Stories (4 page)

D
ear sir, father and benefactor!” the clerk Nevyrazimov
¹
wrote in the draft of a letter of congratulations. “May you spend this bright day,
²
and many more to come, in good health and prosperity And may your fam …”

The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, smoked and stank of burning. On the table, near Nevyrazimov’s writing hand, a stray cockroach was anxiously running about. Two rooms away from the duty-room, the hall porter Paramon was polishing his Sunday boots for the third time, and with such energy that his spitting and the noise of the shoe brush could be heard in all the rooms.

“What else shall I write to the scoundrel?” Nevyrazimov reflected, raising his eyes to the sooty ceiling.

On the ceiling he saw a dark circle—the shadow of the lampshade. Further down were dusty cornices; still further down—walls that had once been painted a bluish-brown color. And the duty-room looked like such a wasteland to him that he felt pity not only for himself but even for the cockroach …

“I’ll finish my duty and leave, but he’ll spend his whole cockroach life on duty here,” he thought, stretching. “Agony! Shall I polish my boots, or what?”

And, stretching once more, Nevyrazimov trudged lazily to the porter’s lodge. Paramon was no longer polishing his boots … Holding the brush in one hand and crossing himself with the other, he was standing by the open vent window,
³
listening …

“They’re ringing!” he whispered to Nevyrazimov, looking at him with fixed, wide-open eyes. “Already, sir!”

Nevyrazimov put his ear to the vent and listened. Through the vent, together with the fresh spring air, the ringing of the Easter bells came bursting into the room. The booming of the bells mingled with the noise of carriages, and all that stood out from the chaos of sounds was a pert tenor ringing in the nearest church and someone’s loud, shrill laughter.

“So many people!” sighed Nevyrazimov, looking down the street, where human shadows flitted one after another past the lighted lamps. “Everybody’s running to church … Our fellows must’ve had a drink by now and be hanging around the city. All that laughter and talking! I’m the only one so wretched as to have to sit here on such a day. And every year I have to do it!”

“Who tells you to get yourself hired? You weren’t on duty today, it was Zastupov hired you to replace him. Whenever there’s a holiday, you get yourself hired … It’s greed!”

“The devil it’s greed! What’s there to be greedy about: two roubles in cash, plus a necktie … It’s need, not greed! And, you know, it would be nice to go with them all to church now, and then break the fast
⁴
… Have a drink, a bite to eat, then hit the sack … You sit at the table, the kulich
⁵
has been blessed, and there’s a hissing samovar, and some little object beside you … You drink a glass, chuck her under the chin, and it feels good … you feel you’re a human being … Ehh … life’s gone to hell! There’s some rogue driving by in a carriage, and you just sit here thinking your thoughts …”

“To each his own, Ivan Danilych. God willing, you’ll get promoted, too, and drive around in carriages.”

“Me? No, brother, that I won’t. I’ll never get beyond titular councillor,
⁶
even if I burst… I’m uneducated.”

“Our general hasn’t got any education either, and yet …”

“Well, the general, before he amounted to all that, stole a hundred thousand. And his bearing is nothing like mine, brother … With my bearing you don’t get far! And my name is so scoundrelly: Nevyrazimov! In short, brother, the situation’s hopeless. Live like that if you want, and if you don’t—go hang yourself…”

Nevyrazimov left the vent window and began pacing the rooms in anguish. The booming of the bells grew louder and louder … It was no longer necessary to stand by the window in order to hear it.
And the clearer the sound of the ringing, the noisier the clatter of the carriages, the darker seemed the brownish walls and sooty cornices, and the worse the smoking of the lamp.

“Maybe I’ll skip work?” thought Nevyrazimov.

But escape did not promise anything worthwhile … After leaving the office and loitering around town, Nevyrazimov would go to his place, and his place was still grayer and worse than the duty-room … Suppose he spent that day nicely, in comfort, what then? The same gray walls, the same work for hire and letters of congratulations …

Nevyrazimov stopped in the middle of the duty-room and pondered.

The need for a new, better life wrung his heart with unbearable anguish. He passionately longed to find himself suddenly in the street, to merge with the living crowd, to take part in the festivity, in honor of which the bells were all booming and the carriages clattering. He wanted something he used to experience in childhood: the family circle, the festive faces of his relatives, the white table cloth, light, warmth … He remembered the carriage in which a lady had just passed by, the overcoat in which the office manager strutted about, the gold chain adorning the secretary’s chest … He re
membered a warm bed, a Stanislas,
⁷
new boots, a uniform with no holes in the elbows … remembered, because he did not have any of it …

“Maybe try stealing?” he thought. “Stealing’s not hard, I suppose, but the problem is hiding it … They say people run away to America with what they steal, but, devil knows, where is this America? In order to steal, you also have to have education.”

