The Duel (11 page)

Friday
 … 
Friday
 …, he thought.
Friday
 …

They had written notes, folded them in half and placed them in Nikodim Aleksandrich’s old top hat, and, when enough notes had accumulated, Kostya, imitating a postman, walked around the table distributing them. The deacon, Katya and Kostya had all received funny notes, and, in attempting to make their replies even funnier, were all in an uproar.

“We need to talk,” Nadezhda Fyodorovna read from her note. She exchanged glances with Maria Konstantinovna, who smiled back all almond-infused and nodded her head in acknowledgment.

What is there to talk about?
Nadezhda Fyodorovna thought.
If you can’t divulge everything, then there’s no point in talking
.

Before they had set off to call on their friends, she had knotted Laevsky’s tie, and this meaningless act had filled her soul with tenderness and sorrow. The anxiety on his face, the distracted looks, paleness and the incomprehensible changeover, the incidents surrounding them in the recent past, and that she was keeping a frightful, disgusting secret from him, and that her hands shook as she knotted his tie—for some reason all this told her that there was little time remaining of their living together. She stared at him as she would at an icon, with fear and repentance, and thought:
Forgive
 … 
forgive
 … Achmianov sat across the table from her and could not tear his black
lovestruck eyes away from her; she was aroused by desires, she was ashamed of herself and feared that even melancholy and woe would not hinder her yielding to tainted passion, neither today, nor tomorrow—and that she, like a compulsive drunk, did not have the power to stop.

So as to no longer continue living this life, one that was shameful to her and insulting to Laevsky, she had decided to go away. She would tearfully beg him to release her, and if he should be against it, then she would leave him secretly. She would not tell him what had transpired. Let the memories that he had left of her be pure.

“I love, I love, I love …” she read. This was from Achmianov.

She would live in some out-of-the-way place, work and send Laevsky money from “Anonymous,” and embroidered shirts and tobacco also, and would return to him in old age and, incidentally, if he should fall seriously ill and require a sick-nurse. When in old age he recognized the reason she had refused to be his wife and left him, he would come to value her sacrifice and forgive her.

“You have a long nose.” This should be from either the deacon or Kostya.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna fancied how, in bidding farewell to Laevsky, she would embrace him tightly, kiss his hand and swear that she would love him her whole, whole life, and then, living in some out-of-the-way place, among strangers, she would think every day of how somewhere she had a friend, a beloved man, pure, benevolent and sublime, who harbored pure memories of her.

“If you do not grant me a rendezvous today, then I will take measures, I give you my honest word. You cannot treat decent people in such a manner, you must understand that.” This was from Kirilin.

Laevsky received two notes; he unfolded one and read: “Don’t go, my good man.”

Who could have written that?
he thought.
Certainly not Samoylenko
 … 
And not the deacon, seeing as he doesn’t know I want to leave. Could it be Von Koren, then?

The zoologist sat hunched over the table drawing a pyramid. It seemed to Laevsky that his eyes were smiling.

Doubtless, Samoylenko has blabbed
 …, Laevsky thought.

On the other note, in that same kinked penmanship with long tails and flourishes, was written:

“Someone’s not leaving on Saturday.”

A foolish mockery
, Laevsky thought.
Friday, Friday
 …

Something caught in his throat. He touched his collar and coughed, but instead of a cough, a laugh escaped.

“Ha—ha—ha!” he burst out laughing. “Ha—ha—ha!”
What am I doing?
he thought. “Ha—ha—ha!”

He tried to contain himself, covering his mouth with his hand, but the laughter pressed against his chest and neck, and his hand couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Really, how foolish this is!
he thought, roaring with laughter.
Have I lost my mind, is that it?

The laughter rose higher and higher and turned into something resembling the yapping of a lapdog. Laevsky wanted to rise from the table but his legs would not respond, and for some strange reason his right hand bounced around the table out of his control, fitfully snatching at pieces of paper and crumbling them. He saw the astonished looks, Samoylenko’s serious startled face and the zoologist’s glare, filled with cold mockery and revulsion, and he understood that he was in a state of hysteria.

