Forty Stories

Big Volodya and Little Volodya

“PLEASE let me drive! I’ll go and sit with the driver!” Sophia Lvovna said in a loud voice. “Wait a moment, driver! I’m coming to sit beside you!”

She stood up in the sleigh, and her husband, Vladimir Nikitich, and the friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mikhailovich, both held her hands to prevent her from falling. The troika was moving fast.

“I said she should never have touched the brandy,” Vladimir Nikitich said in annoyance as he turned to his companion. “You’re some fellow, eh?”

The colonel knew from experience that after even a moderate amount of drinking women like Sophia Lvovna often give way to hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they reached home, instead of going to sleep, he would spend the night administering compresses and pouring out medicines.

“Whoa there!” Sophia Lvovna shouted. “I want to drive!”

She felt genuinely happy and on top of the world. For the last two months, ever since her wedding, she had tormented herself with the thought that she had married Colonel Yagich for his money and, as they say, par dépit; but that day, in a surburban restaurant, she came suddenly and finally to the conclusion that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years he was so finely built, so agile and sinewy, and he was always making exquisite puns and accompanying gypsy bands. It is quite true that older men nowadays are a thousand times more interesting than the young: it seems as though age and youth have exchanged roles. The colonel was two years older than her father, but such a fact could have no significance when, to tell the truth, he had infinitely more vitality, vigor, and youthfulness than she had, and she was only twenty-three.

“Oh, my darling!” she thought. “How wonderful you are!”

In the restaurant she came to the conclusion that there was not one spark of her old feeling for her childhood friend left. For this friend, Vladimir Mikhailovich, or simply Volodya, she had felt only the day before an insane and desperate passion; now she was completely indifferent to him. All evening he had seemed stupid, dull, uninteresting, insignificant; and the way he cold-bloodedly and continually escaped paying the restaurant checks had shocked her, and so she had only just been able to resist telling him: “Why don’t you stay at home, if you are so poor?” The colonel paid for everything.

Perhaps because trees, telephone poles, and snowdrifts were flitting past her eyes, all kinds of disconnected thoughts were passing through her brain. She remembered now that the check at the restaurant amounted to a hundred and twenty rubles, and there was another hundred rubles for the gypsies, and tomorrow she could throw a thousand rubles away if she wanted to, while only two months ago, before her wedding, she had not three rubles to her name, and had to beg her father for the least little thing. How things had changed!

Her thoughts were confused. It occurred to her that when she was ten years old her present husband, Colonel Yagich, was flirting with her aunt, and everyone at home said he had ruined her, and it was perfectly true that her aunt came down to dinner with tears in her eyes and was always going off somewhere; and they said of her that she would never find any peace. He was extremely handsome in those days and had extraordinary success with women, a fact widely known in the town. They said that every day he went on a round of visits among his adorers, exactly like a doctor visiting his patients. Even now, in spite of his gray hair, wrinkles, and spectacles, his lean face, especially in profile, remained handsome.

Sophia Lvovna’s father was an army doctor who had once served in the same regiment as Yagich. Volodya’s father was also an army doctor; at one time he had served in the same regiment as Yagich and her father. In spite of many turbulent and complicated love affairs, Volodya had been a brilliant student, and now, having completed his course at the university with great success, he was specializing in foreign literature and, as they say, writing his dissertation. He lived in the barracks with his father, the army doctor, and although he was now thirty years old he still had no means of subsistence. As children, Sophia Lvovna and he had lived under the same roof, though in different apartments, and he often came to play with her, and they learned dancing and took French lessons together. As he grew to become a well-built, exceedingly handsome young man, she began to feel shy in his presence and fell madly in love with him, and she remained in love with him right up to the moment when she married Yagich. He, too, had been extraordinarily successful with women almost from the age of fourteen, and the women who deceived their husbands with him usually justified themselves by saying that Volodya was only a boy. Recently the story got around that when he was a student living in lodgings near the university, anyone who went to call on him would hear footsteps behind the door and there would come a whispered apology: “Pardon, je ne suis pas seul?” Yagich was enthusiastic about him, and as Derzhavin blessed Pushkin,¹ so Yagich blessed the young student, solemnly regarding him as his successor; and apparently he was very fond of him. For whole hours they played billiards or piquet together without saying a word, and if Yagich drove out on his troika he always took Volodya with him; and Yagich alone was initiated into the mysteries of his dissertation. Earlier, when the colonel was younger, they were often rivals in love, but there was never any jealousy between them. In the society in which they moved, Yagich was nicknamed Big Volodya and his friend Little Volodya.

