Stories

WARD NO. 6

I

In the hospital yard stands a small annex surrounded by a whole forest of burdock, nettles, and wild hemp. The roof is rusty, the chimney is half fallen down, the porch steps are rotten and overgrown with grass, and only a few traces of stucco remain. The front façade faces the hospital, the back looks onto a field, from which it is separated by the gray hospital fence topped with nails. These nails, turned point up, and the fence, and the annex itself have that special despondent and accursed look that only our hospitals and prisons have.

If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, let us go down the narrow path that leads to the annex and see what is going on inside. Opening the first door, we go into the front hall. Here whole mountains of hospital rubbish are piled against the walls and around the stove. Mattresses, old torn dressing gowns, trousers, blue-striped shirts, worthless, worn-out shoes—all these rags are piled in heaps, crumpled, tangled, rotting and giving off a suffocating smell.

On top of this rubbish, always with a pipe in his mouth, lies the caretaker Nikita, an old retired soldier with faded tabs. He has a stern, haggard face, beetling brows, which give his face the look of a steppe sheepdog, and a red nose; he is small of stature, looks lean and sinewy, but his bearing is imposing and his fists are enormous. He is one of those simple-hearted, positive, efficient, and obtuse people who love order more than anything in the world and are therefore convinced that they must be beaten. He beats them on the face, the chest, the back, wherever, and is certain that without that there would be no order here.

Further on you enter a big, spacious room that takes up the entire annex, except for the front hall. The walls here are daubed with dirty blue paint, the ceiling is as sooty as in a chimneyless hut— clearly the stoves smoke in winter and the place is full of fumes. The windows are disfigured inside by iron grilles. The floor is gray and splintery. There is a stench of pickled cabbage, charred wicks, bedbugs, and ammonia, and for the first moment this stench gives you the impression that you have entered a menagerie.

In the room stand beds bolted to the floor. On them sit or lie people in blue hospital gowns and old-fashioned nightcaps. These are madmen.

There are five of them in all. Only one of them is of noble rank, the rest are tradesmen. First from the door, a tall, lean tradesman with a red, gleaming mustache and tearful eyes sits with his head propped on his hand and gazes at a single point. Day and night he grieves, shaking his head, sighing and smiling bitterly; he rarely takes part in conversation and usually does not reply to questions. He eats and drinks mechanically, when offered. Judging by his painful, racking cough, his thinness and the flush of his cheeks, he is in the first stages of consumption.

Next to him is a small, lively, extremely agile old man, with a pointed little beard and dark hair curly as a Negro’s. During the day he strolls about the ward from window to window, or sits on his bed, his legs tucked under Turkish-fashion, and whistles irrepressibly like a bullfinch, sings softly, and giggles. He displays a childlike gaiety and lively character at night as well, when he gets up to pray to God, that is, to beat his breast with his fists and poke at the door with his finger. This is the Jew Moiseika, a half-wit, who went crazy about twenty years ago when his hatter’s shop burned down.

Of all the inhabitants of Ward No. 6, he alone is allowed to go outside the annex and even outside the hospital yard. He has enjoyed this privilege for years, probably as a hospital old-timer and a quiet, harmless half-wit, a town fool, whom people have long been used to seeing in the streets surrounded by boys and dogs. In a flimsy robe, a ridiculous nightcap and slippers, sometimes barefoot and even without trousers, he walks about the streets, stopping at gates and shops and begging for a little kopeck. In one place they give him kvass, in another bread, in a third a little kopeck, so that he usually returns to the annex feeling rich and well-fed. Everything he brings with him Nikita takes for himself. The soldier does this rudely, vexedly, turning his pockets inside out and calling God to be his witness that he will never let the Jew out again and that for him disorder is the worst thing in the world.

Moiseika likes to oblige. He brings his comrades water, covers them up when they sleep, promises to bring each of them a little kopeck from outside and to make them new hats. He also feeds his neighbor on the left, a paralytic, with a spoon. He acts this way not out of compassion, nor from any humane considerations, but imitating and involuntarily submitting to Gromov, his neighbor on the right.

Ivan Dmitrich Gromov, a man of about thirty-three, of noble birth, a former bailiff and provincial secretary, suffers from persecution mania. He either lies curled up on the bed or paces from corner to corner, as if for exercise, but he very rarely sits. He is always agitated, excited, and tense with some vague, unfocused expectation. The slightest rustle in the front hall or shout in the yard is enough to make him raise his head and start listening: is it him they are coming for? Is it him they are looking for? And his face at those moments expresses extreme anxiety and revulsion.

