laundry was being done just then. Lipa was doing it alone, while the cook went to the river to do the rinsing. Steam rose from the tub and the cauldron by the stove, and the kitchen was stuffy and dim with mist. There was still a pile of unwashed laundry on the floor, and on the bench beside it, his red legs sticking up, lay Nikifor, so that if he fell, he would not be hurt. Just as Aksinya came in, Lipa took a shift of hers from the pile, put it into the tub, and reached for the big dipper of boiling water that stood on the table …

"Give it here!" said Aksinya, looking at her with hatred and snatching the shift from the tub. "You've got no business touching my underwear! You're a convict's wife, and you should know your place and what you are!"

Lipa stared at her, bewildered, and did not understand, but suddenly she caught the glance that the woman shot at the baby, and suddenly she understood and went dead all over …

"You took my land, so there's for you!"

As she said it, Aksinya seized the dipper of boiling water and dashed it over Nikifor.

After that a cry was heard such as had never yet been heard in Ukleyevo, and it was hard to believe that such a small, weak being as Lipa could scream like that. And it suddenly became hushed in the yard. Aksinya went into the house silently, with her former naïve smile … The deaf man kept walking about the yard with the laundry in his arms, then began to hang it up again, silently, unhurriedly. And until the cook came back from the river, nobody dared go into the kitchen and see what had happened there.




VIII




Nikifor was taken to the regional hospital, and towards evening he died there. Lipa did not wait till they came for her, but wrapped the dead boy in a blanket and carried him home.

The hospital, new, built recently, with big windows, stood high on a hill; it was all lit up by the setting sun and looked as if it were burning inside. At the bottom was a village. Lipa descended by the road and, before reaching the village, sat down near a small pond. Some woman brought a horse to water, but the horse would not drink.

"What else do you want?" the woman said softly, in perplexity. "What do you want?"

A boy in a red shirt, sitting right by the water, was washing his father's boots. And there was not another soul to be seen either in the village or on the hill.

"He won't drink …" said Lipa, looking at the horse.

But the woman and the boy with the boots left, and now there was no one to be seen. The sun went to sleep, covering itself with purple and gold brocade, and long clouds, crimson and lilac, watched over its rest, stretching across the sky. Somewhere far away, God knows where, a bittern gave a mournful, muted cry, like a cow locked in a barn. The cry of this mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it looked like or where it lived. Up by the hospital, in the bushes just by the pond, beyond the village, and in the surrounding fields, nightingales were pouring out their song. The cuckoo was counting out someone's years and kept losing count and starting over again. In the pond angry, straining frogs called to each other, and one could even make out the words: "You're such a one! You're such a one!" How noisy it was! It seemed that all these creatures were calling and singing on purpose so that no one would sleep on that spring evening, so that all, even the angry frogs, might value and enjoy every minute: for life is given only once!

A silver crescent moon shone in the sky, there were many stars. Lipa could not remember how long she had been sitting by the pond, but when she got up and left, everybody in the village was asleep, and there was not a single light. Home was probably some eight miles away, but she did not have strength enough, she could not figure out how to go; the moon shone now ahead, now to the right, and the same cuckoo kept calling, its voice grown hoarse, laughing, as if mocking her: oh-oh, watch out, you'll lose your way! Lipa walked quickly, lost the kerchief from her head … She gazed at the sky and thought about where the soul of her boy was then: was it following her, or flitting about up there near the stars and no longer thinking of its mother! Oh, how lonely it is in the fields at night, amidst this singing, when you yourself cannot sing, amidst the ceaseless cries of joy, when you yourself cannot be joyful, when the moon looks down from the sky, also lonely, careless whether it is spring now or winter, whether people live or die … When your soul grieves, it is hard to be without people. If only her mother Praskovya was with her, or Crutch, or the cook, or some peasant!

"Boo-o-o!" cried the bittern. "Boo-o-o!"

And suddenly she clearly heard human speech:

"Harness up, Vavila!"

Ahead, just by the road, a campfire was burning; there were no longer any flames, just red embers glowing. She could hear horses munching. Two carts stood out against the darkness—one with a barrel, the other, slightly lower, with sacks—and two men: one was leading a horse in order to harness up, the other stood motionless by the fire, his hands behind his back. A dog growled near the cart. The man leading the horse stopped and said:

"Seems like somebody's coming down the road."

"Quiet, Sharik!" the other shouted at the dog.

And from his voice it was clear this other was an old man. Lipa stopped and said:

"God be with you!"

The old man approached her and replied after a moment:

"Good evening!"

"Your dog won't bite, grandpa?"

"Never mind, come on. He won't touch you."

"I was at the hospital," said Lipa, after a pause. "My little son died there. I'm taking him home."

It must have been unpleasant for the old man to hear that, because he stepped away and said hastily:

"Never mind, dear. It's God's will. You're taking too long, lad!" he said, turning to his companion. "Get a move on!"

"Your yoke's gone," said the lad. "I don't see it."

"You're unyoked yourself, Vavila!"

The old man picked up an ember, blew it to flame—lighting up only his eyes and nose—then, when the yoke was found, went over to Lipa with the light and looked at her; his eyes expressed compassion and tenderness.

"You're a mother," he said. "Every mother feels sorry for her wee one."

And with that he sighed and shook his head. Vavila threw something on the fire, trampled on it—and all at once it became very dark; everything vanished, and as before there were only the fields, the sky with its stars, and the birds making noise, keeping each other from sleeping. And a corncrake called, seemingly from the very place where the campfire had been.

But a minute passed, and again the carts, and the old man, and the lanky Vavila could be seen. The carts creaked as they drove out onto the road.

"Are you holy people?" Lipa asked the old man.

"No. We're from Firsanovo."

"You looked at me just now and my heart softened. And the lad's quiet. So I thought: they must be holy people."

"Are you going far?"

"To Ukleyevo."

"Get in, we'll give you a ride to Kuzmenki. From there you go straight and we go left."

Vavila sat on the cart with the barrel, the old man and Lipa on the other. They went at a walk, Vavila in the lead.

"My little son suffered the whole day," said Lipa. "He looked with his little eyes and said nothing, he wanted to speak but he couldn't. Lord God, Queen of Heaven! I just kept falling on the floor from grief. I'd stand up and fall down beside the bed. And tell me, grandpa, why should a little one suffer before death? When a grown man or woman suffers, their sins are forgiven, but why a little one who has no sins? Why?"

"Who knows!" said the old man.

They rode for half an hour in silence.

"You can't know the why and how of everything," said the old man. "A bird's given two wings, not four, because it can fly with two; so a man's not given to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know in order to live, so much he knows."

"It would be easier for me to walk, grandpa. Now my heart's all shaky."

"Never mind. Just sit."

The old man yawned and made a cross over his mouth.

"Never mind …" he repeated. "Your grief is half a grief. Life is long, there'll be more of good and bad, there'll be everything. Mother Russia is vast!" he said, and he looked to both sides. "I've been all over Russia and seen all there is in her, and believe what I say, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad. I went on foot to Siberia, I went to the Amur and to the Altai, and I moved to live in Siberia, worked the land there, then I began to miss Mother Russia and came back to my native village. We came back to Russia on foot; and I remember us going on a ferry, and I was skinny as could be, all tattered, barefoot, chilled, sucking on a crust, and some gentleman traveler was there on the ferry—if he's dead, God rest his soul—he looked at me pitifully, the tears pouring down. 'Ah,' he says, 'black is your bread, black are your days …' And when I got home I had neither stick nor stone, as they say; there was a wife, but she stayed in Siberia, buried. So I just live as a hired hand. And so what? I'll tell you: since then there's been bad and there's been good. But I'm not up to dying, my dear, I wouldn't mind living another twenty years—which means there's been more good. And Mother Russia is vast!" he said and again looked to both sides and behind him.

"Grandpa," asked Lipa, "when a man dies, how many days after does his soul wander the earth?"

"Who knows! Let's ask Vavila, he went to school. They teach everything now. Vavila!" the old man called.

"Eh!"

"Vavila, after a man dies, how many days does his soul wander the earth?"

Vavila stopped the horse and only then replied:

"Nine days. My uncle Kyrill died, and his soul lived in our cottage thirteen days after."

"How do you know?"

"There was a knocking in the stove for thirteen days."

"Well, all right. Drive on," said the old man, and it was clear that he did not believe any of it.

Near Kuzmenki the carts turned onto the high road, and Lipa kept on straight. Day was breaking. As she went down into the ravine, the cottages and church of Ukleyevo were hidden in mist. It was cold, and it seemed to her that the same cuckoo was calling.

When Lipa came home, the cattle had not gone to pasture yet: everyone was asleep. She sat on the porch and waited. The old man was the first to come out; he understood at once, from the first glance, what had happened, and for a long time could not say a word, but only smacked his lips.

"Eh, Lipa," he said, "you didn't take care of my grandson …"

Varvara was awakened. She clasped her hands and burst into sobs, and they immediately began laying the child out.

"And he was such a pretty little boy …" she kept saying. "Oh, tush, tush … One little boy you had, and you didn't take care of him, foolish girl…"

They served a panikhida in the morning and in the evening. The next day was the funeral, and after the funeral the guests and clergy ate a great deal and with such greed as if they had not eaten for a long time. Lipa served at the table, and the priest, raising a fork with a pickled mushroom on it, said to her:

"Don't grieve over the baby. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

And only after everyone left did Lipa realize properly that there was no more Nikifor and never would be, realize it and begin to weep. And she did not know which room to go to in order to weep, because she felt that, after the boy's death, there was no place for her in this house, that she had no part in it and was superfluous; and the others felt it, too.

"Well, what are you howling here for?" Aksinya suddenly shouted, appearing in the doorway; for the occasion of the funeral she had put on all new clothes and powdered her face. "Shut up!"

Lipa wanted to stop but could not, and wept still louder.

"Do you hear?" Aksinya shouted and stamped her foot in great wrath. I'm speaking to you! Get out and don't ever set foot here, you convict's wife! Out!"

"Well, well, well! …" the old man started fussing. "Aksiuta, calm down, dear … She's crying, it's an understandable thing … her wee one's dead …"

"An understandable thing …" Aksinya mocked him. "Let her stay the night, but tomorrow there better not be a breath of her left here! An understandable thing! …" she mocked once more and, laughing, headed for the shop.

The next day, early in the morning, Lipa went to her mother in Torguyevo.




IX




At the present time the roof and door of the shop have been painted and are shining like new; cheerful geraniums are blooming in the windows as before, and what took place three years ago in the house and yard of the Tsybukins is almost forgotten.

Old Grigory Petrovich is considered the proprietor, as before, but in fact everything has passed into Aksinya's hands; she sells and buys, and nothing can be done without her consent. The brickworks is going well; owing to the demand for bricks for the railway, the price has gone up to twenty-four roubles a thousand; women and girls cart bricks to the station and load them on the cars, and get twenty-five kopecks a day for it.

Aksinya has gone shares with the Khrymins, and their factory is now called "Khrymin Junior and Co." They've opened a tavern by the station, and now play the expensive accordion not at the factory but in this tavern, and the place is frequented by the postmaster, who has also started some sort of business, and by the stationmaster. The Khrymin Juniors have presented deaf Stepan with a gold watch, and he is forever taking it out of his pocket and holding it to his ear.

In the village they say of Aksinya that she has acquired great power; and it is true that when she goes to her brickworks in the morning, with her naïve smile, beautiful, happy, and then when she gives orders at the brickworks, great power is felt in her. Everyone fears her at home, and in the village, and in the brickworks. When she comes to the post office, the postmaster jumps to his feet and says to her:

"I humbly beg you to be seated, Xenia Abramovna."

A certain landowner, a fop in a fine flannel jacket and high patent-leather boots, an elderly man, was once selling her a horse, and got so carried away by his conversation with her that he let the horse go for what she offered. He held her hand for a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, naïve eyes, said:

"For a woman like you, Xenia Abramovna, I'm ready to do any pleasure. Only tell me when we can see each other, so that no one will bother us?"

"Why, whenever you like!"

And since then the elderly fop comes to the shop almost every day to drink beer. The beer is terribly bitter, like wormwood. The landowner wags his head but drinks.

Old Tsybukin no longer mixes in the business. He carries no money on him, because he cannot distinguish real money from false, but he keeps mum and tells no one about this weakness of his. He has become somehow forgetful, and if he is not given anything to eat, he will not ask himself; they are already used to eating without him, and Varvara often says:

"Our man went to bed again last night without eating."

And she says it indifferently, because she is used to it. For some reason, summer and winter alike, he goes about in a fur coat and only on very hot days does not go out but sits at home. Ordinarily, he puts his coat on and turns up the collar, wraps himself up, and strolls around the village, along the road to the station, or else sits from morning till evening on a bench by the church gate. He sits and does not stir. Passersby bow to him, but he does not respond, because he dislikes peasants as much as ever. When someone asks him something, he replies quite reasonably and politely, but briefly.

