Stories (39 page)

“Missyuska, leave us,” Lida said to her sister, obviously finding my words harmful for such a young girl.

Zhenya looked sadly at her sister and mother and left.

“Such nice things are commonly said when one wants to justify one’s indifference,” said Lida. “To reject hospitals and schools is easier than to treat or teach people.”

“True, Lida, true,” the mother agreed.

“You threaten to stop working,” Lida went on. “Obviously you value your works highly. But let’s stop arguing, we’ll never see eye to eye, because I place the least perfect of all little libraries and first-aid kits, which you’ve just spoken of with such scorn, above all the landscape paintings in the world.” And straightaway, turning to her mother, she began in a completely different tone: “The prince has lost a lot of weight and is greatly changed since he visited us. They sent him to Vichy”
⁸

She told her mother about the prince, so as not to speak with me. Her face was burning, and to conceal her agitation, she bent low to the table, as if she were nearsighted, pretending to read the
newspaper. My presence was disagreeable. I said good-night and went home.

Outside it was quiet; the village on the other side of the pond was already asleep, there was not a single light to be seen, and only the pale reflections of stars shone faintly on the pond. By the gate with the lions Zhenya stood motionless, waiting to see me off.

“Everyone’s asleep in the village,” I said to her, trying to make out her face in the darkness, and I saw her dark, sorrowful eyes directed at me. “The tavernkeeper and the horse thieves are sleeping peacefully, and we respectable people annoy each other and argue.”

It was a sad August night—sad because autumn was already in the air; covered by a purple cloud, the moon was rising, barely lighting up the road and the dark fields of winter wheat on either side. There were lots of falling stars. Zhenya walked down the road beside me, trying not to look at the sky, so as not to see the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.

“I think you’re right,” she said, shivering from the night’s dampness. “If all people together could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon know everything.”

“Of course. We are higher beings, and if we were really conscious of the whole power of human genius and lived only for higher purposes, then in the end we would become like gods. But that will never be—mankind will degenerate, and there won’t be any trace of genius left.”

When the gates could no longer be seen, Zhenya stopped and hastily pressed my hand.

“Good night,” she said, shivering; her shoulders were covered only by a little blouse, and she hunched up from the cold. “Come tomorrow.”

The thought that I would be left alone, annoyed, dissatisfied with myself and with other people, gave me an eerie feeling; and now I myself tried not to look at the falling stars.

“Spend another moment with me,” I said. “I beg you.”

I loved Zhenya. It must be that I loved her for meeting me and seeing me off, for looking at me tenderly and with admiration. How touchingly beautiful her pale face was, her slender neck, her
slender arms, her frailty, her idleness, her books! And her intelligence? I suspected that she was of uncommon intelligence, I admired the breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the severe and beautiful Lida, who did not like me. Zhenya liked me as an artist, I had won her heart with my talent, I passionately wanted to paint for her alone, and I dreamed of her as my li
ttle queen who, together with me, would one day possess these trees, fields, mists, the dawn, this nature, wonderful, enchanting, but in the midst of which I had till then felt myself hopelessly lonely and useless.

“Stay another moment,” I asked. “I implore you.”

I took off my coat and covered her chilled shoulders; she, afraid of looking ridiculous and unattractive in a man’s coat, laughed and threw it off, and at that moment I embraced her and began to shower kisses on her face, shoulders, hands.

“Till tomorrow!” she whispered, and cautiously, as if afraid of breaking the silence of the night, embraced me. “We have no secrets from each other, I must tell mama and my sister everything at once … It’s so scary! Mama’s nothing, mama likes you, but Lida!”

She ran towards the gates.

“Good-bye!” she called.

And then for about two minutes I listened to her running. I had no wish to go home, nor any reason to go there. I stood for a while in thought and quietly trudged back, to look again at the house where she lived, a dear, naïve old house, which seemed to look at me with the windows of its mezzanine as if with eyes, and to understand everything. I went past the terrace, sat down on a bench by the tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm, and looked at the house from there. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyus lived, there was a flash of bright light, then a peaceful green—the l
amp had been covered with a shade. Shadows moved about … I was filled with tenderness, quietude, and satisfaction with myself—satisfaction that I could be carried away and fall in love—and at the same time I felt discomfort at the thought that just then, a few steps away from me, in one of the rooms of that house, lived Lida, who did not like, and perhaps hated, me. I sat and kept waiting, in case Zhenya came out, listening, and it seemed to me that there was talking in the mezzanine.

About an hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows could no longer be seen. The moon had risen high over the
house, lighting up the sleeping garden, the paths; the dahlias and roses in the flower garden in front of the house were clearly visible and seemed to be all of the same color. It was getting very cold. I left the garden, picked up my coat on the road, and unhurriedly plodded home.

