Stories (34 page)

They arrived in Sebastopol in the evening and stayed at a hotel to get some rest and go on to Yalta the following day They were both weary from traveling. Varvara Nikolaevna had tea, went t
o bed, and soon fell asleep. But Kovrin did not go to bed. At home, an hour before they left for the station, he had received a letter from Tanya and had been unable to bring himself to open it. It was now lying in his side pocket, and the thought of it troubled him unpleasantly. Frankly, at the bottom of his heart, he now considered his marriage to Tanya a mistake, was content to be finally separated from her, and the memory of this woman who in the end had turned into a living skeleton and in whom everything seemed to have died except for the big, intently peering, intelligent eyes, the memory of her
called up in him only pity and vexation with himself. The handwriting on the envelope reminded him of how cruel and unfair he had been two years ago, how he had vented his inner emptiness, boredom, solitude, and dissatisfaction with life on totally blameless people. He incidentally remembered how one day he had torn his dissertation and all the articles he had written during his illness into little pieces and thrown them out the window, and how the scraps, flying with the wind, had caught on trees and flowers; in every line he had seen strange, totally unfounded claims, light-mind
ed defiance, impudence, megalomania, and it had made the same impression on him as if he were reading a description of his own vices; but when the last notebook had been torn up and sent flying out the window, he had suddenly felt bitter and vexed for some reason, had gone to his wife and told her a lot of unpleasant things. My God, how he had tormented her! Once, wishing to cause her pain, he had told her that her father had played an unflattering role in their romance, because he had asked him to marry her; Yegor Semyonych had accidentally overheard it, rushed into the room, and, unable to utter a si
ngle word from despair, only shifted from one foot to the other and moaned somehow strangely, as if he had lost the power of speech, and Tanya, looking at her father, had cried out in a heartrending voice and fainted. It was hideous.

All this rose up in his memory as he looked at the familiar handwriting. Kovrin went out on the balcony; the weather was still and warm, and there was a smell of the sea. The beautiful bay reflected
the moon and the lights and had a color fo
r which it was difficult to find a name. It was a gentle and soft combination of blue and green; in places the water resembled blue vitriol in color, and in places the bay seemed filled with condensed moonlight instead of water, and overall what a harmony of colors, what a peaceful, calm, and lofty feeling!

On the lower floor, under the balcony, the windows were probably open, because women’s voices and laughter could be heard distinctly A party was evidently going on there.

Kovrin forced himself to open the letter and, going into his room, read:

“My father has just died. I owe that to you, because you killed him. Our orchard is perishing, strangers have already taken it over, which is precisely what my poor father feared would happen. I owe that to you as well. I hate you with all my heart and wish you to perish soon. Oh, how I suffer! My soul burns with unbearable pain … May you be cursed! I took you for an extraordinary man, a genius, I loved you, but you turned out to be mad …”

Kovrin could read no further, tore up the letter, and dropped it. An anxiety that resembled fear came over him. Behind the screen Varvara Nikolaevna lay asleep, and he could hear her breathing; from the lower floor came women’s voices and laughter, yet he had the feeling that apart from him there was not a single living soul in the whole hotel. That the unfortunate, grief-stricken Tanya had cursed him in her letter and wished him to perish, gave him an eerie feeling, and he kept glancing at the door, as if fearing that the unknown power which in some two years had wrought such
destruction in his life and the lives of his relations, might come into the room and again take control of him.

He knew from experience that when his nerves acted up, the best remedy for it was work. He had to sit down at the table and make himself concentrate on some thought, whatever the cost. He took a notebook from his red briefcase in which he had jotted do
wn the synopsis of a small compilatory work he had thought up in case he found it boring in the Crimea with nothing to do. He sat down at the table and began working on this synopsis, and it seemed to him that his peaceful, submissive, indifferent mood was returning. The notebook with the synopsis even led him to reflect on worldly vanity. He thought of the high toll life takes for the insignificant or very ordinary blessings it bestows on man. For instance,
to have a chair by the time you are forty, to be an ordinary professor, to explain ordinary thoughts, and other people’s at that, in sluggish, boring, heavy language—in short, to attain the position of a mediocre scholar—he, Kovrin, had had to study for fifteen years, to work day and night, to suffer a grave mental illness, to live through an unsuccessful marriage, and to do all sorts of stupid and unfair things, which it would be more pleasant not to remember. Kovrin clearly recognized now that he was a mediocrity, and he willingly accepted it, because, in his opinion, each man shoul
d be content with what he is.

