Forty Stories (30 page)

Sophia Lvovna did not know why she began weeping. For a whole minute she wept silently, and then she dried her eyes and said: “Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She is here with us. Volodya’s here, too. They are near the gate. How pleased they would be if you would come out and see them! Shall we go? The service hasn’t begun yet.”

“Yes, let’s go,” Olga agreed.

She crossed herself three times and went out with Sophia Lvovna to the gate.

“Are you really happy? Are you, Sophia?” she asked as they came into the open.

“Very happy!”

“Praise be!”

Big Volodya and Little Volodya jumped out of the sleigh as
soon as they saw the nun, and they greeted her respectfully. They were both visibly touched by her pallor and the dark nun’s costume, and they were both pleased because she remembered them and had come out to greet them. To prevent her from getting cold, Sophia wrapped her in a rug and covered her with a flap of fur coat. Sophia’s tears of a few moments ago had cleansed and relieved her spirits, and she was happy now that this noisy, restless, and in fact thoroughly impure night could have such a pure and clear-cut sequel. To keep Olga a little longer by her side, she said: “Let’s take her for a drive! Come in, Olga! We’ll just have a short drive.…”

The men expected the nun to refuse—holy people do not ride around in troikas—but to their surprise she agreed and got into the sleigh. And when the sleigh was hurrying in the direction of the town gate they were all silent, while trying to keep her warm and comfortable, and they were all thinking about her past and her present. Her face was passionless, almost expressionless, cold, pale, transparent, as though water, not blood, were flowing through her veins. Only two or three years ago she had been plump and red-cheeked, and she had talked all the time about her beaux and giggled over every mortal thing.

Near the town gate the sleigh turned back, and ten minutes later they stopped outside the nunnery gate and Olga got out. Now the church bells were ringing again.

“May God be with you,” Olga said, making a low bow as nuns always do.

“You’ll come and visit us, won’t you, Olga?”

“Yes, indeed!”

Then she left them and quickly disappeared through the dark gateway. Afterward the troika drove on again, and they were engulfed in a wave of melancholy. They were all silent. Sophia Lvovna felt as though her whole body had gone weak, and her spirits fell. It occurred to her that inviting a nun to sit in a sleigh and drive around with some drunken companions was stupid, tactless, and perhaps sacrilegious, and as her own drunkenness
wore off, so she lost any desire to delude herself, and it became clear to her that she had no love for her husband and indeed could never love him, and it was all folly and stupidity. She had married him for his money, because, in the words of her school friends, he was madly rich, and because she was afraid of being an old maid like Rita, and because she was fed up with her father, the doctor, and because she wanted to annoy Little Volodya. If she could have known when she married her husband that her life would be hideous, dreadful, and burdensome, she would not have consented to the marriage for all the gold in the world. But the damage could never be undone, and she had to reconcile herself to it.

They went home. Lying in her warm soft bed and covering herself with her bedclothes, Sophia Lvovna remembered the dark doorway, the smell of incense, and the figures beside the columns, and she was terrified by the thought that these figures would remain motionless through the night, while she slept. The early service would go on forever, and would be followed by “the hours,” and then by the mass, and then by the thanksgiving service.…

“Oh, there is a God, yes, there truly is a God, and I must surely die, and that is why sooner or later I must think about my soul, about eternal life, and about Olga. Olga is saved now—she has found the answers to all the questions about herself.… But what if there is no God? Then her life has come to nothing. But how has it come to nothing? Why?”

A moment later another thought entered her head: “Yes, there is a God, and death will surely come, and I must think about my soul. If Olga saw death before her this very minute, she would not be afraid. She is ready. The important thing is that she has solved the problem of life for herself. There is a God … yes.… But is there any other way out, except by entering a nunnery? Entering a nunnery means renouncing life, reducing it to zero.…”

Sophia Lvovna began to feel a bit frightened. She hid her head under a pillow.