I like his broad, high-cheekboned face, always pale and unhappy, reflecting as in a mirror his soul tormented by struggle and prolonged fear. His grimaces are strange and morbid, but the fine lines that deep and sincere suffering has drawn on his face are sensible and intelligent, and there is a warm, healthy brightness in his eyes. I like the man himself, polite, obliging, and of extraordinary delicacy in dealing with everyone except Nikita. When anyone drops a button or a spoon, he quickly jumps from his bed and picks it up. Every morning he wishes his comrades a good morning, and on going to bed he wishes them a good night.

Besides his permanently tense state and grimacing, his madness also expresses itself as follows. Sometimes in the evening he wraps himself in his robe and, trembling all over, teeth chattering, begins pacing rapidly from corner to corner and between the beds. It looks as if he has a very high fever. From the way he suddenly stops and gazes at his comrades, it is clear that he wants to say something very important, but, evidently realizing that he would not be listened to or understood, he shakes his head impatiently and goes on pacing. But soon the wish to speak overcomes all other considerations, and he gives himself free rein and speaks ardently and passionately His speech is disorderly, feverish, like raving, impulsive, and not always comprehensible, yet in it, in his words and in his voice, one can hear something extremely good. When he speaks, you recognize both the madman and the human being in him. It is hard to convey his insane speech on paper. He speaks of human meanness, of the violence that tramples on truth, of the beautiful life there will be on earth in time, of the grilles on the windows, which remind him every moment of the obtuseness and cruelty of the oppressors. The result is a disorderly, incoherent potpourri of old but still unfinished songs.

II

Some twelve or fifteen years ago there lived in town, right on the main street, in his own private house, the official Gromov, a solid and well-to-do man. He had two sons: Sergei and Ivan. When he was a fourth-year student, Sergei fell ill with galloping consumption and died, and this death seemed to mark the beginning of a whole series of misfortunes that suddenly rained down on the Gromov family. A week after Sergei’s funeral, the old father was taken to court for forgery and embezzlement, and soon afterwards died of typhus in the prison hospital. The house and all the move-able property was auctioned off, and Ivan Dmitrich and his mother were left without any means.

Formerly, when his father was alive, Ivan Dmitrich, who lived in Petersburg and studied at the university, received sixty or seventy roubles a month and had no notion of poverty, but now he was abruptly forced to change his life. He had to work from morning till night, giving penny lessons, doing copying work, and still go hungry, because all his earnings went to support his mother. Ivan Dmitrich proved unable to endure such a life, he lost heart, wasted away, and, quitting the university, went home. Here in town, through connections, he obtained a post as teacher in the local high school, but he did not get along with his colleagues, the students did not like him, and soon afterwards he quit the post. His mother died. For half a year he went without work, living on nothing but bread and water, then he was hired as a bailiff. That position he occupied until he was dismissed on account of illness.

Never, even in his young student years, did he give the impression of being a healthy person. He was always pale, thin, subject to colds, ate little, slept badly. One glass of wine made him dizzy and hysterical. He was always drawn to people, but, owing to his irritable character and mistrustfulness, he never became close to anyone and had no friends. He always spoke scornfully of the townspeople, saying that he found their coarse ignorance and sluggish animal existence loathsome and repulsive. He spoke in a tenor voice, loudly, ardently, and not otherwise than with indignation and exasperation, or with rapture and astonishment, and always sincerely. Whatever you touched upon with him, he brought it all down to one thing: life in town is stifling and boring, society has no higher interests, it leads a dull, meaningless life, finding diversion in violence, coarse depravity, and hypocrisy; the scoundrels are sleek and well-dressed, while honest men feed on crumbs; there is a need for schools, for a local newspaper with an honest trend, a theater, public readings, a uniting of intellectual forces; society needs to become aware of itself and be horrified. In his judgments of people he laid the paint on thick, only white and black, not recognizing any shades; mankind was divided for him into honest people and scoundrels; there was no middle ground. Of women and love he always spoke passionately, with rapture, but he was never once in love.

Despite his nervousness and the sharpness of his judgments, he was liked in town and, behind his back, was affectionately called Vanya. His innate delicacy, obligingness, decency, moral purity, and his worn little frock coat, sickly appearance, and family misfortunes, inspired a kindly, warm, and sad feeling; besides, he was educated and well-read, knew everything, in the townspeople’s opinion, and around town was something of a walking reference book.

