About Love

2 Gooseberries

ince early morning the whole sky had been overcast with rain clouds; it was still, but not warm and dreary like those dull grey days when clouds hang over the fields for such a long time while you wait for rain that doesn’t come. Ivan Ivanych, the veterinarian, and Burkin, the teacher, had grown tired of walking, and the field in front of them appeared endless. Far ahead, scarcely visible, the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe stretched to their right, and then a row of low hills disappeared into the distance beyond the village; they were both familiar with the riverbank, the meadows, yellow willows, farmsteads; if one stood on one of the little hills there was a view of the vast field, the telegraph, and the train, which came forth like a creeping caterpillar and in clear weather was visible all the way to the city. Now in calm weather when all nature seemed gentle and pensive, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were inspired by love of this landscape, and both thought how grand and beautiful the country was.

“Before, when we were in the village elder’s hut,” Burkin said, “you had it in mind to tell some story.”

“Yes, I wanted to tell you about my brother.”

Ivan Ivanych gave a deep sigh and lit his pipe, ready to begin telling his story, but just at that moment the rain came on. And within five minutes a heavy rain was pouring down on all sides, and it was hard to foresee when it might end. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin stood hesitating; the dogs, already soaked, put their tails between their legs and looked toward them pathetically.

“We have to find shelter somewhere,” Burkin said. “Let’s go to Alyokhin’s. It’s close by.”

“Let’s go.”

They turned aside and walked steadily through the mown fields, first straight on, then bearing right until they reached the road. Soon poplars came into sight, an orchard, then the red roofs of the barns; a river shone and the view opened out on a wide pool with a mill and a white bathhouse. This was Sophina, where Alyokhin lived.

The mill was working, drowning out the sound of the rain; the dam trembled. By the wagons stood wet horses, hanging their heads, and people went back and forth, covering themselves with sacks. It was damp, muddy, comfortless, and the pool looked cold and dire. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin experienced a sensation of wetness and dirt, a discomfort through the whole body, feet heavy with mud, and as they crossed the dam to climb toward the manorial barns, they were silent, as if angry with one another.

In one of the barns a winnowing machine was noisily at work; the door was open, and dust poured out. Just at hand stood Alyokhin himself, a man of forty, tall, heavy, with long hair, more like a professor or artist than a landowner. He wore a white but long-unwashed shirt with a rope belt, long johns instead of trousers, and his boots were clotted with mud and straw. His nose and eyes were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanych and Burkin, and it was obvious he was glad to see them.

“To the house, please, gentlemen,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be there right away, this very minute.”

The house was large, with two storeys. Alyokhin lived downstairs in two rooms with vaulted ceilings and small windows, where the farm managers used to live. The furnishings were simple, and it smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He seldom went upstairs to the reception rooms, only when guests arrived. A maid welcomed Burkin and Ivan Ivanych to the house, a young woman so beautiful that they both stopped short and stared at each other.

“You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen,” Alyokhin said as he came into the antechamber behind them. “I certainly didn’t expect you.” He turned to the maid. “Pelageya, offer our guests someplace to change their clothes. Yes, and while you do, I’ll change mine. Only first I must go and wash up; it must look as if I haven’t washed since spring. Come to the bathhouse if you like, by then they’ll have everything here prepared.”

The beautiful Pelageya, so tactful, so pleasing to look at, brought soap and towelling, and Alyokhin went to the bathhouse with his guests.

“Yes it’s been a good while since I washed,” he said, as he undressed. “My bathhouse, as you see, is a fine one, my father built it long since, but somehow it never gets used.”

He sat on the step and soaped his long hair and his neck, and the water around him turned brown.

“Yes, I can see . . . ,” pronounced Ivan Ivanych, glancing meaningfully at his head.

“Haven’t washed for a long time now,” Alyokhin repeated self-consciously, and soaped himself again, and the water around him turned dark blue, almost black.

Ivan Ivanych went outside, plunged into the water with a splash and started swimming along under the rain, stretching his arms wide, and waves spread outward, and the white water-lilies rocked on the waves; he swam out to the very centre of the pool and dived, and after a moment he appeared in another place, and began to swim further, diving over and over, trying to reach the bottom. “Oh my God . . . ,” he repeated delightedly. “Oh my God . . .” He swam over to the mill, and there he talked about something with the men, then turned back and lay in the centre of the pool, turning his face up under the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin, dressed again, were prepared to leave, but he continued to swim and dive.

“Oh my God,” he said, “Lord have mercy.”

“So be it,” Burkin shouted to him.

