Stories (15 page)

The three of us go in; first we have tea, then on the table appear the two long-familiar decks of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle of Crimean champagne. Our topics of conversation are not new, they’re all the same as in the winter. The university, students, literature, theater all come in for it; the air gets thicker and stuffier with malignant gossip, it is poisoned by the breath not o
f two toads now, as in the winter, but of all three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the laugh that resembles a harmonica, the maid who serves us also hears an unpleasant, cracked laughter, like that of a vaudeville general: haw, haw, haw …

There are terrible nights of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which among the people are known as sparrow nights. There was one such sparrow night in my personal life …

I wake up past midnight and suddenly jump out of bed. It seems to me for some reason that I’m suddenly just about to die. Why does it seem so? There’s not a feeling in my body that would point to an imminent end, but my soul is oppressed by such terror as if I had suddenly seen some enormous, sinister glow.

I quickly light the lamp, drink water straight from the carafe, then rush to the open window. The weather outside is magnificent. There’s a smell of hay and of something else very good. I can see the teeth of the fence, the sleepy, scrawny trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of the forest; a calm, very bright moon in the
sky, and not a single cloud. Silence, not a leaf stirs. I feel as if everything is looking at me and listening in on how I’m going to die …

Eerie. I close the window and run to my bed. I feel my pulse and, not finding it in my wrist, search for it in my temples, then under my chin, then again in my wrist, and it’s all cold, clammy with sweat. My breath comes quicker and quicker, my body trembles, all my insides are stirred up, my face and bald head feel as if they’re covered with cobwebs.

What to do? Call the family? No, no need. I don’t know what my wife and Liza will do if they come to me.

I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes, and wait, wait … My back is cold, it’s as if it were being drawn into me, and I have the feeling that death will surely come at me from behind, on the sly …

“Kee-wee, kee-wee!” a piping suddenly sounds in the silence of the night, and I don’t know where it is—in my breast, or outside?

“Kee-wee, kee-wee!”

My God, how frightening! I’d drink more water, but I’m scared to open my eyes and afraid to raise my head. The terror I feel is unconscious, animal, and I’m unable to understand why I’m frightened: is it because I want to live, or because a new, still unknown pain awaits me?

Upstairs, through my ceiling, someone either moans or laughs … I listen. Shortly afterwards I hear footsteps on the stairs. Someone hurriedly comes down, then goes back up. A moment later there are footsteps downstairs again; someone stops by my door, listening.

“Who’s there?” I cry.

The door opens, I boldly open my eyes and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes tearful.

“You’re not asleep, Nikolai Stepanych?” she asks.

“What is it?”

“For God’s sake, go and look at Liza. Something’s the matter with her …”

“All right … with pleasure …” I mutter, very pleased that I’m not alone. “All right… this minute.”

I follow my wife, listen to what she tells me, and understand nothing in my agitation. Bright spots from her candle leap over the steps of the stairway, our long shadows quiver, my legs get tangled in the skirts of my dressing gown, I’m out of breath, and it seems to
me as if something is pursuing me and wants to seize me by the back. “I’m going to die right now, here on the stairs,” I think. “Right now …” But the stairs and the dark corridor with the Italian window are behind us, and we go into Liza’s room. She’s sitting on her bed in nothing but her nightgown, her bare feet hanging down, and moaning.

“Oh, my God … oh, my God!” she murmurs, squinting at our candle. “I can’t, I can’t …”

“Liza, my child,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

Seeing me, she cries out and throws herself on my neck.

“My kind papa …” she sobs, “my good papa … My dearest little papa … I don’t know what’s wrong with me … I’m so sick at heart!”

She embraces me, kisses me, and babbles tender words such as I heard from her when she was a little girl.

“Calm yourself, my child, God be with you,” I say. “You mustn’t cry. I’m sick at heart, too.”