He read a great deal. He used to sit in the club all the time, nervously pulling at his beard and leafing through magazines and books; one could see by his face that he was not reading but devouring, with barely any time to chew. It must be assumed that reading was one of his morbid habits, since he used to fall with equal appetite upon whatever was at hand, even the past year’s newspapers and calendars.¹ At home he always read lying down.

III

One autumn morning, the collar of his coat turned up, splashing through the mud, Ivan Dmitrich was making his way by lanes and backyards to some tradesman to collect on a court claim. He was in a dark mood, as always in the morning. In one lane he met two prisoners in chains, being escorted by four armed soldiers. Ivan Dmitrich had often met prisoners before, and each time they called up feelings of compassion and awkwardness in him, but this time the encounter made a special, strange impression on him. For some reason it suddenly seemed to him that he, too, could be put in chains and led in the same way through the mud to prison. Returning home after calling on the tradesman, he met near the post office a police inspector he knew, who greeted him and walked a few steps down the street with him, and for some reason he found that suspicious. At home he could not get the prisoners and armed soldiers out of his head all day, and an incomprehensible inner anxiety kept him from reading and concentrating. He did not light the lamp in the evening, and during the night he did not sleep, but kept thinking about the possibility of his being arrested, put in chains, and taken to prison. He was not guilty of anything that he knew of and could pledge that he would never kill, or burn, or steal; yet it was not difficult to commit a crime accidentally, inadvertently, and was slander or, finally, a judicial error impossible? Not for nothing has age-old popular experience taught us that against poverty and prison there is no guarantee. And a judicial error, given present-day court procedures, was very possible, and it would be no wonder if it happened. Those who take an official, business-like attitude towards other people’s suffering, like judges, policemen, doctors, from force of habit, as time goes by, become callous to such a degree that they would be unable to treat their clients otherwise than formally even if they wanted to; in this respect they are no different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in his backyard without noticing the blood. With this formal, heartless attitude towards the person, a judge needs only one thing to deprive an innocent man of all his property rights and sentence him to hard labor: time. Only the time to observe certain formalities, for which the judge is paid a salary, and after that—it is all over. Then go looking for justice and protection in this dirty little town two hundred miles from the railroad! And is it not ridiculous to think of justice when society greets all violence as a reasonable and expedient necessity, and any act of mercy—an acquittal, for instance—provokes a great outburst of dissatisfied, vengeful feeling?

In the morning Ivan Dmitrich got out of bed in horror, with cold sweat on his brow, already quite convinced that he could be arrested at any moment. If yesterday’s oppressive thoughts had not left him for so long, he thought, it meant there was a portion of truth in them. They could not, indeed, have come into his head without any reason.

A policeman unhurriedly passed by the windows: not for nothing. Here two men stopped near the house and stood silently. Why were they silent?

And painful days and nights began for Ivan Dmitrich. All who passed by his windows or entered the yard seemed like spies or sleuths to him. At noon the police chief usually drove down the street with his carriage and pair; he was coming to the police station from his outlying estate, but to Ivan Dmitrich it seemed each time that he was driving too fast and with some special expression: obviously he was hastening to announce that a very important criminal had appeared in town. Ivan Dmitrich jumped at each ring or knock at the gate; he suffered each time he met a new person at his landlady’s; when he met policemen or gendarmes he smiled and began to whistle in order to appear indifferent. He did not sleep for whole nights, expecting to be arrested, but he snored loudly and sighed like a sleeping man, so that his landlady would think he was asleep; because if he did not sleep, it meant he was suffering from remorse—what evidence! Facts and logical sense insisted that all these fears were absurd and psychopathic, that, once one took a broader view, there was nothing especially terrible in arrest and prison—as long as his conscience was at ease; but the more sensible and logical his reasoning was, the more intense and painful his inner anxiety became. It resembled the story of the recluse who wanted to clear a little spot for himself in a virgin forest; the more zealously he worked with the axe, the deeper and thicker the forest grew. Seeing in the end that it was useless, Ivan Dmitrich abandoned reasoning altogether and gave himself up entirely to fear and despair.

