Stories (8 page)

N
ight. The nanny Varka, a girl of about thirteen, is rocking a cradle in which a baby lies, and murmuring barely audibly:

A green oil lamp is burning before an icon; a rope is stretched across the whole room from corner to corner, with swaddling clothes and large black trousers hanging on it. A big green spot from the icon lamp falls on the ceiling, and the swaddling clothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, the cradle, and Varka … When the icon lamp begins to flicker, the spot and the shadows come alive and start moving as if in the wind. It is stuffy. There is a smell of cabbage soup and shoemaker’s supplies.

The baby is crying. He became hoarse and exhausted from crying long ago, but he goes on howling, and no one knows when he will quiet down. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes close, her head droops down, her neck aches. She cannot move her eyelids or her lips, and it seems to her that her face has become dry and stiff and her head is as small as the head of a pin.

“Hush-a-bye, baby,” she murmurs, “I’ll feed you by and by …”

A cricket chirps from the stove. In the next room, behind the door, the master and his apprentice Afanasy are snoring … The cradle creaks pitifully, Varka herself is murmuring—and all this
merges into the lulling night music that is so sweet to hear when you are going to bed. But now this music is only vexing and oppressive, because it makes her drowsy, yet she cannot sleep. God forbid that Varka should fall asleep, or the masters will give her a beating.

The icon lamp flickers. The green spot and the shadows begin to move, getting into Varka’s fixed, half-open eyes and forming dim reveries in her half-sleeping brain. She sees dark clouds chasing each other across the sky and crying like babies. But now the wind has blown, the clouds have vanished, and Varka sees a broad highway covered with liquid mud. Down the highway stretches a string of carts, people trudge along with bundles on their backs, and some sort of shadows flit back and forth. Forest can be seen on both sides through the cold, harsh fog. Suddenly the shadows and the people with bund
les drop down in the liquid mud. “Why is that?” asks Varka. “To sleep, to sleep,” comes the answer. And they fall fast asleep, sleep sweetly, and crows and magpies sit on the telegraph wires, crying like babies, trying to wake them up.

“Hush-a-bye, baby, I’ll sing you a song …” murmurs Varka, and now she sees herself in a dark, stuffy cottage.

Her late father, Yefim Stepanov, is thrashing on the floor. She does not see him, but she hears him moaning and rolling on the floor in pain. His rupture, as he puts it, “is acting up.” The pain is so intense that he cannot utter a single word and only sucks in air, his teeth chattering like a drum roll:

“Rat-a-tat-tat-tat …”

Her mother Pelageya has run to the manor to tell the masters that Yefim is dying. She has been gone for a long time and ought to be back. Varka lies on the stove, awake, and listens to her father’s “rat-a-tat-tat.” But now she hears someone drive up to the cottage. The masters have sent the young doctor, who came from town for a visit. The doctor enters the cottage. He cannot be seen in the darkness, but she hears him cough and clack the door.

“Light a lamp,” he says.

“Rat-a-tat-tat …” answers Yefim.

Pelageya rushes to the stove and starts looking for the crock of matches. A minute passes in silence. The doctor feels in his pockets and lights his own match.

“One moment, good man, one moment,” says Pelageya, rushing out of the cottage and coming back shortly with a candle end.

Yefim’s cheeks are pink, his eyes shine, and his gaze is somehow sharp, as if Yefim can see through both the cottage and the doctor.

“Well, so? What’s this you’re up to?” the doctor says, bending over him. “Aha! Have you had it long?”

“What, sir? It’s time to die, Your Honor … I’m done living …”

“Enough of that nonsense … We’ll cure you!”

“As you like, Your Honor, my humble thanks, only we do understand … Since death has come, there’s no use.”

The doctor fusses over Yefim for a quarter of an hour. Then he gets up and says:

“I can do nothing … You must go to the hospital, they’ll do surgery on you. Go right now … Go without fail! It’s a bit late, everybody’s asleep there, but never mind, I’ll give you a note. Do you hear me?”

“How is he going to get there, good man?” says Pelageya. “We have no horse.”