The talk going round the village is that his daughter-in-law has driven him out of his own house and gives him nothing to eat, and that he supposedly lives by begging: some are glad, others are sorry

Varvara has grown still more plump and white and does good deeds as before, and Aksinya does not interfere with her. There is now such a quantity of preserves that there is no time to eat it before the new berries come; it crystallizes, and Varvara all but weeps, not knowing what to do with it.

They have begun to forget about Anisim. A letter came from him once, written in verse, on a big sheet of paper with the look of a petition, in the same magnificent hand. Evidently his friend Samorodov was serving his term together with him. Below the verses, in a poor, barely legible hand, a single line was written: "I'm sick all the time here, it's hard for me, help me, for Christ's sake."

Once—this was on a clear autumn day, before evening—old man Tsybukin was sitting by the church gates, the collar of his coat turned up, so that only his nose and the visor of his cap could be seen. At the other end of the long bench sat the contractor Yelizarov and beside him the school watchman, Yakov, a toothless old man of about seventy. Crutch and the watchman were talking.

"Children must give their old parents food and drink … honor thy father and mother," Yakov was saying with vexation, "but she, this daughter-in-law, has driven her father-in-law out of his ownest house. The old man's got nothing to eat, nothing to drink—where's he to go? It's the third day he hasn't eaten."

"The third day!" Crutch said in surprise.

"He just sits like that, saying nothing. He's grown weak. And why say nothing? If he goes to court, the court's not going to praise her for it."

"What's the court going to praise?" asked Crutch, who had not heard well.

"Eh?"

"She's an all-right woman, works hard. In that business you can't get by without it … sin, I mean …"

"From his ownest house," Yakov went on in vexation. "Earn yourself a house, then drive people out. Eh, she's a fine one, she is! A pla-a-ague!"

Tsybukin listened without stirring.

"Your own house or somebody else's, it makes no difference, so long as it's warm and the women don't yell at you …" said Crutch, and he laughed. "When I was still a young man, I pitied my Nastasya very much. She was a quiet little woman. She used to say: 'Buy a house, Makarych! Buy a house, Makarych! And buy a horse, Makarych!' She was dying, and she kept saying: 'Buy yourself a droshky, Makarych, so as not to go on foot.' But I only ever bought her gingerbread."

"Her husband's deaf and stupid," Yakov went on, not listening to Crutch, "a fool of fools, the same as a goose. Does he understand anything? Hit a goose on the head with a stick—it still won't understand."

Crutch got up to go home to the factory. Yakov also got up, and the two went off together, still talking. When they were fifty paces away, old Tsybukin also got up and trudged after them, stepping uncertainly, as if on slippery ice.

The village was already sunk in evening twilight, and the sun shone only up above, on the road that ran snakelike down the slope. The old women were coming back from the forest, and the children with them; they were carrying baskets of mushrooms. Women and girls were coming in a crowd from the station, where they had been loading bricks on the cars, and their noses and cheeks under their eyes were covered with red brick dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all went Lipa, and she sang in a high voice, pouring out her song as she looked up at the sky, as if celebrating and rejoicing that the day, thank God, was over and they could rest. Her mother was in the crowd, the day laborer Praskovya, walking with a bundle in her arms and breathing heavily as always.

"Good evening, Makarych!" said Lipa, seeing Crutch. "Good evening, dear heart!"

"Good evening, Lipynka!" said Crutch, delighted. "Dear women, dear girls, love the rich carpenter! Ho, ho! Little ones, my little ones," Crutch sobbed. "My gentle little hatchets."

Crutch and Yakov walked on, and could still be heard talking. After them the crowd met with old Tsybukin, and it suddenly became very quiet. Lipa and Praskovya had dropped behind a little, and when the old man came abreast of them, Lipa bowed low and said:

"Good evening, Grigory Petrovich!"

And her mother also bowed. The old man stopped and looked at the two women without saying anything; his lips trembled and his eyes were filled with tears. Lipa took a piece of kasha pie from her mother's bundle and gave it to him. He took it and began to eat.

The sun had set completely; its glow had gone out even on the road above. It was growing dark and cool. Lipa and Praskovya walked on and kept crossing themselves for a long time.
JANUARY 1900






THE BISHOP








I




On the eve of Palm Sunday the vigil was going on in the Old Petrovsky Convent. It was almost ten o'clock when they began to hand out the pussywillows,1 the lights were dim, the wicks were sooty, everything was as if in a mist. In the twilight of the church, the crowd heaved like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men's and women's—were alike, that everyone who came up to get a branch had the same expression in their eyes. The doors could not be seen in the mist, the crowd kept moving, and it looked as if there was and would be no end to it. A women's choir was singing, a nun was reading the canon.

How hot it was, how stifling! How long the vigil was! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was labored, short, dry, his shoulders ached with fatigue, his legs trembled. And it was unpleasantly disturbing that some holy fool cried out now and then from the gallery. Besides, the bishop suddenly imagined, as if in sleep or delirium, that his own mother, Marya Timofeevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or else an old woman resembling his mother, came up to him in the crowd, and, receiving a branch from him, stepped away, all the while gazing happily at him, with a kind, joyful smile, until she mingled with the crowd again. And for some reason tears poured down his face. His soul was at peace, all was well, yet he gazed fixedly at the choir on the left, where they were reading, where not a single person could be made out in the evening darkness—and wept. Tears glistened on his face, his beard. Then someone else began to weep near him, then someone else further away, then another and another, and the church was gradually filled with quiet weeping. But in a short while, some five minutes, the convent choir began to sing, there was no more weeping, everything was as before.

The service was soon over. As the bishop was getting into his carriage to go home, the whole moonlit garden was filled with the merry, beautiful ringing of the expensive, heavy bells. The white walls, the white crosses on the graves, the white birches and black shadows, and the distant moon in the sky, which stood directly over the convent, now seemed to live their own special life, incomprehensible, yet close to mankind. April was just beginning, and after the warm spring day it turned cooler, slightly frosty, and a breath of spring could be felt in the soft, cold air. The road from the convent to town was sandy, they had to go at a walking pace; and on both sides of the carriage, in the bright, still moonlight, pilgrims trudged over the sand. And everyone was silent, deep in thought, everything around was welcoming, young, so near—the trees, the sky, even the moon—and one wanted to think it would always be so.

At last the carriage drove into town and rolled down the main street. The shops were closed, except that of the merchant Yerakin, the millionaire, where they were trying out electric lighting, which was flickering badly, and people crowded around. Then came wide, dark streets, one after another, deserted, then the high road outside town, the fields, the smell of pines. And suddenly there rose up before his eyes a white, crenellated wall, and behind it a tall bell tower, all flooded with light, and beside it five big, shining, golden domes—this was St. Pankraty's Monastery, where Bishop Pyotr lived. And here, too, high above the monastery hung the quiet, pensive moon. The carriage drove through the gate, creaking over the sand, here and there the black figures of monks flashed in the moonlight, footsteps were heard on the flagstones …

"Your mother came while you were away, Your Grace," the cell attendant reported, when the bishop came to his quarters.

"Mama? When did she come?"

"Before the vigil. She first asked where you were, and then went to the convent."

"That means it was her I saw in church! Oh, Lord!"

And the bishop laughed with joy.

"She asked me to tell Your Grace," the attendant went on, "that she will come tomorrow. There's a girl with her, probably a granddaughter. They're staying at Ovsyannikov's inn."

"What time is it now?"

"Just after eleven."

"Ah, how vexing!"

The bishop sat for a while in the drawing room, pondering and as if not believing it was so late. His arms and legs ached, there was a pain in the back of his head. He felt hot and uncomfortable. Having rested, he went to his bedroom and there, too, sat for a while, still thinking about his mother. He heard the attendant leave and Father Sisoy, a hieromonk, cough on the other side of the wall. The monastery clock struck the quarter hour.

The bishop changed his clothes and began to read the prayers before going to sleep. He read these old, long-familiar prayers attentively, and at the same time thought about his mother. She had nine children and around forty grandchildren. Once she had lived with her husband, a deacon, in a poor village, lived there for a long time, from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty. The bishop remembered her from early childhood, almost from when he was three—and how he loved her! Sweet, dear, unforgettable childhood! Why does this forever gone, irretrievable time, why does it seem brighter, more festive and rich, than it was in reality? When he had been sick as a child or a youth, how tender and sensitive his mother had been! And now his prayers were mixed with memories that burned ever brighter, like flames, and the prayers did not interfere with his thoughts of his mother.

When he finished praying, he undressed and lay down, and at once, as soon as it was dark around him, he pictured his late father, his mother, his native village Lesopolye … Wheels creaking, sheep bleating, church bells ringing on bright summer mornings, gypsies under the windows—oh, how sweet to think of it! He remembered the priest of Lesopolye, Father Simeon, meek, placid, good-natured; he was skinny and short himself, but his son, a seminarian, was of enormous height and spoke in a furious bass; once he got angry with the cook and yelled at her: "Ah, you Iehudiel's ass!" and Father Simeon, who heard it, did not say a word and was only ashamed because he could not remember where in holy scripture there was mention of such an ass.2 After him the priest in Lesopolye was Father Demyan, who was a heavy drinker and was sometimes drunk to the point of seeing a green serpent, and he was even nicknamed "Demyan the Serpent-seer." The schoolmaster in Lesopolye was Matvei Nikolaich, a former seminarian, a kind man, not stupid, but also a drunkard; he never beat his students, but for some reason always had a bundle of birch switches hanging on the wall with a perfectly meaningless Latin inscription under it—Betula kinderbalsamica secuta.3 He had a shaggy black dog that he called Syntax.

And the bishop laughed. Five miles from Lesopolye was the village of Obnino, with its wonder-working icon. In summer the icon was carried in procession to all the neighboring villages, and bells rang the whole day, now in one village, now in another, and to the bishop it had seemed then that the air was vibrant with joy, and he (he was then called Pavlusha) had followed after the icon, hatless, barefoot, with naïve faith, with a naïve smile, infinitely happy. In Obnino, he now recalled, there were always many people, and the priest there, Father Alexei, in order to manage the proskomedia, made his deaf nephew Ilarion read the lists "for the living" and "for the dead" sent in with the prosphoras;4 Ilarion read them, getting five or ten kopecks every once in a while for a liturgy, and only when he was gray and bald, when life had passed, did he suddenly notice written on one slip: "What a fool you are, Ilarion!" At least till the age of fifteen, Pavlusha remained undeveloped and a poor student, so that they even wanted to take him from theological school and send him to work in a shop; once, when he went to the Obnino post office for letters, he looked at the clerks for a long time and then said: "Allow me to ask, how do you receive your salary—monthly or daily?"

The bishop crossed himself and turned over on the other side, in order to sleep and not think anymore.

"My mother has come …" he remembered and laughed.

The moon looked in the window, the floor was lit up, and shadows lay on it. A cricket called. In the next room, on the other side of the wall, Father Sisoy snored, and something lonely, orphaned, even vagrant could be heard in his old man's snoring. Sisoy had once been the steward of the diocesan bishop, and now he was called "the former father steward"; he was seventy years old, lived in the monastery ten miles from town, also lived in town, or wherever he happened to be. Three days ago he had come to St. Pankraty's Monastery, and the bishop had let him stay with him, in order to talk with him somehow in leisure moments about various things, local ways …

At half past one the bell rang for matins. He heard Father Sisoy cough, grumble something in a displeased voice, then get up and walk barefoot through the rooms.

"Father Sisoy!" the bishop called.

Sisoy went to his room and shortly afterwards appeared, wearing boots now and holding a candle; over his underclothes he had a cassock, on his head an old, faded skullcap.

"I can't sleep," said the bishop, sitting up. "I must be unwell. And what it is, I don't know. A fever!"

"You must've caught cold, Your Grace. You should be rubbed with tallow."

Sisoy stood for a while and yawned: "O Lord, forgive me, a sinner."

"At Yerakin's today they burned electricity," he said. "I doan like it!"

Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always displeased with something, and his eyes were angry, protruding, like a crayfish's.

"Doan like it!" he said, going out. "Doan like it, God help 'em all!"




II




The next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop served the liturgy in the town cathedral, then visited the diocesan bishop, visited a certain very sick old general's widow, and finally went home. Between one and two o'clock he had dinner with two dear guests: his old mother and his niece Katya, a girl of about eight. All through dinner the spring sun looked through the window from outside, shining merrily on the white tablecloth and in Katya's red hair. Through the double windows one could hear the noise of rooks in the garden and the singing of starlings.