When I came to the Volchaninovs’ the next day after dinner, the glass door to the garden was wide open. I sat on the terrace, expecting that Zhenya would appear at any moment on the tennis court beyond the flower garden, or on one of the paths, or that her voice would come from inside; then I went to the drawing room, the dining room. There was not a soul. From the dining room I walked down the long corridor to the front hall, then back. There were several doors in the corridor, and behind one of them Lida’s voice rang out.

“To a crow somewhere … God …” she said loudly and slowly, probably dictating. “God sent a piece of cheese … To a crow … somewhere …
⁹
Who’s there?” she suddenly called out, hearing my footsteps.

“It’s me.”

“Ah! Excuse me, I can’t come right now, I’m busy with Dasha.”

“Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”

“No, she and my sister left this morning to visit our aunt in Penza province. And in the winter they will probably go abroad …” she added after a pause. “To a crow somewhere … God sent a pie-e-ece of che-e-ese … Have you written that?”

I went out to the front hall and, not thinking of anything, stood and looked from there at the pond and the village, and the words came to me:

“A piece of cheese … To a crow somewhere God sent a piece of cheese …”

And I left the estate by the same road I had come there on the first time, only in reverse: from the yard to the garden, past the house, then down the linden avenue … There a boy caught up with me and gave me a note. “I told my sister everything, and she demands that I part with you,” I read. “It is beyond me to upset her by my disobedience. Forgive me, and God grant you happiness. If you only knew how bitterly mama and I are weeping!”

Then the dark avenue of firs, the collapsed fence … In the field where rye was flowering then and quail were calling, cows and hobbled horses now wandered. Here and there on the hills the winter
wheat showed bright green. A sober, everyday mood came over me, and I felt ashamed of everything I had said at the Volchaninovs, and bored with life, as before. I went home, packed, and left that evening for Petersburg.

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Recently, going to the Crimea, I met Belokurov on the train. As usual, he was wearing his vest and embroidered shirt, and when I asked how he was getting along, he said: “By your prayers.” We got to talking. He had sold his estate and bought another, a smaller one, in Lyubov Ivanovna’s name. Of the Volchaninovs he said little. Lida, according to him, was still living at Shelkovka and teaching children in the school; she had gradually succeeded in gathering a circle of people sympathetic to her, who had formed themselves into a strong party and, at the la
st zemstvo elections, had “ousted” Balagin, who till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of Zhenya, Belokurov told me only that she was not living at home and he did not know where she was.

I am beginning to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and only rarely, while painting or reading, will I suddenly recall, as if at random, now the green light in the window, now the sound of my own footsteps in the fields at night, as I, in love, made my way home, rubbing my hands from the cold. And still more rarely, at moments when solitude weighs on me and I feel sa
d, I dimly remember, and for some reason I am gradually beginning to think that I, too, am remembered, waited for, and that we will meet …

Missyus, where are you?

A
PRIL
1896

A
t the very edge of the village of Mironositskoe, in the headman Prokofy’s shed, some belated hunters had settled down for the night. There were only two of them: the veterinarian Ivan Ivanych and the high-school teacher Burkin. Ivan Ivanych had a rather strange double surname—Chimsha-Himalaysky—which did not go with him at all, and throughout the province he was known simply by his first name and patronymic; he lived on a stud farm near town and had gone hunting now to get a breath of fresh air. The high-school teacher Burkin visited Count P. every summer and had long been a familiar
man in those parts.

They were not asleep. Ivan Ivanych, a tall, lean old man with a long mustache, sat outside by the entrance and smoked his pipe; the moon shone on him. Burkin lay inside on the hay, and could not be seen in the darkness.

They told various stories. Among other things they talked about the headman’s wife, Mavra, a healthy woman and not stupid—that she had never gone anywhere outside her native village, had never seen a town or a railroad, and for the last ten years had always sat behind the stove and went outside only at night.

“What’s surprising about that!” said Burkin. “There are not a few naturally solitary people in this world, who try to hide in their shells like hermit crabs or snails. Maybe what we have here is the phenomenon of atavism, a return to the time when man’s ancestors were not yet social animals and lived solitarily in their dens, or
maybe it’s simply one of the varieties of human character—who knows? I’m not a natural scientist, and it’s not my business to touch on such questions; I only want to say that people like Mavra are not a rare phenomenon. No need to look far, about two mon
ths ago a certain Belikov died in our town, a teacher of Greek, my colleague. You’ve heard of him, of course. He was remarkable for always going out, even in the finest weather, in galoshes and with an umbrella, and unfailingly wearing a warm, padded coat. His umbrella had a cover, and his watch a cover of gray suede, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen a pencil, the penknife, too, had a little cover; and his face also seemed to have a cover over it, because he always hid it behind his turned-up collar. He wore dark glasses, a quilted jacket, stopped his ears with cotton, and whenever he too
k a cab, ordered the top put up. In short, the man showed a constant and insuperable impulse to envelop himself, to create a case for himself, so to speak, that would isolate him, protect him from outside influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in constant anxiety, and, maybe in order to justify his timidity, his aversion to the present, he always praised the past and what had never been; the ancient languages he taught were for him essentially the same galoshes and umbrella, in which he hid from real life.