“Never mind, I’ll ask the masters, they’ll give you a horse.”

The doctor leaves, the candle goes out, and again she hears “rat-a-tat-tat” … Half an hour later somebody drives up to the cottage. The masters have sent a gig to go to the hospital. Yefim gets ready and goes …

Now comes a fine, clear morning. Pelageya is not home: she has gone to the hospital to find out what is happening with Yefim. Somewhere a baby is crying, and Varka hears someone singing with her own voice:

“Hush-a-bye, baby, I’ll sing you a song …”

Pelageya comes back. She crosses herself and whispers:

“They set it during the night, but by morning he gave up his soul to God … The kingdom of heaven, eternal rest … They say they caught it too late … He should have come earlier …”

Varka goes to the woods and weeps there, but suddenly somebody hits her on the back of the head so hard that she bumps her forehead against a birch. She lifts her eyes and sees before her the shoemaker, her master.

“What’s this, you mangy girl?” he says. “The little one’s crying, and you sleep?”

He twists her ear painfully, and she shakes her head, rocks the cradle, and murmurs her song. The green spot and the shadows of the trousers and swaddling clothes ripple, wink at her, and soon invade her brain again. Again she sees the highway covered with
liquid mud. Shadows and people with bundles on their backs sprawl about, fast asleep. Looking at them, Varka passionately longs to sleep; it would be such a pleasure to lie down, but her mother Pelageya walks beside her and hurries her. They are hastening to town to find work.

“Give alms, for Christ’s sake!” her mother asks passersby “Show God’s mercy, merciful people.”

“Give me the baby!” somebody’s familiar voice answers her. “Give me the baby!” the same voice repeats, angrily and sharply now. “Sleeping, you slut?”

Varka jumps up and, looking around her, understands what is the matter: there is no road, no Pelageya, no passersby, but only her mistress standing in the middle of the room, come to nurse her baby. While the fat, broad-shouldered mistress nurses and quiets the baby, Varka stands and looks at her, waiting till she is finished. Outside the windows the air is turning blue, the shadows and the green spot on the ceiling are becoming noticeably paler. It will soon be morning.

“Take him!” says the mistress, buttoning her nightshirt over her breasts. “He’s crying. Must be the evil eye.”

Varka takes the baby, lays him in the cradle, and again begins to rock. The green spot and the shadows gradually disappear, and there is nothing left to get into her head and cloud her brain. And she is as sleepy as before, so terribly sleepy! Varka lays her head on the edge of the cradle and rocks with her whole body, so as to overcome sleep, but her eyes keep closing all the same and her head is heavy.

“Varka, light the stove!” the master’s voice comes from behind the door.

That means it is time to get up and start working. Varka leaves the cradle and runs to the shed to fetch firewood. She is glad. When you run and walk, you do not feel so sleepy as when you are in a sitting position. She brings the firewood, lights the stove, and feels how her stiffened face relaxes and her thoughts become clear.

“Varka, set up the samovar!” cries the mistress.

Varka splits some splinters, and has barely had time to light them and put them under the samovar when she hears a new order.

“Varka, clean the master’s galoshes!”

She sits on the floor, cleans the galoshes, and thinks how good it would be to put her head into a big, deep galosh and have a nap
there … Suddenly the galosh grows, swells, fills the whole room. Varka drops the brush, but immediately shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and tries to look at things in such a way that they do not grow and move as she looks.

“Varka, wash the front steps, it’s shameful for the customers!”

Varka washes the steps, tidies the rooms, then lights the other stove and runs to the grocer’s. There is much work, and not a free moment.

But nothing is harder than to stand in one spot at the kitchen table and peel potatoes. Her head droops on the table, potatoes flash in her eyes, the knife keeps falling from her hand, and around her paces the fat, angry mistress, with her sleeves rolled up, talking so loudly that it makes her ears ring. It is also a torment to serve at the table, do the laundry, sew. There are moments when she longs to forget everything, collapse on the floor, and sleep.