What a scandal, what shame
, he thought, feeling the warmth of tears on his face … 
Oh, oh, what a disgrace! This has never happened to me before
 …

Now they bore him by the arms and, supporting his head, led him away somewhere; now a glass flashed before his eyes and knocked against his teeth, and water spilled over his chest; now a small room, two beds close together in the middle, covered with clean blankets as white as snow. He fell onto one of the beds and burst out sobbing.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing …” Samoylenko said. “It happens … It happens …”

Chilled by fear, her entire body shaking and sensing something terrible, Nadezhda Fyodorovna stood beside the bed and asked:

“What’s wrong with you? What? For God’s sake, speak …”

Could Kirilin have written something to him?
she thought.

“It’s nothing …” Laevsky said, laughing and crying. “Leave here … my dove.”

His face expressed neither hatred nor disgust: which meant he knew nothing. Nadezhda Fyodorovna calmed down a bit and returned to the drawing room.

“Don’t worry, darling!” Maria Konstantinovna said to her, sitting down beside her and taking her by the hand. “This shall pass. Men are just as weak as we are sinful. It’s understood … that right now you both are going through a crisis! Well, darling, I expect an answer. Let’s go have a talk.”

“No, we will not talk …” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, heeding Laevsky’s sobs. “I’ve melancholy … Please, allow me to leave.”

“What’s this? What’s this, darling?” Maria Konstantinovna distressed. “Did you really think that I would let you go without supper? Have a bite, then go with the lord.”

“I’ve melancholy …” whispered Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and, so as not to fall, gripped the armrests of the armchair in both hands.

“He’s having convulsions!” said Von Koren cheerfully, entering the drawing room, but upon seeing Nadezhda Fyodorovna grew embarrassed and left the room.

When the hysterics had finished, Laevsky sat on the stranger’s bed and thought:

What a disgrace, I bawled, like a girl! Most assuredly, I’m a laughingstock and abominable. I’ll have to exit through a pitch-black passage. However, that would mean, that I am attributing serious meaning to my hysterics. It would follow, that I should play it off as a joke
 …

He looked himself over in the mirror, sat for a bit and walked into the drawing room.

“Well, here I am!” he said, smiling; he was tortuously embarrassed, and he sensed that others were embarrassed by his very presence. “These things do happen,” he said, taking a seat. “I was just sitting here, and suddenly, wouldn’t you know, I felt a frightful stitch in my side … unbearable, my nerves could not withstand it and … and this foolish thing came out. Our nerve-racking era, there’s not a thing to do about it!”

He drank wine with his supper, conversed and, on occasion, would jerkily gasp, gently stroking his side, as though demonstrating that the pain was still felt. And there was no one, except Nadezhda Fyodorovna, who believed him, and he saw this.

In the tenth hour they went for a walk along the boulevard. Nadezhda Fyodorovna, fearing that Kirilin would try to strike up a conversation with her, tried to stay close to Maria Konstantinovna and the children the whole time. She had been weakened by fear and melancholy, and, with the presentiment of fever, languished and was barely able to move her legs, but she would not go home, such that she was certain she would be followed either by Kirilin or Achmianov, or both. Kirilin walked behind, alongside Nikodim Aleksandrich, and hummed in a low voice:

“I won’t allo-ow myself to be to-oyed with! I won’t allow it!”

They turned off the boulevard toward the pavilion and walked along the embankment, and for a long time looked out at the phosphorescence of the sea. Von Koren began explaining what makes it phosphorescent.

“Nonetheless, it’s time for me to play Vint … They’re expecting me,” Laevsky said. “Farewell, ladies and gentlemen.”

“And I’m with you, hold on,” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, and took him by the arm.

They bid farewell to the company and were on their way. Kirilin also bid farewell and proceeded alongside them; he was going the same way, he said.