He began to seek solitude and avoid people. His work had disgusted him even before, but now it became unbearable to him. He was afraid that someone might do him a bad turn, put a bribe in his pocket surreptitiously and then expose him, or that he himself might make a mistake tantamount to forgery in some official papers, or lose someone else’s money Strangely, his thought had never before been so supple and inventive as now, when he invented thousands of different pretexts every day for seriously fearing for his freedom and honor. But, on the other hand, his interest in the external world, particularly in books, weakened considerably, and his memory began to fail him badly

In the spring, when the snow melted, two half-decayed corpses—of an old woman and a boy, with signs of violent death— were found in the ravine near the cemetery These corpses and the unknown murderers became the only talk of the town. To make sure that people would not think he killed them, Ivan Dmitrich went about the streets smiling, and, on meeting his acquaintances, turned pale, then blushed and began assuring them that there was no meaner crime than the murder of the weak and defenseless. But he soon wearied of this lie and, after some reflection, decided that in his situation the best thing would be—to hide in his landlady’s cellar. In that cellar he sat for a day, then a night, then another day, became very chilled, and, waiting till dark, made his way on the sly, like a thief, to his room. He stood till dawn in the middle of the room, motionless, listening. Early in the morning, before daybreak, some stovemakers came to his landlady’s. Ivan Dmitrich knew very well that they had come to reset the stove in the kitchen, but fear whispered to him that they were policemen disguised as stovemakers. He quietly left the apartment and, gripped by terror, ran down the street without his hat and frock coat. Dogs chased after him, barking, a peasant shouted somewhere behind him, the wind whistled in his ears, and it seemed to Ivan Dmitrich that the violence of the whole world had gathered at his back and was pursuing him.

He was stopped, brought home, and the landlady went for the doctor. Dr. Andrei Yefimych, of whom we shall speak further on, prescribed cold compresses and laurel water, shook his head sadly, and left, telling the landlady that he would not come anymore, because people should not be prevented from losing their minds. Since there was no money for expenses and medications at home, Ivan Dmitrich was soon sent to the hospital, where he was put in the ward for venereal patients. He did not sleep at night, fussed and disturbed the patients, and soon, on orders from Andrei Yefimych, was transferred to Ward No. 6.

Within a year Ivan Dmitrich was completely forgotten in town, and his books, which the landlady dumped into a sleigh in the shed, were pilfered by street boys.

IV

Ivan Dmitrich’s neighbor on the left, as I have already said, is the Jew Moiseika, and his neighbor on the right is a fat-swollen, nearly spherical peasant with a dumb, completely senseless face. He is an inert, gluttonous, and slovenly animal, who long ago lost the ability to think and feel. He constantly gives off a pungent, suffocating stench.

Nikita, who cleans up after him, beats him terribly, with all his might, not sparing his fists; and the terrible thing here is not that he is beaten—that one can get used to—but that this dumb animal does not respond to the beating either by sound or by movement, or by the expression of his eyes, but only rocks slightly like a heavy barrel.

The fifth and last inhabitant of Ward No. 6 is a tradesman who once worked as a sorter in the post office, a small, lean, blond fellow with a kind but somewhat sly face. Judging by his calm, intelligent eyes, which have a bright and cheerful look, he keeps his own counsel and has some very important and pleasant secret. He keeps something under his pillow or mattress that he does not show to anyone, not from fear that it might be taken away or stolen, but from bashfulness. Sometimes he goes to the window and, turning his back to his comrades, puts something on his chest and looks, craning his neck; if anyone approaches him at that moment, he gets embarrassed and tears the something off his chest. But his secret is not hard to guess.

“Congratulate me,” he often says to Ivan Dmitrich, “I’ve been recommended for the Stanislas, second degree, with star.² The second degree with star is only given to foreigners, but for some reason they want to make an exception in my case,” he smiles, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity. “I must confess, I really didn’t expect it!”

“I understand nothing about that,” Ivan Dmitrich says glumly.

“But do you know what I’ll get sooner or later?” the former sorter continues, narrowing his eyes slyly “I’m sure to get the Swedish ‘Polar Star.’³ It’s a decoration worth soliciting for. A white cross and a black ribbon. Very beautiful.”

Probably nowhere else is life so monotonous as in this annex. In the morning the patients, except for the paralytic and the fat peasant, wash themselves from a big tub in the front hall, wiping themselves with the skirts of their robes; after that they have tea in tin mugs, which Nikita brings from the main building. Each of them gets one mug. At noon they eat pickled cabbage soup and kasha, and in the evening they have the kasha left over from dinner. In between they lie down, sleep, look out the windows, or pace up and down. And so it goes every day. Even the former sorter talks about the same decorations.