“I mustn’t think about it,” she muttered. “No, I mustn’t think about it.…”

Yagich was pacing the carpet in the adjoining room: there came the soft jingling sound of spurs as he surrendered to his contemplations. It occurred to Sophia Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only because he bore the name of Vladimir: that was the only reason. She sat up in bed and called out tenderly: “Volodya!”

“What’s the matter?” her husband answered.

“Nothing.”

She lay down again. She heard the pealing of a bell, and perhaps it came from the same nunnery she had been visiting. Once again she remembered the dark gateway and the figures standing there, and there came to her the idea of God and of her own inevitable death, and she put her hands to her ears to keep out the sound of the bells. It occurred to her that a long, long life stretched before her until old age and death finally overcame her, and every day of her life she would have to live in close proximity to a man she did not love, this man who was now entering the bedroom and preparing to go to bed, and she would have to stifle her hopeless love for the other man, who was young and fascinating and in her eyes quite extraordinary. She looked up at her husband and tried to say good night to him, but instead she suddenly burst into tears. She was distraught.

“Well, here comes the music!” Yagich said, and he stressed the second syllable of “music.”

She remained distraught until ten o’clock the next morning, when she finally stopped crying and trembling all over; her tears gave place to a terrible headache. Yagich was in a hurry to attend late mass; he was growling at the orderly who was helping him to dress in the next room. Once he came into the bedroom to fetch something, and his footsteps were attended by the soft
jingling of spurs, and then he came in again wearing his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and it occurred to Sophia Lvovna that he looked and walked like a ravening beast.

She heard him ringing up someone on the telephone.

“Be so good as to connect me with the Vasilyevsky barracks,” he said, and a minute later: “Vasilyevsky barracks? Would you please ask Dr. Salimovich to come to the telephone?” And then another minute later: “Who’s speaking? Is that you, Volodya? Delighted. Dear boy, ask your father to come to the telephone at once. My wife is a bit upset after yesterday. Not at home, eh? Well, thank you very much. Excellent. Much obliged.
Merci .…
”

For the third time Yagich entered the bedroom, and he bent over the bed and made the sign of the cross over her and gave her his hand to kiss—the women who had loved him invariably kissed his hand, and he had fallen into the habit of doing this. Then, saying he would be back for dinner, he went out.

At noon the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailovich had arrived. Though she was staggering with fatigue and a headache, Sophia Lvovna quietly slipped into her wonderful new lilac-colored dressing gown, which was trimmed with fur, and she hurriedly arranged her hair. In her heart she felt a surge of inexpressible tenderness, and she was trembling with joy and the fear that he might leave her. She wanted only one thing—to gaze upon him.

Little Volodya was properly attired for calling upon a lady: he wore a frock coat and a white tie. When Sophia Lvovna entered the drawing room he kissed her hand and genuinely offered his sympathy over her illness. When they sat down, he praised her dressing gown.

“I was absolutely shattered by the visit to Olga yesterday,” she said. “At first I thought it was quite terrible, but now I envy her. She is like a rock which can never be destroyed, nothing can budge her. Tell me, Volodya, was there any other way out
for her? Is burying oneself alive the answer to all life’s problems? It is death, not life …”

Little Volodya’s face was touched with deep emotion as he remembered Olga.

“Listen to me, Volodya, you are a clever man,” Sophia Lvovna went on. “Teach me how to rise above myself, as she has done. Of course, I am not a believer and could never enter a nunnery, but surely I could do something which is equivalent. My life is not an easy one,” she added after a pause. “Tell me something which will give me faith. Tell me something, even if it is only a single word.”

“One word? Well—
ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay
!”

“Volodya, why do you despise me?” she asked, livid with anger. “You have a quite fatuous way of talking to me—I beg your pardon, but you do—people don’t talk to their friends and women acquaintances like that. You are so successful and so learned, and you love science, yet you never talk to me about scientific things. Why? Am I not worthy?”

Little Volodya’s brows were knit with vexation.

