Forty Stories (17 page)

Surrendering to his grief, Iona told her the whole story.

January 1886

IN one of those very cheap rooms in the Lisbon rooming house, Stepan Klochkov, a third-year medical student, was pacing up and down as he applied himself zealously to cramming from a medical textbook. The strain of memorizing the words made his mouth dry, and sweat dampened his forehead.

Anyuta, who roomed with him, sat on a stool by the window, where the edges were white with icy tracery. She was a small, thin brunette, twenty-five years old, very pale, with gentle gray eyes. Head bent, she was embroidering the collar of a man’s shirt with red thread. She was working hurriedly, against time. It was afternoon, and the clock in the passageway outside drowsily struck two o’clock, but the room was still in disorder. Rumpled bedclothes, pillows scattered everywhere, books, clothes, a large filthy washbasin filled with soapy slop water in which cigarette butts were floating, filth on the floor—everything seemed to have been hurled down in a heap, crumpled, deliberately thrown into confusion.

“The right lung consists of three lobes …” Klochkov recited. “Boundaries! Upper lobe on anterior wall of the chest reaches fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib … behind up to the
spina scapulae …
”

Klochkov tried to visualize what he was reading, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Unable to form a clear picture, he began to feel his upper ribs through his waistcoat.

“These ribs resemble the keys of a piano,” he said. “To avoid
being confused by them, you simply must make a mental picture of them. You have to study them on the skeleton and on the living body. Come here, Anyuta! Let’s get this thing straight!”

Anyuta put down her sewing, removed her jacket, and straightened her shoulders. Kluchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began to count her ribs.

“Hm! The first rib can’t be felt.… It’s behind the collarbone. This must be the second rib.… Oh yes, and here is the third, and the fourth.… Hm … Well, why are you shivering?”

“Your fingers are cold!”

“Nonsense, it won’t kill you! Don’t wriggle about so much. This must be the third, and here’s the fourth.… You’re so thin, and yet I can hardly feel your ribs.… Here’s the second.… Here’s the third.… No, you are getting confused. You don’t see the thing clearly. I shall have to draw it. Where is my piece of charcoal?”

Klochkov took the charcoal crayon and began to sketch some parallel lines corresponding to the ribs on Anyuta’s chest.

“Wonderful! Now everything is clear as daylight. Now let me sound your chest. Stand up!”

Anyuta stood up, raising her chin. Klochkov began to tap her chest, becoming so deeply immersed in the task that he did not notice that her lips, nose, and fingers were turning blue with cold. She shivered, and then she was afraid the student would see her shivering, stop drawing lines on her chest, stop tapping her, and then perhaps he would fail miserably in the examinations.

“Now it’s all clear,” Klochkov said, and he stopped tapping her. “Just sit there, don’t rub off the charcoal, and I’ll learn some more.”

Once again the student began pacing up and down the room, memorizing. Anyuta had black stripes across her chest, and looked as though she had been tattooed. She sat there thinking, huddled up, shivering with cold. She was never talkative, always silent, thinking, thinking.…

In six or seven years of wandering from one furnished room to another, she had known five students like Klochkov. Now they had finished their courses, had gone out into the world, and being respectable people, they had put her out of their minds. One of them lived in Paris, two were doctors, a fourth was an artist, and they said the fifth was already a professor. Klochkov was the sixth. Soon he too would leave the medical school and go out into the world. No doubt a beautiful future awaited him, and no doubt he would become a great man, but the present prospects did not look promising. He had no tobacco, no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left. She must hurry up with her embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered it, and then with the quarter ruble she would get for it buy tea and tobacco.

“Can I come in?” said a voice from the door.

Anyuta quickly pulled a woolen shawl round her shoulders.

Fetissov, an artist, walked in.

“Do me a favor,” he began, addressing Klochkov and glaring like a wild beast through the hair hovering over his forehead. “Do me the kindness of lending me that pretty woman of yours for an hour or two! You see, I am painting a picture, and I can do nothing without a model.”

“With pleasure,” the student said. “Go along, Anyuta.”