The ringing stopped. Only the distant noise of a carriage was heard, and Paramon’s coughing, and Nevyrazimov’s sadness and spite grew stronger and more unbearable. The office clock struck half-past midnight.

“Maybe write a denunciation? Proshkin denounced somebody and started rising in the world …”

Nevyrazimov sat down at his desk and pondered. The lamp, which had completely run out of kerosene, was smoking badly now and threatening to go out. The stray cockroach still scurried about the table and found no shelter …

“I could denounce somebody, but how write it out! It has to be with all those equivocations and dodges, like Proshkin … Not me!
I’ll write something and get in trouble for it myself. A complete nitwit, devil take me!”

And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for some way out of his hopeless situation, stared at the draft of the letter he had written. The letter was to a man he hated and feared with all his soul, and from whom he had been trying for ten years to obtain a transfer from a sixteen-rouble post to an eighteen-rouble …

“Ah … running about here, you devil!” With the palm of his hand he spitefully swatted the cockroach, which had had the misfortune of catching his eye. “What vileness!”

The cockroach fell on its back and desperately waved its legs … Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared and crackled …

And Nevyrazimov felt better.

M
ARCH
1885

A
sultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky … The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again … The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.

A tall, narrow-shouldered man of about forty, in a red shirt, patched gentleman’s trousers, and big boots, lazily saunters along the edge of the clearing. He saunters down the road. To his right are green trees, to his left, all the way to the horizon, stretches a golden sea of ripe rye … His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey’s visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game bag with a crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes a
t his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere … Everything alive is hiding from the heat.

“Yegor Vlasych!” the hunter suddenly hears a soft voice.

He gives a start and turns around, scowling. Beside him, as if sprung from the ground, stands a pale-faced woman of about thirty with a sickle in her hand. She tries to peer into his face and smiles shyly.

“Ah, it’s you, Pelageya!” says the hunter, stopping and slowly un-cocking his gun. “Hm! … How did you turn up here?”

“The women from our village are working here, so I’m here with them … Hired help, Yegor Vlasych.”

“So-o …” Yegor Vlasych grunts and slowly goes on.

Pelageya follows him. They go about twenty steps in silence.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlasych …” says Pelageya, gazing tenderly at the hunter’s moving shoulders and shoulder blades. “You stopped by our cottage for a drink of water on Easter day, and we haven’t seen you since … You stopped for a minute on Easter day, and that God knows how … in a drunken state … You swore at me, beat me, and left … I’ve been waiting and waiting … I’ve looked my eyes out waiting for you … Eh, Yegor Vlasych, Yegor Vlasych! If only you’d come one little time!”

“What’s there for me to do at your place?”

“There’s nothing to do there, of course, just … anyway there’s the household … Things to be seen to … You’re the master … Look at you, shot a grouse, Yegor Vlasych! Why don’t you sit down and rest …”

As she says all this, Pelageya laughs like a fool and looks up at Yegor’s face … Her own face breathes happiness …

“Sit down? Why not …” Yegor says in an indifferent tone and picks a spot between two pine saplings. “Why are you standing? Sit down, too!”

Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand. Two minutes pass in silence.

“If only you’d come one little time,” Pelageya says softly.

“What for?” sighs Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead with his sleeve. “There’s no need. To stop by for an hour or two—dally around, get you stirred up—and my soul can’t stand living all the time in the village … You know I’m a spoiled man …
I want there to be a bed, and good tea, and delicate conversation … I want to have all the degrees, and in the village there you’ve got poverty, soot … I couldn’t even live there a day. Suppose they issued a decree that I absolutely had to live with you, I’d either burn down the cottage or lay hands on myself. From early on I’ve been spoiled like this, there’s no help for it.”

“Where do you live now?”

“At the squire Dmitri Ivanych’s, as a hunter. I furnish game for his table, but it’s more like … he keeps me because he’s pleased to.”