The synopsis might have calmed him down completely, but the torn-up letter lay white on the floor and disturbed his concentration. He got up from the table, picked up the scraps of the letter, and threw them out the window, but a light breeze was blowing from the sea, and the scraps scattered over the windowsill. Again an anxiety that resembled fear came over him, and it began to seem as if, apart from him, there was not a single soul in the whole hotel … He went out on the balcony. The bay, as if alive, looked at him with a multitude of blue, aquamarine, tu
rquoise, and fiery eyes and beckoned to him. It was indeed hot and stifling, and it would have done no harm to go for a swim.

Suddenly on the lower floor, under the balcony, a violin started playing and two tender women’s voices began to sing. It was something familiar. The romance they were singing below spoke of some girl with a morbid imagination, who heard mysterious sounds in the garden at night and decided that it was a sacred harmony incomprehensible to us mortals … Kovrin’s breath was taken away, and his heart was wrung with sorrow, and a wo
nderful, sweet joy, such as he had long forgotten, trembled in his breast.

A black, tall pillar, resembling a whirlwind or a tornado, appeared on the far shore of the bay. With terrific speed it moved across the bay in the direction of the hotel, growing ever smaller and darker, and Kovrin barely had time to step aside and let it pass … A monk with a bare, gray head and black eyebrows, barefoot, his arms crossed on his chest, raced by and stopped in the middle of the room.

“Why didn’t you believe me?” he asked reproachfully, looking tenderly at Kovrin. “If you had believed me then, when I said you were a genius, you would not have spent these two years so sadly and meagerly”

Kovrin now believed that he was chosen of God and a genius, he vividly recalled all his old conversations with the black monk and wanted to speak, but blood flowed from his throat straight on to his chest, and he, not knowing what to do, moved his hands over his chest, and his cuffs became wet with blood. He wanted to call Varvara Nikolaevna, who was sleeping behind the screen, made an effort and said:

“Tanya!”

He fell to the floor and, propping himself on his arms, again called:

“Tanya!”

He called out to Tanya, called out to the big garden with its luxuriant flowers sprinkled with dew, called out to the park, the pines with their shaggy roots, the field of rye, his wonderful science, his youth, courage, joy, called out to life that was so beautiful. He saw a big pool of blood on the floor by his face, and could no longer utter a single word from weakness, but an inexpressible, boundless happiness filled his whole being.
Below, under the balcony, they were playing the serenade, and the black monk was whispering to him that he was a genius and was dying only because his weak human body had lost its equilibrium and could no longer serve as a container for genius.

When Varvara Nikolaevna woke up and came from behind the screen, Kovrin was already dead, and a blissful smile was frozen on his face.

J
ANUARY
1894

T
he town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying. And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been a coffin-maker in the provincial capital, he would most likely have had a house of his own and been called Yakov Matveich; but in this wretched little town he was simply called Yakov, his street nickname for some reason was “Bronzy,” and he lived a poor life, like a simple peasant, in a little old cottage with only one room, and that room housed
himself, Marfa, the stove, the double bed, the coffins, the workbench, and all his chattels.

Yakov made good, sturdy coffins. For peasants and tradesmen he made them his own size and was never once mistaken, because no one anywhere, not even in the jail, was taller or stronger than he, though he was now seventy years old. For gentlefolk and women he worked to measure, and for that he used an iron ruler. He accepted orders for children’s coffins very reluctantly, and made them straight off without measurements, scornfully, and, taking the money for his work, would say each time:

“I confess, I don’t like messing with trifles.”

Besides his craft, he also earned a little money playing the fiddle. There was a Jewish orchestra in town that usually played at weddings, conducted by the tinsmith Moisei Ilyich Shakhkes, who took more than half the proceeds for himself. Since Yakov played the
fiddle very well, especially Russian songs, Shakhkes sometimes invited him to join the orchestra for fifty kopecks a day, not counting gifts from the guests. When Bronzy sat in the orchestra, his face first of all sweated and turned purple; it was hot,
the smell of garlic was stifling, the fiddle screeched, the double bass croaked just by his right ear, and by his left wept the flute, played by a skinny, redheaded Jew with a whole network of red and blue veins on his face, who bore the name of the famous rich man Rothschild. And this cursed Jew managed to play even the merriest things plaintively. For no apparent reason, Yakov gradually began to be filled with hatred and contempt for the Jews, and especially for Rothschild; he started picking on him, abusing him with bad words, and once was even about to give him a beating, and
Rothschild got offended and, looking at him fiercely, said:

“If not for respecting your talent, I’d be chucking you out the window long ago.”

