Forty Stories (46 page)

Nina Ivanovna sat up with a jerk.

“You and your grandmother keep torturing me,” she sobbed. “I want to live—to live!” she repeated, and she struck her breast twice with her little fist. “Let me free! I’m still young and I want to live, and you’re making an old woman out of me!”

She cried bitterly and lay down, rolling herself up in the blanket, looking very silly, small, and pathetic. Nadya went to her room, dressed, and sat at the window to wait for the dawn. All night she sat there thinking, while someone down below in the courtyard seemed to be tapping the shutters and whistling.

The next morning Grandmother complained that during the night the wind had blown down all the apples in the garden and thrown down an old plum tree. It was a dull gray desolate day: one of those mornings when you want to light the lamps; everyone complained of the cold, and the raindrops kept tapping on the windowpanes. After breakfast Nadya went to Sasha’s room, and without saying a word she fell on her knees before a chair in the corner and covered her face with her hands.

“What’s the matter?” Sasha asked.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “I don’t know how I was able to live here before. I don’t understand it. I despise my fiancé, I despise myself, I despise all idle, nonsensical life!”

“What’s come over you?” said Sasha, who was still unable to understand what it was all about. “You know … everything will turn out all right.”

“I am disgusted with my life,” Nadya went on. “I can’t endure
the thought of another day here! I’m leaving here tomorrow. Take me with you, for God’s sake!”

For a moment Sasha gazed at her in astonishment. At last the truth dawned on him, and he was as delighted as a child. He waved his arms and began to shuffle around the room in his slippers, like someone dancing for joy.

“Wonderful!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “God, how wonderful!”

And she gazed at him steadily with wide-open eyes full of love, like someone spellbound, and she waited for him to say something important, something which would have infinite meaning for her. He had told her nothing yet, but already it seemed to her that something new and great, something she had never known before, was opening before her, and already she was gazing at him with a look of expectation, prepared for everything, even for death.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told her after some thought. “You can come to the station to see me off.… I’ll have your baggage in my trunk and get your ticket, and then when the third bell rings you can jump on the train, and we’ll go away. You can come with me to Moscow and then go off alone to St. Petersburg. Have you a passport?”

“Yes.”

“I swear you’ll never regret it, never repent,” Sasha said with enthusiasm. “You can leave here and study, and then go where-ever fate beckons. When your life is completely revolutionized, then everything will change. The important thing is to revolutionize your life, and nothing else is of any importance. Shall we leave tomorrow?”

“Yes, for God’s sake, let’s leave tomorrow!”

Nadya, who imagined that she was deeply moved and that her heart had never felt so heavy, was quite sure she would spend all the time before her departure in anguish and torment. Yet she had scarcely reached her room and lain down on the bed
when she was overcome with sleep; and she slept soundly, her face wet with tears and a smile on her lips, till evening came.

They sent for a cab. Nadya went upstairs, in her hat and coat, to take one last look at her mother, at all the things that had belonged to her for so long. First she went to her own room and stood beside the bed, which was still warm, and for a while she looked around her; then she went softly into her mother’s room. After kissing her mother and smoothing her hair, she remained there a few moments before walking slowly downstairs.

A heavy rain fell. In front of the porch stood a droshky, the hood up, drenched with rain.

“There’s no room for you, Nadya,” said Grandmother while a servant was stowing the luggage. “I wonder you want to see him off in this weather! Much better to stay at home! Oh, look at the rain!”

Nadya tried to say something, but words failed her. Sasha helped her into the droshky, and covered her legs with a rug. Then he sat down beside her.

“Good luck! May God keep you!” Grandmother shouted from the steps. “Write to us when you get to Moscow!”

“Yes, of course. Good-by, Granny!”

“May the Queen of Heaven have you in her keeping.”

“What rotten weather!” Sasha said.