“It’s not a dignified thing to do, Yegor Vlasych … For people it’s just toying, but for you it’s like a trade … a real occupation …”

“You don’t understand, stupid,” says Yegor, dreamily looking at the sky. “In all your born days you’ve never understood and never will understand what kind of a man I am … To you, I’m a crazy, lost man, but for somebody who understands, I’m the best shot in the whole district. The gentlemen feel it and even printed something about me in a magazine. Nobody can match me in the line of hunting … And if I scorn your village occupations, it’s not because I’m spoiled or proud. Right from infancy, you know, I’ve never known any occupation but guns and dogs. Take away my gun, I’ll get a
fishing pole, take away the fishing pole, I’ll hunt bare-handed. Well, and I also did some horse-trading, roamed around the fairs whenever I had some money, and you know yourself, if any peasant gets in with hunters or horse traders, it’s good-bye to the plough. Once a free spirit settles in a man, there’s no getting it out of him. It’s like when a squire goes to the actors or into some other kind of artistry, then for him there’s no being an official or a landowner. You’re a woman, you don’t understand, and it takes understanding.”

“I understand, Yegor Vlasych.”

“Meaning you don’t understand, since you’re about to cry …”

“I … I’m not crying …” says Pelageya, turning away. “It’s a sin, Yegor Vlasych! You could spend at least one little day with me, poor woman. It’s twelve years since I married you, and … and never once was there any love between us! … I … I’m not crying.

“Love …” Yegor mutters, scratching his arm. “There can’t be any love. It’s just in name that we’re man and wife, but is it really so? For you I’m a wild man, and for me you’re a simple woman, with no understanding. Do we make a couple? I’m free, spoiled, loose, and you’re a barefoot farm worker, you live in dirt, you never straighten your back. I think like this about myself, that I’m first in the line of hunting, but you look at me with pity … What kind of couple are we?”

“But we were married in church, Yegor Vlasych!” Pelageya sobs.

“Not freely… Did you forget? You can thank Count Sergei Pavlych … and yourself. The count was envious that I was a better
shot than he was, kept me drunk for a whole month, and a drunk man can not only be married off but can even be seduced into a different faith. In revenge he up and married me to you … A huntsman to a cow girl. You could see I was drunk, why did you marry me? You’re not a serf, you could have told him no! Of course, a cow girl’s lucky to marry a huntsman, but we need to be reasonable. Well, so now you can suffer and cry. It’s a joke for the count, but you cry … beat your h
ead on the wall …”

Silence ensues. Three wild ducks fly over the clearing. Yegor looks at them and follows them with his eyes until they turn into three barely visible specks and go down far beyond the forest.

“How do you live?” he asks, shifting his eyes from the ducks to Pelageya.

“I go out to work now, and in winter I take a baby from the orphanage and nurse him with a bottle. They give me a rouble and a half a month.” So-o …

Again silence. From the harvested rows comes a soft song, which breaks off at the very beginning. It is too hot for singing …

“They say you put up a new cottage for Akulina,” says Pelageya.

Yegor is silent.

“It means she’s after your own heart …”

“That’s just your luck, your fate!” says the hunter, stretching. “Bear with it, orphan. But, anyhow, good-bye, we’ve talked too much … I’ve got to make it to Boltovo by evening …”

Yegor gets up, stretches, shoulders his gun. Pelageya stands up.

“And when will you come to the village?” she asks softly.

“No point. I’ll never come sober, and when I’m drunk there’s not much profit for you. I get angry when I’m drunk … Good-bye!”

“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych …”

Yegor puts his cap on the back of his head and, clucking for his dog, continues on his way. Pelageya stays where she is and looks at his back … She sees his moving shoulder blades, his dashing head, his lazy, nonchalant stride, and her eyes fill with sadness and a tender caress … Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it … He seems to feel this gaze, stops, and looks back … He is silent, but Pelageya can see from his face, from his raised shoulders, that he wants to say something to her. She timidly goes up to him and looks at him with imploring eyes.

“For you!” he says, turning away

He hands her a worn rouble and quickly walks off.

“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” she says, mechanically accepting the rouble.

He walks down the long road straight as a stretched-out belt … She stands pale, motionless as a statue, and catches his every step with her eyes. But now the red color of his shirt merges with the dark color of his trousers, his steps can no longer be seen, the dog is indistinguishable from his boots. Only his visored cap can still be seen, but … suddenly Yegor turns sharply to the right in the clearing and the cap disappears into the greenery.

“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” Pelageya whispers and stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.

J
ULY
1885