“‘Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful the Greek language is!’ he used to say, with a sweet expression; and, as if to prove his words, he would narrow his eyes and, raising a forefinger, pronounce: ‘Anthropos!’

“And Belikov tried to hide his thoughts in a case as well. The only things that were clear for him were circulars and newspaper articles in which something was forbidden. When a circular forbade the schoolboys to go out after nine o’clock in the evening, or some article forbade carnal love, he found that clear, definite; it’s forbidden, and—basta! But the permitting, the authorizing of something always concealed an element of dubiousness for him, something vague and not quite spoken. When a dramatic circle, a reading room or tearoom was permitted in town, he would shake his head and say softly:

“‘That’s very well, of course, it’s all splendid, but something may come of it.’

“Any sort of violation, deviation, departure from the rules threw him into dejection, though you might wonder what business it was of his. If some colleague of his was late for prayers, or rumor
reached him of some schoolboy prank, or a mistress from the girls’ school was seen late at night with an officer, he would become very worried and keep saying that something might come of it. And at faculty meetings he simply oppressed us with his prudence, suspiciousness, and purely case-like reasonings about how the students in the boys’ and girls’ high schools behave badly, they’re very noi
sy in class—ah, what if it gets to the authorities, ah, something may come of it—and if we expel Petrov from the second grade and Yegorov from the fourth, it would be a very good thing. And what then? With his sighing, his whining, his dark glasses on his pale little face—you know, a little face, like a weasel’s—he crushed us all, and we gave in, lowered Petrov’s and Yegorov’s marks for conduct, locked them up, and finally expelled them both. He had a strange habit—of visiting our apartments. He would call on a teacher, sit down, and say nothing, as if he were spying something out. He would sit li
ke that, silently, for an hour or two, and then leave. He called it ‘maintaining good relations with his colleagues,’ and it was obviously painful for him to come to us and sit, and he came only because he considered it his comradely duty. We teachers were afraid of him. And even the director was afraid. Figure, our teachers were all profoundly respectable, thinking people, brought up on Turgenev and Shchedrin,
¹
yet this little man, who always went about in galoshes and with an umbrella, held the whole school in his hands for as long as fifteen years! School, nothing! The whole town! Our ladies re
fused to arrange home dramatic performances on Saturdays for fear he might find out; and the clergy were embarrassed to eat non-lenten fare and play cards in his presence. During the last ten or fifteen years, under the influence of people like Belikov, our town developed a fear of everything. A fear of talking loudly, of sending letters, of making acquaintances, reading books, helping the poor, teaching reading and writing …”

Ivan Ivanych, wishing to say something, coughed, but first lit his pipe, looked at the moon, and only then said measuredly:

“Yes. Thinking people, respectable, reading Shchedrin and Turgenev, and all sorts of Buckles
²
and so on, and yet they gave in and endured … There you have it.”

“Belikov lived in the same house I did,” Burkin went on, “on the same floor, his door faced mine, we saw each other often, and I knew his home life. At home it was the same story: dressing gown, nightcap, shutters, latches, a whole array of restrictions, limitations,
and—ah, something may come of it! Lenten fare isn’t good for you, and non-lenten food is forbidden, because people might say Belikov didn’t observe the fasts,
³
so he ate pike-perch fried in butter—not lenten food, but you couldn’t say it was non-lenten. He didn’t keep a serving woman for fear people might think ill of him, but he
kept a cook, Afanasy, an old man of about sixty, drunk and half-crazy, who had served as an orderly and was able to slap a meal together. This Afanasy usually stood by the door, his arms crossed, and always muttered one and the same thing with a deep sigh:

“‘There’s a lot of
them
around nowadays!’

“Belikov’s bedroom was small, like a box, and the bed had a canopy over it. Lying down to sleep, he would cover his head with a blanket; it was hot, stuffy, the wind knocked at the closed doors, the stove howled; sighs came from the kitchen, sinister sighs …

“And he was afraid under his blanket. He feared that something might happen, that Afanasy might put a knife in him, that thieves might come, and then all night he would have troubled dreams, and in the morning, when he and I walked to school together, he would be dull, pale, and you could see that the crowded school he was going to was frightening, contrary to his whole being, and that for him, a naturally solitary man, walking beside me was very painful.

“‘It’s too noisy in our classrooms,’ he would say, as if trying to find an explanation for his painful feeling. ‘I’ve never seen the like.’

“And this teacher of Greek, this man in a case, if you can imagine it, nearly got married.”

