Fifty-Two Stories

NEIGHBORS

PYOTR MIKHAILYCH IVASHIN was badly out of sorts. His sister, a young girl, had gone off to Vlasich, a married man. To rid himself somehow of the oppressive, dejected mood that never left him either at home or in the fields, he called upon the help of his sense of justice, his good, honorable convictions—for he had always stood for free love!—but that did not help, and each time he involuntarily arrived at the same conclusion as the stupid nanny, that is, that his sister had behaved badly, and Vlasich had stolen her away. And that was painful.

Their mother spent whole days without leaving her room, the nanny spoke in a whisper, the aunt was at the point of leaving each day, and her suitcases were first carried to the front hall, then back to her room. In the house, in the yard, and in the garden there was a hush, as in the house of a dead person. It seemed to Pyotr Mikhailych that the aunt, the servants, and even the peasants looked at him mysteriously and with perplexity, as if they wanted to say: “Your sister has been seduced, why don’t you do something?” And he reproached himself for not doing something, though he did not know what, in fact, the something should consist in.

Six days went by this way. On the seventh—it was on Sunday after lunch—a mounted messenger brought a letter. The address was written in a familiar woman’s handwriting: “To Her Excel. Anna Nikolaevna Ivashina.” For some reason it seemed to Pyotr Mikhailych that there was something challenging, feisty, liberal in the look of the letter, the handwriting, the abbreviated word “Excel.” And women’s liberalism was stubborn, implacable, cruel…

“She’d sooner die than show indulgence to her poor mother by asking for her forgiveness,” Pyotr Mikhailych thought, going to his mother with the letter.

His mother was lying in bed, fully dressed. Seeing her son, she got up impetuously and, tucking back the gray hair that had strayed from under her bonnet, quickly asked:

“What is it? What is it?”

“This was sent…,” the son said, handing her the letter.

Zina’s name, and even the word “she,” was not pronounced at home; they spoke of Zina impersonally: “was sent,” “left”…The mother recognized her daughter’s handwriting, and her face became unattractive, unpleasant, and her gray hair again strayed from under the bonnet.

“No!” she said, drawing her hands back as if the letter had burned her fingers. “No, no, never! Not for anything!”

The mother sobbed hysterically from grief and shame; she obviously wanted to read the letter, but was hindered by her pride. Pyotr Mikhailych knew that he should open the letter and read it aloud, but he was suddenly overcome with such anger as he had never felt before. He ran out to the yard and shouted to the messenger:

“Say there’ll be no reply! No reply! Say just that, you brute!”

And he tore up the letter; then tears came to his eyes, and feeling himself cruel, guilty, and miserable, he went out to the fields.

He was only twenty-seven, but he was already fat, dressed like an old man in loose and baggy clothes, and suffered from shortness of breath. He already had all the makings of an old bachelor landowner. He did not fall in love, did not think of marrying, and loved only his mother, his sister, the nanny, and the gardener Vassilyich; he loved to eat well, loved his after-dinner nap and talking about politics and lofty matters…In his day he had finished university, but he now looked at it as if he had gone through mandatory service for young men from eighteen to twenty-five; at any rate the thoughts that now wandered through his head every day had nothing to do with the university and the disciplines he had studied.

In the fields it was hot and still, as before rain. In the forest it was sultry, and a heavy, fragrant smell came from the pine trees and the rotting leaves. Pyotr Mikhailych stopped frequently and wiped his wet forehead. He looked over his winter and summer crops, went around the clover field, and twice disturbed a partridge and her chicks on the edge of the forest; and all the while he was thinking that this unbearable situation could not last forever, and that it had to be ended one way or another. Ended anyhow, stupidly, wildly, but ended without fail.

“But how? What am I to do?” he asked himself, glancing pleadingly at the sky and at the trees, as if begging them for help.

But the sky and the trees were silent. Honorable convictions were no help, and common sense suggested that there was no resolution for the tormenting question except something stupid, and that today’s scene with the messenger was not the last of its kind. What else might happen—it was frightening to think!