New people are seldom seen in Ward No. 6. The doctor long ago stopped accepting new madmen, and there are not many in this world who enjoy visiting madhouses. Once every two months the barber, Semyon Lazarich, visits the annex. Of how he gives the madmen haircuts, and how Nikita helps him to do it, and what commotion among the patients each appearance of the drunken, grinning barber causes, we will not speak.

Apart from the barber, no one comes to the annex. The patients are condemned to see only Nikita day after day.

Recently, however, a rather strange rumor spread through the hospital.

The rumor went around that the doctor had started visiting Ward No. 6.

V

Strange rumor!

Dr. Andrei Yefimych Ragin is a remarkable man in his way. They say that he was very pious in his youth, was preparing for a clerical career, and that, on graduating from high school in 1863, he intended to enter a theological academy, but that his father, a doctor of medicine and a surgeon, supposedly mocked him venomously and said categorically that he would not consider him his son if he became a priest. How much truth there is to it I do not know, but Andrei Yefimych himself admitted more than once that he never felt any vocation for medicine or generally for any particular science.

However that may be, having completed his studies in the medical faculty, he did not become a priest. He showed no devoutness, and resembled a clergyman as little at the start of his medical career as he does now.

His appearance is heavy, coarse, peasant-like; with his face, his beard, his lank hair and sturdy, clumsy build, he resembles a highway innkeeper, overfed, intemperate, and tough. His face is stern, covered with little blue veins, his eyes are small, his nose red. Tall and broad-shouldered, he has enormous hands and feet; it looks like one whack of his fist would be lights out. But he walks softly, and his gait is cautious and furtive; meeting you in a narrow corridor, he always stops first to make way, and says, not in a bass but in a high, soft tenor: “Excuse me!” He has a small growth on his neck that prevents him from wearing stiff, starched collars, and therefore he always goes about in soft linen or cotton shirts. Generally, he does not dress in doctorly fashion. He goes about in the same suit for some ten years, and new clothes, which he usually buys in a Jewish shop, seem as worn and wrinkled on him as the old; he receives patients, eats dinner, and goes visiting in the same frock coat; but that is not from stinginess, but from a total disregard for his appearance.

When Andrei Yefimych came to take up his post in town, the “charitable institution” was in a terrible state. In the wards, the corridors, and the hospital yard, it was hard to breathe for the stench. The peasant caretakers, nurses, and their children slept in the wards along with the patients. People complained that there was no bearing with the cockroaches, bedbugs and mice. Erysipelas had installed itself permanently in the surgery section. There were only two scalpels and not a single thermometer in the entire hospital; the baths served for storing potatoes. The superintendent, the matron, and the doctor’s assistant robbed the patients, and of the old doctor, Andrei Yefimych’s predecessor, it was said that he had secretly traded in hospital alcohol and had started a real harem for himself among the nurses and female patients. The townspeople were well aware of these disorders and even exaggerated them, but they viewed them calmly; some justified them by saying that only tradesmen and peasants stayed in the hospital, who could not be displeased, since they lived much worse at home than in the hospital—no one was going to feed them on grouse! Others said in justification that the town alone, without the help of the zemstvo,⁴was unable to maintain a good hospital; thank God they at least had a bad one. And the young zemstvo would not open a clinic either in town or near it, explaining that the town already had its own hospital.

Having inspected the hospital, Andrei Yefimych came to the conclusion that it was an immoral institution and highly detrimental to the health of the citizens. In his opinion, the most intelligent thing that could be done would be to discharge the patients and close the place down. But for that he reckoned that his will alone was not enough and in any case it would be useless; when physical and moral uncleanness was driven out of one place, it went to another; one had to wait until it dispersed of itself. Besides, if people had opened the hospital and put up with it in their town, it meant they needed it; prejudice and all this everyday filth and muck are necessary, because in time they turn into something useful, as dung turns into black earth. There is nothing good in the world that does not have some filth in its origin.

On taking over the post, Andrei Yefimych treated these disorders with apparent indifference. He merely asked the peasant caretakers and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and installed two cabinets with instruments. The superintendent, the matron, the assistant doctor, and the surgical erysipelas stayed where they were.