They returned to the house. And only when they had lit the lamp in the big sitting room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanych, dressed in silk dressing gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs, and Alyokhin himself, washed, his hair brushed, in a new frock coat, had come to the sitting room, visibly pleased at feeling the warmth, clean, dry clothes, comfortable footwear, and after the beautiful Pelageya, her footsteps noiseless on the carpet, had brought a tray of tea and jam, only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story, and it seemed that not only Burkin and Alyokhin were listening to him but also the old and young ladies and the soldiers quietly and severely observing from gold frames.

“We are two brothers,” he began, “myself, Ivan Ivanych, and the other, Nikolai Ivanych, the younger by two years. I entered a course of study and became a veterinarian, while Nikolai, when he was nineteen, took up a position in the department of finance. Our father, Chimsha-Himalaiski, was a private’s son, but by qualifying as an officer he left us with the rank and estate of gentlemen. After his death our inheritance was all tied up in debt, but whatever was to come later on, we passed our childhood in the country, doing as we pleased. Day and night we ran about the fields and the woods just like peasant children, guarding the horses, stripping bark off the lindens, catching fish, things like that . . . And you know that anyone who at some time in his life has caught perch or watched the migrating thrushes, how they rush about in flocks over the countryside in the clear cool days, will never be a city boy, and until the day of his death will savour such liberty. My brother was miserable in the finance department. The years passed, and he sat there, always in one place, always writing on the same paper and always thinking just one thing – if only he was in the country. And this yearning of his turned little by little into a settled wish, a dream of buying himself a little country place, somewhere on the shore of a lake or river.

He was a good, humble man, I loved him, but I never sympathized with the way he imprisoned himself all his life in this wish to own a place in the country. There’s a saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But of course the six feet is what you need for a corpse, not a man. These days they say that it’s a fine thing when our educated men feel the pull of the land and aspire to a country estate. But this country estate comes down to the same six feet of earth. Leaving the city, the struggle, leaving the worldly clamour in order to hide away at a place in the country, that isn’t life, that’s egotism, idleness, it’s some kind of monasticism, but monasticism without the challenges. A man doesn’t need six feet of earth, or a place in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature, where there’s scope to manifest all that he is, all the qualities of his free soul.

My brother Nikolai, sitting at home in his study, dreamed of how he would eat cabbage soup from his own land, how the appetizing smell would fill the whole yard, and he’d eat on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours outside the gate on a little bench and look at the fields and woods.

Pamphlets on agriculture and the kind of advice found in almanacs gave shape to his enjoyment, were his favourite spiritual food; he loved to read newspapers, but in them he read only the one thing, advertisements for the sale of so many tenths of ploughed land and meadow, with a farmhouse, a river, an orchard, a mill with spring-fed ponds. And there loomed up in his head paths in the garden, flowers, fruit, houses for starlings, carp in the ponds, you know, all that stuff. These imaginary pictures changed, depending on the advertisement he’d come across, but for some reason, in every one, without fail, there were gooseberries. He could fancy no farm, no poetic nook, without gooseberries.

‘Country life has its comforts,’ he used to say. ‘Sitting out on the balcony you drink your tea, and the ducks float on the pond, it smells so good . . . and the gooseberries are growing.’

He’d draw a plan of his estate, and every time on his plan appeared the same a) gentleman’s house, b) servants’ quarters, c) vegetable garden, d) gooseberries. He lived on the cheap: he was underfed, he didn’t drink, he dressed God knows how, like a beggar, and everything was saved up and put in the bank. He was terribly stingy. It made me sick to look at him, and I’d give him something or send holiday gifts, and he hid it all away. Once a man gives himself up to an idea there’s nothing you can do.

Years passed, he was sent to another province, past forty by now, and he still read those advertisements in the newspapers and went on saving. Then I heard he got married. For one simple reason, to buy his country place with the gooseberries, he married an old and unattractive widow with no family, and only because she came with a bit of money. He lived on the cheap with her too, kept her hungry, and her money was put in the bank in his name. Before this, she had lived with the postmaster and with him was accustomed to pies and brandies, but with her second husband she didn’t see even black bread in any abundance; as a result of that kind of life she began to waste away; she endured three years then gave up her soul to God. And of course my brother didn’t think for a moment that he was to blame for her death. Money’s like vodka, it can make a man strange. Among us in the city a merchant died. Just before his death he demanded a plate of honey and ate all his cash and his lottery tickets along with the honey, so nobody could get at them. Sometimes I examine cattle at the railway station, and one time a young gentleman fell under a locomotive, and it cut off his leg. We took him into the waiting room, blood flying around – a terrible thing, and there he is, frantic, asking if they’ve found his leg; in the boot on the leg that’s been cut off is twenty roubles and he doesn’t want them to be lost.”

