Stories (21 page)

“Today is Thursday, which means the steamer will be coming at nine-thirty”

“Ah, yes, yes … Well, go then …” Ryabovsky said gently, wiping his mouth with a towel instead of a napkin. “You’re bored here and have nothing to do, and one would have to be a great egoist to keep you here. Go, and we’ll see each other after the twentieth.”

Olga Ivanovna packed cheerfully, and her cheeks even burned with pleasure. Could it be true, she asked herself, that she would soon sit painting in a living room, and sleep in a bedroom, and dine on a tablecloth? Her heart felt relieved, and she was no longer angry with the artist.

“I’ll leave the paints and brushes for you, Ryabusha,” she said. “Bring back whatever’s left … See that you don’t get lazy here
without me, or splenetic, but work. I think you’re a fine fellow, Ryabusha.”

At nine o’clock Ryabovsky kissed her good-bye, to avoid, as she thought, having to kiss her on the steamer, in front of the artists, and brought her to the wharf The steamer soon came and took her away

She arrived home two and a half days later. Not taking off her hat and waterproof, breathless with excitement, she went to the drawing room and from there to the dining room. Dymov, in his shirtsleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, was sitting at the table and sharpening his knife on his fork; on a plate in front of him lay a grouse. As Olga Ivanovna was entering the apartment, she felt convinced that it was necessary to hide everything from her husband, and that she would have skill and strength enough to do it, but now, when she saw his broad, meek, happy smile and his shining, joyf
ul eyes, she felt that to hide anything from this man was as base, as loathsome, and as impossible and beyond her strength, as to slander, steal, or kill, and she instantly resolved to tell him all that had happened. After letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank to her knees before him and covered her face.

“What? What is it, mama?” he asked tenderly. “You missed me?”

She raised her face, red with shame, and looked at him guiltily and imploringly, but fear and shame prevented her from telling the truth.

“Never mind …” she said. “I’m just so …”

“Let’s sit down,” he said, raising her up and sitting her at the table. “There … Have some grouse. You must be hungry, poor little thing.”

She greedily breathed in the air of her home and ate the grouse, and he gazed at her lovingly and laughed with joy.

Apparently, by the middle of winter Dymov began to suspect that he was being deceived. As if his own conscience were not clean, he could no longer look his wife straight in the eye, did not smile joyfully when he met her, and, to avoid being alone with her, often brought to dinner his friend Korostelev, a crop-headed little man
with a crumpled face, who, as he spoke with Olga Ivanovna, in his embarrassment would undo all the buttons of his jacket and button them up again, and then would start twisting his left mustache with his right hand. Over dinner the two doctors spoke of the irregular heartbeat that sometimes occurs if the diaphragm is positioned high, or of how multiple neuritis had become more prevalent lately, or how the day before, having dissected a corpse diagnosed as having “malignant anemia,” Dymov had found cancer of the pancreas. And it looked as if the two men conducted a medical conversation only
so that Olga Ivanovna could keep silent—that is, not lie. After dinner Korostelev sat down at the piano, and Dymov sighed and said to him:

“Eh, brother! Well, now! Play us something sad.”

Hunching his shoulders and spreading his fingers wide, Korostelev played a few chords and began singing “Show me such a haven where the Russian muzhik does not groan”
⁴
in a tenor voice, and Dymov sighed again, propped his head on his fist, and fell to thinking.

Lately Olga Ivanovna had been behaving very imprudently. She woke up every morning in a bad mood and with the thought that she no longer loved Ryabovsky, and thank God it was all over. But after coffee she would realize that Ryabovsky had taken her husband from her, and that she now had neither husband nor Ryabovsky; then she would recall what her acquaintances had said about Ryabovsky preparing something astounding for the exhibition, a mixture of landscape and genre painting in the style of Polenov,
⁵
over which everyone who visited his studi
o was in ecstasies; but this, she thought, he had created under her influence, and generally, thanks to her influence, he had changed greatly for the better. Her influence was so beneficial and essential that, if she were to leave him, he might even perish. And she also recalled that he had come to her last time in some gray little frock coat with flecks and a new tie, and had asked languidly: “Am I handsome?” And, graceful, with his long hair and blue eyes, he was indeed very handsome (or perhaps only seemed so), and he was tender with her.