As he returned home, the sun was already setting. It now seemed to him that the question could in no way be resolved. To reconcile with the accomplished fact was impossible, not to reconcile was also impossible, and there was nothing in between. As he walked down the road, taking off his hat and fanning himself with his handkerchief, and still over a mile from home, he heard the jingle of bells behind him. It was an intricate and quite successful combination of big and little bells, which produced a glassy sound. This jingle could belong only to the police chief Medovsky, a former hussar officer, who had squandered his fortune and gone to seed, an ailing man, a distant relation to Pyotr Mikhailych. He was a familiar at the Ivashins’, had a tender paternal feeling for Zina and admired her.

“I’m on my way to your place,” he said, catching up with Pyotr Mikhailych. “Get in, I’ll give you a lift.”

He was smiling and looked cheerful; evidently he did not know yet that Zina had gone off to Vlasich; or maybe he had been told, but did not believe it. Pyotr Mikhailych felt himself in an embarrassing position.

“You’re quite welcome,” he murmured, blushing to the point of tears and not knowing what and how to lie. “I’m very glad,” he went on, trying to smile, “but…Zina has gone and Mama is sick.”

“What a pity!” the police chief said, looking pensively at Pyotr Mikhailych. “And I was planning to spend the evening with you. Where did Zinaida Mikhailovna go?”

“To the Sinitskys’, and from there, I think, to the monastery. I don’t know for sure.”

The police chief talked a little longer, then turned back. Pyotr Mikhailych walked home and thought with horror of how the police chief would feel when he learned the truth. Pyotr Mikhailych pictured that feeling to himself and went into the house experiencing it.

“Help us, Lord, help us,” he thought.

In the dining room his aunt was sitting alone over evening tea. On her face, as usual, there was an expression which said that, though she was weak and defenseless, she would not allow anyone to offend her. Pyotr Mikhailych sat at the other end of the table (he did not like his aunt) and silently began to drink his tea.

“Your mother had no dinner again today,” the aunt said. “You should pay attention, Petrusha. Starving yourself to death doesn’t help anything.”

It seemed absurd to Pyotr Mikhailych that his aunt should interfere in what was none of her business and think her departure was connected with Zina’s leaving. He wanted to say something insolent, but restrained himself. And, as he restrained himself, he felt that the time had come to act, and that he could no longer stand it. To act at once, or to fall down, scream, and beat his head on the floor. He imagined Vlasich and Zina, two self-satisfied liberals, kissing each other somewhere under a maple tree, and everything oppressive and malignant that had accumulated in him over the past seven days heaped itself on Vlasich.

“One seduced and stole my sister,” he thought, “another will come and put a knife in my mother, a third will set my house on fire or rob me…And all that in the guise of personal friendship, lofty ideas, suffering!”

“No, it will never be!” Pyotr Mikhailych suddenly cried out and banged his fist on the table.

He jumped up and ran out of the dining room. In the stable stood the steward’s saddled horse. He mounted it and galloped off to Vlasich.

A whole storm rose up in his soul. He felt the need to do something outrageous, drastic, even if he would repent of it for the rest of his life. Call Vlasich a scoundrel, slap him in the face, and challenge him to a duel? But Vlasich was not the sort to fight a duel; the scoundrel and the slap would make him still more miserable, and he would withdraw still more deeply into himself. These miserable, uncomplaining people are the most unbearable, the most oppressive people. They can do anything with impunity. When such a miserable person, in response to a deserved reproach, looks at you with deep, guilty eyes, smiles painfully, and obediently offers his head, it seems that justice itself will be unable to raise a hand against him.

“Never mind. I’ll hit him with my whip in front of her and say all sorts of insolent things to him,” Pyotr Mikhailych decided.

He rode through his woods and wastelands, and imagined how Zina, to justify her act, would talk about women’s rights, about personal freedom, and about there being no difference between religious and civil marriage. She would argue in her womanly way about things she does not understand. And probably in the end she would ask: “How do you enter into it? What right have you got to interfere?”

“Yes, I have no right,” Pyotr Mikhailych muttered. “So much the better…The more rude, the less right, the better.”

It was stifling. Swarms of mosquitoes hung low over the ground, and in the wastelands lapwings wept pitifully. Everything portended rain, but there was not a single cloud. Pyotr Mikhailych crossed his boundary and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often took this road and knew every little bush, every pothole on it. What now in the twilight looked like a dark cliff far ahead of him in the twilight was a red church; he could picture it to himself in minute detail, even the stucco of the front gate and the calves that always grazed inside the fence. Half a mile to the right of the gate was a dark grove that belonged to Count Koltovich. And beyond the grove Vlasich’s land already began.