I try to cover her with a blanket, my wife gives her a drink, the two of us fuss confusedly around the bed; my shoulder brushes her shoulder, and in that moment the recollection comes to me of how we used to bathe our children together.

“Help her, help her!” my wife implores. “Do something!”

But what can I do? I can’t do anything. The girl has some burden on her heart, but I don’t know or understand anything, and can only murmur:

“Never mind, never mind… It will go away… Sleep, sleep …

As if on purpose, a dog’s howling suddenly comes from our yard, first soft and uncertain, then loud, in two voices. I’ve never ascribed any particular significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the hooting of owls, but now my heart is painfully wrung and I hasten to explain this howling to myself.

“Nonsense …” I think. “The influence of one organism on another. My intense nervous strain transmitted itself to my wife, to Liza, to the dog, that’s all … This sort of transmission explains presentiments, premonitions …”

When I go back to my room a little later to write a prescription for Liza, I no longer think I’ll die soon, I simply feel a heaviness, a tedium, in my soul, so that I’m even sorry I didn’t die suddenly. I stand motionless for a long time in the middle of the room, trying
to think up something to prescribe for Liza, but the moaning through the ceiling quiets down, and I decide not to prescribe anything, and still I stand there …

There’s a dead silence, such a silence that, as some writer has said, it even rings in your ears. Time moves slowly, the strips of moonlight on the windowsill don’t change their position, as if frozen … Dawn is still far off

But now the gate in the fence creaks, someone steals up and, breaking a branch from one of the scrawny trees, cautiously taps on the window with it.

“Nikolai Stepanych!” I hear a whisper. “Nikolai Stepanych!”

I open the window, and think I’m dreaming: by the window, pressing herself to the wall, stands a woman in a black dress, brightly lit by the moon, gazing at me with big eyes. The moon makes her face look pale, stern, and fantastic, as if made of marble. Her chin trembles.

“It’s me …” she says. “Me … Katya!”

In the moonlight all women’s eyes look big and black, people look taller and paler, which is probably why I didn’t recognize her at first.

“What’s the matter?”

“Forgive me,” she says. “For some reason I felt unbearably sick at heart … I couldn’t stand it and came here … There was light in your window and … and I decided to knock … Excuse me … Oh, if only you knew how sick at heart I am! What are you doing n
ow?”

“Nothing … Insomnia.”

“I had a sort of presentiment. Anyhow, it’s nonsense.”

Her eyebrows rise, her eyes glisten with tears, and her whole face lights up with that familiar, long-absent expression of trustfulness.

“Nikolai Stepanych!” she says imploringly, reaching out to me with both arms. “My dear, I beg you … I implore you … If you don’t disdain my friendship and my respect for you, agree to do what I ask you!”

“What is it?”

“Take my money from me!”

“Well, what will you think up next! Why should I need your money?”

“You’ll go somewhere for a cure … You need a cure. Will you take it? Yes? Yes, my dearest?”

She peers greedily into my face and repeats:

“You’ll take it? Yes?”

“No, my friend, I won’t…” I say. “Thank you.”

She turns her back to me and hangs her head. I probably refused her in such a tone as to prohibit any further discussion of money.

“Go home to bed,” I say. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”

“So you don’t consider me your friend?” she asks glumly.

“I didn’t say that. But your money is of no use to me now.”

“Forgive me …” she says, lowering her voice a whole octave. “I understand you … To be indebted to a person like me … a retired actress … Anyhow, good-bye …”

And she leaves so quickly that I don’t even have time to say good-bye to her.

I’m in Kharkov.

Since it would be useless, and beyond my strength, to struggle with my present mood, I’ve decided that the last days of my life will be irreproachable at least in the formal sense; if I’m not right in my attitude towards my family, which I’m perfectly aware of, I will try to do what they want me to do. If it’s go to Kharkov, I go to Kharkov. Besides, I’ve become so indifferent to everything lately that it makes absolutely no difference to me where I go, to Kharkov, to Paris, or to Berdichev.
²⁵

I arrived here around noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. On the train I got seasick and suffered from the drafts, so now I’m sitting on the bed, holding my head and
waiting for my tic. I ought to go and see the professors I know here, but I haven’t the urge or the strength.