Andrei Yefimych is extremely fond of intelligence and honesty, but he lacks character and faith in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life around him. He is positively incapable of ordering, prohibiting, or insisting. It looks as if he has taken a vow never to raise his voice or speak in the imperative. To say “give” or “bring” is hard for him; when he wants to eat, he coughs irresolutely and says to his cook: “How about some tea?” or “How about some dinner?” But to tell the superintendent to stop stealing, or to dismiss him, or to abolish the useless, parasitic post altogether—is completely beyond his strength. When Andrei Yefimych is deceived or flattered, or handed a false receipt to sign knowingly, he turns as red as a lobster and feels guilty, but all the same he signs the receipt; when the patients complain to him that they are hungry or that the nurses are rude, he gets embarrassed and mutters guiltily:

“All right, all right, I’ll look into it later … There’s probably some misunderstanding …”

At first Andrei Yefimych worked very assiduously. He received every day from morning till dinnertime, did surgery and even took up the practice of obstetrics. Ladies said of him that he was attentive and excellent at diagnosing illnesses, especially in children and women. But as time went on he became noticeably bored with the monotony and obvious uselessness of the work. Today you receive thirty patients, and tomorrow, lo and behold, thirty-five come pouring in, and the next day forty, and so it goes, day after day, year after year, and the town mortality rate does not go down, and the patients do not stop coming. To give serious aid to forty outpatients between morning and dinnertime was physically impossible, which meant, willy-nilly, that it was all a deceit. During the fiscal year twelve thousand outpatients were received, which meant, simply speaking, that twelve thousand people were deceived. To put the seriously ill in the hospital and care for them according to the rules of science was also impossible, because while there were rules, there was no science; and to abandon philosophy and follow the rules pedantically, as other doctors did, you first of all needed cleanliness and ventilation, not filth, and wholesome food, not soup made from stinking pickled cabbage, and good assistants, not thieves.

Then, too, why prevent people from dying, if death is the normal and natural end of every man? So what if some dealer or clerk lives for an extra five or ten years? If the purpose of medical science is seen as the alleviation of suffering by medication, then, willy-nilly, the question arises: why alleviate it? First, they say that suffering leads man to perfection, and, second, if mankind really learns to alleviate its suffering with pills and drops, it will completely abandon religion and philosophy, in which it has hitherto found not only a defense against all calamities, but even happiness. Pushkin suffered terribly before death, poor Heine lay paralyzed for many years: why should there be no illness for some Andrei Yefimych or Matryona Savishna, whose life is insipid and would be completely empty and similar to the life of an amoeba were it not for suffering?

Oppressed by such reasoning, Andrei Yefimych threw up his hands and stopped going to the hospital every day.

VI

His life goes like this. Ordinarily he gets up in the morning at around eight, dresses and has tea. Then he sits in his study and reads or goes to the hospital. There, in the hospital, in a dark, narrow corridor, the outpatients sit waiting to be received. Peasants and nurses rush past them, their boots stomping on the brick floor, skinny patients in robes pass by, dead bodies and pots of excrement are carried out, children cry, a drafty wind blows. Andrei Yefimych knows that for the feverish, the consumptive, and the impressionable sick in general, such an atmosphere is torture, but what can he do? In the receiving room he is met by his assistant, Sergei Sergeich, a small, fat man with a clean-shaven, well-scrubbed, plump face, with soft, smooth manners, wearing a roomy new suit and looking more like a senator than an assistant doctor. He has an enormous practice in town, wears a white tie, and considers himself more knowledgeable than the doctor, who has no practice at all. In the corner of the receiving room stands a big icon in a case, with a heavy icon lamp, beside it a candle stand under a white cover; on the walls hang portraits of bishops, a view of the Svyatogorsk monastery, and wreaths of dried cornflowers. Sergei Sergeich is religious and a lover of the beauteous. The icon was installed at his expense; on Sundays one of the patients, on his orders, reads an akathist⁵ aloud in the receiving room, and after the reading Sergei Sergeich himself makes the rounds of all the wards carrying a censer and censing everybody.

The patients are many, but time is short, and so the business is confined to a brief questioning and the dispensing of some sort of medicine like camphor ointment or castor oil. Andrei Yefimych sits with his cheek propped on his fist, deep in thought, and asks questions mechanically. Sergei Sergeich also sits rubbing his little hands and occasionally mixes in.

“We get sick and suffer want,” he says, “because we don’t pray properly to the merciful Lord. Yes!”

Andrei Yefimych does not do any surgery during receiving hours; he got out of the habit long ago, and the sight of blood upsets him unpleasantly. When he has to open a child’s mouth to look down his throat, and the child shouts and resists with his little hands, the noise in his ears makes him giddy and tears come to his eyes. He hastens to prescribe some medicine and waves his arms, so that the peasant mother will quickly take the child away.