"It's nine years since we saw each other," the old woman said, "but yesterday in the convent, when I looked at you—Lord! You haven't changed a bit, only you've lost weight, and your beard has grown longer. Ah, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother! And yesterday during the vigil, nobody could help themselves, everybody wept. Looking at you, I suddenly wept, too—though why, I don't know. It's God's holy will!"

And, in spite of the tenderness with which she said it, she was clearly embarrassed, as if she did not know whether to address him formally or informally, to laugh or not, and seemed to feel more like a deacon's widow than his mother. But Katya gazed without blinking at her uncle, the bishop, as if trying to figure out what sort of man he was. Her hair rose from under the comb and velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo, her nose was turned up, her eyes were sly. Before sitting down to dinner she had broken a tea glass, and now her grandmother, as she talked, kept moving glasses and cups away from her. The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how, many years ago, she used to take him and his brothers and sisters to visit relatives whom she considered wealthy; she was solicitous for her children then, and for her grandchildren now, and so she had brought Katya …

"Your sister Varenka has four children," she told him. "Katya here is the oldest, and, God knows what was the cause of it, but my son-in-law, Father Ivan, took sick and died three days before the Dormition.5 And my Varenka is now fit to go begging through the world."

"And how is Nikanor?" the bishop asked about his oldest brother.

"All right, thank God. He's all right, and able to get by, Lord be blessed. Only there's one thing: his son Nikolasha, my grandson, didn't want to follow the clerical line, but went to the university to become a doctor. He thinks it's better, but who knows! It's God's holy will."

"Nikolasha cuts up dead people," said Katya, and she spilled water in her lap.

"Sit still, child," the grandmother remarked calmly and took the glass from her. "Pray when you eat."

"We haven't seen each other for so long!" the bishop said and tenderly stroked his mother's shoulder and arm. "I missed you when I was abroad, mama, I missed you terribly."

"I thank you."

"I used to sit by the open window in the evening, alone as could be, they'd start playing music, and homesickness would suddenly come over me, and I thought I'd give anything to go home, to see you…"

His mother smiled, brightened up, but at once made a serious face and said:

"I thank you."

His mood changed somehow suddenly He looked at his mother and could not understand where she got that timid, deferential expression in her face and voice, or why it was there, and he did not recognize her. He felt sad, vexed. Besides, his head ached just as yesterday, he had bad pain in his legs, the fish seemed insipid, tasteless, and he was thirsty all the time …

After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, came and spent an hour and a half sitting silently with long faces; the archimandrite,6taciturn and slightly deaf, came on business. Then the bells rang for vespers, the sun set behind the woods, and the day was gone. Returning from church, the bishop hastily said his prayers, went to bed, and covered himself warmly.

The memory of the fish he had eaten at dinner was unpleasant. The moonlight disturbed him, and then he heard talking. In a neighboring room, probably the drawing room, Father Sisoy was discussing politics:

"The Japanese are at war now. They're fighting. The Japanese, my dear, are the same as the Montenegrins, the same tribe. They were both under the Turkish yoke."

And then came the voice of Marya Timofeevna:

"So we said our prayers and had tea, and so then we went to see Father Yegor in Novokhatnoe, which is …"

And it was "we had tea" or "we drank a glass" time and again, as if all she ever did in her life was drink tea. The bishop slowly, listlessly remembered the seminary, the theological academy. For three years he had taught Greek at the seminary, by which time he could no longer read without glasses; then he was tonsured a monk and was made a school inspector. Then he defended his thesis. When he was thirty-two, they made him rector of the seminary, he was consecrated archimandrite, and life then was so easy, pleasant, it seemed so very long that he could see no end to it. Then he fell ill, lost weight, nearly went blind, and on his doctors' advice had to abandon everything and go abroad.

"And what then?" Sisoy asked in the neighboring room.

"And then we had tea …" answered Marya Timofeevna.

"Father, your beard is green!" Katya suddenly said in surprise and laughed.

The bishop recalled that the gray-haired Father Sisoy's beard did indeed have a green tinge, and he laughed.

"Lord God, what a punishment the girl is!" Sisoy said loudly, getting angry. "Spoiled as they come! Sit still!"

The bishop remembered the white church, perfectly new, in which he served when he lived abroad, remembered the sound of the warm sea. His apartment consisted of five rooms, high-ceilinged and bright, there was a new desk in the study, a library. He read a lot, wrote often. And he remembered how homesick he was, how a blind beggar woman sang of love and played the guitar outside his window every day, and each time he listened to her, for some reason he thought of the past. Eight years passed and he was recalled to Russia, and now he was installed as an auxiliary bishop, and the past had all withdrawn somewhere into the distance, the mist, as if it had been a dream …

Father Sisoy came into his bedroom with a candle.

"Well," he was surprised, "you're already asleep, Your Grace?"

"Why not?"

"But it's early, ten o'clock, or not even that. I bought a candle today, I wanted to rub you with tallow."

"I have a fever …" said the bishop, and he sat up. "In fact, I do need something. My head doesn't feel right …"

Sisoy removed his shirt and began to rub his chest and back with candle tallow.

"There … there …" he said. "Lord Jesus Christ … There. Today I went to town, visited—what's his name?—the archpriest Sidonsky … Had tea with him … I doan like him! Lord Jesus Christ … There … Doan like him at all!"




III




The diocesan bishop, old, very fat, was suffering from rheumatism or gout and had not left his bed for a month. Bishop Pyotr went to see him almost every day and received petitioners in his stead. And now, when he was unwell, he was struck by the emptiness, the pettiness of all that people asked about and wept about; he was angered by their backwardness, their timidity; and the mass of all these petty and unnecessary things oppressed him, and it seemed to him that he now understood the diocesan bishop, who once, when he was young, had written Lessons on Freedom of Will, but now seemed totally immersed in trifles, had forgotten everything, and did not think of God. The bishop must have grown unaccustomed to Russian life while abroad, and it was not easy for him; he found the people coarse, the women petitioners boring and stupid, the seminarians and their teachers uncultivated, sometimes savage. And the papers, incoming and outgoing, numbering in the tens of thousands, and what papers! Rural deans throughout the diocese gave the priests, young and old, and even their wives and children, marks for behavior, A's and B's, and sometimes also C's, and it was necessary to talk, read, and write serious papers about all that. And he decidedly did not have a single free moment, his soul trembled all day, and Bishop Pyotr found peace only when he was in church.

He also could not get used to the fear which, without wishing it, he aroused in people, despite his quiet, modest nature. All the people of the province, when he looked at them, seemed to him small, frightened, guilty. In his presence they all grew timid, even old archpriests, they all "plopped down" at his feet, and recently a woman petitioner, the elderly wife of a village priest, had been unable to utter a single word from fear, and so had gone away with nothing. And he, who in his sermons never dared to speak badly of people, never reproached them, because he felt pity for them, lost his temper with petitioners, became angry, flung their petitions to the floor. In all the time he had been there, not a single person had spoken to him sincerely, simply, humanly; even his old mother seemed not the same, not the same at all! And why, one asked, did she talk incessantly and laugh so much with Sisoy, while with him, her son, she was serious, usually silent, bashful, which did not become her at all? The only person who behaved freely in his presence and said whatever he liked was old Sisoy, who had been around bishops all his life and had outlived eleven of them. And that was why he felt at ease with him, though he was unquestionably a difficult, fussy man.

On Tuesday after the liturgy the bishop was at the diocesan bishop's house and received petitioners there, became upset, angry, then went home. He was still unwell and felt like going to bed; but he had no sooner come home than he was informed that Yerakin, a young merchant, a donor, had come on very important business. He had to be received. Yerakin stayed for about an hour, talked very loudly, almost shouted, and it was difficult to understand what he said.

"God grant that!" he said, going out. "Most unfailingly! Depending on the circumstances, Your Episcopal Grace! I wish that!"

After him came an abbess from a distant convent. And when she left, the bells rang for vespers, and he had to go to church.

In the evening the monks sang harmoniously, inspiredly, the office was celebrated by a young hieromonk with a black beard; and the bishop, listening to the verses about the Bridegroom who cometh at midnight and about the chamber that is adorned,7 felt, not repentance for his sins, not sorrow, but inner peace, silence, and was carried in his thoughts into the distant past, into his childhood and youth, when they had also sung about the Bridegroom and the chamber, and now that past appeared alive, beautiful, joyful, as it probably never had been. And perhaps in the other world, in the other life, we shall remember the distant past, our life here, with the same feeling. Who knows! The bishop sat in the sanctuary, it was dark there. Tears flowed down his face. He was thinking that here he had achieved everything possible for a man in his position, he had faith, and yet not everything was clear, something was still lacking, he did not want to die; and it still seemed that there was some most important thing which he did not have, of which he had once vaguely dreamed, and in the present he was stirred by the same hope for the future that he had had in childhood, and in the academy, and abroad.

"They're singing so well today!" he thought, listening to the choir. "So well!"




IV




On Thursday he served the liturgy in the cathedral, and there was the washing of feet.8 When the church service ended and people were going home, it was sunny, warm, cheerful, the water ran noisily in the ditches, and from the fields outside town came the ceaseless singing of larks, tender, calling all to peace. The trees were awake and smiled amiably, and over them, God knows how far, went the fathomless, boundless blue sky.

On coming home, Bishop Pyotr had tea, then changed his clothes, went to bed, and told his cell attendant to close the window blinds. The bedroom became dark. What weariness, though, what pain in his legs and back, a heavy, cold pain, and what a ringing in his ears! He lay without sleeping for a long time, as it now seemed to him, for a very long time, and it was some trifle that kept him from sleeping, that flickered in his brain as soon as his eyes closed. As on the previous day, voices, the clink of glasses and teaspoons came through the wall from neighboring rooms … Marya Timofeevna, merry and bantering, was telling Father Sisoy something, and he responded sullenly, in a displeased voice: "Oh, them! Hah! What else!" And again the bishop felt vexed and then hurt that the old woman behaved in an ordinary and simple way with strangers, but with him, her son, was timid, spoke rarely, and did not say what she wanted to say, and even, as it had seemed to him all those days, kept looking for an excuse to stand up, because she was embarrassed to sit in his presence. And his father? If he were alive, he would probably be unable to utter a single word before him …

Something fell on the floor in the next room and smashed; it must have been Katya dropping a cup or a saucer, because Father Sisoy suddenly spat and said angrily:

"The girl's a sheer punishment, Lord, forgive me, a sinner! There's never enough with her!"

Then it became quiet, only sounds from outside reached him. And when the bishop opened his eyes, he saw Katya in his room, standing motionless and looking at him. Her red hair, as usual, rose from behind her comb like a halo.

"It's you, Katya?" he asked. "Who keeps opening and closing the door downstairs?"

"I don't hear it," Katya said and listened.

"There, somebody just passed by."

"It's in your stomach, uncle!"

He laughed and patted her head.

"So you say cousin Nikolasha cuts up dead people?" he asked after a pause.

"Yes. He's studying."

"Is he kind?"

"Kind enough. Only he drinks a lot of vodka."

"And what illness did your father die of?"

"Papa was weak and very, very thin, and suddenly—in his throat. I got sick then and so did my brother Fedya, all in the throat. Papa died, and we got well."

Her chin trembled and tears welled up in her eyes and rolled slowly down her cheeks.

"Your Grace," she said in a high little voice, now crying bitterly, "mama and all of us were left in such misery … Give us a little money … Be so kind … dear uncle! …"

He, too, became tearful and for a long time was too upset to utter a word, then he patted her head, touched her shoulder, and said:

"Very well, very well, child. The bright resurrection of Christ will come, and then we'll talk … I'll help you … I will …"

Quietly, timidly, his mother came in and crossed herself before the icons. Noticing that he was not asleep, she asked:

"Would you like some soup?"

"No, thank you …" he replied. "I don't want any."

"You don't look well … seems to me. But then how could you not get sick! On your feet the whole day, the whole day—my God, it's painful even to look at you. Well, Easter's not far off, God grant you'll be able to rest, then we can talk, and I won't bother you with my talk now. Let's go, Katechka, let His Grace sleep."

And he remembered how, a long, long time ago, when he was still a boy, she had spoken with a rural dean in just the same jokingly deferential tone … Only by her extraordinarily kind eyes and the timid, worried glance she cast at him as she left the room, could one see that she was his mother. He closed his eyes and it seemed he slept, but twice he heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy cough on the other side of the wall. His mother came in once more and gazed at him timidly for a moment. Someone drove up to the porch in a coach or a carriage, judging by the sound. Suddenly there came a knock, the bang of a door: the attendant came into his bedroom.

"Your Grace!" he called.

"What?"

"The horses are ready, it's time to go to the Lord's Passion."9

"What time is it?"

"A quarter past seven."

