Stories (47 page)

She looked at him with fear, with entreaty, with love, looked at him intently, the better to keep his features in her memory.

“I’ve been suffering so!” she went on, not listening to him. “I think only of you all the time, I’ve lived by my thoughts of you. And I’ve tried to forget, to forget, but why, why did you come?”

Further up, on the landing, two high-school boys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov did not care, he drew Anna Sergeevna to him and began kissing her face, her cheeks, her hands.

“What are you doing, what are you doing!” she repeated in horror, pushing him away from her. “We’ve both lost our minds. Le
ave today, leave at once … I adjure you by all that’s holy, I implore you … Somebody’s coming!”

Someone was climbing the stairs.

“You must leave …” Anna Sergeevna went on in a whisper. “Do you hear, Dmitri Dmitrich? I’ll come to you in Moscow. I’ve never been happy, I’m unhappy now, and I’ll never, never be happy, never! Don’t make me suffer still more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But we must part now! My dear one, my good one, my darling, we must part!”

She pressed his hand and quickly began going downstairs, turning back to look at him, and it was clear from her eyes that she was indeed not happy … Gurov stood for a little while, listened, then, when everything was quiet, found his coat and left the theater.

And Anna Sergeevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once every two or three months she left S., and told her husband she was going to consult a professor about her female disorder—and her husband did and did not believe her. Arriving in Moscow, she stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar
³
and at once sent a man in a red hat to Gurov. Gurov came to see her, and nobody in Moscow knew of it.

Once he was going to see her in that way on a winter morning (the messenger had come the previous evening but had not found him in). With him was his daughter, whom he wanted to see off to school, which was on the way. Big, wet snow was falling.

“It’s now three degrees above freezing, and yet it’s snowing,” Gurov said to his daughter. “But it’s warm only near the surface of the earth, while in the upper layers of the atmosphere the temperature is quite different.”

“And why is there no thunder in winter, papa?”

He explained that, too. He spoke and thought that here he was going to a rendezvous, and not a single soul knew of it or probably would ever know. He had two lives: an apparent one, seen and known by all who needed it, filled with conventional truth and conventional deceit, which perfectly resembled the lives of his acquaintances and friends, and another that went on in secret. And by some strange coincidence, perhaps an accidental one, everything that he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, which constituted the core of his
life, occurred in secret from others, while everything that made up his lie, his shell, in which he hid in order to conceal the truth— for instance, his work at the bank, his arguments at the club, his “inferior race,” his attending official celebrations with his wife—all this was in full view. And he judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always supposed that every man led his own real and very interesting life under the cover of secrecy, as under the cover of night. Every personal existence was upheld by a secret, and it was perhaps partly for that reason that every cultivated man t
ook such anxious care that his personal secret should be respected.

After taking his daughter to school, Gurov went to the Slavyansky Bazaar. He took his fur coat off downstairs, went up,
and knocked softly at the door. Anna Sergeevna, wearing his favorite gray dress, tired from the trip and the expectation, had been waiting for him since the previous evening; she was pale, looked at him and did not smile, and he had barely come in when she was already leaning on his chest. Their kiss was long, lingering, as if they had not seen each other for two years.

“Well, how is your life there?” he asked. “What’s new?”

“Wait, I’ll tell you … I can’t.”

She could not speak because she was crying. She turned away from him and pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.

“Well, let her cry a little, and meanwhile I’ll sit down,” he thought, and sat down in an armchair.

Then he rang and ordered tea; and then, while he drank tea, she went on standing with her face turned to the window… She was crying from anxiety, from a sorrowful awareness that their life had turned out so sadly; they only saw each other in secret, they hid from people like thieves! Was their life not broken?

“Well, stop now,” he said.

For him it was obvious that this love of theirs would not end soon, that there was no knowing when. Anna Sergeevna’s attachment to him grew ever stronger, she adored him, and it would have been unthinkable to tell her that it all really had to end at some point; and she would not have believed it.

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to caress her, to make a joke, and at that moment he saw himself in the mirror.

His head was beginning to turn gray. And it seemed strange to him that he had aged so much in those last years, had lost so much of his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembled. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably already near the point where it would begin to fade and wither, like his own life. Why did she love him so? Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when
they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met women, became intimate, parted, but not once did he love; there was anything else, but not love.

And only now, when his head was gray, had he really fallen in love as one ought to—for the first time in his life.

He and Anna Sergeevna loved each other like very close, dear people, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as if they were two birds of passage, a male and a female, who had been caught and forced to live in separate cages. They had forgiven each other the things they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.