While receiving, he quickly becomes bored with the patients’ timidity, their witlessness, the proximity of the beauteous Sergei Sergeich, the portraits on the walls, and his own questions, which he has been asking unvaryingly for twenty years now. And he leaves after receiving five or six patients. The assistant doctor receives the rest without him.

With the agreeable thought that, thank God, he has had no private practice for a long time, and that no one will bother him, Andrei Yefimych goes home, sits down immediately at the desk in his study, and begins to read. He reads a lot, and always with great pleasure. Half of his salary goes on books, and of the six rooms of his apartment, three are heaped with books and old magazines. He likes writings on history and philosophy most of all; in the field of medicine, he subscribes to The Doctor, which he always starts reading from the back. Each time the reading goes on uninterruptedly for several hours without tiring him. He does not read quickly and impulsively, as Ivan Dmitrich used to, but slowly, sensitively, often lingering over places that please or puzzle him. Beside the book there always stands a little carafe of vodka, and a pickled cucumber or apple lies directly on the baize, without a plate. Every half hour, without taking his eyes off the book, he pours himself a glass of vodka and drinks it, then, without looking, feels for the pickle and takes a bite.

At three o’clock he warily approaches the kitchen door, coughs, and says:

“Daryushka, how about some dinner …”

After dinner, rather poor and slovenly, Andrei Yefimych paces about his rooms, his arms folded on his chest, and thinks. It strikes four, then five, and still he paces and thinks. Occasionally the kitchen door creaks, and Daryushka’s red, sleepy face peeks out.

“Andrei Yefimych, isn’t it time you had your beer?” she asks worriedly.

“No, not yet …” he replies. “I’ll wait a bit … wait a bit …”

Towards evening the postmaster, Mikhail Averyanych, usually comes, the only man in town whose company Andrei Yefimych does not find burdensome. Mikhail Averyanych was once a very rich landowner and served in the cavalry, but he was ruined and, out of need, joined the postal service in his old age. He has a hale and hearty look, magnificent gray side-whiskers, well-bred manners, and a loud, pleasant voice. He is kind and sensitive, but hot-tempered. When a client at the post office protests, disagrees, or simply begins to argue, Mikhail Averyanych turns purple, shakes all over, and in a thundering voice shouts: “Silence!” so that the post office has long since acquired the reputation of an institution one fears to visit. Mikhail Averyanych respects and loves Andrei Yefimych for his education and nobility of soul, but to the rest of the townspeople he behaves haughtily, as to his own subordinates.

“And here I am!” he says, coming in to Andrei Yefimych’s. “Good evening, my dear! You must be tired of me by now, eh?”

“On the contrary, I’m very glad,” the doctor replies. “I’m always glad to see you.”

The friends sit down on the sofa in the study and smoke silently for a time.

“Daryushka, how about some beer!” says Andrei Yefimych.

The first bottle is also drunk silently—the doctor deep in thought, and Mikhail Averyanych with a merry, animated air, like a man who has something very interesting to tell. It is always the doctor who begins the conversation.

“What a pity,” he says slowly and softly, shaking his head and not looking his interlocutor in the eye (he never looks anyone in the eye), “what a great pity, my esteemed Mikhail Averyanych, that our town is totally lacking in people who enjoy and are capable of carrying on an intelligent and interesting conversation. That is an enormous privation for us. Even the intelligentsia is not above banality; the level of its development, I assure you, is no whit higher than in the lower estates.”

“Quite right. I agree.”

“You yourself are aware,” the doctor continues softly and measuredly, “that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of human reason. Reason draws a sharp distinction between animal and man, hints at the divinity of the latter, and for him, to a certain degree, even takes the place of immortality, which does not exist. Hence, reason is the only possible source of pleasure. We, however, neither see nor hear any reason around us—which means we are deprived of pleasure. True, we have books, but that is not at all the same as live conversation and intercourse. If you will permit me a not entirely successful comparison, books are the scores, while conversation is the singing.”

“Quite right.”

Silence ensues. Daryushka comes from the kitchen and, with an expression of dumb grief, her face propped on her fist, stops in the doorway to listen.

“Ah!” sighs Mikhail Averyanych. “To ask reason of people nowadays!”