He dressed and drove to the cathedral. He had to stand motionless in the middle of the church through all twelve Gospel readings, and the first Gospel, the longest, the most beautiful, he read himself. A vigorous, healthy mood came over him. The first Gospel— "Now is the Son of Man glorified"10—he knew by heart; and as he read, he raised his eyes from time to time and saw on both sides a whole sea of lights, heard the sizzle of candles, but, as in previous years, he was unable to see the people, and it seemed to him that they were the same people as in his childhood and youth, that they would be the same every year, but for how long—God only knew.

His father had been a deacon, his grandfather a priest, his great-grandfather a deacon, and all his ancestry, perhaps since the time when Russia embraced Christianity,11 had belonged to the clergy, and the love for church services, the clergy, the ringing of bells, was innate in him, deep, ineradicable; in church, especially when he celebrated the office himself, he felt active, vigorous, happy And so he did now. Only when the eighth Gospel had been read, he felt that his voice had weakened, even his coughing had become inaudible, his head ached badly, and he was troubled by a fear that he was about to fall down. And indeed his legs had gone quite numb, so that he gradually ceased to feel them, and it was incomprehensible to him how and on what he was standing, and why he did not fall down …

When the service ended, it was a quarter to twelve. Returning home, the bishop undressed at once and lay down, without even saying his prayers. He was unable to speak, and it seemed to him that he would now be unable to stand. As he pulled the blanket over him, he suddenly had a longing to be abroad, an unbearable longing! He thought he would give his life only not to see those pathetic, cheap blinds, the low ceilings, not to breathe that oppressive monastery smell. If there had been just one person to whom he could talk, unburden his soul!

For a long time he heard someone's footsteps in the next room and could not remember who it was. At last the door opened and Sisoy came in, holding a candle and a teacup.

"In bed already, Your Grace?" he asked. "And I've come because I want to rub you with vodka and vinegar. If you rub it in well, it can be of great benefit. Lord Jesus Christ … There … There … And I've just been to our monastery … I doan like it! I'll leave here tomorrow, Your Grace, I want no more of it. Lord Jesus Christ… There …"

Sisoy was unable to stay long in one place, and it seemed to him that he had been living in St. Pankraty's Monastery for a whole year by then. And, above all, listening to him, it was hard to understand where his home was, whether he loved anyone or anything, whether he believed in God … He did not understand himself why he was a monk, and he did not think about it, and the time of his tonsuring had long been erased from his memory; it looked as if he had simply been born a monk.

"I'll leave tomorrow. God bless the lot of them!"

"I'd like to talk with you … I never can get around to it," the bishop said softly, forcing himself. "I don't know anyone or anything here."

"So be it, if you like I'll stay till Sunday, but no longer. I want none of it! Pah!"

"What sort of bishop am I?" the bishop went on softly. "I should be a village priest, a deacon … or a simple monk … All this oppresses me, oppresses me …"

"What? Lord Jesus Christ … There … Well, go to sleep, Your Grace! … No point! Forget it! Good night!"

The bishop did not sleep all night. And in the morning, around eight o'clock, he began to have intestinal bleeding. The cell attendant became frightened and ran first to the archimandrite, then for the monastery doctor, Ivan Andreich, who lived in town. The doctor, a stout old man with a long gray beard, examined the bishop for a long time, and kept shaking his head and scowling, then said:

"You know, Your Grace, you've got typhoid fever."

Within an hour the bishop became very thin from the bleeding, pale, pinched, his face shrank, his eyes were now big, he looked older, smaller, and it seemed to him that he was thinner, weaker, more insignificant than anyone, that all that had once been had gone somewhere very far away and would no longer repeat itself, would not be continued.

"How good!" he thought. "How good!"

His old mother came. Seeing his shrunken face and big eyes, she became frightened, fell on her knees by his bed, and started kissing his face, shoulders, hands. And to her, too, it seemed that he was thinner, weaker, and more insignificant than anyone, and she no longer remembered that he was a bishop, and she kissed him like a child very near and dear to her.

"Pavlusha, my darling," she said, "my dear one! … My little son! … What makes you like this? Pavlusha, answer me!"

Katya, pale, stern, stood nearby and did not understand what was the matter with her uncle, why there was such suffering on her grandmother's face, why she was saying such touching, sad words. And he could no longer say a word, he understood nothing, and imagined that he was now a simple, ordinary man, walking briskly, merrily across the fields, tapping his stick, and over him was the broad sky, flooded with sunlight, and he was free as a bird and could go wherever he liked!

"My little son, Pavlusha, answer me!" said the old woman. "What's the matter with you? My dear one!"

"Don't trouble His Grace," Sisoy said crossly, passing through the room. "Let him sleep … there's no point… forget it! …"

Three doctors came, held a consultation, then left. The day was long, unbelievably long, then night came and lasted a very, very long time, and towards morning on Saturday the cell attendant went up to the old woman, who was lying on a sofa in the drawing room, and asked her to go to the bedroom: the bishop had bid the world farewell.

The next day was Easter. There were forty-two churches and six monasteries in the town; a resounding, joyful ringing of bells hung over the town from morning till evening, never silent, stirring up the spring air; the birds sang, the sun shone brightly. It was noisy on the big market square, swings were swinging, barrel organs playing, accordions shrieked, drunken voices shouted. In the afternoon people went driving about the main streets—in short, all was cheerful, all was well, just as it had been the year before, and as it would also be, in all probability, the year after.

A month later a new auxiliary bishop was appointed, and no one thought of Bishop Pyotr anymore. Soon he was completely forgotten. And only the old woman, the mother of the deceased, who now lives with her deacon son-in-law in a forsaken little provincial town, when she went out before evening to meet her cow, and got together by the pasture with other women, would begin telling them about her children and grandchildren, and how she once had a son who was a bishop, and she said it timidly, afraid they would not believe her …

And indeed not everyone believed her.
APRIL 1902






THE FIANCÉE








I




It was ten o'clock in the evening, and a full moon was shining over the garden. In the Shumins' house the vigil ordered by the grandmother, Marfa Mikhailovna, had just ended, and now Nadya—she had gone out to the garden for a moment—could see the table being set for a light meal in the reception room, and her grandmother bustling about in her magnificent silk dress; Father Andrei, the archpriest of the cathedral, was talking about something with Nadya's mother, Nina Ivanovna, and now, through the window in the evening light, her mother for some reason looked very young; next to her stood Father Andrei's son, Andrei Andreich, listening attentively

The garden was quiet, cool, and shadows lay dark and peaceful on the ground. From somewhere far away, very far, probably outside town, came the calling of frogs. May, sweet May, was in the air! She breathed deeply and wanted to think that, not here, but somewhere under the sky, above the trees, far outside town, in the fields and woods, spring's own life was now unfolding, mysterious, beautiful, rich, and holy, inaccessible to the understanding of weak, sinful human beings. And for some reason she wanted to cry.

She, Nadya, was already twenty-three years old; since the age of sixteen she had been dreaming passionately of marriage, and now at last she was the fiancée of Andrei Andreich, the same one who was standing behind the window; she liked him, the wedding was already set for the seventh of July, and yet there was no joy, she slept badly at night, her gaiety had vanished … From the open window to the basement, where the kitchen was, came the sounds of people hurrying about, of knives chopping, of the door slamming shut on its pulley; there was a smell of roast turkey and pickled cherries. And for some reason it seemed that it would be like this all her life, without change, without end!

Now someone came out of the house and stood on the porch; it was Alexander Timofeich, or simply Sasha, a guest, come from Moscow ten days before. Long ago a distant relative, Marya Petrovna, an impoverished widow, a small, thin, ailing gentlewoman, used to come to the grandmother for charity. She had a son Sasha. For some reason he was said to be a wonderful artist, and when his mother died, the grandmother, for the salvation of her soul, sent him to Komissarov's school in Moscow; two years later he transferred to a school of fine arts, stayed there for nearly fifteen years, and finished up none too brilliantly in architecture, but he did not go into architecture anyway, but worked in one of the Moscow printing houses. He came to the grandmother's almost every summer, usually very sick, to rest and recuperate.

He was now wearing a buttoned-up frock coat and shabby duck trousers frayed at the bottoms. His shirt was unironed, and his entire look was somehow unfresh. Very thin, with large eyes and long, slender fingers, bearded, dark, but, for all that, handsome. He was accustomed to the Shumins, as to his own family, and felt at home with them. And the room he lived in there had long been known as Sasha's room.

Standing on the porch, he saw Nadya and went over to her.

"It's nice here," he said.

"Of course it's nice. You ought to stay till autumn."

"Yes, that's probably so. Perhaps I'll stay with you till September."

He laughed for no reason and sat down beside her.

"And I'm sitting here and looking at mama," said Nadya. "She looks so young from here! My mama has her weaknesses, of course," she added after a pause, "but still she's an extraordinary woman."

"Yes, she's nice …" Sasha agreed. "Your mama is, of course, a very kind and dear woman in her own way, but … how shall I put it? Early this morning I went to your kitchen, and there were four servants sleeping right on the floor, no beds, rags instead of sheets, stench, bedbugs, cockroaches … The same as it was twenty years ago, no change at all. Well, your grandmother, God be with her, that's how grandmothers are; but your mama speaks French, takes part in theatricals. It seems she might understand."

When Sasha spoke, he held up two long, skinny fingers in front of his listener.

"I find everything here somehow wild, because I'm unused to it," he went on. "Devil knows, nobody's doing anything. Your mother spends the whole day strolling about like some sort of duchess, your grandmother also doesn't do anything, and neither do you. And your fiancé, Andrei Andreich, doesn't do anything either."

Nadya had heard it all last year and, it seemed, the year before last, and she knew that Sasha could not think differently, and it used to make her laugh, but now for some reason she felt annoyed.

"That's all the same old, boring stuff," she said and got up. "Try to invent something newer."

He laughed and also got up, and they both went towards the house. Tall, beautiful, trim, she now looked very healthy and well-dressed beside him; she sensed it and felt sorry for him and, for some reason, slightly awkward.

"And you say a lot that's unnecessary," she said. "You just talked about my Andrei, but you don't know him."

"My Andrei… God be with your Andrei! It's your youth I feel sorry for."

When they went into the reception room, everyone was just sitting down to supper. The grandmother, or granny, as she was known at home, very stout, homely, with thick eyebrows and a little mustache, spoke loudly, and from her voice and manner of speaking it was clear that she was the head of the household. She owned the shopping stalls in the market and the old house with columns and a garden, but every morning she prayed that God would save her from ruin, and with tears at that. Her daughter-in-law, Nadya's mother, Nina Ivanovna, blond, tightly corseted, in a pince-nez, and with diamonds on every finger; and Father Andrei, an old man, lean, toothless, and with a look as if he were about to say something very funny; and his son, Andrei Andreich, Nadya's fiancé, stout and handsome, with wavy hair, resembling an actor or an artist—all three were talking about hypnotism.

"You'll recover after a week with me," said granny, addressing Sasha, "only you must eat more. Just look at you!" she said. "It's frightful! A real prodigal son, if I ever saw one!"

"I have scattered the riches which thou gavest me," Father Andrei said slowly, with laughing eyes. "Accursed, I have fed with senseless swine …"1

"I love my papa," said Andrei Andreich, touching his father's shoulder. "A nice old man. A kind old man."

They all fell silent. Sasha suddenly burst out laughing and put his napkin to his mouth.

"So you believe in hypnotism?" Father Andrei asked Nina Ivanovna.

"I cannot, of course, maintain that I believe in it," Nina Ivanovna replied, giving her face a serious, even stern, expression, "but I must admit that there is much in nature that is mysterious and incomprehensible."

"I fully agree with you, though I must add for my own part that faith considerably diminishes the sphere of the mysterious for us."

A big, very fat turkey was served. Father Andrei and Nina Ivanovna continued their conversation. The diamonds glittered on Nina Ivanovna's fingers, then tears began to glitter in her eyes, she became upset.

"Though I dare not argue with you," she said, "you must agree that there are a great many insoluble riddles in life."

"Not a single one, I dare assure you."

After supper Andrei Andreich played the violin and Nina Ivanovna accompanied him on the piano. Ten years ago he had graduated from the university with a degree in philology, but he did not work anywhere, had no definite occupation, and only participated occasionally in concerts of a charitable nature; and in town he was called an artiste.

Andrei Andreich played; everyone listened silently. The samovar boiled quietly on the table, and only Sasha drank tea. Then, as it struck twelve, a string suddenly broke on the violin; everyone laughed and began bustling about and saying good-bye.

After seeing her fiancé off, Nadya went to her room upstairs, where she lived with her mother (the grandmother occupied the lower floor). Below, in the reception room, the lights were being put out, but Sasha still sat and drank tea. He always drank tea for a long time, Moscow-style, up to seven glasses at a time. Long after she had undressed and gone to bed, Nadya could hear the servants tidying up downstairs, and her grandmother being angry At last everything quieted down, and all that could be heard was Sasha coughing occasionally in a bass voice downstairs in his room.