The day passes. Looking at the darkening windows, Varka clutches her stiffening temples and smiles, not knowing why herself. The evening darkness caresses her closing eyes, promising a sound sleep soon. In the evening her masters have guests.

“Varka, set up the samovar!” cries the mistress.

Their samovar is small, and before the guests have had enough tea, she has to heat it some five times. After tea, Varka stands in one spot for a whole hour, looking at the guests and awaiting orders.

“Varka, run and fetch three bottles of beer!”

She tears herself from the spot and tries to run faster so as to drive sleep away.

“Varka, run and fetch vodka! Varka, where’s the corkscrew? Varka, clean the herring!”

But now, finally, the guests have gone, the lights are put out, the masters go to sleep.

“Varka, rock the baby!” comes the last order.

A cricket chirps from the stove. The green spot on the ceiling and the shadows of the trousers and swaddling clothes again get into Varka’s half-closed eyes, flicker, and cloud her head.

“Hush-a-bye, baby,” she murmurs, “I’ll sing you a song …”

And the baby cries and gets exhausted from crying. Again Varka sees the muddy highway, the people with bundles, Pelageya, her father Yefim. She understands everything, recognizes everyone, but through her half sleep she simply cannot understand what power binds her hand and foot, oppresses her, and keeps her from living.

She looks around, seeking this power in order to rid herself of it, but she cannot find it. Finally, worn out, she strains all her powers and her vision, looks up at the flickering green spot, and, hearing the crying, locates the enemy that keeps her from living.

That enemy is the baby.

She laughs. It amazes her: how is it that she was unable to understand such a simple thing before? The green spot, the shadows, and the cricket, too, seem to laugh and be amazed.

A false notion takes hold of Varka. She gets up from the stool and, smiling broadly, without blinking her eyes, walks about the room. She is pleased and tickled by the thought that she is about to rid herself of the baby that binds her hand and foot … To kill the baby, and then sleep, sleep, sleep …

Laughing, winking, and shaking her finger at the green spot, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. After strangling him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughing with j
oy that she can sleep, and a moment later is already fast asleep, like the dead …

J
ANUARY
1888

T
here is in Russia an honored professor named Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, a privy councillor and chevalier. He has so many Russian and foreign decorations that when he has to wear them all, the students call him “the iconostasis.”
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His acquaintances are of the most aristocratic sort; at least for the last twenty-five or thirty years in Russia there is not and has not been a single famous scholar with whom he has not been closely acquainted. Now he has no one to be friends with, but if we speak of the past, the long list of his glorious friends ends with such names as Pirogov, Kavel
in and the poet Nekrasov,
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who offered him the warmest and most sincere friendship. He is a member of all the Russian and three foreign universities. And so on and so forth. All this and many other things that might be said constitute what is known as my name.

This name of mine is popular. In Russia it is known to every literate person, and abroad it is mentioned from podiums with the addition of well-known and esteemed. It is one of those few fortunate names which it is considered bad tone to abuse or take in vain, in public or in print. And so it should be. For my name is closely connected with the notion of a man who is famous, richly endowed, and unquestionably useful. I’m as staunch and hardworking as a camel, which is important, and I’m talented, which is still more
important. Besides that, be it said in pas
sing, I’m a well-bred, modest, and honorable fellow. Never have I poked my nose into literature and politics, or sought popularity in polemics with ignoramuses, or given speeches either at dinners or over the graves of my colleagues … Generally, there is not a single blot on my learned name, and it has nothing to complain of. It is happy.

The bearer of this name, that is, myself, has the look of a sixty-two-year-old man with a bald head, false teeth, and an incurable tic. As my name is brilliant and beautiful, so I myself am dull and ugly. My head and hands shake from weakness; my neck, as with one of Turgenev’s heroines,
³
resembles the fingerboard of a double bass, my chest is sunken, my shoulders narrow. When I speak or read, my mouth twists to one side; when I smile, my whole face is covered with an old man’s deathly wrinkles. There is nothing imposing in my pathetic figure; except perhaps that when I have my tic, I acquir
e some peculiar expression, which evokes in anyone looking at me the stern and imposing thought: “This man will evidently die soon.”