At this point Nadya burst out sobbing. Now for the first time she realized she was really going away, and this was something she had not permitted herself to believe when she was gazing at her mother or saying good-by to her grandmother. Good-by, town! It all came back to her with a rush: Andrey, the father, the new house, the naked lady with the vase; but these things no longer oppressed her, no longer frightened her, but on the contrary seemed naïve and unimportant, fading deeper and deeper
into the distance. And when they were sitting in the railroad carriage and the train started, the whole of the past, once so huge and imposing, shrank almost to nothing: instead the broad roads of the future, scarcely perceptible until this moment, opened out to her. The rain rapped on the carriage windows, nothing could be seen but the green fields and the telegraph poles flashing past—the birds sitting on the wires. Quite suddenly she found she was almost choking with joy. It seemed to her she would soon enter her freedom, spending her time studying, “running wild,” as people used to say. She was simultaneously laughing and crying and saying her prayers.

“Everything is going to be all right,” Sasha was saying with a broad smile. “You’ll see.…”

Autumn had gone, and winter, too, had passed away. Nadya was now very homesick, and every day she thought of her mother and her grandmother; she thought of Sasha, too. Letters from home were resigned and kindly, everything seemed to have been forgiven and forgotten. In May after the examinations she went home in good health and high spirits, breaking her journey in Moscow to see Sasha. He had changed very little since the previous summer—the same beard, the same disheveled hair, the same large and beautiful eyes, and he wore the same coat and the same canvas trousers. Yet he looked ill and troubled, and seemed much older and thinner, and coughed incessantly. He struck Nadya at first as oddly colorless and provincial.

“Good heavens, Nadya is here!” he exclaimed with a burst of gay laughter. “My dear child …”

They sat in the lithography shop, which was full of tobacco smoke and the suffocating smell of paint and India ink, and then they went to his room, which was filthy and also reeked of tobacco. The samovar on the table had turned cold; beside it lay a shattered plate with dark paper on it, and there were heaps of
dead flies on the table and on the floor. Everything about the room suggested that Sasha led a completely slovenly existence, living anyhow, and despising comfort; and if anyone had spoken to him about his private joys, about his personal life and whether anyone loved him, he would have understood nothing and would only have laughed.

“Everything went off all right,” Nadya said hurriedly. “Mama came to see me in Petersburg during the autumn. She tells me Granny isn’t angry any more, but keeps going to my room and making the sign of the cross over the walls.”

Sasha seemed cheerful, but he coughed continually and spoke in an oddly broken voice. Nadya was watching him closely, unable to make up her mind whether he was seriously ill or whether she was just imagining it.

“Dear Sasha,” she said. “How ill you are!”

“Nonsense. Maybe I’m not well, but I’m all right!”

“Dear God!” Nadya exclaimed, suddenly overwhelmed. “You ought to see a doctor. Why don’t you take care of yourself? Oh, dear darling Sasha,” she said as tears rushed to her eyes, and for some reason she thought of Andrey Andreyich and the naked lady with the vase and the whole of her past life, which seemed as distant as childhood, and she began to cry because Sasha no longer seemed so original, so intelligent, and so interesting as the year before. “Sasha dear, you are very, very ill. I don’t know what I wouldn’t do to keep you from being thin and pale. I owe you so much! Dear kind Sasha, you can’t imagine how much you have done for me! Your are really the closest and dearest person in my whole life!”

They sat there and went on talking. After her winter in St. Petersburg she found his words, his smile, the man himself and everything about him, curiously old-fashioned and out of date, as though the time of maturity had passed long ago, and perhaps he was already in his grave.

“I’m going down the Volga the day after tomorrow,” Sasha said. “That way I can drink some koumiss. I’m going to try
koumiss seriously. A friend of mine and his wife are coming with me. His wife is wonderful. I’ve been trying to make her study. I think she ought to revolutionize herself.”

When they had talked themselves to a standstill, Sasha drove her to the station. He treated her to tea and bought her apples, and when the train began to move out he smiled and waved his handkerchief, but even his thin legs showed that he was very ill and not long for this world.

Nadya arrived at her native town at midday. As she drove home from the station, the streets seemed unusually wide, but the houses looked curiously squat and very small. There were no people about, and the only person she met was the German piano tuner with the rust-colored coat. All the houses seemed covered in dust. Her grandmother, who looked very old, and as fat and ugly as ever, threw her arms round Nadya and wept interminably, with her face against Nadya’s shoulder, and she was completely unable to tear herself away. Nina Ivanovna looked much older and plainer; she seemed shrunken and as strait-laced as ever; and the diamonds glittered on her fingers.