Having recalled and realized many things, Olga Ivanovna would get dressed and, in great agitation, go to see Ryabovsky in his studio. She would find him cheerful and delighted with his indeed magnificent painting; he would clown, hop about, and answer
serious questions with jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the painting and hated it, but out of politeness she would stand silently before it for some five minutes and, sighing as one sighs before some sacred thing, say softly:

“Yes, you’ve never yet painted anything like that. You know, it’s even frightening.”

Then she would begin imploring him to love her, not to abandon her, to have pity on her, poor and unhappy as she was. She would weep, kiss his hands, demand that he swear his love for her, insist that without her good influence he would go astray and perish. And, having ruined his good spirits and feeling humiliated herself, she would go to her dressmaker or to some actress acquaintance to obtain a ticket.

If she did not find him in his studio, she would leave a note for him, in which she swore that if he did not come to her that day, she would certainly poison herself. He would get alarmed, come to her, and stay for dinner. Unembarrassed by her husband’s presence, he would say impertinent things to her, and she would respond in kind. They both felt that they were hampering each other, that they were despots and enemies, and they were angr
y. And in their anger, they did not notice that they were being indecent, and that even crop-headed Korostelev understood everything. After dinner, Ryabovsky would hurriedly say good-bye and leave.

“Where are you going?” Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the front hall, looking at him with hatred.

Wincing and narrowing his eyes, he would name some lady of their acquaintance, and it was clear that he was making fun of her jealousy and wanted to vex her. She would go to her bedroom and lie down on the bed; from jealousy, vexation, a feeling of humiliation and shame, she would bite her pillow and begin crying loudly. Dymov would leave Korostelev in the drawing room, come to the bedroom, and, embarrassed and perplexed, say softly:

“Don’t cry so loudly, mama … Why? You must keep it quiet … You mustn’t show … You know you can’t mend what’s happened.”

Not knowing how to suppress her painful jealousy, which even made her temples ache, and thinking that things could still be put right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face, and fly to the lady acquaintance. Not finding Ryabovsky there, she would go to another, then a third … In the beginning she was ashamed of going
around like that, but then she got used to it, and it would happen that in one evening she would visit all the ladies of her acquaintance, searching for Ryabovsky, and they all understood it.

She had once said of her husband to Ryabovsky:

“The man crushes me with his magnanimity!”

She liked the phrase so much that, whenever she met artists who knew about her affair with Ryabovsky, she would say of her husband, with an energetic gesture of the hand:

“The man crushes me with his magnanimity!”

The order of life was the same as the year before. There were soirées on Wednesdays. The actor recited, the artists painted, the cellist played, the singer sang, and at half-past eleven, unfailingly, the door to the dining room would open, and Dymov, smiling, would say:

“A bite to eat, gentlemen.”

As before, Olga Ivanovna sought great people, found them and was unsatisfied, and sought again. As before, she returned home late every night, but Dymov would not be asleep, as last year, but sitting in his study and working on something. He would go to bed at around three and get up at eight.

One evening, as she was standing in front of the pier glass getting ready for the theater, Dymov came into the bedroom in a tailcoat and white tie. He was smiling meekly and, as before, looked joyfully straight into his wife’s eyes. His face was beaming.

“I’ve just defended my thesis,” he said, sitting down and patting his knees.

“Successfully?” asked Olga Ivanovna.

“Uh-huh!” he laughed and craned his neck so as to see his wife’s face in the mirror, as she went on standing with her back to him, straightening her hair. “Uh-huh!” he repeated. “You know, it’s very likely I’ll be offered a post as assistant professor of general pathology. It’s in the air.”

It was clear from his blissfully beaming face that, if Olga Ivanovna could share his joy and triumph with him, he would forgive her anything, both present and future, and forget everything, but she did not understand what an assistant professor of general pathology was, and besides she was afraid to be late to the theater, and so she said nothing.