Formerly, in sad moments, he had calmed himself with all sorts of arguments, whatever had come into his head, but now he did not care about any arguments, he felt deep compassion, he wanted to be sincere, tender …

“Stop, my good one,” he said, “you’ve had your cry—and enough … Let’s talk now, we’ll think up something.”

Then they had a long discussion, talked about how to rid themselves of the need for hiding, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long periods. How could they free themselves from these unbearable bonds?

“How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.

D
ECEMBER
1899

W
hat’ll I write?” asked Yegor, and he dipped the pen.

Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years now. After the wedding, her daughter Yefimia had left for Petersburg with her husband, had sent two letters, and then seemed to have dropped from sight: not a sound, not a breath. And whether the old woman was milking the cow at dawn, or lighting the stove, or dozing at night, she kept thinking of one thing: how was Yefimia, was she alive? She would have liked to write a letter, but the old man did not know how to write, and there was nobody to ask.

But now Christmastime had come, and Vasilisa could not help herself and went to Yegor, the tavernkeeper’s brother, who, once he came home from the army, just stayed around the tavern all the time and did nothing; they said he was good at writing letters, if you paid him properly. Vasilisa spoke with the cook in the tavern, then with the tavernkeeper, then with Yegor himself. They agreed on fifteen kopecks.

And now—this was in the tavern, in the kitchen, the day after the feast—Yegor was sitting at the table and holding the pen in his hand. Vasilisa stood before him, deep in thought, with an expression of care and grief on her face. Her old man, Pyotr, very thin, tall, with a tanned bald spot, had come with her; he stood and gazed fixedly ahead of him, like a blind man. Pork was being fried
in a pan on the stove; it hissed and spat and even seemed to say “flu-flu-flu.” It was stuffy.

“What’ll I write?” Yegor asked again.

“Wait!” said Vasilisa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously. “Don’t rush me! You’re not writing for free, you’re getting money for it! Well, so write. To our gentle son-in-law, Andrei Khrisanfych, and our beloved only daughter, Yefimia Petrovna, we send with our love a low bow and our parental blessing forever inviolable.”

“Got it. Keep shooting.”

“And we also wish you a happy feast of the Nativity of Christ, we are alive and well and wish you the same from the Lord … the Heavenly King.”

Vasilisa pondered and exchanged glances with the old man.

“And wish you the same from the Lord… the Heavenly King …” she repeated and began to cry.

She could not say anything more. And before, when she used to lie thinking at night, it had seemed to her that even ten letters would not have held everything. Since her daughter had left with her husband much water had flowed under the bridge, the old people had lived like orphans and sighed deeply at night, as if they had buried their daughter. And so many things had happened in the village during that time, so many weddings, so many deaths. Such long winters! Such long nights!

“It’s hot!” said Yegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “Must be a hundred degrees. What else?” he asked.

The old people were silent.

“What does your son-in-law do?” asked Yegor.

“He used to be a soldier, my dear, you know that,” the old man answered in a weak voice. “He came home from the army the same time you did. He was a soldier, and so now he’s in Petersburg, in s
ome water-curing institution. The doctor treats his patients with water. So he’s doorkeeper at the doctor’s.”

“It’s written here …” the old woman said, taking a letter out of her handkerchief. “We got it from Yefimia, God knows how long ago. Maybe they’re no longer in this world.”

Yegor thought a little and began writing quickly.

“In this present time,” he wrote, “since your fate has destinned you out for a Military Cureer, we advise You to open the Code of Disciplinery Measures and the Criminal Laws of the Department
of War and You will perceive in the said Law the civilizaytion of the Ranks of the Department of War.”

He was writing and reading aloud what he had written, and Vasilisa reflected that they ought to write about the want of the past year, when they had not had grain enough to last even till Christmastime, and they had been forced to sell the cow. They ought to ask for some money, to write and say that the old man was often sick and probably would soon give up his soul to God … But how to put it into words? What to say first and what after?

“Pay atention,” Yegor went on writing, “to Volume 5 of the Military Decrees. Soldier is a commun noun, a Well-nown one. The Soldier is called the Farmost General and the leest Private …”

The old man moved his lips and said quietly:

“It wouldn’t be a bad thing to see the grandchildren.”

“What grandchildren?” asked the old woman, and she gave him an angry look. “Maybe there aren’t any!”