“What I have to put up with,” Anyuta murmured softly.

“That’s enough! He wants you for the sake of his art, not for some nonsense or other. Why not help him when you can?”

Anyuta began dressing.

“What are you painting?” Klochkov said.

“Psyche. Wonderful subject. It’s not going along well, though. I have to keep working with different models. Yesterday there was one with blue legs. I asked how the legs got blue, and she said it was the dye from her stockings. Still learning away, eh? Happy man, with all that patience!”

“Medicine is one of those things you have to keep pegging away at.”

“Hm … Excuse me, Klochkov, but you are really living in a terrible pigsty. The devil alone knows how you live!”

“What do you mean? I can’t live any other way. I only get twelve rubles a month from my father, and it’s difficult to live decently on that money.”

“Well, so it is,” the artist said, knitting his brows with an air of disgust. “Still, you should be able to live better. A civilized man should have some measure of aesthetic taste, surely? Only the devil knows what this room is like! The bed’s not made. Slops, filth … Yesterday’s porridge still in the plates! Pfui!”

“It’s true enough,” the student said, embarrassed. “Anyuta did not wash up today. All her time was taken.”

When Anyuta and the artist had left, Klochkov threw himself down on the divan and went on with his lessons, lying down. Unexpectedly he fell asleep, waking up an hour later. He propped his head in his fists and gave himself up to gloomy reflections. He remembered the artist saying that all civilized men were obliged to have a measure of aesthetic taste, and yet here in the room everything was revolting and loathsome. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as he would be in the future: receiving patients in his consulting room, drinking tea in a vast drawing room with his wife, a very proper woman, beside him—and now here was the washbasin with cigarette butts swimming around, and it was unbelievably nauseating. He thought of Anyuta—ugly, unprepossessing, pitiful. He decided to get rid of her at once, whatever the cost.

When she returned from the artist, she took off her coat. He got up and spoke very seriously: “My dear, sit down and listen to me. We have to separate. I don’t want to live with you any longer.”

Anyuta came back from the artist worn out and close to fainting. From long standing in a suitable pose, her face looked thin and sallow, her chin sharper than ever. She did not reply to the student, but her lips trembled.

“You knew it would have to come sooner or later,” the student
said. “You’re a good, fine person, and you’re nobody’s fool. You’ll understand.”

Anyuta put on her coat again. Silently she wrapped up her embroidery in a sheet of paper, gathered up needles and thread, and picked up the four lumps of sugar she had left by the window. These she put on the table next to his books.

“There’s your sugar,” she said softly, and turned away to hide her tears.

“Why are you crying?” Klochkov said.

He walked confusedly around the room, and said: “Really you are a strange woman. You knew yourself we would have to separate one day. We can’t live together forever.”

She had already bundled together all her belongings. She was turning to say good-by when he felt sorry for her.

Perhaps I could let her live here for another week, he thought. After all, she might as well stay. In another week I’ll tell her to go.

Annoyed by his own weakness, he shouted roughly: “What are you standing there for? If you are going, go! If you don’t want to go, take off your coat and stay! Stay if you want to!”

Slowly, silently, Anyuta removed her coat, then blew her nose very softly, sighed, and quietly returned to her familiar place on the stool by the window.

The student drew up his textbook to him, and once again he began to pace up and down the floor.

“The right lung consists of three lobes,” he read slowly. “The upper lobe on the anterior wall of the chest reaches the fourth or fifth rib …”

In the passageway someone was shouting at the top of his voice: “Gregory! The samovar!”

February 1886

Valentin Petrovich Peredyorkin, a handsome young man, put on a frock coat, laced his patent-leather boots with their sharp toecaps, clapped an opera hat on his head, and then, hardly able to restrain his excitement, he drove off to the house of Princess Vera Zapiskina.

How sad, dear reader, that you have never met the Princess. She is a gentle and enchanting creature with soft heavenly-blue eyes and hair like a silken wave.