Then he wept. And so Bronzy was not invited to join the orchestra very often, only in cases of extreme need, when one of the Jews was absent.

Yakov was never in good spirits, because he always had to suffer terrible losses. For instance, it was sinful to work on Sundays and holidays, Monday was an unlucky day, and as a result in one year there was a total of about two hundred days when he had, willy-nilly, to sit with folded arms. And what a loss that was! If anyone in town celebrated a wedding without music, or if Shakhkes did not invite Yakov, that, too, was a loss. The police inspector had been sick and pining away for two years, and Yakov had been waiting impatiently for him to die, but the inspector went to the prov
incial capital for treatment, and up and died there. That was a loss for you, ten roubles at the very least, because he would have had to make him an expensive coffin, with silk brocade. The thought of these losses bothered Yakov especially at night; he used to place the fiddle beside him on the bed, and when all sorts of nonsense started coming into his head, he would touch the strings, the fiddle would go twang in the darkness, and he would feel better.

On the sixth of May of the previous year, Marfa suddenly fell ill. The old woman breathed heavily, drank a lot of water, and staggered about, but all the same she stoked the stove in the morning and even went to fetch water. Towards evening she took to her bed. Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely
dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he pi
cked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were also a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere.

“Yakov!” Marfa called out unexpectedly. “I’m dying.”

He turned to look at his wife. Her face, rosy with fever, was unusually serene and joyful. Bronzy, who was used to seeing her face always pale, timid, and unhappy, was now dismayed. It looked as if she was indeed dying, and was glad to be leaving that cottage, the coffins, and Yakov finally and forever … She was gazing at the ceiling and moving her lips, and her expression was happy, as if she could see death, her deliverer, and was whispering to him.

Day was already breaking, and the glow of early dawn appeared in the window. Looking at the old woman, Yakov for some reason recalled that in all their life, it seemed, he had never once been gentle with her, or sorry for her, had never once thought of buying her a little shawl or bringing her something sweet from a wedding, but had only yelled at her, scolded her for their losses, threatened her with his fists; true, he had never beaten her, but he had frightened her, and each time she was frozen with fear. Yes, he had told her not to drink tea, because expenses were high as it wa
s, and she had drunk only hot water. And he understood why she had such a strange, joyful face now, and it gave him an eerie feeling.

Having waited for morning, he borrowed a neighbor’s horse and took Marfa to the clinic. There were not many patients, and he did not have to wait long, only about three hours. To his great satisfaction, the patients were being received not by the doctor, who was ill himself, but by the doctor’s assistant, Maxim Nikolaich, an old man, of whom everyone in town said that, though he was a drunkard and a brawler, he understood more than the doctor.

“Good day to you,” said Yakov, leading his old woman into the receiving room. “Excuse us, Maxim Nikolaich, for troubling you with our trifling affairs. Here, you’ll kindly see, my object has taken sick. My life’s companion, as they say, excuse the expression …”

Knitting his gray eyebrows and stroking his side-whiskers, the assistant doctor began to examine the old woman, and she sat there on the stool, hunched up and skinny, sharp-nosed, her mouth open, in profile resembling a thirsty bird.

“Mm, yes … So …” the assistant said slowly and sighed. “Influenza, and maybe ague. There’s typhus going around town. So? The old woman has lived, thank God … How old is she?”

“One year short of seventy, Maxim Nikolaich.”

“So? The old woman has lived. Enough and to spare.”

“There, of course, you’ve made a correct observation, Maxim Nikolaich,” said Yakov, smiling out of politeness, “and we’re heartily grateful for your agreeableness, but—permit me the expression—every insect wants to live.”

“What else is new!” the assistant said, sounding as if it depended on him whether the old woman was to live or die. “Now then, my
good man, you put a cold compress on her head and give her these powders twice a day. And with that—bye-bye, bonzhur.”

From the expression of his face Yakov could see that things were bad and that no powders would help; it was clear to him now that Marfa would die very soon, if not today then tomorrow. He gave the assistant a slight nudge in the arm, winked at him, and said in a low voice:

“Maybe try cupping glasses,
¹
Maxim Nikolaich.”

“No time, no time, my good man. Take your old woman and God speed you. Bye-bye.”

“Do us a kindness,” Yakov implored. “You know yourself that if she had, say, a stomachache or something else inside, well, then it would be powders and drops, but she’s got a cold! The first thing with a cold is to let blood, Maxim Nikolaich.”

But the assistant doctor was already calling for the next patient, and a peasant woman with a boy was coming into the receiving room.