On the sleigh, besides Sophia Lvovna, Big Volodya, and Little Volodya, there was still another person—Margarita Alexandrovna, known as Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagich, a very pale woman, over thirty, with black eyebrows and wearing pince-nez; she smoked cigarettes continually even in the bitterest frosty weather: there was always cigarette ash on her knees and on the front of her dress. She spoke through her nose, drawling out each word, a coldhearted woman who could drink any amount of liqueurs and brandy without getting drunk, and she liked telling anecdotes with double-entendres in a tasteless way. At home she read serious magazines from morning to night, while strewing cigarette ash all over them and eating frozen apples.

“Oh, Sonya, stop behaving like a lunatic!” she said, drawling out the words. “Really, it is too silly for words!”

When they were in sight of the town gate, the troika went more slowly, as houses and people began to flicker past; and now Sophia Lvovna grew quiet, nestling against her husband and surrendering to her own thoughts. Sitting opposite her was Little Volodya. Her happy, lighthearted thoughts were mingled with melancholy ones. She thought: “This man who is sitting opposite me knows I loved him, and it is very likely he believes the gossip that I married the colonel par dépit?” Not once had she ever told him she was in love with him, and she had never wanted him to know this, and accordingly she had concealed her feelings; but from the expression on his face it was perfectly obvious that he had seen through her, and her pride suffered. The most humiliating thing was that ever since the wedding Little Volodya had been forcing his attentions upon her, and this had never happened before. He spent long hours with her in complete silence or talking about nothing at all, and even now in the sleigh, though he did not speak to her, he would gently touch her feet or her hands. It appeared that he wanted nothing more and was delighted with her marriage; it also appeared that he despised her and she excited in him an interest of a certain kind, as though she were an immoral, disreputable woman. And when her triumphant affection for her husband mingled in her soul with feelings of humiliation and wounded pride, she was overcome with a fierce resentment and wanted to sit in the coachman’s box and whistle and scream at the horses.

They were just passing the nunnery when the huge sixteen-ton bell rang out. Rita crossed herself.

“Our Olga lives in the nunnery,” Sophia Ivanovna said, and then she crossed herself and shivered.

“Why did she enter a nunnery?” the colonel asked.

“Par dépit” Rita said angrily, with obvious reference to Sophia Lvovna’s marriage to Yagich. “Par dépit is all the rage now. Defy the whole world—that’s what they do. She was a furious little coquette, always giggling, and she only liked balls and cavaliers and then suddenly—she had gone away, and everyone was surprised!”

“Not true at all!” said Little Volodya, turning down the collar of his fur coat and revealing his handsome face. “It wasn’t par dépit at all, but something quite horrible, if you please. Her brother Dmitry went to penal servitude, and no one knows where he is. Her mother died of grief.”

Then he turned up his collar.

“Olga did well,” he added in a muffled voice. “Living as an adopted child and with that paragon of virtue Sophia Lvovna—you have to take that into account, too!”

Sophia Lvovna was well aware of the note of contempt in his voice and she wanted to say something to hurt him, but she remained silent. Once again she was overcome with a passion of remonstrance, and she rose to her feet and shouted in a tear-filled voice: “I want to go to the early service! Turn back, driver! I want to see Olga!”

They turned back, and the deep-toned nunnery bell reminded Sophia of Olga and about all Olga’s life. Other church bells were also ringing. When the driver brought the troika to a stop, Sophia Lvovna jumped from the sleigh, and ran unescorted up to the gate of the nunnery.

“Please be quick!” her husband shouted after her. “We’re already late!”

She went through the dark gateway and then along an avenue which led from the gateway to the largest of the churches, while the snow crackled under her feet and the church bells rang directly over her head, so that they seemed to penetrate her whole being. Then she came to the church door; there were three steps leading down, and a porch with icons on each side which smelled of incense and juniper, and then there was another door, and a dark figure opened it and bowed low to the ground. Inside the church, the service had not yet begun. One of the nuns was walking past the iconostasis and lighting the candles on the tall candlesticks, while another lit the candles on the luster. Here and there by the columns and the side chapels stood black motionless figures. “I suppose they will be standing there as they are now until tomorrow morning,” Sophia Lvovna thought, and it seemed to her that everything in the church was cold, dark, and boring—more boring than a cemetery. With a bored gaze she watched those motionless figures growing colder each minute, and suddenly she felt as though a hand were squeezing her heart. She recognized Olga, who was one of the nuns, with thin shoulders, a black kerchief over her head, and quite short. She was sure she had seen her, though when Olga had entered the nunnery she was plump and seemed taller. Hesitating, completely overwhelmed by what she had seen, Sophia Lvovna went up to the nun and looked at her over her shoulder, and she was sure it was Olga.