From behind the church and the count’s grove an enormous black cloud was looming up, with pale lightning flashing in it.

“Here it comes!” thought Pyotr Mikhailych. “Help us, Lord, help us!”

The horse soon became tired from going so quickly, and Pyotr Mikhailych was tired as well. The dark cloud looked at him angrily, as if advising him to go back home. He felt a little frightened.

“I’ll prove to them that they’re not right!” he tried to encourage himself. “They’ll say that this is free love, personal freedom; but freedom is in abstinence, not in subjection to passions. What they have is depravity, not freedom!”

Here was the count’s big pond; the cloud turned it dark blue and gloomy, it smelled of dampness and slime. By the dam two willows, an old one and a young one, leaned tenderly towards each other. Two weeks earlier, Pyotr Mikhailych and Vlasich had come there on foot, singing in low voices the old student song: “Not to love means to bury your young life…” A pathetic song!

There was a rumble of thunder as Pyotr Mikhailych rode through the grove, and the trees rustled and bent in the wind. He had to hurry. There was no more than a mile left to go from the grove across the meadow to Vlasich’s estate. Here old birches stood on both sides of the road. They looked as sad and miserable as their master Vlasich, and were as gaunt and lanky as he. Big raindrops splashed on the birches and the grass; the wind died down at once, and there was a smell of wet soil and poplars. Then Vlasich’s fence appeared with its yellow acacia, which was also gaunt and lanky; where the grillwork had fallen down, you could see the neglected orchard.

Pyotr Mikhailych was no longer thinking of the slap in the face or the whip, and did not know what he was going to do at Vlasich’s. He turned coward. He feared for himself and for his sister, and was frightened that he was about to see her. How would she behave with her brother? What would the two of them talk about? Shouldn’t he turn back before it was too late? With these thoughts he rode down the linden alley towards the house, skirted the thick bushes of lilacs, and suddenly saw Vlasich.

Vlasich, hatless, in a cotton shirt and high boots, stooping under the rain, was walking from the corner of the house towards the porch; behind him came a workman carrying a hammer and a box of nails. They must have been repairing a shutter that was banging in the wind. Seeing Pyotr Mikhailych, Vlasich stopped.

“Is it you?” he said and smiled. “Well, that’s nice.”

“Yes, I’ve come, as you see…,” Pyotr Mikhailych said softly, shaking off the rain with both hands.

“Well, that’s good. I’m very glad,” Vlasich said, but did not offer his hand: evidently he hesitated and waited for a hand to be offered him. “It’s good for the oats!” he said and looked up at the sky.

“Yes.”

They silently went into the house. The door to the right from the front hall led to another hallway and then to the reception room, the door to the left to a small room where the steward lived in winter. Pyotr Mikhailych and Vlasich went into that room.

“Where did you get caught by the rain?” Vlasich asked.

“Not far away. Almost by the house.”

Pyotr Mikhailych sat down on the bed. He was glad that the rain made noise and that the room was dark. It was better that way: not so frightening, and there was no need to look his interlocutor in the face. He was no longer angry, but only fearful and vexed with himself. He felt that he had begun badly and that this visit of his would come to nothing.

The two were silent for a time and pretended to be listening to the rain.

“Thank you, Petrusha,” Vlasich began, clearing his throat. “I’m very grateful to you for coming. It is magnanimous and noble on your part. I understand that, and, believe me, I value it highly. Believe me.”

He looked out the window and went on, standing in the middle of the room.

“It all happened somehow in secret, as if we were concealing it from you. The consciousness that you might be offended and angry with us put a stain on our happiness all these days. But allow me to justify myself. We acted in secret not because we had little trust in you. In the first place, it all happened suddenly, by some sort of inspiration, and there was no time to reason things out. Secondly, this is an intimate, ticklish matter…it was awkward to mix a third person into it, even such a close one as you. But the main thing is that in all this we counted strongly on your magnanimity. You are a very magnanimous, very noble person. I’m infinitely grateful to you. If you ever need my life, come and take it.”¹

Vlasich spoke in a quiet, muffled bass, all on the same note, as if he were humming; he was obviously nervous. Pyotr Mikhailych sensed that it was his turn to speak, and that to listen and say nothing would mean that in fact he was playing the part of a magnanimous and noble simpleton, and that was not what he had come there for. He quickly stood up and said in a low voice, breathlessly:

“Listen, Grigory, you know I loved you and never wished my sister a better husband; but what’s happened is terrible! It’s awful to think of it!”