“Go, go …” he said to Yakov, frowning. “Don’t blow smoke.”

“In that case at least apply leeches to her! I’ll pray to God eternally for you!”

The assistant doctor blew up and shouted:

“Just won’t stop talking! B-blockhead …”

Yakov also blew up and turned all purple, but he did not say a word, he took Marfa under the arm and led her out of the receiving
room. Only when they were getting into the cart did he give the clinic a stern and derisive look and say: “Got yourselves nicely planted there, play-actors! You’d be sure to cup a rich man, but you won’t even spare a poor man a leech! Herods!”

When they came home, Marfa went into the cottage and stood for ten minutes holding on to the stove. She thought that if she lay down Yakov would start talking about losses and scold her for lying down all the time and not wanting to work. And Yakov gazed dully at her and remembered that tomorrow was St. John the Theologian’s, and the next day St. Nicholas the Wonderworker’s,
²
then Sunday, then Monday—the unlucky day. He would not be able to work for four days, and Marfa was sure to die on one of them; meaning that the coffin had to be made today. He took his iron ruler, went over to the old woman and measured her. Then she lay down, and he crossed himself and started making the coffin.

When the work was done, Bronzy put on his spectacles and wrote in his notebook:

“Coffin for Marfa Ivanov—2 roubles, 40 kopecks.”

And sighed. The old woman lay silent all the while with her eyes closed. But in the evening, when it grew dark, she suddenly called to the old man.

“Remember, Yakov?” she asked, looking at him joyfully. “Remember, fifty years ago God gave us a little baby with a blond little head? You and I used to sit by the river then and sing songs … under the pussywillow.” And with a bitter smile she added: “The little girl died.”

Yakov strained his memory, but simply could not remember either the baby or the pussywillow.

“You’re imagining it,” he said.

The priest came, gave her communion and anointed her with oil. Then Marfa began to murmur something incoherent, and towards morning she passed away.

Some old neighbor women washed her and dressed her and put her in the coffin. To avoid paying extra to the reader, Yakov read the Psalter himself, and they did not charge him for the grave either, because the cemetery caretaker was his chum. Four peasants carried the coffin to the cemetery, not for money but out of respect. Old women, beggars, and two holy fools followed the coffin, passersby crossed themselves piously … And Yakov was very pleased that it
was all so honorable, decent, and cheap, and no offense to anyone. Bidding his last farewell to Marfa, he touched the coffin w
ith his hand and thought, “Fine work!”

But on his way back from the cemetery, he was overcome by intense anguish. Something was wrong with him: his breath was hot and heavy, his legs were weak, he felt thirsty. And then all sorts of thoughts began coming into his head. He recalled again that in his whole life he had never once pitied Marfa or been gentle with her. The fifty-two years that they had lived in the same cottage had dragged on and on, yet it turned out somehow that in all that time he had never thought of her, never paid attention to her, as if she were a cat or a dog. And yet every day she had stoked the sto
ve, cooked and baked, fetched water, chopped wood, slept in the same bed with him, and when he came home drunk from weddings, she reverently hung his fiddle on the wall each time and put him to bed, and all that in silence, with a timid, solicitous look.

Rothschild came towards Yakov, smiling and bowing.

“And I’ve been looking for you, uncle!” he said. “Moisei Ilyich greets you and tells you to come to him right away.”

Yakov could not be bothered with that. He wanted to weep.

“Let me be!” he said and walked on.

“But how is this possible?” Rothschild became all alarmed and ran ahead of him. “Moisei Ilyich will be upset! He said right away.”

Yakov found it disgusting that the Jew was out of breath, kept blinking, and had so many red freckles. And it was repulsive to look at his green frock coat with its dark patches and at his whole fragile, delicate figure.

“What are you bothering me for, you piece of garlic?” Yakov shouted. “Leave me alone!”

The Jew got angry and also shouted:

“But you please calm down, or I’m sending you flying over the fence!”

“Out of my sight!” Yakov bellowed and rushed at him with his fists. “These mangy Yids won’t let a man live!”

Rothschild went dead with fear, cowered, and waved his arms over his head as if protecting himself from blows, then jumped up and ran away as fast as he could. He hopped as he ran, clasped his hands, and you could see his long, skinny back twitch. The street urchins, glad of the chance, ran after him, shouting: “Yid! Yid!” The dogs also chased him, barking. Somebody guffawed, then
whistled, the dogs barked louder and more in unison … Then one of the dogs must have bitten Rothschild, because there was a desperate cry of pain.