I still lecture fairly well; I can hold the attention of my listeners for two hours at a stretch, as I used to. My passion, the literary quality of my exposition, and my humor make almost unnoticeable the defects of my voice, which is dry, shrill, and sing-song, like a hypocrite’s. But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I’ve lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished an
d timid. I often write something other than what I mean; when I get to the end, I no longer remember the beginning. I often forget ordinary words, and always have to waste much energy avoiding superfluous phrases and unnecessary parenthetical clauses in my writing—both clearly witnessing to a decline of mental activity. And, remarkably, the simpler the writing, the more excruciating is the strain. With a learned article I feel myself far more free and intelligent than with a letter of congratu
lations or a report. Another thing: it’s easier for me to write in German or English than in Russian.

As for my present way of life, first of all I must make note of the insomnia from which I’ve been suffering lately. If I were to be asked: What now constitutes the main and fundamental feature of
your existence? I would answer: Insomnia. As before, out of habit, I get undressed and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but I wake up again before two o’clock, and with a feeling as if I haven’t slept at all. I have to get up and light the lamp. For an hour or two I pace the room from corner to corner and gaze at the long-familiar paintings and photographs. When I
get tired of pacing, I sit down at my desk. I sit motionless, not thinking about anything and not feeling any desires; if there’s a book lying in front of me, I mechanically draw it towards me and read without any interest. Thus, recently, in a single night I mechanically read an entire novel with the strange title
What the Swallow Sang
.
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Or else, to occupy my attention, I make myself count to a thousand or picture the face of one of my colleagues and begin recalling: in what year and under what circumstances did he take up his post? I like listening to sounds. Two doors away my daughter Liza says somethin
g rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the living room with a candle and unfailingly drops the box of matches, or a cupboard creaks from dryness, or the lamp flame suddenly starts to hum—and for some reason all these sounds trouble me.

Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep. A long, wearisome time goes by before the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bearer of good tidings. Once he crows, I know that in an hour the hall porter will wake up below and, coughing gruffly, come upstairs for something. And then little by little the air outside the windows will turn pale, voices will be heard in the street …

My day begins with the coming of my wife. She enters my room in a petticoat, her hair not yet done, but already washed, smelli
ng of flower cologne, and with the air of having come in by chance, and each time she says one and the same thing:

“Excuse me, I’ll only stay a moment … You didn’t sleep again?”

Then she puts out the lamp, sits down by the desk and begins to talk. I’m no prophet, but I know beforehand what the talk will be about. It is the same every morning. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she suddenly remembers our son, an officer serving in Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty roubles—that mainly serves as the theme of our conversation.

“Of course, it’s difficult for us,” my wife sighs, “but until he finally gets on his feet, it’s our duty to help him. The boy is in a
foreign land, his pay is small … However, if you like, next month we’ll send him not fifty but forty What do you think?”

Everyday experience might have convinced my wife that expenses are not diminished by our frequent talking about them, but my wife does not recognize experience and tells me regularly each morning about our officer, and that the price of bread has gone down, thank God, but sugar has gone up two kopecks—and all this in such a tone as if she were telling me some news.

I listen, mechanically saying yes, and strange, useless thoughts come over me, probably because I haven’t slept all night. I look at my wife and am astonished, like a child. In perplexity, I ask myself: Can it be that this old, very stout, ungainly woman with a dull expression of petty care and fear over a crust of bread, with eyes clouded by constant thoughts of debt and poverty, only capable of talking about expenses and only smiling at bargains—can it be that this woman was once that same slender Varya whom I passionately loved for her good, clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othe
llo loved Desdemona, “that she did pity” my science? Can this be that same wife Varya who once bore me a son?

I peer intently into the flabby, ungainly old woman’s face, searching for my Varya in her, but nothing has survived from the past except her fear for my health and her way of calling my salary our salary and my hat our hat. It pains me to look at her, and to comfort her at least a little I let her say whatever she likes, and even say nothing when she judges people unfairly or chides me for not having a practice or publishing textbooks.

Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I have not had my tea yet and becomes alarmed.