“Why awful?” Vlasich asked in a faltering voice. “It would be awful if we had acted badly, but that isn’t so!”

“Listen, Grigory, you know I’m without prejudice; but, forgive my frankness, in my opinion you both acted egocentrically. Of course, I wouldn’t say this to Zina, it would upset her, but you should know: Mother is suffering so much, it’s hard to describe.”

“Yes, that’s sad.” Vlasich sighed. “We foresaw it, Petrusha, but what were we to do? If your action upsets someone, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Nothing to be done! Any serious step you take is inevitably going to upset someone. If you go to fight for freedom, that will also make your mother suffer. Nothing to be done! Anyone who places the peace of his family above all else must completely renounce the life of ideas.”

There was a bright flash of lightning outside the window, and this flash seemed to change the course of Vlasich’s thinking. He sat down beside Pyotr Mikhailych and began saying something completely uncalled for.

“I’m in awe of your sister, Petrusha,” he said. “When I used to visit you, I had the feeling each time as if I was on a pilgrimage, and I actually prayed before Zina. Now my awe increases with each day. She is higher than a wife for me! Higher!” (Vlasich raised his arms.) “She is sacred to me. Since she’s been living here, I enter my house as if it were a temple. She’s a rare, extraordinary, noble woman!”

“So, he’s grinding away on his barrel-organ!” thought Pyotr Mikhailych. He did not like the word “woman.”

“Why don’t you really get married?” he asked. “How much does your wife want for a divorce?”

“Seventy-five thousand.”

“That’s a bit steep. What if you bargain?”

“She won’t yield a kopeck. She’s a terrible woman, brother!” Vlasich sighed. “I never told you about her before, it was disgusting to recall, but since there’s now an occasion, I will. I married her under the influence of a good, honest impulse. In our regiment, if you want the details, a battalion commander took up with an eighteen-year-old girl, that is, he simply seduced her, lived with her for a couple of months, and abandoned her. She ended up in the most terrible situation. She was ashamed to go back to her parents, and they wouldn’t take her; her lover had abandoned her—so go and sell yourself at the barracks. The comrades in the regiment were indignant. They weren’t saints themselves, but the baseness here was too offensive. Besides, everyone in the regiment detested this battalion commander. And, to do him dirt, you see, the indignant lieutenants all started a subscription to raise money for the unfortunate girl. Well, so, when we young subalterns met together and started laying out five or ten roubles, I suddenly had a brainstorm. The situation seemed all too suitable for a heroic deed. I hurried to the girl and in ardent phrases expressed my commiseration to her. And while going to her and then talking to her, I loved her ardently, as someone humiliated and insulted.² Yes…Well, it so happened that a week after that I proposed to her. My superiors and my comrades found my marriage incompatible with the dignity of an officer. That inflamed me still more. So, you see, I wrote a long letter in which I asserted that my action ought to be written down in the history of the regiment in golden letters, and so on. I sent the letter to my commander and copies to my comrades. Well, of course, I was agitated, and did not do it without some sharpness. I was asked to leave the regiment. I put the draft away somewhere, I’ll give it to you to read some day. It’s written with great feeling. You’ll see what honorable, bright moments I lived through. I handed in my resignation and came here with my wife. My father left some debts, I had no money, and my wife made acquaintances from day one, started dressing up and playing cards, so I had to mortgage the estate. She led a bad life, you see, and of all my neighbors you alone were not her lover. A couple of years later I gave her smart money—all I had then—and she left for the city. Yes…And now I pay her twelve hundred a year. A terrible woman! There’s a fly, brother, that sticks a larva on a spider’s back, so that it can’t shake it off; the larva attaches itself to the spider and drinks its heart’s blood. In just the same way this woman is attached to me and drinks my heart’s blood. She hates and despises me for doing such a stupid thing, that is, marrying a woman like her. She finds my magnanimity pathetic. ‘An intelligent man dropped me,’ she says, ‘and a fool picked me up.’ In her opinion, only a pathetic idiot could act as I did. It’s unbearably painful for me, brother. Generally, brother, I’ll say parenthetically, fate weighs me down. It really weighs me down.”

