Fifty-Two Stories

DIFFICULT PEOPLE

SHIRYAEV, EVGRAF IVANOVICH, a petty landowner and priest’s son (his late parent, Father Ioann, had received 274 acres of land as a gift from General Kuvshinnikov’s wife), was standing in the corner in front of a copper washstand, washing his hands. As usual, he looked glum and preoccupied, and his beard was dishevelled.

“Well, some weather!” he said. “It’s not weather, it’s divine punishment. Raining again!”

He was grumbling, and his family was sitting at the table and waiting until he finished washing his hands so as to begin dinner. His wife, Fedosya Semyonovna; their son Pyotr, a student; their daughter Varvara; and the three little boys had long been sitting at the table and waiting. The boys—Kolka, Vanka, and Arkhipka—pug-nosed, grimy, with fleshy faces and coarse, long-untrimmed hair, fidgeted impatiently on their chairs, while the adults sat without stirring, and it seemed it was all the same to them whether they ate or waited…

As if testing their patience, Shiryaev slowly dried his hands, slowly said a prayer, and unhurriedly sat down at the table. Cabbage soup was served at once. From the yard came the rapping of carpenters’ axes (a new barn was being built at Shiryaev’s) and the laughter of the farmhand Fomka, who was teasing a turkey. Few but big drops of rain struck the window.

The student Pyotr, in spectacles and round-shouldered, was eating and exchanging glances with his mother. He set his spoon down several times and coughed, wishing to begin talking, but, taking a close look at his father, fell to eating again. Finally, when the kasha was served, he coughed resolutely and said:

“I should take the evening train tonight. It’s long been time, I’ve already missed two weeks. The lectures started on the first of September!”

“Go, then,” Shiryaev consented. “What are you waiting around here for? Just up and go with God!”

A minute passed in silence.

“He’ll need money for the road, Evgraf Ivanych,” the mother said softly.

“Money? Oh, well! You can’t travel without money. Take it right now, since you need it. Could have taken it long ago!”

The student sighed with relief and exchanged cheerful glances with his mother. Shiryaev unhurriedly took the wallet from his side pocket and put on his spectacles.

“How much?” he asked.

“In fact, the trip to Moscow costs eleven roubles forty-two…”

“Ah, money, money!” the father sighed (he always sighed when he saw money, even receiving it). “Here’s twelve for you. There’ll be some change, boy, it’ll come in handy during the trip.”

“Thank you.”

After a few moments, the student said:

“Last year I didn’t find lessons right away. I don’t know how it will be this year; I probably won’t earn any money for a while. I’d like to ask you to give me maybe fifteen roubles for room and board.”

Shiryaev pondered and sighed.

“Ten’ll be enough for you,” he said. “Here, take it!”

The student thanked him. He should have requested more for clothes, to pay for attending lectures, for books, but, having looked closely at his father, he decided not to pester him any more. But his mother, unpolitic and unreasonable, as all mothers are, could not help herself and said:

“Give him another six roubles, Evgraf Ivanovich, so he can buy boots. No, just look, how can he go to Moscow in such tatters?”

“He can take my old ones. They’re still quite new.”

“Give him some for trousers, too. It’s a shame to look at him…”

And immediately after that appeared a precursor of the storm before which the entire family trembled: Shiryaev’s short, thick neck suddenly turned Turkey red. The color slowly spread to his ears, from his ears to his temples, and gradually covered his whole face. Evgraf Ivanych fidgeted on his chair and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt so as not to suffocate. He was evidently struggling with the feeling that was coming over him. A dead silence ensued. The children held their breath, but Fedosya Semyonovna, as if not understanding what was happening with her husband, went on:

“He’s not a little boy. He’s ashamed to go around badly dressed.”

Shiryaev suddenly jumped up and with all his might hurled his fat wallet into the middle of the table, knocking a piece of bread off the plate. On his face flared up a repulsive expression of wrath, offense, greed—all of it together.

“Take it all!” he shouted in a voice not his own. “Rob me! Take it all! Strangle me!”

He jumped away from the table, clutched himself by the head, and ran stumbling around the room.

“Bleed me dry!” he shouted in a shrieking voice. “Squeeze me to the last drop! Rob me! Strangle me by the throat!”

The student turned red and dropped his eyes. He was no longer able to eat. Fedosya Semyonovna, who in twenty-five years had not grown used to her husband’s difficult character, shrank into herself and murmured something in her own defense. On her haggard birdlike face, always dumb and frightened, appeared an expression of astonishment and dumb fear. The boys and the older daughter Varvara, an adolescent girl with a pale, unattractive face, set down their spoons and froze.