“What am I doing sitting here?” she says, getting up. “The samovar has long been on the table, and I sit here chattering. Lord, I’ve become so forgetful!”

She goes out quickly but stops in the doorway to say:

“We owe Yegor for five months. Do you know that? It won’t do to fall behind with the servants’ pay, I’ve said so many times! Paying ten roubles a month is much easier than going five months and paying fifty!”

She gets through the door, stops again, and says:

“There’s no one I pity so much as our poor Liza. The girl studies at the conservatory, she’s always in good society, and she’s dressed
God knows how. It’s shameful to go out in such a coat. If she were someone else’s daughter, it would be nothing, but everybody knows her father is a famous professor, a privy councillor!”

And, having reproached me with my name and rank, she finally leaves. So my day begins. The sequel is no better.

While I’m having tea, my Liza comes in with her coat and hat on, holding some scores, all ready to go to the conservatory. She’s twenty-two years old. She looks younger, is pretty, and slightly resembles my wife when she was young. She kisses me tenderly on the temple and on the hand, and says:

“Good morning, papa. Are you well?”

As a child she was very fond of ice cream, and I often took her to the pastry shop. For her, ice cream was the measure of all that was beautiful. If she wanted to praise me, she would say: “You’re ice cream, papa.” One little finger was named pistachio, another vanilla, another raspberry, and so on. Usually, when she came and said good morning to me, I would take her on my knee and, kissing her fingers, repeat:

“Vanilla … pistachio … lemon …”

And now, for old times’ sake, I kiss Liza’s fingers, murmuring: “Pistachio … vanilla … lemon …” but it turns out all wrong. I’m cold as ice cream and feel ashamed. When my daughter comes to me and brushes my temple with her lips, I give a start as if I’d been stung by a bee, smile tensely, and turn my face away. Ever since I began to suffer from insomnia, a question has been lodged in my brain like a nail: my daughter often sees me, an old man, a celebrity, blush painfully because I owe money to a servant; she sees how often the worry over petty debts makes me abandon my work and spend whole hour
s pacing back and forth, pondering, but why has she never once come to me, in secret from her mother, and whispered: “Father, here is my watch, my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses … Pawn it all, you need money …”? Why, seeing how her mother and I, surrendering to a false feeling, try to hide our poverty from people, does she not give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? Not that I’d accept any watch, or bracelets, or sacrifices, God forbid—I don’t need that.

And then I also remember my son, the officer in Warsaw. He’s an intelligent, honest, and sober man. But I don’t find that enough. I think if I had an old father and if I knew that he had moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I would give my officer’s post
to someone else and go to do day labor. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What’s the point? To harbor spiteful
feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man. But enough of that.

At a quarter to ten I must go to my dear boys and give a lecture. I get dressed and follow a road that has been familiar to me for thirty years now and has its own history for me. Here is a big gray house with a pharmacy; a small house once stood there, and in it there was a beer parlor; in that beer parlor I thought over my dissertation and wrote my first love letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page with the heading “Historia morbi.”
⁵
Here is the grocery shop; it was formerly run by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, then by a fat woman who loved students because “
each of them has a mother”; now there’s a red-haired shopkeeper sitting there, a very indifferent man, who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy university gates, which have long needed repair; the bored caretaker in a sheepskin coat, his besom, the heaps of snow … Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a fresh boy, come from the provinces, who imagines that the temple of learning really is a temple. In the history of Russian pessimism, the general decrepitude of the university buildings, the gloomy corridors, the grimy walls, the inadequate light, the disma
l look of the stairs, cloakrooms and benches, occupy one of the foremost places in the series of causes predisposing … And here is our garden. It seems to have become neither better nor worse since I was a student. I don’t like it. It would be much smarter if, instead of consumptive lindens, yellow acacias, and sparse trimmed lilacs, there were tall pines and handsome oaks growing here. The student, whose mood is largely created by the surroundings of his place of learning, should see at every step only the lofty, the strong, the graceful … God save him from scrawny trees, broken windows, gray walls, and do
ors upholstered with torn oilcloth.