Pyotr Mikhailych listened to Vlasich and asked himself in perplexity: How could Zina like this man so much? None too young—he was already forty-one—skinny, gangly, narrow-chested, with a long nose and some gray in his beard. His talk is like humming, his smile is sickly, and when he talks he waves his arms awkwardly. No health, no handsome masculine manners, no social grace, no gaiety, and on the outside something lackluster and indefinite. He dresses tastelessly, his furniture is depressing, he doesn’t acknowledge poetry or painting, because “they don’t respond to the needs of the day,” meaning he doesn’t understand them; music doesn’t touch him. He is a bad landowner. His estate is in total disorder and is mortgaged; he pays twelve percent on his second mortgage, and on top of that owes about ten thousand in promissory notes. When the time comes to pay interest or send money to his wife, he begs loans from everybody with a look as if his house is burning down, and at the same time he rushes headlong to sell his entire winter stock of kindling for five roubles, or a haystack for three roubles, and then orders that they stoke the stoves with garden fencing or old hotbed frames. His meadows are destroyed by pigs, in the woods peasant cattle eat the young growth, and with every winter there are fewer and fewer old trees; beehives and rusty buckets lie about in his garden and vegetable patch. He has no talents or gifts, nor even the ordinary ability to live as people live. In practical life he is a naïve, weak man, whom it is easy to deceive and offend, and it’s not for nothing that his peasants call him “a bit simple.”

He is a liberal and in the district is considered a red, but that, too, comes out boring in him. There is no originality or pathos in his freethinking; he is outraged, indignant, or joyful somehow all in the same tone, unimpressively and listlessly. Even in moments of great inspiration, he does not raise his head and remains stoop-shouldered. But most boring of all is that he even manages to express his good, honorable ideas in such a way that they come out banal and retrograde. It reminds you of something old, read long ago, when he begins, slowly and with an air of profundity, to talk about his honest, bright moments, his best years, or when he extols the young, who have always gone and still go in advance of society, or denounces Russian men for putting on their dressing-gowns at the age of thirty and forgetting the precepts of their alma mater. When you stay overnight, he puts Pisarev or Darwin on your night table. If you tell him you’ve read them, he goes and brings you Dobrolyubov.³

In the district this was known as freethinking, and many regarded this freethinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; for him, however, it was a cause of profound unhappiness. It was that larva he had just been talking about: it attached itself firmly to him and drank his heart’s blood. In the past a strange marriage in Dostoevsky’s taste,⁴ long letters and their copies, in poor, illegible handwriting, but with great feeling; endless misunderstandings, explanations, disappointments; then debts, a second mortgage, payments to his wife, monthly loans—and all that of no use to anyone, neither himself nor other people. And in the present, as before, he keeps bustling, seeks a heroic deed, meddles in other people’s affairs; as before, at every favorable opportunity there are long letters and copies, tiresome commonplace conversations about communes or the developing of arts and crafts, or establishing the cheese-making industry—conversations that resemble each other, as if he prepared them not in his living brain, but by machine. And, finally, this scandal with Zina, the outcome of which is as yet unknown!

And meanwhile his sister Zina is young—only twenty-two—good-looking, graceful, cheerful. She is a giggler, a chatterbox, an arguer, a passionate musician; she is a connoisseur of clothes, of books, and of good furniture, and she would not suffer having a room like this at home, smelling of boots and cheap vodka. She is also liberal-minded, but in her freethinking one senses an abundance of force, the ambition of a young, strong, brave girl, a passionate desire to be better and more original than others…How could it happen that she fell in love with Vlasich?

“He’s a Don Quixote, a stubborn fanatic, a maniac,” Pyotr Mikhailych thought, “and she’s as slack, weak-willed, and yielding as I am…We both surrender quickly and without resistance. She fell in love with him; but don’t I love him myself, in spite of it all…”

Pyotr Mikhailych considered Vlasich a good, honest, but narrow and one-sided man. In his worries and sufferings and in his whole life he did not see any lofty aims, either immediate or distant, but only boredom and an inability to live. His self-denial and all that Vlasich called heroic deeds or honest impulses seemed to him a useless waste of strength, unnecessary blank shots, which used up a great deal of powder. That Vlasich believed fanatically in the extraordinary honesty and infallibility of his thinking, seemed to him naïve and even morbid; and that all his life Vlasich had somehow managed to confuse the worthless with the lofty, that he had married stupidly and considered it a heroic deed, and then had taken up with women and saw in it the triumph of some idea—that was simply incomprehensible.