“But that’s from another opera,” Burkin said.

“After the death of his wife,” Ivan Ivanych continued after a moment’s thought, “my brother began to look around for an estate. Of course even if you search for five years, in the end you can still get it wrong, and buy something that’s not at all what you dreamed of. Through a broker and with a mortgage transfer my brother Nikolai bought a hundred and twenty tenths, with a gentleman’s house, servants’ quarters, a park, but neither an orchard nor gooseberries, nor a pond with ducks; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour of coffee because on one side of the property was a brickworks, and on the other a glue factory. But my Nikolai Ivanych didn’t gripe; he ordered himself twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them and settled in as lord of the manor.

The next year I went to see him. Travel there, think, observe how things are going on. In his letters my brother called his estate The Chumbaroklov Wasteland, now Himalaiskoe. I arrived at this now Himalaiskoe after noon. It was hot. Everywhere ditches, fences, hedges, barriers, tool handles, rows of fir trees – and I can’t figure out how to get into the yard or where to tie my horse. I walk toward the house, and there to meet me is a red-coloured dog, fat and looking like a pig. He wants to bark, but he’s too lazy. Out of the house came the cook, bare-legged, fat, also looking like a pig, and she said that the gentleman was taking a nap after lunch. I go in to my brother, he’s sitting in bed, his knees covered with a blanket; he’s aged, got fat, flabby, his cheeks, nose and lips bulging – looks as if he’ll give a grunt under the blanket.

We embraced and shed a few tears, out of gladness and the sad thought that once we were young and now were both grey-haired and soon enough to die. He dressed and took me out to show me his estate.

Well, and how is life going for you here?’ I asked.

‘Not bad at all. I swear to God I live happily.’

This was no longer the poor timid devil of a functionary, but the present-day landowner, a gentleman. He’d already made himself at home here, settled in and starting to enjoy it all; he ate a lot, soaped himself in the bathhouse, put on weight, had gone to law against the community and both factories, and he took great offense when the peasants didn’t call him ‘Your Excellency.’ He dealt with spiritual matters firmly, in the grand manner, and he performed his acts of charity, not simply but with a flourish. What acts of charity? He treated the peasants for every illness with soda and castor oil, and on the afternoon of his name day he offered public prayers in the middle of the village and afterwards he set out a gallon of vodka as he thought he should. Oh those terrible gallons of vodka! Today a fat landowner drags the peasants to an assembly to account for the crop damage by their cattle, and tomorrow, on a festival day, he stands them a full gallon, and they drink and shout ‘Hurray,’ and drunk, they bow at his feet. A change for the better in his life, a full stomach and idleness, create a self-importance in a Russian, a towering insolence. Nikolai Ivanych, a clerk in the finance department afraid even to see with his own eyes, now spoke only truisms in the tone of a cabinet minister: ‘Education is necessary, but for the people it is premature,’ ‘Corporal punishment is harmful in general, but in some cases it is wholesome and indispensible.’

‘I know the people and am able to deal with them,’ he said. ‘The people love me. I have only to wave a finger, and the people will do anything I wish.’

And all this, of course, is said with a wise, kindly smile. He repeated twenty times, ‘we of the gentry,’ ‘I as a gentleman’: obviously he didn’t remember that our grandfather was a peasant and our father only a soldier. Even our family name, Chimsha-Himalaiski, absurd as it is, seemed to him sonorous, distinguished and very pleasing.

But what I have to say is not about him, but about me. I want to tell you the change that took place in me during those few hours when I was at his country estate. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a whole plate of gooseberries. These were not bought but home grown, the first gathered since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanych laughed, then for a moment he stared silently at the gooseberries, tears in his eyes – he couldn’t speak for emotion – then he placed one berry in his mouth, gazed at me with the solemnity of a child who has at last received a toy he’s set his heart on, and he said: ‘How delicious!’

And he ate it greedily and said over again:

‘Oh how delicious. You try one.’