He sat for a couple of minutes, smiled guiltily, and left.

This was a most troublesome day.

Dymov had a bad headache. He did not have tea in the morning, did not go to the hospital, and spent the whole time lying on the Turkish divan in his study. After twelve, as usual, Olga Ivanovna went to Ryabovsky to show him her study for a
nature morte
and ask him why he had not come the day before. The study was nothing to her, and she had painted it only so as to have a further pretext for calling on the artist.

She went in without ringing the bell, and as she was removing her galoshes in the front hall, she seemed to hear something run softly across the studio, a rustling as of a woman’s dress, and when she hastened to peek into the studio, she saw just a bit of brown skirt flash for a moment and disappear behind a big painting which, together with its easel, was covered to the floor with black cloth. There was no possible doubt, it was a woman hiding. How often Olga Ivanovna herself had taken refuge behind that painting! Ryabovsky, obviously quite embarrassed, seemed surprised by her visit, gave her bo
th hands, and said with a forced smile:

“A-a-ah! Very glad to see you. What’s the good news?”

Olga Ivanovna’s eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed, bitter, and not for any amount would she have consented to speak in the presence of a strange woman, a rival, a liar, who was now standing behind the painting, probably tittering gleefully.

“I’ve brought you a study …” she said timidly, in a thin little voice, and her lips trembled, “a
nature morte
.”

“A-a-ah … a study?”

The artist took the study and, as he examined it, went as if mechanically into the other room.

Olga Ivanovna obediently followed him.

“Nature morte…
best sort,” he muttered, choosing a rhyme, “resort… port… wart…”

Hurried footsteps were heard in the studio and the rustle of a dress. It meant
she
had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to shout loudly, hit the artist on the head with something heavy, and leave, but she could see nothing through her tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt herself no longer an Olga Ivanovna, nor an artist, but a little bug.

“I’m tired …” the artist said languidly, looking at the study and shaking his head to overcome his drowsiness. “It’s sweet, of course, but it’s a study today, and a study last year, and in a month another study … Aren’t you bored? If I were you, I’d drop painting and take up something seriously, music or whatever. You’re not an artist, you’re a musician. Anyhow, I’m so tired! I’ll have tea served … Eh?”

He left the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some order to his servant. So as not to say good-bye, not to explain, and, above all, not to burst into tears, she quickly ran to the front hall before Ryabovsky came back, put on her galoshes, and went outside. There she breathed easily and felt herself free forever from Ryabovsky, and from painting, and from the heavy shame that had so oppressed her in the studio. It was all finished!

She went to her dressmaker, then to the actor Barnay,
⁶
who had arrived the day before, from Barnay to a music shop, thinking all the while of how she was going to write Ryabovsky a cold, stern letter, filled with dignity, and how in the spring or summer she and Dymov would go to the Crimea, there definitively free themselves of the past, and start a new life.

She returned home late in the evening and, without changing her clothes, sat down in the drawing room to
write the letter. Ryabovsky had told her that she was not an artist, and she, in revenge, would write to him that he painted the same thing every year and said the same thing every day, that he was stuck, and nothing would come from him except what had already come. She also wanted to write that he owed a lot to her good influence, and if he acted badly, it was only because her influence was paralyzed by various ambiguous persons, like the one who had been hiding behind the painting that day.

“Mama!” Dymov called from the study, without opening the door. “Mama!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Mama, don’t come in, just come to the door. The thing is … Two days ago I caught diphtheria in the hospital, and now … I’m not well. Send for Korostelev quickly.”

Olga Ivanovna had always called her husband, as she did all the men she knew, not by his first but by his last name. She did not like his first name, Osip, because it reminded her of Gogol’s Osip
⁷
and of the tongue twister: “Osip’s hoarse, his horse has pip.” But now she cried out:

“Osip, it can’t be!”

“Send quickly! I’m not well …” Dymov said behind the door, and she heard him go to the divan and lie down. “Send quickly!” came his muted voice.