“My dearest,” she said, trembling all over. “My darling …”

Then they sat down and wept silently together. It was evident that both the mother and the grandmother realized that the past would never return, was irrevocably lost: their social position, their prestige in the community, their right to invite guests to stay with them, all this had gone. So it happens sometimes that the police burst into a house at night, one of those houses accustomed to an easy, leisurely existence, and the master of the house is discovered to be a forger and an embezzler, and then farewell forever to the easy, leisurely existence!

Nadya went upstairs and saw the familiar bed, the familiar windows and simple white curtains, and from the windows there could be seen the familiar view of the garden, brilliant with sunshine, gay and clamorous with birdsong. She ran her fingers over the table, sat down, and fell to thinking. She had enjoyed a good dinner, and the tea was served with delicious thick cream,
but something was missing. She was aware of the emptiness of the room, and the ceilings were very low. In the evening when she went to bed, covering herself with the bedclothes, it somehow seemed absurd to be lying in that warm, very soft bed.

Nina Ivanovna came in for a moment and sat down, as people do when they feel guilty. She was timid and kept glancing round her.

“Tell me, Nadya, how is everything?” she asked after a moment’s silence. “Are you contented? Quite contented?”

“Yes, Mama.”

Nina Ivanovna rose and made the sign of the cross over Nadya and over the window.

“As you see, I have grown deeply religious,” she said. “You know, I am studying philosophy now, and I am always thinking, thinking.… And many things are clear as daylight now. It seems to me now that what is necessary above all is that life should pass as it were through a prism.”

“Mama, tell me, how is Grandmother?”

“Oh, she’s all right. When you went away with Sasha, and then when your telegram came, your grandmother read it and fell to the ground, and for three days she lay in bed without moving. After that she was always praying and weeping. But now it’s over.”

She got up and walked around the room.

“Tick-tock …” came the tapping of the night watchman. “Tick-tock, tick-tock …”

“What is necessary above all is that life should as it were pass through a prism,” she said. “In other words, what is necessary is that our life in consciousness should be analyzed into its simplest elements, as though into the seven primary colors, and each element must be studied separately.”

What else Nina Ivanovna said, and when she went away, Nadya did not know, for she soon fell asleep.

May passed, and June came. Nadya had grown accustomed to being at home. Grandmother fussed over the samovar, and gave
deep sighs, while Nina Ivanovna spent her evenings talking about philosophy; she still lived in the house like a poor cousin, and she had to ask Grandmother for every twenty-kopeck piece. There were heaps of flies in the house, and the ceilings seemed to be falling lower and lower. For fear of meeting Father Andrey and Andrey Andreyich, Granny and Nina Ivanovna never went out into the streets. Nadya wandered through the garden and strolled down the streets, gazing at the houses and the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the town had been growing old for a long time, and the town itself had outlived its day and was now waiting either for the end or for the beginning of something fresh and young. Oh, if only this new pure life would come more quickly, a life where one could look one’s fate in the eyes boldly and straightforwardly, sure of being right, joyful and free! Sooner or later this life would come! The time would come when there would be nothing left of her grandmother’s house, that house where everything was so arranged that the four servants could only live in the basement in a single filthy room—the time would come when no trace of the house would remain, when it would be forgotten and no one would remember it. Nadya’s only distraction came from the little boys next door: when she wandered in the garden, they banged on the fence and shouted with glee: “The bride! The bride!”

A letter from Sasha arrived from Saratov. In his happy, dancing handwriting he wrote that the journey down the Volga was a complete success, but he had fallen rather ill in Saratov, and had lost his voice and was spending these last two weeks in the hospital. She knew what this meant, and she was overwhelmed with a foreboding which amounted to a complete certainty. It hurt her that her foreboding and her thoughts about Sasha did not distress her, as once they would have done. She passionately wanted to live and she longed to be in St. Petersburg, and her friendship with Sasha, although still sweet, seemed to belong to a far-distant past. She could not sleep all night, and in the morning she
sat by the window, listening. And she did hear voices coming from downstairs: her grandmother was asking questions in rapid, querulous tones, and someone was weeping.… When Nadya went down, her grandmother was standing in a corner of the room praying, and her face was wet with tears. On the table lay a telegram.