It was hard and sour, but as Pushkin said, ‘Deception that exalts is dearer than thousands of truths.’ I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had come true, who had achieved his goal in life, received what he wished for, who was contented with his country estate, with what he had become. To me, for some reason, the idea of human happiness is always tinged with melancholy, and right now at the sight of a happy man I was oppressed, felt something like despair. As usual I was depressed in the night. They made up a bed for me in a room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he didn’t sleep, how he got up and went to the plate of gooseberries and took some. I pondered it, how many people are by and large happy and contented. What an overpowering force that is! Take a look at our life: the insolence, effrontery and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and animal squalor of the weak – all around uncontrolled poverty, narrowness, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies . . . Meanwhile in every home and on the streets, peace, tranquility; out of fifty thousand living in the city not one to cry out, grow loud and indignant. We see them shop for groceries, eat by day, sleep at night, talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their deceased to the churchyard; but we don’t see and don’t hear what they suffer, the terrible things that take place behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful, calm, and only certain mute statistics protest: how many lose their minds, how many drink by the gallon, how many children die of hunger . . . The order of things is what it must be; it’s obvious that the happy man feels good only because the unhappy carry their burden in silence, and without this silence happiness would be impossible. We’re in a hypnotic trance. What do we need? Someone to stand with a little hammer at the door of every satisfied, happy man, the tapping a constant reminder that the unhappy exist, that though he may be happy, life will sooner or later show him its claws, misfortune befall him – sickness, poverty, loss, and no one will see or hear, as now he doesn’t see or hear the others. But there is no man with a little hammer; the happy man lives for himself with only small worldly anxieties to disturb him a little, like wind in the aspens – and all goes well.

That night it was clear to me that I too was contented, complacent,” Ivan Ivanych continued, standing up. “After dinner or out hunting, I too have sermonized about how to live, what to believe in, how to govern the nation. I too have declared what’s to be taught to the world, how education is necessary, but for the simple people it is enough to read and write. Freedom is a blessing, I’ve said, without it there is nothing, it’s like being without air, but for now it’s necessary to wait. Yes, I’ve said that, and now I’m asking, Wait in whose name?” As Ivan Ivanych spoke he looked angrily at Burkin. “Wait in whose name? I ask you that. And for what reason? They say to me, Not all at once, every idea comes to fruition gradually, in its own time. But who says this? Where are the proofs that this is just? You refer to the natural order of things, to the laws of phenomena, but is there order and law in this, that I stand aside and wait, a living, thinking man, stand above a ditch and wait while it is collapsing or sinking into the silt at a moment when I could leap across it or build a bridge over it? I say yet again, Wait in whose name? To wait when there is no strength to live, but nevertheless a duty to live and a will to live.

I left my brother early in the morning, and since then it’s become unbearable to be in the city. The peace and tranquility oppress me. I’m afraid to look into a window since there is no sight more painful to me now than a happy family sitting around a table and drinking tea. I’m already old and unfit for the struggle, I’m not even capable of hate. Only I grieve, I’m vexed and sore, in the night my head’s on fire with the rush of thoughts, and I can’t sleep . . . Oh if only I were young.”

In his agitation, Ivan Ivanych propelled himself from one corner to another and repeated, “If only I were young.”

He suddenly went up to Alyokhin and began to shake first his one hand then the other.

“Pavel Konstantinovich,” he went on in an entreating voice, “don’t settle down, don’t let yourself be lulled to sleep. While you’re young and powerful and brisk, don’t weary in doing good. Happiness is nothing, inessential; if there is a reason, a purpose to life, that reason and purpose is not to aim at happiness, but something higher and wiser. Do good.”

All this Ivan Ivanych spoke with a pitiable, beseeching smile, as if he was begging a favour for himself.

Then all three sat in their armchairs, in different corners of the sitting room and were silent. Ivan Ivanych’s story didn’t satisfy either Burkin or Alyokhin. As the generals and ladies watched from the gold frames, seeming to be alive in the twilight, listening to a story about a poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries was boring. They would have liked some sort of conversation about people of refinement, about women. And the fact that they were sitting in a drawing room where everything – chandeliers in slipcovers, armchairs, carpets under foot – spoke of how at one time those very same people who watched from the frames had walked here, sat, taken tea where now the beautiful Pelageya moved about so silently – this was better than any such stories.

Alyokhin badly wanted to go to sleep; he had started in at the farm work early, at three o’clock in the morning, and now his eyes were closing, but he was afraid that his guests might discuss something interesting without him, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t try to grasp whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was wise or just; that the guests didn’t discuss grain or hay or tar but things that had no direct connection to his life pleased him, and he wanted them to go on . . .

“Well I’m ready to sleep,” Burkin, said as he stood up. “Let me wish you a good night.”

Alyokhin took his leave, went off to his room downstairs, and his guests stayed above. A large room was allocated to the two of them for the night, and in it stood two wooden bedsteads with ornamental carvings, and in a corner was an ivory crucifix; each of their beds was wide, freshly made by the beautiful Pelageya, smelling pleasantly of clean linen.

Ivan Ivanych undressed in silence and lay down.

“Lord, pardon us sinners,” he said and pulled the covers over his head.

From his pipe lying on the table there was a strong smell of burnt tobacco, and for a long time Burkin couldn’t sleep but couldn’t understand where the strong smell was coming from.

The rain beat against the windows all night.