But Pyotr Mikhailych still loved Vlasich, sensed in him the presence of some force, and for some reason never had the heart to contradict him.

Vlasich sat down quite close to him, so as to talk under the noise of the rain, in the dark, and had already cleared his throat, prepared to tell something long, like the story of his marriage; but Pyotr Mikhailych found it unbearable to listen; he was tormented by the thought that he was about to see his sister.

“Yes, you weren’t lucky in life,” he said gently, “but, forgive me, we’ve strayed from the main thing. We’re talking about something else.”

“Yes, yes, indeed. So let’s get back to the main thing,” Vlasich said and stood up. “I’m telling you, Petrusha, our conscience is clear. We weren’t married in church, but our marriage is perfectly legitimate—it’s not for me to prove and not for you to judge. Your thinking is as free as mine, and, thank God, we can’t have any disagreement on that account. As for our future, that shouldn’t alarm you. I’ll work till I sweat blood, I won’t sleep nights—in short, I’ll pour all my strength into making Zina happy. Her life will be beautiful. You ask if I’ll be able to do it? I will, brother! When a man thinks about one and the same thing every moment, it’s not hard for him to achieve what he wants. But let’s go to Zina. She’ll be so glad!”

Pyotr Mikhailych’s heart pounded. He got up and followed Vlasich into the front hall and from there into the reception room. In this enormous, gloomy room there was only a piano and a long row of old chairs with bronze trimming, on which no one ever sat. On the piano one candle was burning. From the reception room they silently passed into the dining room. It was also vast and uninviting. In the middle of the room stood a round extension table on six fat legs, and only one candle. The clock, in a big red case that resembled an icon case, showed half past two.

Vlasich opened the door to the next room and said:

“Zinochka, Petrusha’s here!”

At once there was the sound of hurrying footsteps and Zina came into the dining room, tall, buxom, and very pale, dressed the way Pyotr Mikhailych had last seen her at home—in a black skirt and a red blouse with a big buckle at the waist. She embraced her brother with one arm and kissed him on the temple.

“Such a thunderstorm!” she said. “Grigory went out somewhere, and I was left alone in the whole house.”

She was not embarrassed and looked at her brother candidly and directly, as at home. Looking at her, Pyotr Mikhailych also stopped feeling embarrassed.

“But you’re not afraid of a thunderstorm,” he said, sitting down at the table.

“No, but the rooms here are enormous, the house is old and jingles all over from the thunder, like a cupboard full of dishes. A charming little house, generally,” she went on, sitting down facing her brother. “Here, in any room you like, there’s some sort of pleasant memory. In my room, just imagine, Grigory’s grandfather shot himself.”

“In August there’ll be money, we’ll renovate the cottage in the garden,” said Vlasich.

“For some reason during thunderstorms I remember the grandfather,” Zina went on. “And in this dining room a man was flogged to death.”

“That’s an actual fact,” Vlasich confirmed and looked wide-eyed at Pyotr Mikhailych. “In the ’forties this estate was rented by a certain Olivier, a Frenchman. His daughter’s portrait is still lying here in the attic. A very pretty girl. This Olivier, my father told me, despised Russians for their ignorance and mocked them cruelly. So, for instance, he demanded that the priest take off his hat a half mile before he passed the manor house, and that church bells be rung each time the Olivier family drove through the village. With the serfs and the lowly of the world in general, of course, he showed even less ceremony. Once a man came down the road here, one of the most kindhearted sons of wandering Russia, something like Gogol’s seminarian Khoma Brut.⁵ He asked to spend the night, the clerks liked him, and they kept him on in the office. There are many variations. Some say the seminarian stirred up the peasants, others that Olivier’s daughter supposedly fell in love with him. I don’t know which is right, but one fine evening Olivier summoned him here and interrogated him, then ordered him beaten. You see, he was sitting at this table drinking Bordeaux, and the stablemen were beating the seminarian. It must have been real torture. By morning the man died from it, and they hid the body somewhere. They say it was thrown into Count Koltovich’s pond. A case was opened, but the Frenchman paid several thousand to the proper person and left for Alsace. Incidentally, the term of his lease was also up, so the matter ended there.”