“Olga!” she cried, and clapped her hands, and she was so tongue-tied that she could only say: “Olga!”

The nun recognized her at once, and her eyebrows rose in surprise. Both her pure, pale, freshly washed face and the white headband she wore under the wimple seemed to be shining with joy.

“God has sent a miracle!” she cried, and she clapped her thin, pale hands.

Sophia Lvovna threw her arms fiercely around her, and then kissed her. She was afraid Olga would smell the wine she had drunk.

“We were just driving past when I remembered about you,” she said, breathing deeply, as though she had been hurrying. “Lord, how pale you are! I’m so glad to see you! Tell me how you are! Are you lonely here?”

Sophia Lvovna looked round at the other nuns and said softly: “There have been so many changes at home. You know I am married to Yagich—Vladimir Nikitich Yagich. I suppose you remember him.… I’m very happy!”

“Praise be,” Olga said. “And is your father well?”

“Yes, he’s well, thank you. He often asks about you. Olga, you must come and stay with us during the holidays.”

“Yes, of course,” Olga said, and she smiled. “I’ll come the second day of the holidays.”

Sophia Lvovna did not know why she began weeping. For a whole minute she wept silently, and then she dried her eyes and said: “Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She is here with us. Volodya’s here, too. They are near the gate. How pleased they would be if you would come out and see them! Shall we go? The service hasn’t begun yet.”

“Yes, let’s go,” Olga agreed.

She crossed herself three times and went out with Sophia Lvovna to the gate.

“Are you really happy? Are you, Sophia?” she asked as they came into the open.

“Very happy!”

“Praise be!”

Big Volodya and Little Volodya jumped out of the sleigh as soon as they saw the nun, and they greeted her respectfully. They were both visibly touched by her pallor and the dark nun’s costume, and they were both pleased because she remembered them and had come out to greet them. To prevent her from getting cold, Sophia wrapped her in a rug and covered her with a flap of fur coat. Sophia’s tears of a few moments ago had cleansed and relieved her spirits, and she was happy now that this noisy, restless, and in fact thoroughly impure night could have such a pure and clear-cut sequel. To keep Olga a little longer by her side, she said: “Let’s take her for a drive! Come in, Olga! We’ll just have a short drive.…”

The men expected the nun to refuse—holy people do not ride around in troikas—but to their surprise she agreed and got into the sleigh. And when the sleigh was hurrying in the direction of the town gate they were all silent, while trying to keep her warm and comfortable, and they were all thinking about her past and her present. Her face was passionless, almost expressionless, cold, pale, transparent, as though water, not blood, were flowing through her veins. Only two or three years ago she had been plump and red-cheeked, and she had talked all the time about her beaux and giggled over every mortal thing.

Near the town gate the sleigh turned back, and ten minutes later they stopped outside the nunnery gate and Olga got out. Now the church bells were ringing again.

“May God be with you,” Olga said, making a low bow as nuns always do.

“You’ll come and visit us, won’t you, Olga?”

“Yes, indeed!”

Then she left them and quickly disappeared through the dark gateway. Afterward the troika drove on again, and they were engulfed in a wave of melancholy. They were all silent. Sophia Lvovna felt as though her whole body had gone weak, and her spirits fell. It occurred to her that inviting a nun to sit in a sleigh and drive around with some drunken companions was stupid, tactless, and perhaps sacrilegious, and as her own drunkenness wore off, so she lost any desire to delude herself, and it became clear to her that she had no love for her husband and indeed could never love him, and it was all folly and stupidity. She had married him for his money, because, in the words of her school friends, he was madly rich, and because she was afraid of being an old maid like Rita, and because she was fed up with her father, the doctor, and because she wanted to annoy Little Volodya. If she could have known when she married her husband that her life would be hideous, dreadful, and burdensome, she would not have consented to the marriage for all the gold in the world. But the damage could never be undone, and she had to reconcile herself to it.