II




When Nadya woke up, it must have been about two o'clock. Dawn was breaking. Somewhere far away a night watchman was rapping. She did not want to sleep, her bed was very soft, uncomfortable. Nadya, as on all previous nights that May, sat up in bed and began to think. Her thoughts were the same as last night, monotonous, superfluous, importunate—thoughts of how Andrei Andreich had begun courting her and proposed to her, how she had accepted and had then gradually come to appreciate this kind, intelligent man. But now, for some reason, with less than a month to go till the wedding, she had begun to experience fear, anxiety, as if something uncertain and oppressive awaited her.

"Tick-tock, tick-tock …" the watchman rapped lazily. "Tick-tock …"

Through the big old window she can see the garden, and further away the densely flowering lilac bushes, sleepy and languid from the cold; and dense white mist is slowly drifting towards the lilacs, wanting to cover them. Drowsy rooks are cawing in the distant trees.

"My God, what makes it so oppressive for me?"

Perhaps every fiancée feels the same way before her wedding. Who knows! Or is it Sasha's influence? But Sasha has been saying the same thing for several years on end, as if by rote, and when he says it, it seems naïve and strange. But, anyway, why can she not get Sasha out of her head? Why?

The watchman had stopped rapping long ago. Under the window and in the garden birds began making noise, the mist left the garden, everything around brightened up with the light of spring, as with a smile. Soon the whole garden revived, warmed and caressed by the sun, and dewdrops sparkled like diamonds on the leaves; and that morning the old, long-neglected garden seemed so young, so festive.

Granny was already awake. Sasha coughed in a rough bass. There was the sound of the samovar being prepared downstairs, of chairs being moved around.

The hours passed slowly. Nadya had long been up and strolling in the garden, but the morning still dragged on.

Then Nina Ivanovna came, teary-eyed, with a glass of mineral water. She was taken up with spiritism, homeopathy, read a lot, liked to talk of the doubts to which she was susceptible, and all that, as it seemed to Nadya, contained a deep, mysterious meaning. Now Nadya kissed her mother and walked beside her.

"What were you crying about, mother?" she asked.

"Last night I began reading a story describing an old man and his daughter. The old man works in some office and, well, so his superior falls in love with his daughter. I didn't finish it, but there's a passage where I couldn't help crying," said Nina Ivanovna, and she sipped from the glass. "This morning I remembered it and cried a little more."

"And I've been feeling so cheerless all these days," said Nadya, after some silence. "Why can't I sleep nights?"

"I don't know, dear. When I can't sleep at night, I close my eyes very, very tight, like this, and picture Anna Karenina to myself, how she walks and speaks, or I picture something historical, from the ancient world …"

Nadya felt that her mother did not and could not understand her. She felt it for the first time in her life, and even became frightened, wanted to hide herself; and she went to her room.

At two o'clock they sat down to dinner. It was Wednesday, a fast day, and therefore the grandmother was served a meatless borscht and bream with kasha.

To tease the grandmother, Sasha ate both his own meat soup and the meatless borscht. He joked all the while they were eating, but his jokes came out clumsy, invariably calculated to moralize, and it came out as not funny at all when, before producing a witticism, he raised his very long, emaciated, dead-looking fingers, and the thought occurred to one that he was very ill and was perhaps not long for this world, and one pitied him to the point of tears.

After dinner the grandmother went to her room to rest. Nina Ivanovna played the piano for a little while and then she also left.

"Ah, dear Nadya," Sasha began his usual after-dinner conversation, "if only you would listen to me! If only you would!"

She was sitting deep in an old armchair, her eyes closed, while he quietly paced up and down the room.

"If you'd just go and study!" he said. "Only enlightened and holy people are interesting, only they are needed. The more such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth. Of your town then there will gradually be no stone left upon stone— everything will turn upside down, everything will change as if by magic. And there will be huge, magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, extraordinary fountains, remarkable people … But that's not the main thing. The main thing is that the crowd as we think of it, as it is now, this evil will not exist then, because every man will have faith, and every man will know what he lives for, and no one will seek support from the crowd. My dear, my darling, go! Show them all that this stagnant, gray, sinful life is sickening to you. Show it to yourself at least!"

"Impossible, Sasha. I'm getting married."

"Ah, enough! Who needs that?"

They went out to the garden and strolled a bit.

"And however it may be, my dear, you must perceive, you must understand, how impure, how immoral this idle life of yours is," Sasha went on. "You must understand, for instance, that if you, and your mother, and your dear granny do nothing, it means that someone else is working for you, that you are feeding on someone else's life, and is that pure, is it not dirty?"

Nadya wanted to say: "Yes, that's true," she wanted to say that she understood, but tears came to her eyes, she suddenly grew quiet, shrank into herself, and went to her room.

Towards evening Andrei Andreich came and, as usual, played his violin for a long time. Generally he was untalkative, and liked the violin, perhaps, because he could be silent while he played. After ten, going home, with his coat already on, he embraced Nadya and greedily began kissing her face, shoulders, hands.

"My dear, my sweet, my lovely! …" he murmured. "Oh, how happy I am! I'm mad with ecstasy!"

And it seemed to her that she had already heard it long ago, very long ago, or read it somewhere … in a novel, old, tattered, long since abandoned.

In the reception room Sasha sat at the table and drank tea, the saucer perched on his five long fingers; granny was playing patience, Nina Ivanovna was reading. The flame sputtered in the icon lamp, and everything seemed quiet and happy. Nadya said good night, went upstairs to her room, lay down, and fell asleep at once. But, as on the previous night, she awoke with the first light of dawn. She did not want to sleep, her soul was uneasy, heavy. She sat, her head resting on her knees, and thought about her fiancé, about the wedding … She remembered for some reason that her mother had not loved her deceased husband and now owned nothing and was totally dependent on her mother-in-law, granny. And, think as she might, Nadya could not figure out why up to now she had seen something special, extraordinary, in her mother, why she had failed to notice the simple, ordinary, unhappy woman.

And Sasha was not asleep downstairs—she could hear him coughing. He is a strange, naïve man, thought Nadya, and there is something absurd in his dreams, in all his wonderful gardens and extraordinary fountains. But for some reason there was so much that was beautiful in his naïveté, even in that absurdity, that the moment she merely thought whether she should go and study, her whole heart, her whole breast felt a cold shiver and was flooded with a feeling of joy, ecstasy.

"But better not think, better not think …" she whispered. "I mustn't think of it."

"Tick-tock…" the watchman rapped somewhere far away. "Tick-tock … tick-tock …"




III




In the middle of June Sasha suddenly became bored and began preparing to go to Moscow.

"I can't live in this town," he said glumly. "No running water, no drains! I feel queasy eating dinner—there's the most impossible filth in the kitchen …"

"Wait a bit, prodigal son!" the grandmother persuaded him, for some reason in a whisper. "The wedding's on the seventh!"

"I don't want to."

"You were going to stay with us till September."

"But now I don't want to. I must work!"

The summer had turned damp and cold, the trees were wet, everything in the garden looked dismal, uninviting, one did indeed feel like working. In the rooms downstairs and upstairs, unfamiliar women's voices were heard, the grandmother's sewing machine clattered: they were hurrying with the trousseau. Of fur coats alone Nadya was to come with six, and the cheapest of them, in the grandmother's words, cost three hundred roubles! The fuss annoyed Sasha; he sat in his room and felt angry; but they still persuaded him to stay, and he promised not to leave before the first of July.

The time passed quickly. On St. Peter's day,2 after dinner, Andrei Andreich and Nadya went to Moscovskaya Street for one more look at the house that had been rented and long since prepared for the young couple. It was a two-story house, but so far only the upper story was furnished. In the reception room a shiny floor, painted to look like parquet, bentwood chairs, a grand piano, a music stand for the violin. It smelled of paint. On the wall hung a big oil painting in a gilt frame: a naked lady, and beside her a purple jug with the handle broken off.

"A wonderful painting," said Andrei Andreich, sighing with respect. "By the artist Shishmachevsky."

Further on was the drawing room, with a round table, a sofa, and armchairs upholstered in bright blue material. Over the sofa, a big photographic portrait of Father Andrei wearing a kamilavka3and medals. Then they went into the dining room with its cupboard, then into the bedroom; there in the half-darkness two beds stood next to each other, and it looked as if, when the bedroom was being decorated, it was with the idea that it should always be good there and could not be otherwise. Andrei Andreich led Nadya through the rooms, his arm all the while around her waist; and she felt herself weak, guilty, she hated all these rooms, beds, armchairs, was nauseated by the naked lady. It was clear to her now that she had stopped loving Andrei Andreich, or perhaps had never loved him; but how to say it, whom to say it to, and why, she did not and could not figure out, though she thought about it every day and every night … He held her by the waist, spoke so tenderly, so modestly, was so happy going around this apartment of his; while in all of it she saw only banality, stupid, naïve, unbearable banality, and his arm that encircled her waist seemed to her as hard and cold as an iron hoop. And she was ready to run away, to burst into tears, to throw herself out the window at any moment. Andrei Andreich brought her to the bathroom and touched the faucet built into the wall, and water suddenly flowed.

"How about that?" he said and laughed. "I ordered a hundred-bucket cistern installed in the attic, and now you and I will have water."

They strolled through the courtyard, then went out to the street and got into a cab. Dust flew up in thick clouds, and it looked as if it was about to rain.

"You're not cold?" asked Andrei Andreich, squinting from the dust.

She did not answer.

"Yesterday, you remember, Sasha reproached me for not doing anything," he said after a short pause. "Well, he's right! Infinitely right! I don't do anything and can't do anything. Why is that, my dear? Why am I repulsed even by the thought that one day I might stick a cockade to my forehead and go into government service?4Why am I so ill at ease when I see a lawyer or a Latin teacher, or a member of the town council? O Mother Russia! O Mother Russia, how many idle and useless people you still carry on your back! How many you have who are like me, O long-suffering one!"

And he generalized from the fact that he did nothing, and saw it as a sign of the times.

"When we're married," he went on, "we'll go to the country together, my dear, we'll work there! We'll buy a small piece of land with a garden, a river, we'll work, observe life … Oh, how good it will be!"

He took his hat off and his hair flew in the wind, and she listened to him, thinking: "God, I want to be home! God!" Almost in front of the house they overtook Father Andrei.

"There goes my father!" Andrei Andreich joyfully waved his hat. "I love my papa, I really do," he said as he paid the cabby. "A nice old man. A kind old man."

Nadya went into the house angry, unwell, thinking that there would be guests all night, that she would have to entertain them, smile, listen to the violin, listen to all sorts of nonsense, and talk only of the wedding. Her grandmother, imposing, magnificent in her silk dress, haughty, as she always seemed when there were guests, sat by the samovar. Father Andrei came in with his sly smile.

"I have the pleasure and blessed consolation of finding you in good health," he said to the grandmother, and it was hard to tell whether he was joking or serious.




IV




The wind rapped on the windows, on the roof; a whistling was heard, and the household goblin in the stove sang his little song, plaintively and gloomily. It was past midnight. Everyone in the house was already in bed, but no one slept, and Nadya kept having the feeling that someone was playing the violin downstairs. There was a sharp knock, probably a blind being torn off its hinge. A moment later Nina Ivanovna came in in just her nightgown, holding a candle.

"What was that knocking, Nadya?"

Her mother, her hair plaited in a single braid, smiling timidly, seemed older, smaller, plainer on this stormy night. Nadya recalled how still recently she had considered her mother an extraordinary woman and had proudly listened to the words she spoke; and now she could not recall those words; everything that came to her mind was so weak, so useless.

From the stove came the singing of several basses, and one could even hear: "O-o-oh, my Go-o-od!" Nadya sat up in bed and suddenly seized herself strongly by the hair and broke into sobs.

"Mama, mama," she said, "my dear mama, if only you knew what's happening to me! I beg you, I implore you, let me go away! I implore you!"

"Where?" asked Nina Ivanovna, not understanding, and she sat on the bed. "Go away where?"

Nadya wept for a long time and could not utter a word.

"Let me go away from this town!" she said at last. "There should not be and will not be any wedding, understand that! I don't love this man … I can't even speak of him."

"No, my dear, no," Nina Ivanovna began speaking quickly, terribly frightened. "Calm yourself—it's because you're in a bad mood. It will pass. It happens. You've probably had a falling out with Andrei, but lovers' trials end in smiles."

"Oh, leave me, mama, leave me!" Nadya sobbed.

"Yes," said Nina Ivanovna after a silence. "Not long ago you were a child, a little girl, and now you're already a fiancée. There's a constant turnover of matter in nature. And you won't notice how you yourself become a mother and an old woman and have a daughter as rebellious as mine is."

"My dear, kind one, you're intelligent, you're unhappy," said Nadya, "you're very unhappy—why do you talk in banalities? For God's sake, why?"