“Why this sudden interest in science?” he asked. “What about a discussion on the constitution—or maybe about sturgeon and horse-radish?”

“Very well. I’m an insignificant, silly, stupid woman without principles. I have an appalling number of faults. I’m a psychopath, I am utterly depraved—I should be despised for these things. But remember, you are ten years older than I am, and my husband is thirty years older. I’ve grown up before your eyes, and if you had wanted, you could have made anything out of me—even an angel. But instead”—and here her voice quivered—“you treated me abominably! Yagich married me when he was already an old man, but you could have …”

“We’ve had quite enough of that, haven’t we?” Volodya said, sitting close to her and kissing both her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, while I kiss your little hands …”

“You despise me! If only you knew how you are making me suffer!” She spoke uncertainly, knowing already that he would not believe her. “If only you knew how much I want to change and start my life afresh! I think about it with such joy!” she went on, while tears of joy actually sprang into her eyes. “Oh, to be good, honest, pure, never to lie, to have an aim in life …”

“Please stop putting on those silly airs—I don’t like them at all,” Volodya said, and his face assumed a whimsical expression. “Dear God, it’s like being on the stage! Why don’t we behave like ordinary people?”

She was afraid he would be angry and go away, and so she began to justify herself, and she forced herself to smile to please him, and once again she talked about Olga and how much she wanted to solve the problem of her life and become human.

“
Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay
,” he sang under his breath. “
Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay
 …”

Quite suddenly he put his arm round her waist. Without knowing what she was doing she put her hands on his shoulders and for a full minute she gazed with a look of dazed rapture at his clever mocking face, his forehead, his eyes, his handsome beard.

“You have known for a long time how much I love you,” she confessed to him, and she blushed painfully, and she knew her lips were twisting convulsively with shame. “I love you! Why are you torturing me?”

She closed her eyes and kissed him fiercely on the lips, and it was a full minute before she was able to put an end to the kiss, even though she knew that kissing him was improper, and that he was standing in judgment over her, and that a servant might come in at any moment.

“Oh, how you are torturing me!” she repeated.

Half an hour later, when he had got all he wanted from her, and was sitting over lunch, she knelt before him and gazed hungrily up at his face, while he told her she resembled a puppy waiting
for some ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on one knee and danced her up and down, as though she were a child, singing: “
Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay … Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay
 …”

When he was about to leave, she asked in passionate tones: “When? Today? Where?”

She held out both arms toward his lips, as though she wanted to tear out his answer with her hands.

“Today would hardly be suitable,” he told her after some thought. “Tomorrow perhaps.”

And so they parted. Before dinner Sophia Lvovna went along to the nunnery to see Olga, and was told that Olga was reading the psalter over the dead somewhere. From the nunnery she went off to see her father, but he was not at home, and so she took another sleigh and drove aimlessly through the roads and side streets until evening. For some reason she kept remembering that aunt of hers whose eyes were filled with tears and who knew no peace.

That night they drove again to the restaurant outside the town in a troika and listened to the gypsies. Driving past the nunnery, Sophia Lvovna again thought about Olga, and it terrified her that for girls and women of her station in life there was no solution except to go driving around in troikas and tell lies, or else to enter a nunnery and mortify the flesh. The next day she met her lover, and afterwards she drove around the town alone with a coachman and thought about her aunt.

During the following week Little Volodya threw her over. Life went on as usual, dull, miserable, sometimes even agonizing. The colonel and Little Volodya spent long hours together at billiards or playing piquet, and Rita continued to tell her tasteless anecdotes. Sophia Lvovna wandered around in her hired sleigh and kept asking her husband to take her for a drive in a troika.

Almost every day now she went to the nunnery and bored Olga with a recital of her unbearable sufferings, and she wept
and felt she was bringing something impure and pitiable and worn-out into the cell with her, while Olga, in the tone of someone mechanically repeating a lesson, told her that all this was of no importance, it would all pass away, and God would forgive her.

1893