The waves of the sea break on rocks, but the waves of her hair, on the contrary, would shatter and crumble into dust the hardest stone. Only an insensitive nincompoop could resist her smile or the soft charms of her very small and perfectly formed bust. Only a blockhead could fail to register feelings of absolute joy when she speaks or smiles or shows her dazzling white teeth.

Peredyorkin was received.…

He sat down facing the Princess, and he was beside himself with excitement when he said: “Princess, would you listen to something I have to say?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Princess, forgive me. I don’t know where to begin. It will be so sudden for you … so extempore.… Promise me you won’t be angry.…”

He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and
began to mop his face. All the while the Princess was smiling gently and gazing inquiringly at him.

“Princess!” he went on. “From the moment I set eyes on you, my soul … yes, my soul has been filled with unquenchable desires. These desires give me no peace during the day or during the night … and if these desires are to remain unfulfilled, I will be utterly miserable.…”

The Princess lowered her gaze meditatively.

Peredyorkin was silent for a moment, and went on: “Oh, my dear, it will come as a surprise to you.… You are above all earthly concerns, but … I regard you as the most suitable.…”

A silence followed.

“Most especially,” Peredyorkin sighed, “because our estates are contiguous.… I am rich.…”

“Yes, but what is all this about?” the Princess asked in a soft voice.

“What is it all about? Oh, Princess!” Peredyorkin exclaimed impetuously, rising to his feet. “I entreat you, do not refuse me.… Do not ruin my plans with your refusal. My dear, permit me to propose to you …”

Valentin Petrovich suddenly sat down, leaned over toward the Princess, and whispered: “I am making the most profitable proposal possible.… This way we shall be able to sell a million poods of tallow in a single year.… Let us start on our adjoining estates a limited liability company dedicated to tallow boiling!”

The Princess reflected for a moment, and then she said: “With great pleasure!”

The feminine reader, who expected a melodramatic ending, may relax.

October 1886

NINE-YEAR-OLD Vanka Zhukov, who was apprenticed three months ago to the shoemaker Alyakhin, did not go to bed on Christmas Eve. He waited till the master and mistress and the more senior apprentices had gone to the early service, and then he took a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib from his master’s cupboard, and began to write on a crumpled sheet of paper spread out in front of him. Before tracing the shape of the first letter, he looked several times fearfully in the direction of the doors and windows, and then he gazed up at the dark icon, flanked on either side by shelves filled with cobbler’s lasts, and then he heaved a broken sigh. With the paper spread over the bench, Vanka knelt on the floor beside it.

“Dear Grandfather Konstantin Makarich,” he wrote. “I am writing a letter to you. I wish you a Merry Christmas and all good things from the Lord God. I have no father and mother, and you are all I have left.”

Vanka raised his eyes to the dark windowpane, on which there gleamed the reflection of a candle flame, and in his vivid imagination he saw his grandfather Konstantin Makarich standing there. His grandfather was a night watchman on the estate of some gentlefolk called Zhivaryov, a small, thin, unusually lively and nimble old man of about sixty-five, his face always crinkling with laughter, and his eyes bleary from drink. In the daytime
the old man slept in the servants’ kitchen or cracked jokes with the cooks. At night, wrapped in an ample sheepskin coat, he made the rounds of the estate, shaking his clapper. Two dogs followed him with drooping heads—one was the old bitch Brownie, the other was called Eel from his black coat and long weaselly body. Eel always seemed to be extraordinarily respectful and endearing, gazing with the same fond eyes on friends and strangers alike; yet no one trusted him. His deference and humility concealed a most jesuitical malice. No one knew better how to creep stealthily behind someone and take a nip at his leg, or how to crawl into the icehouse, or how to scamper off with a peasant’s chicken. More than once they just about broke his hind legs, twice a noose was put round his neck, and every week he was beaten until he was only half alive, yet he always managed to survive.

At this very moment Grandfather was probably standing by the gates, screwing up his eyes at the bright red windows of the village church, stamping about in his felt boots and cracking jokes with the servants. His clapper hung from his belt. He would be throwing out his arms and then hugging himself against the cold, and, hiccoughing as old men do, he would be pinching one of the servant girls or one of the cooks.