“What scoundrels!” Zina said and shuddered.

“My father remembered Olivier and his daughter very well. He said she was a remarkable beauty and an eccentric besides. I think that that seminarian did all of it at once: stirred up the peasants and enticed the daughter. Maybe he wasn’t a seminarian, but some sort of incognito.”

Zina fell to thinking: the story of the seminarian and the beautiful French girl carried her far away in her imagination. It seemed to Pyotr Mikhailych that externally she had not changed at all in the last week, only become a little more pale. She looked calm and the same as ever, as if she had come to visit Vlasich along with her brother. But Pyotr Mikhailych felt that some sort of change had taken place in himself. Indeed, before, when she lived at home, he could talk to her about decidedly anything, while now he could not bring himself to ask even the simple question: “How do you like living here?” The question seemed awkward and unnecessary. The same change must have taken place in her as well. She was in no hurry to talk about their mother, about home, about her affair with Vlasich; she did not justify herself, did not say that civil marriage was better than religious, was not nervous, and calmly pondered the story of Olivier…And why had they suddenly started talking about Olivier?

“You’ve both got wet shoulders from the rain,” Zina said and smiled joyfully. She was touched by this slight resemblance between her brother and Vlasich.

And Pyotr Mikhailych felt all the bitterness and all the horror of his situation. He remembered his now empty house, the closed grand piano, and Zina’s bright room, which no one went into anymore; he remembered that there were no small footprints on the garden paths now, and that no one went swimming now, laughing loudly, before evening tea. What he had been so attached to since early childhood, what he had liked to think about when he sat in a stuffy classroom or lecture hall—brightness, purity, joy—all that had filled the house with life and light, was gone irretrievably, vanished, and mixed up with a crude, uncouth story of some battalion commander, a magnanimous lieutenant, a depraved woman, a grandfather who had shot himself…And to start talking about their mother, or thinking that the past could come back, meant not to understand what was clear.

Pyotr Mikhailych’s eyes filled with tears, and his hand, resting on the table, trembled. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her eyes also turned red and glistened.

“Grigory, come here!” she said to Vlasich.

They walked over to the window and started discussing something in a whisper. And by the way Vlasich bent towards her and the way she looked at him, Pyotr Mikhailych realized once again that everything was already irretrievably finished and that there was no need to talk about anything. Zina went out.

“So it goes, brother,” Vlasich began after some silence, rubbing his hands and smiling. “I just called our life happiness, but that was to obey literary requirements, so to speak. As a matter of fact, there has been no sense of happiness yet. Zina has been thinking all the time about you, about her mother, and she’s suffered. Looking at her, I suffered, too. She has a free, bold nature, but when you’re unaccustomed, you know, it’s hard, and besides she’s young. The servants call her ‘miss’; it seems like a trifle, but it upsets her. So it goes, brother.”

Zina brought a bowl of strawberries. She was followed by a little maid, who looked meek and downtrodden. The maid put a jug of milk on the table and made a very low bow…She had something in common with the old furniture, just as torpid and dull.

There was no more sound of rain. Pyotr Mikhailych was eating strawberries, and Vlasich and Zina silently watched him. The time of the needless but inevitable conversation was drawing near, and it already weighed on the three of them. Pyotr Mikhailych’s eyes again filled with tears; he pushed the bowl aside and said it was time he went home, or else it would be late and it might well rain again. The moment came when Zina, out of propriety, ought to say something about home and her new life.

“How are things at our place?” she asked quickly, and her pale face quivered. “How is Mama?”

“You know Mama…,” Pyotr Mikhailych replied without looking at her.

“Petrusha, you’ve long been thinking about what’s happened,” she said, taking her brother by the sleeve, and he realized how hard it was for her to speak. “You’ve long been thinking. Tell me, can we count on Mama reconciling with Grigory some day…and generally with this situation?”

She stood close to her brother, face to face, and he was astonished that she was so beautiful and that he seemed not to have noticed it before; and that his sister, whose face resembled their mother’s, pampered, refined, was living in Vlasich’s house, and with Vlasich, along with the torpid maid, along with the six-legged table, in a house where a living man had been flogged to death, and that she would not ride home with him now, but would stay here for the night—that struck him as incredibly absurd.