Nina Ivanovna wanted to say something but was unable to utter a word, sobbed, and went to her room. The basses droned in the stove again, and it suddenly became frightening. Nadya jumped out of bed and went quickly to her mother. Nina Ivanovna, her face tear-stained, lay in bed with a blue blanket over her, holding a book.

"Mama, listen to me!" said Nadya. "I implore you to perceive and understand! Simply understand how shallow and humiliating our life is. My eyes have been opened and I see it all now. And what is your Andrei Andreich? He's not intelligent, mama! Lord God! Understand, mama, he's stupid!"

Nina Ivanovna sat up abruptly.

"You and your grandmother torment me!" she said with a sob. "I want to live! To live!" she repeated and beat her breast twice with her little fist. "Give me freedom! I'm still young, I want to live, and you've made an old woman out of me! …"

She wept bitterly, lay down, and curled up under her blanket, and looked so small, pitiful, silly. Nadya went to her room, got dressed, and, sitting by the window, waited for morning. She sat all night thinking, and someone outside kept rapping on the blinds and whistling away.

In the morning the grandmother complained that during the night the wind had blown down all the apples in the orchard and broken an old plum tree. It was a gray, dull, joyless day, fit for lighting the lamps; everyone complained about the cold, and rain rapped on the windows. After tea Nadya went to Sasha's room and, without saying a word, knelt by the armchair in the corner and covered her face with her hands.

"What is it?" asked Sasha.

"I can't …" she said. "How could I have lived here before, I can't understand, I can't perceive! I despise my fiancé, I despise myself, I despise all this idle, meaningless life …"

"Well, well …" said Sasha, not yet understanding what was the matter. "It's nothing … It's all right."

"This life is hateful to me," Nadya went on, "I can't stand it here one more day. Tomorrow I'll go away. Take me with you, for God's sake!"

For a moment Sasha looked at her in amazement; finally he understood and was happy as a child. He waved his arms and began shuffling in his slippers, as if dancing for joy

"Splendid!" he said, rubbing his hands. "God, how good!"

And she looked at him without blinking, with big, enamoured eyes, as if spellbound, expecting him to say something significant at once, something of boundless importance; he had not said anything yet, but it seemed to her that something vast and new was opening out before her, something she had not known before, and she now looked at him, filled with expectations, ready for anything, even death.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," he said, after some thought, "and you will come to the station to see me off… I'll bring your luggage in my trunk and buy you a ticket; at the third bell you'll get on the train, and—off we'll go. You'll keep me company as far as Moscow and then go on by yourself to Petersburg. You have a passport?"5

"Yes."

"I swear you won't regret it and won't repent of it," Sasha said with enthusiasm. "You'll go, you'll study, and then let your destiny carry you on. Once you've turned your life around, the rest will change. The main thing is to turn your life around, and the rest doesn't matter. So, then, tomorrow we go?"

"Oh, yes! For God's sake!"

It seemed to Nadya that she was very agitated, that her soul was heavy as never before, that now, right up to their departure, she would have to suffer and have tormenting thoughts; but as soon as she went to her room upstairs and lay down on the bed, she fell asleep and slept soundly, her face tear-stained and smiling, till evening.




V




They sent for a cab. Nadya, already in her hat and coat, went upstairs to look once more at her mother and at all that had been hers; she stood in her room by the still-warm bed, looked around, then went quietly to her mother. Nina Ivanovna was asleep, it was quiet in the room. Nadya kissed her mother and straightened her hair, stood there for a minute or two … Then she unhurriedly went downstairs.

Outside it was raining hard. A cab with its top up, all wet, was standing by the porch.

"There won't be room enough for you, Nadya," said the grandmother, as a servant began putting in the trunks. "Who wants to go and see him off in such weather! Stay home! Look how it's raining!"

Nadya wanted to say something and could not. Sasha helped her into the cab, and covered her legs with a plaid. Then he got in beside her.

"Have a good trip! God bless you!" the grandmother called from the porch. "And you, Sasha, write to us from Moscow!"

"All right. Good-bye, granny!"

"May the Queen of Heaven keep you!"

"Well, some weather!" said Sasha.

Only now did Nadya begin to cry. Now it was clear to her that she was bound to leave, something she had not yet believed when she was saying good-bye to her grandmother, when she was looking at her mother. Farewell, town! And suddenly she remembered everything: Andrei, and his father, and the new apartment, and the naked lady with the vase; and now it was all not frightening, not oppressive, but naïve, petty, and dropping further and further behind her. And when they got in the carriage and the train started, this whole past, so big and serious, shrank into a little lump, and a vast, expansive future, which until now had been so little noticeable, began to unfold. Rain rapped on the carriage windows, only green fields could be seen, telegraph poles with birds on the wires flashed by, and joy suddenly took her breath away: she remembered that she was on the way to freedom, on the way to study, and it was the same as what very long ago was called going to the Cossacks.6She laughed, and wept, and prayed.

"It's all ri-i-ight!" said Sasha, grinning. "It's all ri-i-ight!"




VI




Autumn passed, then winter passed. Nadya was already very homesick, and thought every day of her mother, her grandmother, thought of Sasha. The letters that came from home were quiet, kind, and everything seemed to have been forgiven and forgotten. In May after examinations she went home, healthy and cheerful, and stopped in Moscow on her way to see Sasha. He was the same as last summer: bearded, his hair disheveled, in the same frock coat and duck trousers, with the same large, beautiful eyes; but he looked unhealthy, worn out, had aged and lost weight, and kept coughing. And for some reason Nadya found him gray, provincial.

"My God, Nadya's come!" he said and laughed merrily. "My dearest, my darling!"

They sat for a while in the printing shop, where it was smoky and smelled strongly, suffocatingly, of India ink and paint; then they went to his room, where it was also smoky, messy; on the table, next to the cold samovar, was a cracked plate with a piece of dark paper, and on the table and the floor a multitude of dead flies.7And here everything showed that Sasha's personal life was slovenly, that he lived anyhow, with a total disdain of comfort, and if anyone had begun talking to him about his personal happiness, about his personal life, about anyone's love for him, he would have understood none of it and would only have laughed.

"It's all right, everything worked out very well," Nadya told him hurriedly. "Mama came to see me in Petersburg during the autumn and told me that my grandmother wasn't angry, but only kept going into my room and crossing the walls."

Sasha looked cheerful, but kept coughing and spoke in a cracked voice, and Nadya peered at him and could not understand whether he was indeed seriously ill or it only seemed so to her.

"Sasha, my dear," she said, "you're quite ill!"

"No, it's nothing. I'm sick, but not very …"

"Ah, my God!" Nadya said worriedly, "why don't you go to a doctor, why don't you look after your health? My dear, sweet Sasha," she said, and tears poured from her eyes, and for some reason Andrei Andreich appeared in her imagination, and the naked lady with the vase, and all her past life, which now seemed as distant as her childhood; and she wept because Sasha no longer seemed so new, intelligent, interesting to her as he had last year. "Dear Sasha, you're very, very ill. I don't know what I wouldn't do to keep you from being so pale and thin. I owe you so much! You can't even imagine how much you've done for me, my good Sasha! In fact, you're now the nearest and dearest person for me."

They sat and talked for a while; and now, after Nadya had spent a winter in Petersburg, there was in Sasha, in his words, in his smile, and in his whole figure, the air of something outlived, old-fashioned, long sung, and perhaps already gone to its grave.

"I'm leaving for the Volga the day after tomorrow," said Sasha, "and then for a kumys cure.8 I want to drink kumys. A friend of mine and his wife are coming with me. His wife is an amazing woman; I keep whipping her up, convincing her to go and study. I want her to turn her life around."

Having talked, they went to the station. Sasha treated her to tea and apples; and when the train started and he smiled and waved his handkerchief, she could tell even from his legs that he was very ill and would hardly live long.

Nadya arrived in her town at noon. As she drove home from the station, the streets seemed very wide and the houses very small, flattened; there were no people, and she met only the German piano tuner in his faded brown coat. And all the houses seemed covered with dust. Her grandmother, quite old now, stout and homely as before, put her arms around Nadya, and wept for a long time, pressing her face to Nadya's shoulder, unable to tear herself away. Nina Ivanovna had also aged considerably and looked bad, somehow all pinched, but was still as tightly corseted as before, and the diamonds sparkled on her fingers.

"My dear!" she said, trembling all over. "My dear!"

Then they sat and wept silently. It was evident that both her grandmother and her mother felt that the past was lost forever and irretrievably: gone now was their position in society, gone their former honor, and their right to invite people; so it happens when, amidst a carefree, easy life, the police suddenly come at night, make a search, and it turns out that the master of the house is an embezzler, a counterfeiter—and then farewell forever to the carefree, easy life!

Nadya went upstairs and saw the same bed, the same windows with the naïve white curtains, and through the windows the same garden, flooded with light, cheerful, noisy. She touched her table, sat, thought a little. And she ate well, and drank tea with rich, delicious cream, but something was lacking now, there was a feeling of emptiness in the rooms, and the ceilings were low. In the evening she went to bed, covered herself up, and for some reason it was funny to be lying in that warm, very soft bed.

Nina Ivanovna came in for a moment and sat down, as guilty people do, timidly and furtively.

"Well, how is it, Nadya?" she asked, after some silence. "Are you content? Quite content?"

"I am, mama."

Nina Ivanovna stood up and made a cross over Nadya and over the windows.

"And I, as you see, have become religious," she said. "You know, I've taken up philosophy and keep thinking, thinking … And many things have become clear as day to me now. First of all, I think, the whole of life must pass as if through a prism."

"Tell me, mama, how is grandmother?"

"She seems all right. When you left then with Sasha, and the telegram came from you, your grandmother read it and collapsed; for three days she lay in bed without moving. Then she prayed to God and wept all the time. But now it's all right."

She got up and paced about the room.

"Tick-tock…" the watchman rapped. "Tick-tock, tick-tock …"

"First of all, the whole of life must pass as if through a prism," she said, "that is, in other words, life must be broken down into the simplest elements, as if into the seven primary colors, and each element must be studied separately."

What else Nina Ivanovna said, and when she left, Nadya did not hear, because she soon fell asleep.

May passed, June came. Nadya was accustomed to home now. Her grandmother fussed over the samovar and sighed deeply; Nina Ivanovna talked in the evenings about her philosophy; as before, she lived in the house as a hanger-on and had to turn to the grandmother for every penny. There were lots of flies in the house, and the ceilings of the rooms seemed to get lower and lower. Granny and Nina Ivanovna did not go out, for fear of meeting Father Andrei and Andrei Andreich. Nadya walked in the garden, in the street, looked at the houses, at the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the town had long since grown old, outlived itself, and was only waiting for the end, or for the beginning of something young, fresh. Oh, if only this new, bright life would come sooner, when one could look one's fate directly and boldly in the eye, be conscious of one's rightness, be cheerful, free! And this life would come sooner or later! There would be a time when of grandmother's house, where everything was so arranged that four maids could not live otherwise than in a single basement room, in filth—there would be a time when no trace of this house would remain, it would be forgotten, no one would remember it. And Nadya's only entertainment came from the boys in the neighboring yard; when she strolled in the garden, they rapped on the fence and teased her, laughing:

"The fiancée! The fiancée!"

A letter came from Sasha in Saratov. In his merry, dancing hand he wrote that the trip down the Volga had been quite successful, but that he had fallen slightly ill in Saratov, had lost his voice, and had been in the hospital for two weeks now. She realized what it meant, and a foreboding that amounted to certainty came over her. And she found it unpleasant that this foreboding and her thoughts of Sasha did not trouble her as before. She wanted passionately to live, wanted to be in Petersburg, and her acquaintance with Sasha now seemed to her something dear, but long, long past! She did not sleep all night and in the morning sat by the window, listening. And, indeed, voices could be heard downstairs; her grandmother was quickly, anxiously asking about something. Then someone began to weep … When Nadya came downstairs, her grandmother was standing in the corner and praying, and her face was wet with tears. On the table lay a telegram.

Nadya paced the room for a long time, listening to her grandmother's weeping, then picked up the telegram and read it. It said that on the previous morning, in Saratov, there died of consumption Alexander Timofeich, or simply Sasha.

The grandmother and Nina Ivanovna went to church to order a panikhida, but Nadya still paced the rooms for a long time, thinking. She realized clearly that her life had been turned around, as Sasha had wanted, that here she was lonely, alien, not needed, and that she needed nothing here, that all former things had been torn from her and had vanished, as if they had been burned and their ashes scattered on the wind. She went into Sasha's room and stood there for a while.

"Farewell, dear Sasha!" she thought, and pictured before her a new, expansive, spacious life, and that life, still unclear, full of mysteries, lured and beckoned to her.