Shiryaev, growing more and more furious, uttering words one more terrible than the other, ran to the table and started shaking the money out of his wallet.

“Take it!” he muttered, trembling all over. “You’ve eaten, you’ve drunk, so take the money, too! I need nothing! Make yourselves new boots and uniforms!”

The student turned pale and stood up.

“Listen, Papa,” he began, gasping for breath. “I…I beg you to stop, because…”

“Silence!” the father shouted at him, so loudly that his spectacles fell off his nose. “Silence!”

“Before I…I could put up with these scenes, but now…I’ve lost the habit! Understand! I’ve lost the habit!”

“Silence!” the father shouted and stamped his feet. “You must listen to what I say! I say what I like, and you—keep silent! At your age I earned my own money, and you, you scoundrel, do you know how much you cost me? I’ll throw you out! Parasite!”

“Evgraf Ivanych!” Fedosya Semyonovna murmured, nervously twitching her fingers. “But he…but Petya…”

“Silence!” Shiryaev shouted at her, and wrath even brought tears to his eyes. “It’s you who spoiled them! You! You’re to blame for it all! He doesn’t respect us, he doesn’t pray to God, he doesn’t earn any money! There’s ten of you and one of me. I’ll throw you out of the house!”

The daughter Varvara stared open-mouthed at her mother for a long time, then shifted her dumb gaze to the window, turned pale, and, with a loud cry, threw herself against the back of the chair. Her father waved his hand, spat, and ran outside.

This was how family scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs’. But this time, unfortunately, an insurmountable anger suddenly came over the student Pyotr. He was as hot-tempered and difficult as his father, and as his grandfather, an archpriest who used to hit his parishioners on the head with a stick. Pale, his fists clenched, he went up to his mother and screamed in the highest tenor notes he was capable of producing:

“I find these reproaches vile and repulsive! I need nothing from you! Nothing! I’d sooner die of hunger than eat even one more crumb of yours! Here’s your wretched money! Take it!”

The mother pressed herself against the wall and started waving her hands, as if it were not her son standing before her, but a phantom.

“What have I done wrong?” she wept. “What?”

The son waved his hand, just like his father, and ran outside. Shiryaev’s house stood isolated by a gully that cut through the steppe for three miles. Its edges were overgrown with young oaks and alders, and a stream ran along the bottom. One side of the house looked onto the gully, the other onto the open field. There were no wooden or wattle fences. Instead there were all sorts of outbuildings, pressing close to each other as they surrounded the small space in front of the house, which was considered the yard and where chickens, ducks, and pigs walked about.

Having gone outside, the student went down the muddy road to the field. A penetrating autumnal dampness filled the air. The road was muddy, little puddles glistened here and there, and from the grass of the yellow field peered autumn itself: dismal, putrid, dark. On the right side of the road was a kitchen garden, all dug up, gloomy, with occasional sunflowers rising from it, their downcast heads already black.

Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to go to Moscow on foot, to go as he was, without a hat, in tattered boots, and without a kopeck. At the hundredth mile, his dishevelled and frightened father would catch up with him, start begging him to come back or to accept the money, but he would not even glance at him, and would keep going, going…Bare forests would be supplanted by dismal fields, the fields by forests; soon the earth would turn white with the first snow and the streams would be covered with sheet ice…Somewhere near Kursk or Serpukhov, exhausted and starving, he would fall down and die. His body would be found, and in all the newspapers the report would appear that in such-and-such place the student so-and-so had died of hunger…

A white dog with a dirty tail, who had been wandering about the kitchen garden looking for something, glanced at him and trudged after him…

He walked along the road and thought about his death, about his family’s grief, his father’s moral torment, and at the same time he pictured to himself all sorts of adventures on the road, one more whimsical than the other, picturesque places, scary nights, chance encounters. He imagined a procession of women pilgrims, a hut in the forest with one little window, which shone brightly in the darkness; he stands by the window, asks for a night’s lodging…they let him in and—suddenly he sees robbers. Or better still: he comes upon a big manor house, where, on learning who he is, they give him food and drink, play the piano for him, listen to his complaints, and the owner’s beautiful daughter falls in love with him.

Preoccupied with his grief and similar thoughts, young Shiryaev kept walking and walking…Far, far ahead against a background of gray clouds an inn appeared darkly; still further beyond the inn, right on the horizon, a small bump could be seen; that was the railroad station. This bump reminded him of the connection that existed between the place where he now stood and Moscow, in which streetlights burned, carriages rattled, lectures were given. He nearly burst into tears from anguish and impatience. This solemn nature with its order and beauty, this deathly silence all around, disgusted him to the point of despair, of hatred!

