Forty Stories

Anyuta

IN one of those very cheap rooms in the Lisbon rooming house, Stepan Klochkov, a third-year medical student, was pacing up and down as he applied himself zealously to cramming from a medical textbook. The strain of memorizing the words made his mouth dry, and sweat dampened his forehead.

Anyuta, who roomed with him, sat on a stool by the window, where the edges were white with icy tracery. She was a small, thin brunette, twenty-five years old, very pale, with gentle gray eyes. Head bent, she was embroidering the collar of a man’s shirt with red thread. She was working hurriedly, against time. It was afternoon, and the clock in the passageway outside drowsily struck two o’clock, but the room was still in disorder. Rumpled bedclothes, pillows scattered everywhere, books, clothes, a large filthy washbasin filled with soapy slop water in which cigarette butts were floating, filth on the floor—everything seemed to have been hurled down in a heap, crumpled, deliberately thrown into confusion.

“The right lung consists of three lobes …” Klochkov recited. “Boundaries! Upper lobe on anterior wall of the chest reaches fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib … behind up to the spina scapulae …”

Klochkov tried to visualize what he was reading, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Unable to form a clear picture, he began to feel his upper ribs through his waistcoat.

“These ribs resemble the keys of a piano,” he said. “To avoid being confused by them, you simply must make a mental picture of them. You have to study them on the skeleton and on the living body. Come here, Anyuta! Let’s get this thing straight!”

Anyuta put down her sewing, removed her jacket, and straightened her shoulders. Kluchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began to count her ribs.

“Hm! The first rib can’t be felt.… It’s behind the collarbone. This must be the second rib.… Oh yes, and here is the third, and the fourth.… Hm … Well, why are you shivering?”

“Your fingers are cold!”

“Nonsense, it won’t kill you! Don’t wriggle about so much. This must be the third, and here’s the fourth.… You’re so thin, and yet I can hardly feel your ribs.… Here’s the second.… Here’s the third.… No, you are getting confused. You don’t see the thing clearly. I shall have to draw it. Where is my piece of charcoal?”

Klochkov took the charcoal crayon and began to sketch some parallel lines corresponding to the ribs on Anyuta’s chest.

“Wonderful! Now everything is clear as daylight. Now let me sound your chest. Stand up!”

Anyuta stood up, raising her chin. Klochkov began to tap her chest, becoming so deeply immersed in the task that he did not notice that her lips, nose, and fingers were turning blue with cold. She shivered, and then she was afraid the student would see her shivering, stop drawing lines on her chest, stop tapping her, and then perhaps he would fail miserably in the examinations.

“Now it’s all clear,” Klochkov said, and he stopped tapping her. “Just sit there, don’t rub off the charcoal, and I’ll learn some more.”

Once again the student began pacing up and down the room, memorizing. Anyuta had black stripes across her chest, and looked as though she had been tattooed. She sat there thinking, huddled up, shivering with cold. She was never talkative, always silent, thinking, thinking.…

In six or seven years of wandering from one furnished room to another, she had known five students like Klochkov. Now they had finished their courses, had gone out into the world, and being respectable people, they had put her out of their minds. One of them lived in Paris, two were doctors, a fourth was an artist, and they said the fifth was already a professor. Klochkov was the sixth. Soon he too would leave the medical school and go out into the world. No doubt a beautiful future awaited him, and no doubt he would become a great man, but the present prospects did not look promising. He had no tobacco, no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left. She must hurry up with her embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered it, and then with the quarter ruble she would get for it buy tea and tobacco.

“Can I come in?” said a voice from the door.

Anyuta quickly pulled a woolen shawl round her shoulders.

Fetissov, an artist, walked in.

“Do me a favor,” he began, addressing Klochkov and glaring like a wild beast through the hair hovering over his forehead. “Do me the kindness of lending me that pretty woman of yours for an hour or two! You see, I am painting a picture, and I can do nothing without a model.”

“With pleasure,” the student said. “Go along, Anyuta.”

“What I have to put up with,” Anyuta murmured softly.

“That’s enough! He wants you for the sake of his art, not for some nonsense or other. Why not help him when you can?”

Anyuta began dressing.

“What are you painting?” Klochkov said.

“Psyche. Wonderful subject. It’s not going along well, though. I have to keep working with different models. Yesterday there was one with blue legs. I asked how the legs got blue, and she said it was the dye from her stockings. Still learning away, eh? Happy man, with all that patience!”

“Medicine is one of those things you have to keep pegging away at.”

“Hm … Excuse me, Klochkov, but you are really living in a terrible pigsty. The devil alone knows how you live!”

“What do you mean? I can’t live any other way. I only get twelve rubles a month from my father, and it’s difficult to live decently on that money.”

“Well, so it is,” the artist said, knitting his brows with an air of disgust. “Still, you should be able to live better. A civilized man should have some measure of aesthetic taste, surely? Only the devil knows what this room is like! The bed’s not made. Slops, filth … Yesterday’s porridge still in the plates! Pfui!”

“It’s true enough,” the student said, embarrassed. “Anyuta did not wash up today. All her time was taken.”

When Anyuta and the artist had left, Klochkov threw himself down on the divan and went on with his lessons, lying down. Unexpectedly he fell asleep, waking up an hour later. He propped his head in his fists and gave himself up to gloomy reflections. He remembered the artist saying that all civilized men were obliged to have a measure of aesthetic taste, and yet here in the room everything was revolting and loathsome. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as he would be in the future: receiving patients in his consulting room, drinking tea in a vast drawing room with his wife, a very proper woman, beside him—and now here was the washbasin with cigarette butts swimming around, and it was unbelievably nauseating. He thought of Anyuta—ugly, unprepossessing, pitiful. He decided to get rid of her at once, whatever the cost.

When she returned from the artist, she took off her coat. He got up and spoke very seriously: “My dear, sit down and listen to me. We have to separate. I don’t want to live with you any longer.”

Anyuta came back from the artist worn out and close to fainting. From long standing in a suitable pose, her face looked thin and sallow, her chin sharper than ever. She did not reply to the student, but her lips trembled.

“You knew it would have to come sooner or later,” the student said. “You’re a good, fine person, and you’re nobody’s fool. You’ll understand.”

Anyuta put on her coat again. Silently she wrapped up her embroidery in a sheet of paper, gathered up needles and thread, and picked up the four lumps of sugar she had left by the window. These she put on the table next to his books.

“There’s your sugar,” she said softly, and turned away to hide her tears.

“Why are you crying?” Klochkov said.

He walked confusedly around the room, and said: “Really you are a strange woman. You knew yourself we would have to separate one day. We can’t live together forever.”

She had already bundled together all her belongings. She was turning to say good-by when he felt sorry for her.

Perhaps I could let her live here for another week, he thought. After all, she might as well stay. In another week I’ll tell her to go.

Annoyed by his own weakness, he shouted roughly: “What are you standing there for? If you are going, go! If you don’t want to go, take off your coat and stay! Stay if you want to!”

Slowly, silently, Anyuta removed her coat, then blew her nose very softly, sighed, and quietly returned to her familiar place on the stool by the window.

The student drew up his textbook to him, and once again he began to pace up and down the floor.

“The right lung consists of three lobes,” he read slowly. “The upper lobe on the anterior wall of the chest reaches the fourth or fifth rib …”

In the passageway someone was shouting at the top of his voice: “Gregory! The samovar!”

February 1886