“You know Mama…,” he said without answering the question. “In my opinion, you ought to observe…to do something, to ask her forgiveness, or whatever…”

“But to ask her forgiveness means to make it look as if we acted badly. I’m ready to lie for the sake of Mama’s peace, but that wouldn’t lead to anything. I know Mama. Well, what will be, will be!” Zina said, cheering up because what was most unpleasant had already been said. “We’ll wait five, ten years, bear with it, and then it’s as God wills.”

She took her brother under the arm and, when they went through the dark front hall, she pressed herself to his shoulder.

They came out to the porch. Pyotr Mikhailych said goodbye, mounted his horse, and rode at a walk; Zina and Vlasich went a little of the way to see him off. It was quiet, warm, and there was a wonderful smell of hay; stars shone brightly between the clouds in the sky. Vlasich’s old garden, which had witnessed so many unhappy stories in its time, slept, wrapped in darkness, and for some reason it was sad to ride through it.

“After dinner today Zina and I spent several truly bright moments!” Vlasich said. “I read aloud to her an excellent article on the question of resettlement. Read it, brother! It’s necessary for you! The article is remarkable in its honesty. I couldn’t help myself and wrote the publisher a letter to be forwarded to the author. I wrote just one line: ‘I thank you and firmly press your honest hand!’ ”

Pyotr Mikhailych wanted to say: “Please don’t meddle in what’s none of your business!”—but he kept silent.

Vlasich walked by the right stirrup, Zina by the left; they both seemed to forget that they had to go back home, and it was damp and they were already not far from Koltovich’s grove. Pyotr Mikhailych felt that they were waiting for something from him, though they themselves did not know what, and he felt an unbearable pity for them. Now, as they walked beside the horse, with a submissive look and lost in thought, he was deeply convinced that they were unhappy and could not be happy, and their love seemed to him a sad, irreparable mistake. From pity and the awareness that he could not help them in any way, he was overcome by that state of inner laxity in which, to rid himself of the painful feeling of compassion, he was ready for any sacrifice.

“I’ll come to stay the night with you,” he said.

But that sounded as if he was making a concession, and it did not satisfy him. When they stopped at Koltovich’s grove to say goodbye, he bent down to Zina, touched her shoulder, and said:

“You’re right, Zina! You did well!”

And, so as not to say more and not to burst into tears, he whipped up his horse and galloped into the grove. Going into the darkness, he turned and saw Vlasich and Zina walking home down the road—he with big strides, and she beside him with a hurrying, skipping gait—and talking animatedly about something.

“I’m just an old woman,” Pyotr Mikhailych thought. “I went to resolve the question, but I’ve confused it even more. Well, God be with it all!”

His heart was heavy. When the grove ended, he rode on at a walk and then stopped the horse by the pond. He wanted to sit motionless and think. The moon was rising, and was reflected in a red column on the other side of the pond. There was a muted rumbling of thunder somewhere. Pyotr Mikhailych looked at the water without blinking and imagined his sister’s despair, the suffering paleness and dry eyes with which she would hide her humiliation from people. He imagined her pregnancy, their mother’s death, her funeral, Zina’s horror…The proud, superstitious old woman could not end otherwise than in death. Terrible pictures of the future loomed before him on the dark, smooth water, and among pale women’s figures he saw himself, fainthearted, weak, with a guilty face…

A hundred paces away, on the right bank of the pond, something dark stood motionless: was it a man or a tall stump? Pyotr Mikhailych remembered about the seminarian who had been killed and thrown into this pond.

“Olivier behaved inhumanly, but in any case he resolved the question, and I haven’t resolved anything, but only confused it,” he thought, peering at the dark figure, which looked like a phantom. “He said and did what he thought, while I say and do what I do not think; and I don’t even know for certain what I actually think…”

He rode up to the dark figure: it was a rotten old post left from some construction.

A strong scent of lily-of-the-valley and honeyed herbs came from the grove and Koltovich’s estate. Pyotr Mikhailych rode along the bank of the pond and gazed sorrowfully at the water, and, looking back on his life, was becoming convinced that up to then he had always said and done what he did not think, and people had repaid him in kind, and therefore the whole of life now looked to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and waterweeds were entangled. And it seemed to him that it could not be set right.

1892