The old servant on my floor comes to ask whether I have bed linen. I keep him for about five minutes and ask him several questions about Gnekker, on whose account I’ve come here. The servant turns out to be a native of Kharkov, knows it like the palm of his hand, but doesn’t remember a single house that bears the name of Gnekker. I ask about country estates—same answer.

The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three … These last months of my life, as I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my whole life. And never before was I able to be so reconciled
to the slowness of time as now. Before, when I waited at the station for a train or sat at an examination, a quarter of an hour seemed like an eternity, but now I can spend the whole night sitting motionless on my bed and think with perfect indifference that tomorrow the night will be just as long and colorless, and the night after …

In the corridor it strikes five o’clock, six, seven … It’s getting dark.

There’s a dull pain in my cheek—the tic is beginning. To occupy myself with thoughts, I put myself in my former point of view, when I was not indifferent, and ask: why am I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sitting in this small hotel room, on this bed with its strange gray blanket? Why am I looking at this cheap tin washbasin and listening to the trashy clock clanking in the corridor? Can all this be worthy of my fame and my high station among people? And my response to these questions is a smile. The naïveté with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the ex
clusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I’m well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in
Niva
and
World Illustrated,
²⁶
I’ve even read my own biography in a certain German magazine—and what of it? I’m sitti
ng all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm … Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway
workers, the inconvenience of the passport system,
²⁷
expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior—all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives. How, then, does the exclusiveness of my position manifest itself? Suppose I’m famous a thousand times over, that I’m a hero and the pride of my motherland; all the newspapers publish bulletins about my illness, expressions of sympathy come to me by mail from colleagues, students, the public; but all that will not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in anguish, in utte
r solitude … No one’s to blame for that, of course, but, sinner that I am, I dislike my popular name. It seems to me that it has betrayed me.

Around ten o’clock I fall asleep and, despite my tic, sleep soundly and would go on sleeping for a long time if no one woke me up. Shortly after one o’clock there is a sudden knock at the door.

“Who’s there?”

“Telegram!”

“You might have brought it tomorrow,” I grumble as I take the telegram from the servant. “Now I won’t fall back to sleep.”

“Sorry, sir. You had a light burning, I thought you weren’t asleep.”

I open the telegram and look at the signature first: from my wife. What does she want?

“Yesterday Gnekker and Liza secretly married. Come back.”

I read this telegram and am frightened for a moment. What frightens me is not what Gnekker and Liza have done, but the indifference with which I receive the news of the
ir marriage. They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

I lie down in bed again and begin inventing thoughts to occupy myself with. What to think about? It seems everything has already been thought through, and there’s nothing now that is capable of stirring my mind.

When dawn comes I’m sitting in bed with my arms around my knees and, since I have nothing to do, am trying to know myself. “Know yourself”
²⁸
—what splendid and useful advice; too bad the ancients never thought of showing how to use this advice.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.

And now I examine myself: what do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, and students to love in us not the name, not the brand or label, but the ordinary person. What else? I’d like to have helpers and heirs. What else? I’d like to wake up in a hundred years and have at least a glimpse of what’s happened with science. I’d like to live another ten years or so … And what more?

Nothing more. I think, I think for a long time, and can’t think up anything else. And however much I think, however widely my thought ranges, it’s clear to me that my wishes lack some chief thing, some very important thing. In my predilection for science, in my wish to live, in this sitting on a strange bed and trying to know myself, in all the thoughts, feelings, and conceptions I form about everything, something general is lacking that would unite it
all into a single whole. Each feeling and thought lives separately in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theater, l
iterature, students, and in all the pictures drawn by my imagin
ation, even the most skillful analyst would be unable to find what is known as a general idea or the god of the living man.