“No grandchildren? And maybe there are. Who knows!” “And thereby You can judge,” Yegor was rushing along, “who is the Forin enemy and who is the Inturnal one. Our Farmost Inturnal Enemy is: Bacchus.”

The pen scratched away, making flourishes that looked like fish hooks on the paper. Yegor hurried and re-read every line several times. He was sitting on a stool, his legs spread wide under the table, well-fed, stalwart, beefy-faced, ruddy-necked. This was vulgarity itself, crude, arrogant, invincible, proud of having been born and raised in a tavern, and Vasilisa understood very well that this was vulgarity, but she could not put it into words, and only glared angrily and suspiciously at Yegor. His voice, his incomprehensible words, the heat and stuffiness gave her a headache, con
fused her thoughts, and she did not say or think anything more, but only waited until he finished his scratching. But the old man looked on with complete trust. He trusted both in the old woman who had brought him there and in Yegor; and earlier, when he had mentioned the water-curing institution, his face had shown clearly that he trusted both in the institution and in the curative power of water.

When he finished writing, Yegor stood up and read out the whole letter from the beginning. The old man did not understand it, but he nodded his head trustfully.

“Nice job, smooth …” he said. “God bless you. Nice job …”

They put three five-kopeck pieces on the table and left the tavern; the old man looked straight ahead of him fixedly, like a blind man, and complete trust was written on his face, but Vasilisa shook her fist at the dog as they left the tavern, and said angrily:

“Ugh, you pest!”

The old woman did not sleep all night, troubled by thoughts, but she got up at dawn, said her prayers, and went to the station to mail the letter.

The station was seven miles away.

The water-curing clinic of Dr. B. O. Moselweiser was open on New Year’s Day, just as on ordinary days, only the doorkeeper Andrei Khrisanfych was wearing a uniform with new galloons, his boots shone somehow specially, and he wished everyone who came in a Happy New Year.

It was morning. Andrei Khrisanfych stood by the door and read a newspaper. At exactly ten o’clock a general came in, a familiar figure, one of the regular clients, and after him the postman. Andrei Khrisanfych helped the general out of his overcoat and said:

“Happy New Year, Your Excellency!”

“Thank you, my good man. And the same to you.”

And, going up the stairs, the general nodded towards a door and asked (he asked every day and then forgot each time):

“What’s in this room?”

“That is the massage room, Your Excellency!”

When the general’s steps died away, Andrei Khrisanfych looked through the mail and found a letter addressed to him. He opened it, read a few lines, then, while looking into his newspaper, went unhurriedly to his room, which was right there, downstairs, at the end of the corridor. His wife Yefimia was sitting on the bed nursing a baby; another child, the eldest, stood beside her, resting his curly head on her lap, and the third was asleep on the bed.

Going into his little room, Andrei handed the letter to his wife and said:

“Must be from the village.”

Then he went out, without taking his eyes off the newspaper,
and stopped in the corridor not far from his door. He could hear Yefimia reading the first lines in a trembling voice. She read and could not go on; those lines were enough for her, she dissolved in tears and, embracing her eldest boy and kissing him, began to talk, and it was impossible to tell whether she was crying or laughing.

“It’s from grandma and grandpa …” she said. “From the village … Queen of Heaven, saints above. There’s snow there now, up to the roofs … the trees are all white. Children on tiny sleds … And dear, bald-headed grandpa on the stove … and the little yellow d
og … My dear darlings!”

Andrei Khrisanfych, listening to that, remembered that his wife had given him letters three or four times, asking him to send them to the village, but some important business had prevented him: he had not sent the letters and they had gotten lost somewhere.

“There are little hares running in the field,” Yefimia went on chanting, bathed in tears, kissing her boy. “Grandpa is quiet, kind, grandma is kind, too, pitiful. It’s a soulful life in the village, a god-fearing life … And there’s a church there, the peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven, our mother and helper, take us away from here!”

Andrei Khrisanfych went back to his little room to smoke until someone came, and Yefimia suddenly fell silent, quieted down, and wiped her eyes, and only her lips quivered. She was very afraid of him, oh, how afraid! She trembled, she was terrified by his step, his glance; she did not dare say a single word in his presence.

Andrei Khrisanfych lit a cigarette, but just then there came a ring from upstairs. He put the cigarette out and, making a very serious face, ran to his front door.

The general was coming down, pink and fresh after his bath.

“And what’s in this room?” he asked, pointing to a door.

Andrei Khrisanfych drew himself to attention and said loudly:

“Charcot showers,
¹
Your Excellency!”

J
ANUARY
1900