She went to her room upstairs to pack, and the next morning said good-bye to her family and, alive, cheerful, left town—as she thought, forever.
DECEMBER 1903




Notes




  
THE DEATH OF A CLERK
  
1. The name Cherviakov comes from the Russian word cherviak ('worm'). - THE DEATH OF A CLERK [back]
  
2. A popular operetta by French composer Robert Planquette (1843–1903). - THE DEATH OF A CLERK [back]
  
3. The name Brizzhalov suggests a combination of bryzgat’ ('to spray') and briuzzhat’ ('to grumble'). - THE DEATH OF A CLERK [back]

  
SMALL FRY
  
1. The name Nevyrazimov comes from nevyrazimy ('inexpressible'), also used as a euphemism for men’s long underwear (nevyrazimye, i.e., unmentionables). - SMALL FRY [back]
  
2. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Easter Sunday and the days of the week following Easter are called 'bright' days. - SMALL FRY [back]
  
3. In Russia windows are double-glazed and sealed for the winter, but one pane can be opened for ventilation. - SMALL FRY [back]
  
4. Easter is preceded by the forty-day fast known as the Great Lent, which continues through Holy Week and ends with a feast on Easter Day. - SMALL FRY [back]
  
5. A kulich is a dense, sweet yeast bread that is traditionally eaten at Easter; the loaves are brought to church to be blessed. - SMALL FRY [back]
  
6. Titular councillor was ninth of the fourteen ranks of the Russian imperial civil service established by Peter the Great, immortalized by Nikolai Gogol in the figure of the poor clerk Akaky Akakievich, hero of 'The Overcoat.' - SMALL FRY [back]
  
7. The Order of St. Stanislas, a Polish civil order founded in 1792, began to be awarded in Russia in 1831; its decoration was in the form of a star. - SMALL FRY [back]

  
PANIKHIDA
  
1. The church is named for a famous iconographic type of the Mother of God which Byzantine tradition traces back to an image painted by Saint Luke. There is no agreement among scholars on the origin and meaning of the word 'Hodigitria.' - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
2. An iconostasis is an icon-bearing partition with three doors that spans the width of an Orthodox church, separating the body of the church from the sanctuary. - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
3. A prosphora is a small, round loaf of leavened bread used for communion in the Orthodox Church. Prosphoras are sent in to the sanctuary by each of the faithful with a list of names of people to be commemorated during the offering, and are sent out again for distribution at the end of the liturgy. - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
4. The proskomedia is the office of preparation of the bread and wine for the sacrament of communion. - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
5. The forgiving of the harlot is recounted in John 8:3–11. Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint greatly venerated in Orthodoxy, was a prostitute who converted to Christianity and spent forty-seven years in the desert in prayer and repentance. - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
6. A panikhida, which gives the story its title, is an Orthodox prayer service in commemoration of the dead. - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
7. Kolivo, also known as kutya, is a special dish made of grain (wheat or rice) mixed with nuts, raisins, and honey, served in the church on occasions of commemoration of the dead. - PANIKHIDA [back]
  
8. Esau’s selling of his birthright 'for a mess of pottage' is told in Genesis 27:1–46, the punishment of Sodom in Genesis 18:20–19:29, and the account of Joseph in Genesis 37. - PANIKHIDA [back]

  
EASTER NIGHT
  
1. The exclamation 'Christ is risen!' is heard during the Orthodox Easter service, and is also used as a greeting among Orthodox Christians during the forty days between Easter and the Ascension. - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
2. The words are from the first hymn (troparion) of Canticle IX of the Easter matins (Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, fifth edition, Englewood, N.J., 1975, p. 232). - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
3. An akathist (from the Greek 'standing up') is a special canticle sung in honor of Christ, the Mother of God, or one of the saints. - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
4. An archimandrite is the Orthodox equivalent of an abbot, the superior of a monastery or superintendent of several monasteries. - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
5. Saint Nicholas, fourth-century bishop of Myra in Lycia (Asia Minor), is one of the most highly venerated saints in all Christendom. - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
6. The church is emptied and the people and clergy process around it with candles before going back in to begin the Easter service. - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
7. See note 5 to 'Small Fry.' - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
8. The royal doors are the central doors in the iconostasis (see note 2 to 'Panikhida'); a large church would have several side chapels with their own iconostasis and royal doors; they are all left open throughout the Easter service, signifying that the Kingdom of Heaven is now open to all. - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
9. From the first hymn of Canticle VIII of the Easter matins (Hapgood, p. 231). - EASTER NIGHT [back]
  
10. See note 4 to 'Small Fry.' - EASTER NIGHT [back]

  
VANKA
  
1. Watchmen patrolled their territory at night rapping out the hours on an iron or wooden bar. - VANKA [back]
  
2. A village Christmas custom, commemorating the wise men’s journey to Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1–12). - VANKA [back]
  
3. In a village church anyone who wanted to could sing in the choir; the choirs in large city churches could be more selective. - VANKA [back]

  
A BORING STORY
  
1. See note 2 to 'Panikhida.' The iconostasis of a large church may be hung with a great many icons, large and small, often in gold or silver casings. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
2. N. I. Pirogov (1810–81) was a great Russian surgeon and anatomist, active in questions of popular education. K. D. Kavelin (1818–85) was a liberal journalist and social activist. N. A. Nekrasov (1821–78) was a poet and liberal social critic, editor of the influential journal The Contemporary. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
3. The reference is to the eminent Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818–83); we are unable to identify the heroine Nikolai Stepanovich has in mind. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
4. A novel by the German writer Friedrich Spielhagen (1829–1911). - A BORING STORY [back]
  
5. 'History of the illness' (Latin), the heading on the blank page to be filled in by the doctor. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
6. V. L. Gruber (1814–85) was a Russian anatomist. A. I. Babukhin (1835–91) was a histologist and physiologist. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
7. M. D. Skobelev (1843–82) was a Russian general prominent at the time of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
8. Professor V. G. Perov (1833–82), Russian artist, was head of the Russian Academy of Art in Petersburg. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
9. Adelina Patti (1843–1919), Italian opera singer, was one of the great sopranos of her time, known especially for her performances of Mozart, Rossini, and Verdi. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
10. Cf. Hamlet, II, 2, 562: 'What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba …?' - A BORING STORY [back]
  
11. The phrase, become proverbial, is from Part I, chapter 8 of Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol (1809–52). - A BORING STORY [back]
  
12. Chatsky is the hero of the comedy in verse Woe from Wit (1822–23), the first real masterpiece of the Russian theater, by Alexander S. Griboedov (1795–1829). - A BORING STORY [back]
  
13. Having the civil service rank of privy councillor, third of the fourteen degrees established by Peter the Great and equivalent to the military rank of general, Nikolai Stepanovich is also entitled to be addressed as 'Your Excellency.' - A BORING STORY [back]
  
14. Nikolai Stepanovich lists some of the homeliest and most comforting staples of Russian peasant cooking, including kasha, most often made from buckwheat. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
15. Seminary education was open to poorer people who could not afford private tutors or expensive schools, and did not necessarily mean that the student was preparing for a church career. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
16. The first line of the poem 'Reflection,' by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41). - A BORING STORY [back]
  
17. N. A. Dobrolyubov (1836–61) was a radical literary critic of the earnest materialist sort, with a prominent forehead and tubercular pallor. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
18. A. A. Arakcheev (1769–1834), all-powerful minister under emperors Paul I and Alexander I, was an extreme reactionary and strict disciplinarian. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
19. 'Final argument' (Latin). The full phrase, ultima ratio regum ('the final argument of kings'), was the motto Louis XIV had engraved on his cannons. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
20. 2 Kings 2:23. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
21. There are several important Orthodox feast days during the summer months: the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29, the feast of the Transfiguration on August 6, and of the Dormition of the Mother of God (Assumption) on August 15. However, Chekhov also commonly refers to ordinary Sundays as feast days. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
22. A distortion of the opening line of the old Latin students’ song Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus ('Let us make merry while we are young'). - A BORING STORY [back]
  
23. N. I. Krylov (1807–79) was a famous Russian jurist. Revel is the old name of Tallinn, capital of Estonia. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
24. A quotation from the fable 'The Eagle and the Hens,' by the Russian poet and fabulist I. A. Krylov (1768–1844). - A BORING STORY [back]
  
25. Berdichev, a town in the Ukraine, is synonymous with deep provinciality. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
26. Actual illustrated magazines of the time. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
27. A reference to the Russian law requiring the use of internal passports for citizens traveling within the country. At the time, Russia was the only European country to have such a system. - A BORING STORY [back]
  
28. These words (Gnôthi seauton in Greek) were inscribed on the pediment of the oracular temple of Apollo at Delphi; Socrates adopted them as his personal motto. - A BORING STORY [back]

  
GUSEV
  
1. Captain Kopeikin is the hero of an inset story in Gogol’s Dead Souls. Midshipman Dyrka (his name means 'hole') is referred to in Gogol’s play The Marriage. - GUSEV [back]
  
2. A Turco-Tartar people who settled on the Black Sea in the ninth century A.D. They were exterminated by the Byzantine emperor John II Comnenus in 1123. For Pavel Ivanych the word simply means primitive, savage people. - GUSEV [back]
  
3. The proper preparation for death for an Orthodox Christian. The sacrament of anointing with oil is in fact a sacrament of healing, but has come to be considered a part of the 'last rites.' - GUSEV [back]
  
4. Germans, being Lutherans, were not thought of as Christians in the Russian popular mind. - GUSEV [back]
  
5. The prayer 'Memory Eternal' (Vechnaya pamyat’) is sung at the end of the Orthodox funeral service and the panikhida. - GUSEV [back]

  
PEASANT WOMEN
  
1. The words 'where there is no sickness or sighing' come from the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox memorial service. - PEASANT WOMEN [back]
  
2. Holy Week is the week preceding Easter, during which the events of Christ’s Passion are remembered. Thursday is a day of particular holiness when the Last Supper is commemorated. - PEASANT WOMEN [back]
  
3. In Russia 'Trinity' is another name for Pentecost, the feast that falls on the fiftieth day after Easter and celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit. - PEASANT WOMEN [back]
  
4. Churches and homes are traditionally decorated at Pentecost with green branches and flowers, symbolizing the life-giving action of the Holy Spirit. - PEASANT WOMEN [back]
  
5. He means 'the fiery Gehenna,' synonymous with Hell in Jewish and Christian tradition. The words are somewhat closer in Russian. The actual Gehenna is the Hinnom valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem, which in ancient times was a refuse dump where fires constantly smoldered. - PEASANT WOMEN [back]

  
THE FIDGET
  
1. See note 6 to 'Small Fry.' - THE FIDGET [back]
  
2. A dacha is a summer residence for city dwellers—a cottage, part of a big house, or a whole house, depending on a person’s means. 'Going to dacha' also signifies the whole way of life in the summer. - THE FIDGET [back]
  
3. A. Mazzini (1845–1926) was an Italian opera singer. - THE FIDGET [back]
  
4. The words come from the poem 'Reflections at the Front Entrance,' by Nikolai Nekrasov (see note 2 to 'A Boring Story'), which became very popular in its musical setting. - THE FIDGET [back]
  
5. V. D. Polenov (1844–1927) was a Russian landscape and historical painter. - THE FIDGET [back]
  
6. L. Barnay (1842–1924) was a German actor. - THE FIDGET [back]
  
7. Osip is the servant of Khlestakov, impostor-hero of Gogol’s comedy Revizor ('The Inspector General'). - THE FIDGET [back]

  
IN EXILE
  
1. See note 21 to 'A Boring Story.' - IN EXILE [back]

  
WARD NO. 6
  
1. These 'calendars' included edifying little stories and helpful advice as well as the days of the year. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
2. See note 7 to 'Small Fry.' - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
3. The Swedish Order of the Polar Star was also awarded in Russia. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
4. The zemstvo was an elective provincial council with powers of local government; it came to be very important for reform-minded Russians in the latter nineteenth century. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
5. See note 3 to 'Easter Night.' - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
6. The 1860s in Russia were a period when liberalism became radicalized and the material and practical were exalted above the ideal. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
7. See note 2 to 'A Boring Story.' - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
8. 'In the future' (Latin). - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
9. The French biochemist Louis Pasteur (1822–95) and the German doctor and microbiologist Robert Koch (1843–1910) were pioneers in the study of microbes and contagious diseases. Koch discovered the tuberculosis bacillus. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
10. Mt. Elbrus in Georgia, at 18,481 feet, is the highest peak of the Caucasus and the highest mountain in Europe. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
11. An old-fashioned method of treatment for various respiratory ailments, which consisted in applying a number of small heated glasses to the patient’s back. The heat would cause suction and draw the blood to the surface. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
12. In The Brothers Karamazov (Part I, Book 1, chapter 4) Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov does indeed produce a variant of Voltaire’s famous saying: Si Dieu n′ existait pas, il faudrait l’ inventer ('If God did not exist, he would have to be invented'). - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
13. The Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic (412?–323 B.C.) came to Athens from his native Sinope as a penniless vagabond and was so scornful of wealth and social convention that he lived in a barrel. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
14. Marcus Aurelius (121–180 A.D.), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, taught the wisdom of self-restraint and indifference to both pleasure and pain. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
15. See Matthew 26:39 (also Mark 14:36 and Luke 22:42). - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
16. The itinerary includes some of the standard tourist sights in Moscow. The Iverskaya icon of the Mother of God was an ancient miracle-working icon which, in Chekhov’s time, was kept in a specially built chapel between the arches of the Iversky Gate at the entrance to Red Square; it disappeared soon after the revolution. Zamoskvorechye is the part of Moscow across the river from the Kremlin. The Rumiantsev Museum was the first public museum in Russia, opened in the early nineteenth century in Pashkov House; it contained anthropological collections, books, manuscripts, antiquities, and paintings. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
17. A reference to the phrase 'and out of me burdock will grow,' spoken by Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), which became proverbial in Russia (see note 3 to 'A Boring Story'). - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
18. 'Bad tone' (French), meaning socially unacceptable. - WARD NO. 6 [back]
  