Ivan Ivanych quickly glanced into the shed and said:

“You’re joking!”

“Yes, he nearly got married, strange as it sounds. A new teacher of history and geography was appointed to us, a certain Kovalenko, Mikhail Savvich, a Ukrainian. He didn’t come alone, but with his sister Varenka. He was young, tall, swarthy, with enormous hands, and by the looks of him you could see he had a bass voice, and in fact he boomed like a barrel: boo, boo, boo … And she was no longer young, about thirty, but also tall, trim, dark-browed, red-cheeked—in short, not a girl but a sugarplum—and so saucy and loud, and she sang Ukrainian romances and laughed all the time. At
the least thing she’d burst into peals of laughter: ha, ha, ha! Our first real acquaintance with the Kovalenkos came, I remember, at the director’s name-day party. Amidst the stern, tensely dull pedagogues,
who even came to name-day parties out of duty, we suddenly see: a new Aphrodite rising from the foam. She walks about, arms akimbo, laughs, sings, dances … She sang ‘The Winds Waft’ with feeling, then another romance, and another, and charmed us all—all, even Belikov. He sat down beside her and said with a sweet smile:

“‘The Ukrainian language, in its softness and pleasing sonority, is reminiscent of the ancient Greek.’

“This flattered her, and she began telling him, with feeling and conviction, that she had a farmstead in the Gadyach district, that her dear mama lived on that farmstead, and they had such pears there, such melons, such squash! In the Ukraine pum
pkins are called squash, and squash are called gourds, and they make borscht out of them with little red peppers and little blue eggplants, ‘so tasty, so tasty, it’s simply—awful!’

“We listened and listened, and suddenly the same thought occurred to us all.

“‘It would be nice to get them married,’ the director’s wife said to me softly.

“We all remembered for some reason that our Belikov wasn’t married, and now it seemed strange to us that we had somehow never noticed, had completely lost sight of such an important detail of his life. What generally was his attitude towards women, and how did he resolve this essential question for himself? Earlier that hadn’t interested us at all; maybe we hadn’t even admitted the thought that a man who wore galoshes in all weather and slept under a canopy was able to love.

‘He’s well over forty, and she’s thirty …’ the director’s wife clarified her thought. ‘I think she’d accept him.’

“So many things are done in our provinces out of boredom, so much that’s unnecessary, absurd! That’s because what’s necessary doesn’t get done at all. Well, so why did we suddenly have to marry off this Belikov, whom it was even impossible to imagine married? The director’s wife, the inspector’s wife, and our lady teachers all livened up, even became prettier, as if they suddenly saw some purpose in life. The director’s wife reserved a box in the theater, and we looked—there was Varenka sitting in her box with a fan, radiant, happy, and beside her Belikov, small, hunched up, as if they’d
pulled him out of his house with pliers. I gave a party and the ladies demanded that I invite Belikov and Varenka without fail. In short, the
machine got going. It turned out that Varenka wouldn’t have minded getting married. Her life with her brother was not so happy, all they could do was argue and quarrel the whole day long. Here’s a scene for you: Kovalen
ko goes walking down the street, a tall, hefty hulk in an embroidered shirt, his forelock falling over his forehead from under his cap; a pile of books in one hand, a thick, knotty stick in the other. Behind him comes his sister, also with books.

“‘But Mikhailik, you haven’t read this one!’ she protests loudly. ‘I’m telling you, I swear, you haven’t read it at all!’

“‘And I tell you I have!’ shouts Kovalenko, rapping his stick on the sidewalk.

“‘Ah, my God, Minchik! Why are you getting angry, we’re having a conversation of principle.’

“‘And I tell you I’ve read it!’ Kovalenko shouts still louder.

“And at home, whenever an outsider comes, there’s some spat. Such a life was probably boring, she wanted a corner of her own, and age was also a consideration; there was no time for choosing, she’d marry anybody, even the teacher of Greek. And to tell the truth, for the majority of our young ladies, it didn’t matter whom they married, as long as they got married. Be that as it may, Varenka began to show our Belikov a marked benevolence.

“And Belikov? He called on Kovalenko just as he did on us. He’d come to him and say nothing. He’d say nothing, and Varenka would sing ‘The Winds Waft’ for him, or look at him pensively with her dark eyes, or suddenly dissolve:

“‘Ha, ha, ha!’

“In amorous matters, especially in marriage, insinuation plays a major role. Everybody—his colleagues and the ladies—started assuring Belikov that he must marry, that there was nothing left for him in life but to marry; we all congratulated him and with important faces uttered various banalities, such as that marriage was a serious step; besides, Varenka was interesting and not bad-looking, she was the daughter of a state councillor and own
ed a farmstead, and, above all, she was the first woman who had treated him gently, cordially—his head got in a whirl, and he decided that he really did have to marry.”