Whatever will be, will be
 …, Nadezhda Fyodorovna thought.
Let it be
 …

It appeared to her that every bad remembrance had left her head and now walked through the darkness beside her and breathed heavily, as if she were a fly that had fallen into ink, crawled along the pavement using all its strength and sullied Laevsky’s side and arm with black. If Kirilin, she thought, did anything stupid, then the blame would lie not with him but with her alone. Indeed, there had been a time when not a single man would have spoken to her in such a manner as Kirilin, and she herself had sheared that time, as you would a thread, and had ruined it irrevocably—who could possibly be to blame here? Inebriated by her own desires, she’d begun smiling at this man who was a total stranger only because, apparently, he was stately and tall in height, then after two rendezvous he had bored her, and she had dumped him, and is this truly the reason—she thought now—that he had the right to behave however he liked with her?

“Here, my dove, is where I say goodbye to you,”
Laevsky said, stopping. “Ilya Mikhailich will see you the rest of the way.”

He bowed to Kirilin and quickly walked across the boulevard, proceeding along the street to the home of Sheshkovsky, where the windows were aglow, and the sound of his clanking the gate followed.

“Allow me to explain myself to you,” Kirilin began, “I’m not a little boy, not some sort of Atchkasov or Latchkasov, Zatchkasov … I demand serious attention!”

Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s heart began to pound. She answered to nothing.

“I initially attributed the severe change in your attitude toward me to coquettishness,” Kirilin continued, “but now I see that you’re simply incapable of relating to decent people. You simply wanted to play with me, as you did with that Armenian boy, but I am a decent person and I demand that I be treated as a decent person. Thus, I am at your service …”

“I’ve melancholy …” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, and began to cry, and turned away to hide her tears.

“I too have melancholy, but what is to be done about it?”

Kirilin was silent for a moment, then spoke precisely, with deliberateness:

“I’ll repeat myself, my good lady, that if you do not grant me a rendezvous today, then this very day I will start a scandal.”

“Release me this day,” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, not recognizing her own voice, as it had become so extremely piteous and thin.

“I must teach you a lesson … Please forgive the vulgar tone, but it is imperative that you be taught a lesson. Yes, milady, unfortunately I must teach you a lesson. I demand two rendezvous: today and tomorrow. The day after tomorrow you are completely free and may go to the four corners of the earth with whomever it is you choose. Today and tomorrow.”

Nadezhda Fyodorovna had reached her own gate and stopped.

“Release me!” she whispered, her whole body shaking and seeing nothing before her in the darkness save for a white service jacket. “You are correct, I am a horrible woman … I am to blame, but release me … I’m asking you …” She reached out for his cold hand and shuddered … “I’m begging you …”

“Alas!” Kirilin drew a long breath. “Alas! It isn’t in my plans to release you, I only want to teach you a lesson, to make you understand, and by the way, madam, I have very little faith in women.”

“I’ve melancholy …”

Nadezhda Fyodorovna listened to the repetitive noise of the sea, looked up at the sky sprinkled with stars, and she had the desire to promptly end everything, and to be rid of the accursed sensation of life by this sea, these stars, these men, this fever …

“Only not in my home …” she said coldly. “Take me somewhere.”

“Let’s go to Muridov’s. That’ll be best.”

“Where is that?”

“By the old seawall.”

She quickly walked along the street and then turned in to the side street that led to the mountains. It was dark. Here and there along the pavement lay pale, luminous stripes from illuminated windows, and it seemed to her that she, like a fly, either found herself immersed in ink or crawled out of it into the light. Kirilin walked behind her. At one point, he stumbled, nearly fell over and burst out laughing.

He’s drunk
 …, thought Nadezhda Fyodorovna.
Either way
 … 
either way
 … 
Let it be
.

Achmianov also excused himself from the gathering in a hurry and followed the trail of Nadezhda Fyodorovna, so that he could invite her to go for a boat ride. Nearing her house, he peered through the small front garden: the windows were wide open, no flame shone.

“Nadezhda Fyodorovna!” he called out.

A minute passed. He called out again.

“Who’s there?” Olga’s voice was heard.

“Is Nadezhda Fyodorovna home?”

“She’s not here. She hasn’t returned yet.”

That’s strange
 … 
Very strange
, Achmianov thought, beginning to feel a powerful unease. “She went home …”

He walked along the boulevard, then along the street and glanced in Sheshkovsky’s windows. Laevsky was sitting at the table without his frock coat and attentively gazed into his cards.