“Watch out!” he heard a loud voice behind him.

An old lady landowner of his acquaintance drove by him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her and smiled with his whole face. And he immediately caught himself in this smile, which did not go at all with his dark mood. Where had it come from, if his whole soul was filled with vexation and anguish?

And he thought that nature herself probably gave man this ability to lie, so that even in difficult moments of inner tension he could keep the secrets of his nest, the way a fox or a wild duck keeps them. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they are, it is hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are secret. For instance, on account of some falsehood, the father of the lady landowner who had just driven by bore the wrath of Tsar Nicholas for half his life, her husband had been a gambler, of her four sons not one of them had made anything of himself. One can imagine how many terrible scenes took place in her family, how many tears were shed. And yet the old woman seemed happy, content, and responded to his smile with a smile. The student remembered his friends who talked reluctantly about their families, remembered his mother, who almost always lied when she had to talk about her husband and children…

Until nightfall Pyotr walked around on roads far from home, abandoning himself to cheerless thoughts. When rain began to sprinkle, he headed for home. On his way back, he decided to talk with his father at all costs, to make him understand once and for all that it was difficult and frightening to live with him.

At home he found silence. His sister Varvara lay behind the partition, moaning sightly from a headache. His mother, with a surprised and guilty look, sat beside her on a trunk, mending Arkhipka’s trousers. Evgraf Ivanych paced from window to window, frowning at the weather. From his gait, his cough, and even the crown of his head, one could see that he felt guilty.

“So you’ve changed your mind about leaving today?” he asked.

The student felt sorry for him, but, overcoming that feeling, he said at once:

“Listen…I must talk seriously with you…Yes, seriously…I’ve always respected you and…never dared to talk with you in this tone, but your behavior…your latest act…”

The father looked out the window and said nothing. The student, as if searching for words, rubbed his forehead and went on in strong agitation:

“Not a dinner or a tea goes by without you raising a ruckus. Your bread sticks in all of our throats. There’s nothing more insulting, more humiliating than being reproached by a crust of bread…You may be our father, but nobody, neither God nor nature, gave you the right to insult and humiliate us so deeply, to vent your own bad spirits on the weak. You torment my mother, depersonalize her, my sister is hopelessly downtrodden, and I…”

“It’s not your business to teach me,” the father said.

“No, it is my business! You can bully me as much as you like, but leave Mother alone! I won’t allow you to torment Mother!” the student went on, flashing his eyes. “You’re spoiled because nobody has ever dared to go against you. We trembled, we went dumb, but that’s all over now! Crude, ill-bred man! You’re crude…understand? Crude, difficult, callous! The peasants can’t stand you either!”

The student had lost his thread by then and no longer spoke, but seemed to fire off separate words. Evgraf Ivanovich listened and said nothing, as if stunned; but suddenly his neck turned purple, color crept over his face, and he stirred.

“Keep silent!” he yelled.

“Fine!” His son would not be stopped. “You don’t like listening to the truth? Excellent! All right! Start shouting! Excellent!”

“Keep silent, I tell you!” Evgraf Ivanovich roared.

Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway with an astonished face, very pale; she wanted to say something and could not, but only moved her fingers.

“It’s your fault!” Shiryaev yelled at her. “You brought him up this way!”

“I don’t want to live in this house anymore!” the student yelled, weeping and looking spitefully at his mother. “I don’t want to live with you!”

The daughter Varvara cried out behind the partition and burst into loud sobs. Shiryaev waved his hand and ran out of the house.

The student went to his room and quietly lay down. Until midnight he lay motionless and without opening his eyes. He did not feel anger or shame, but some sort of indefinite inner pain. He did not blame his father, did not pity his mother, did not suffer remorse; it was clear to him that everyone in the house now felt the same sort of pain, but who was to blame, who suffered more, who less, God only knew…

At midnight he woke up the farmhand and told him to prepare a horse by five in the morning to go to the station, then undressed and covered himself, but could not fall asleep. Until morning he could hear how his sleepless father quietly paced from window to window and sighed. Nobody slept; they all spoke little, only in whispers. Twice his mother came to him behind the partition. With the same astonished and dumb expression, she made the sign of the cross over him many times, twitching nervously…

At five in the morning the student tenderly said goodbye to them all and even wept a little. Passing by his father’s room, he looked through the door. Evgraf Ivanovich, still dressed, not having gone to bed, stood at the window and drummed on the glass.

“Goodbye, I’m leaving,” said the son.

“Goodbye…The money’s on the little round table…,” the father replied, not turning.

As the farmhand drove him to the station, a disgusting cold rain fell. The sunflowers drooped their heads still more, and the grass looked even darker.

1886