They went home. Lying in her warm soft bed and covering herself with her bedclothes, Sophia Lvovna remembered the dark doorway, the smell of incense, and the figures beside the columns, and she was terrified by the thought that these figures would remain motionless through the night, while she slept. The early service would go on forever, and would be followed by “the hours,” and then by the mass, and then by the thanksgiving service.…

“Oh, there is a God, yes, there truly is a God, and I must surely die, and that is why sooner or later I must think about my soul, about eternal life, and about Olga. Olga is saved now—she has found the answers to all the questions about herself.… But what if there is no God? Then her life has come to nothing. But how has it come to nothing? Why?”

A moment later another thought entered her head: “Yes, there is a God, and death will surely come, and I must think about my soul. If Olga saw death before her this very minute, she would not be afraid. She is ready. The important thing is that she has solved the problem of life for herself. There is a God … yes.… But is there any other way out, except by entering a nunnery? Entering a nunnery means renouncing life, reducing it to zero.…”

Sophia Lvovna began to feel a bit frightened. She hid her head under a pillow.

“I mustn’t think about it,” she muttered. “No, I mustn’t think about it.…”

Yagich was pacing the carpet in the adjoining room: there came the soft jingling sound of spurs as he surrendered to his contemplations. It occurred to Sophia Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only because he bore the name of Vladimir: that was the only reason. She sat up in bed and called out tenderly: “Volodya!”

“What’s the matter?” her husband answered.

“Nothing.”

She lay down again. She heard the pealing of a bell, and perhaps it came from the same nunnery she had been visiting. Once again she remembered the dark gateway and the figures standing there, and there came to her the idea of God and of her own inevitable death, and she put her hands to her ears to keep out the sound of the bells. It occurred to her that a long, long life stretched before her until old age and death finally overcame her, and every day of her life she would have to live in close proximity to a man she did not love, this man who was now entering the bedroom and preparing to go to bed, and she would have to stifle her hopeless love for the other man, who was young and fascinating and in her eyes quite extraordinary. She looked up at her husband and tried to say good night to him, but instead she suddenly burst into tears. She was distraught.

“Well, here comes the music!” Yagich said, and he stressed the second syllable of “music.”

She remained distraught until ten o’clock the next morning, when she finally stopped crying and trembling all over; her tears gave place to a terrible headache. Yagich was in a hurry to attend late mass; he was growling at the orderly who was helping him to dress in the next room. Once he came into the bedroom to fetch something, and his footsteps were attended by the soft jingling of spurs, and then he came in again wearing his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and it occurred to Sophia Lvovna that he looked and walked like a ravening beast.

She heard him ringing up someone on the telephone.

“Be so good as to connect me with the Vasilyevsky barracks,” he said, and a minute later: “Vasilyevsky barracks? Would you please ask Dr. Salimovich to come to the telephone?” And then another minute later: “Who’s speaking? Is that you, Volodya? Delighted. Dear boy, ask your father to come to the telephone at once. My wife is a bit upset after yesterday. Not at home, eh? Well, thank you very much. Excellent. Much obliged. Merci .…”

For the third time Yagich entered the bedroom, and he bent over the bed and made the sign of the cross over her and gave her his hand to kiss—the women who had loved him invariably kissed his hand, and he had fallen into the habit of doing this. Then, saying he would be back for dinner, he went out.

At noon the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailovich had arrived. Though she was staggering with fatigue and a headache, Sophia Lvovna quietly slipped into her wonderful new lilac-colored dressing gown, which was trimmed with fur, and she hurriedly arranged her hair. In her heart she felt a surge of inexpressible tenderness, and she was trembling with joy and the fear that he might leave her. She wanted only one thing—to gaze upon him.

Little Volodya was properly attired for calling upon a lady: he wore a frock coat and a white tie. When Sophia Lvovna entered the drawing room he kissed her hand and genuinely offered his sympathy over her illness. When they sat down, he praised her dressing gown.

“I was absolutely shattered by the visit to Olga yesterday,” she said. “At first I thought it was quite terrible, but now I envy her. She is like a rock which can never be destroyed, nothing can budge her. Tell me, Volodya, was there any other way out for her? Is burying oneself alive the answer to all life’s problems? It is death, not life …”

Little Volodya’s face was touched with deep emotion as he remembered Olga.

“Listen to me, Volodya, you are a clever man,” Sophia Lvovna went on. “Teach me how to rise above myself, as she has done. Of course, I am not a believer and could never enter a nunnery, but surely I could do something which is equivalent. My life is not an easy one,” she added after a pause. “Tell me something which will give me faith. Tell me something, even if it is only a single word.”