19. See Genesis 1:26: 'Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’' - WARD NO. 6 [back]

  
THE BLACK MONK
  
1. Lines from Evgeny Onegin, a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), used in the opera of the same name composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky (1840–93). - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
2. Gaetano Braga (1829–1907), Italian cellist and composer, was best known for his salon composition La Serenata, which was arranged for various instruments. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
3. The words are a quotation from Poltava, a long poem by Pushkin. Kochubey, who appears in the poem, was a wealthy Ukrainian landowner. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
4. 'Let the other side be heard' and 'sufficient for an intelligent man' (Latin). - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
5. See John 14:2. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
6. 'A sound mind in a sound body' (Latin), from the tenth Satire of the Roman poet Juvenal (c. 65–128 A.D.). - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
7. A two-week fast period preceding the feast of the Dormition on August 15. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
8. Polycrates (d. 522 B.C.), tyrant of Samos, after enjoying forty years of happiness, became worried that his luck would not hold out. He thought he might bribe fate by throwing a precious ring into the sea, but it was found in the belly of a fish and brought back to him. Soon after that Samos was taken by the Persian general Orontes, and Polycrates was crucified. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
9. See the first Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians, 5:16. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
10. July 20. - THE BLACK MONK [back]
  
11. Kovrin confuses two stories here: Herod ordered the slaughter of all the male children under two years old in and around Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18); the Egyptian 'first-born' were smitten by the Lord as a sign to Pharaoh that he should let Moses lead the people of Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 12:29–32). - THE BLACK MONK [back]

  
ROTHSCHILD’S FIDDLE
  
1. See note 11 to 'Ward No. 6.' - ROTHSCHILD’S FIDDLE [back]
  
2. The feast of St. John the Theologian, author of the fourth Gospel, is celebrated on May 8, and the feast of the relics of St. Nicholas (see note 5 to 'Easter Night') on May 9, commemorating the 'rescue' of the saint’s relics a few days before the Turkish invasion of Myra in the eleventh century and their safe transfer to the Italian town of Bari, where they now lie. - ROTHSCHILD’S FIDDLE [back]

  
THE STUDENT
  
1. Good Friday, commemorating the Passion of Christ, is a day of total fast. - THE STUDENT [back]
  
2. Rurik (d. 879), a Viking chief, was invited by the people of Novgorod to become their prince, thus founding the first ruling dynasty of Russia; Ivan IV, the Terrible (Ioann is the Old Slavonic form of the name), born in 1530, ruled Russia from 1547 to 1584 and was the first to adopt the title of tsar; Peter I, the Great (1672–1725), the first to adopt the title of emperor, extended the power of Russia considerably and built the new capital of St. Petersburg. - THE STUDENT [back]
  
3. According to an old Russian superstition, a person not immediately recognized by face or voice is destined to become rich. - THE STUDENT [back]
  
4. A composite reading of twelve passages from the four Gospels describing the Crucifixion is part of the matins of Holy Friday, sometimes referred to simply as 'the Twelve Gospels.' The student gives his own summary of some of the readings in what follows. - THE STUDENT [back]

  
ANNA ON THE NECK
  
1. Not a real pilgrimage, but a visit to a monastery, where hotel rooms could be had more cheaply than elsewhere. - ANNA ON THE NECK [back]
  
2. The Order of St. Anna, named for the mother of the Virgin Mary, was founded in 1735 by Karl Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, in honor of his wife Anna Petrovna, daughter of the Russian emperor Peter the Great. It had four degrees, two civil and two military: the decoration for the first civil degree was worn on a ribbon around the neck, for the second, in the buttonhole. - ANNA ON THE NECK [back]
  
3. Shchi (cabbage soup) and kasha (buckwheat gruel) were the most common Russian peasant dishes. - ANNA ON THE NECK [back]
  
4. The Order of St. Vladimir, named for St. Vladimir, Prince of Kiev (956?–1015), who converted Russia to Christianity in 988 A.D., was founded by the empress Catherine the Great in 1782 and was generally awarded for long-term civil service. - ANNA ON THE NECK [back]

  
THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE
  
1. N. A. Amosov (1787–1868) was an artillery officer and engineer. He invented a kind of stove that functioned pneumatically, which was introduced on the market in 1835. An Amosov heating system was installed in the imperial Winter Palace in Petersburg, bringing the inventor a reward of 5,400 acres of land. - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
2. See note 4 to 'Ward No. 6.' - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
3. A sign of protest; it was considered improper for a girl or woman to go out without covering her head. - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
4. Baikal is a sea-sized freshwater lake in Siberia famous for the depth and purity of its water; the Buryat are an Oriental nationality inhabiting the region around Baikal. - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
5. A folk motif: the hero cannot recover his lost beloved until he wears out a pair of iron shoes. - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
6. See note 19 to 'Ward No. 6.' - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
7. For Rurik see note 2 to 'The Student.' Petrushka, the peasant servant of Chichikov, hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, 'liked not so much what he was reading about as the reading itself, or, better, the process of reading, the fact that letters are eternally forming some word, which sometimes even means the devil knows what' (Volume I, chapter 2). - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
8. A health spa in central France, known for its mineral waters. - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]
  
9. A line from the fable 'The Crow and the Fox,' by I. A. Krylov (see note 24 to 'A Boring Story'). The end of the fable is well known: the crow fails to hold on to the God-sent piece of cheese. - THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE [back]

  
THE MAN IN A CASE
  
1. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89) was a liberal journalist and satirist best known for his dark novel The Golovlevs and his satirical history of Russia, The History of a Certain Town. - THE MAN IN A CASE [back]
  
2. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–94) was a liberal historian, author of The History of Civilization in England (1857–61), in which he formulated the idea that the development of civilization leads to the cessation of war between nations. There was also a George Buckle (b. 1857), a biographer and editor of the English magazine Life. - THE MAN IN A CASE [back]
  
3. Fish is 'lenten' but butter is not—thus Belikov strikes a middle path. In addition to the four major fast periods during the year (the Advent fast before Christmas, the Great Lent before Easter, the Peter and Paul fast, and the Dormition fast), Wednesdays and Fridays are also fast days in the Orthodox Church. - THE MAN IN A CASE [back]

  
GOOSEBERRIES
  
1. Cantonists were sons of career soldiers, who were assigned to the department of the army from birth and educated in special schools at state expense. - GOOSEBERRIES [back]
  
2. Bast is the pliant inner bark of the linden tree, which when stripped from the outer bark was put to a variety of uses in Russia, as material for roofing, shoes, wagon covers, and so forth. - GOOSEBERRIES [back]
  
3. An altered quotation from the poem 'The Hero,' by Alexander Pushkin; it should read, 'Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.' - GOOSEBERRIES [back]

  
A MEDICAL CASE
  
1. The reader will realize from this and other stories in the collection that summer nights in northern Russia are extremely short and dawn may come as early as two o’clock in the morning. - A MEDICAL CASE [back]
  
2. See note 16 to 'A Boring Story.' Tamara is the heroine of the long poem The Demon (1839). - A MEDICAL CASE [back]

  
THE DARLING
  
1.Faust Inside Out may be the Russian title of Le Petit Faust ('The Little Faust'), an operetta by French composer Florimond Hervé (1825–92). Orpheus in the Underworld is an operetta by Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), French composer of German origin. - THE DARLING [back]

  
ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS
  
1. See note 4 to 'Ward No. 6.' - ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS [back]
  
2. That is, the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. - ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS [back]
  
3. A line from Evgeny Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. - ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS [back]
  
4. 'A little glass of Cliquot' (French). Cliquot is one of the finest champagnes. - ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS [back]
  
5. 'The Queen of Spades,' a short story by Pushkin, was made into an opera by Tchaikovsky. - ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS [back]

  
THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG
  
1. See note 4 to 'Gusev.' - THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG [back]
  
2. Selyanka is a casserole of cabbage and meat or fish, served in its own baking pan. - THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG [back]
  
3. The Slavyansky Bazaar was a highly respectable hotel and restaurant in Moscow, frequented in Chekhov’s time by artists, actors, and writers. - THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG [back]

  
AT CHRISTMASTIME
  
1. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), a French doctor known for his work on nervous ailments, invented a method of treatment by means of cold showers. - AT CHRISTMASTIME [back]

  
IN THE RAVINE
  
1. Krasnaya Gorka ('Pretty little hill') is the Tuesday of the second week after Easter, when the graves of dead relations are visited and decorated. It was usual to celebrate weddings after Easter, because they could not be celebrated in church during Lent. - IN THE RAVINE [back]
  
2. The Flagellants were a sect in Russia (with its counterparts elsewhere) that believed in flagellation as a means of spiritual purification. They had their own prophets and scriptures, and were always rejected by the Orthodox Church. - IN THE RAVINE [back]
  
3. A Persian term meaning 'plenipotentiary,' the title of the highest Persian ministers, but here used simply by association with things Middle Eastern. - IN THE RAVINE [back]
  
4. The church is named after the icon of the Mother of God from the city of Kazan, a sixteenth-century wonder-working icon the type of which is one of the most widespread in Russia. - IN THE RAVINE [back]
  
5. The first Sunday after Easter, commemorating the disciple who doubted Christ’s resurrection. - IN THE RAVINE [back]

  
THE BISHOP
  
1. In Russia on Palm Sunday, the feast celebrating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem a week before the Crucifixion, pussywillows are handed out to the people in church, for lack of palms. The day is known as 'Pussywillow Sunday.' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
2. Father Simeon is right: there is no mention of Iehudiel or his ass in the Bible. - THE BISHOP [back]
  
3. A Latin-German macaronic phrase meaning 'child-curing whipping birch.' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
4. See notes 3 and 4 to 'Panikhida.' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
5. See note 21 to 'A Boring Story.' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
6. See note 4 to 'Easter Night.' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
7. The words come from hymns sung during the services known as 'Bridegroom services' celebrated on the first three days of Holy Week: 'Behold, the Bridegroom cometh at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless …' and 'Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior, and I have no wedding garment that I may enter …' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
8. The washing of feet is part of the liturgy of Holy Thursday when it is served by a bishop. It commemorates Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet before the Last Supper (John 13:3–15). - THE BISHOP [back]
  
9. See note 1 to 'The Student.' - THE BISHOP [back]
  
10. John 13:31–18:1, the longest of the twelve Gospel readings. - THE BISHOP [back]
  
11. See note 4 to 'Anna on the Neck.' - THE BISHOP [back]

  
THE FIANCÉE
  
1. Quotations from the hymns of matins of the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, three weeks before the beginning of Lent (see Luke 15:11–32). - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
2. That is, June 29. - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
3. A straight-sided hat, usually made of velvet, awarded to Orthodox priests as a token of distinguished service. The Russian kamilavka is a distortion of the Greek kalimavka ('beautiful hat'). - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
4. Russian civil servants wore uniforms similar to military uniforms, including hats with cockades. - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
5. See note 27 to 'A Boring Story.' - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
6. The Cossack territory in the southeastern Ukraine enjoyed some measure of freedom and autonomy before it was fully annexed by Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. 'Going to the Cossacks' meant living a life free of restrictions and conventions. - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
7. As a means of killing flies, a piece of paper treated with poison would be left to soak in a dish of water. The flies would drink the water and die. - THE FIANCÉE [back]
  
8.Kumys is the Tartar word for fermented mare’s milk, which was believed to strengthen the lungs. Leo Tolstoy, among others, was an advocate of the 'kumys cure,' which he took several times while visiting his property in Samara province during the summer. - THE FIANCÉE [back]