“One word? Well—ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!”

“Volodya, why do you despise me?” she asked, livid with anger. “You have a quite fatuous way of talking to me—I beg your pardon, but you do—people don’t talk to their friends and women acquaintances like that. You are so successful and so learned, and you love science, yet you never talk to me about scientific things. Why? Am I not worthy?”

Little Volodya’s brows were knit with vexation.

“Why this sudden interest in science?” he asked. “What about a discussion on the constitution—or maybe about sturgeon and horse-radish?”

“Very well. I’m an insignificant, silly, stupid woman without principles. I have an appalling number of faults. I’m a psychopath, I am utterly depraved—I should be despised for these things. But remember, you are ten years older than I am, and my husband is thirty years older. I’ve grown up before your eyes, and if you had wanted, you could have made anything out of me—even an angel. But instead”—and here her voice quivered—“you treated me abominably! Yagich married me when he was already an old man, but you could have …”

“We’ve had quite enough of that, haven’t we?” Volodya said, sitting close to her and kissing both her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, while I kiss your little hands …”

“You despise me! If only you knew how you are making me suffer!” She spoke uncertainly, knowing already that he would not believe her. “If only you knew how much I want to change and start my life afresh! I think about it with such joy!” she went on, while tears of joy actually sprang into her eyes. “Oh, to be good, honest, pure, never to lie, to have an aim in life …”

“Please stop putting on those silly airs—I don’t like them at all,” Volodya said, and his face assumed a whimsical expression. “Dear God, it’s like being on the stage! Why don’t we behave like ordinary people?”

She was afraid he would be angry and go away, and so she began to justify herself, and she forced herself to smile to please him, and once again she talked about Olga and how much she wanted to solve the problem of her life and become human.

“Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay,” he sang under his breath. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay …”

Quite suddenly he put his arm round her waist. Without knowing what she was doing she put her hands on his shoulders and for a full minute she gazed with a look of dazed rapture at his clever mocking face, his forehead, his eyes, his handsome beard.

“You have known for a long time how much I love you,” she confessed to him, and she blushed painfully, and she knew her lips were twisting convulsively with shame. “I love you! Why are you torturing me?”

She closed her eyes and kissed him fiercely on the lips, and it was a full minute before she was able to put an end to the kiss, even though she knew that kissing him was improper, and that he was standing in judgment over her, and that a servant might come in at any moment.

“Oh, how you are torturing me!” she repeated.

Half an hour later, when he had got all he wanted from her, and was sitting over lunch, she knelt before him and gazed hungrily up at his face, while he told her she resembled a puppy waiting for some ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on one knee and danced her up and down, as though she were a child, singing: “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay … Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay …”

When he was about to leave, she asked in passionate tones: “When? Today? Where?”

She held out both arms toward his lips, as though she wanted to tear out his answer with her hands.

“Today would hardly be suitable,” he told her after some thought. “Tomorrow perhaps.”

And so they parted. Before dinner Sophia Lvovna went along to the nunnery to see Olga, and was told that Olga was reading the psalter over the dead somewhere. From the nunnery she went off to see her father, but he was not at home, and so she took another sleigh and drove aimlessly through the roads and side streets until evening. For some reason she kept remembering that aunt of hers whose eyes were filled with tears and who knew no peace.

That night they drove again to the restaurant outside the town in a troika and listened to the gypsies. Driving past the nunnery, Sophia Lvovna again thought about Olga, and it terrified her that for girls and women of her station in life there was no solution except to go driving around in troikas and tell lies, or else to enter a nunnery and mortify the flesh. The next day she met her lover, and afterwards she drove around the town alone with a coachman and thought about her aunt.

During the following week Little Volodya threw her over. Life went on as usual, dull, miserable, sometimes even agonizing. The colonel and Little Volodya spent long hours together at billiards or playing piquet, and Rita continued to tell her tasteless anecdotes. Sophia Lvovna wandered around in her hired sleigh and kept asking her husband to take her for a drive in a troika.

Almost every day now she went to the nunnery and bored Olga with a recital of her unbearable sufferings, and she wept and felt she was bringing something impure and pitiable and worn-out into the cell with her, while Olga, in the tone of someone mechanically repeating a lesson, told her that all this was of no importance, it would all pass away, and God would forgive her.

1893

¹ The poet Gavril Derzhavin is said to have blessed the sixteen-year-old Pushkin in 1815.