And he talks about how life used to be wholesome, gay, and interesting, what a smart intelligentsia there was in Russia and how highly it placed the notions of honor and friendship. Money was lent without receipt, and it was considered a disgrace not to offer a helping hand to a needy comrade. “And what campaigns, adventures, skirmishes there were, what comrades, what women! And the Caucasus—what an astonishing country! And the wife of one of the battalion commanders, a strange woman, used to dress up as an officer and ride off into the mountains in the evening alone, without an escort. They said she was having a romance with some princeling in a village there.”

“Saints alive …” Daryushka sighs.

“And how they drank! How they ate! What desperate liberals they were!”

Andrei Yefimych listens and hears nothing; he ponders something and sips his beer.

“I often dream about intelligent people and conversations with them,” he says unexpectedly, interrupting Mikhail Averyanych. “My father gave me an excellent education, but, influenced by the ideas of the sixties,⁶ he forced me to become a doctor. I think that if I hadn’t obeyed him, I would now be at the very center of the intellectual movement. I would probably be a member of some faculty. Of course, reason is not eternal and also passes, but you already know why I am well disposed towards it. Life is a vexing trap. When a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to adult consciousness, he involuntarily feels as if he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, against his will he is called by certain accidents from non-being into life … Why? He wants to learn the meaning and aim of his existence, and he is not told or else is told absurdities; he knocks—it is not opened; death comes to him—also against his will. And so, as people in prison, bound by a common misfortune, feel better when they come together, so also in life the trap can be disregarded when people inclined to analysis and generalization come together and spend time exchanging proud, free ideas. In this sense reason is an irreplaceable pleasure.”

“Quite right.”

Without looking his interlocutor in the eye, softly and with pauses, Andrei Yefimych goes on talking about intelligent people and his conversations with them, and Mikhail Averyanych listens to him attentively and agrees: “Quite right.”

“And you don’t believe in the immortality of the soul?” the postmaster suddenly asks.

“No, my esteemed Mikhail Averyanych, I do not believe in it and have no grounds for doing so.”

“I confess that I, too, have doubts. Though, incidentally, I have the feeling that I’ll never die. Hey, I think to myself, you old duffer, it’s time for you to die! And a little voice in my soul says: don’t believe it, you won’t die! …”

After nine, Mikhail Averyanych leaves. Putting his fur coat on in the front hall, he says with a sigh:

“But what a hole the fates have brought us to! The most vexing thing is that we’ll have to die here as well. Ah! …”

VII

After seeing his friend off, Andrei Yefimych sits down at the desk and again begins to read. The stillness of the evening and then the night is not broken by any sound, and time seems to stop, transfixed, with the doctor over the book, and it seems that nothing exists except for this book and the lamp with its green shade. The doctor’s coarse, peasant face gradually lights up with a smile of tenderness and delight at the movements of the human spirit. Oh, why is man not immortal? he thinks. Why brain centers and convolutions, why sight, speech, self-awareness, genius, if it is all doomed to sink into the ground and in the final end to cool down along with the earth’s crust and then whirl without sense or purpose, for millions of years, with the earth around the sun? For that cooling down and whirling around there was no need at all to bring man out of non-being, along with his lofty, almost divine reason, and then, as if in mockery, turn him into clay.

The life cycle! But what cowardice to comfort oneself with this surrogate of immortality! The unconcious processes that occur in nature are even lower than human stupidity, for in stupidity there is still consciousness and will, while in these processes there is nothing. Only a coward whose fear of death is greater than his dignity can comfort himself with the thought that in time his body will live in grass, a stone, a toad … To see one’s own immortality in the life cycle is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future to the case after the costly violin has been broken and made useless.

When the clock strikes, Andrei Yefimych throws himself back in his armchair and closes his eyes in order to think a little. And inadvertently, under the influence of the good thoughts he has found in his book, he casts a glance over his past and present. The past is repulsive, better not to recall it. And the present is the same as the past. He knows that all the while his thoughts are whirling together with the cooled-down earth around the sun, in the big building next door to the doctor’s apartment people are languishing in disease and physical uncleanness; perhaps someone is lying awake and battling with insects, or someone is coming down with erysipelas or moaning because his bandage is too tight; perhaps the patients are playing cards with the nurses and drinking vodka. Twelve thousand people have been deceived during the fiscal year; the whole hospital business, just as twenty years ago, is built on theft, squabbles, gossip, chumminess, crude charlatanism, and, just as before, the hospital is an immoral institution, highly detrimental to the townspeople’s health. He knows that in Ward No. 6, behind the grilles, Nikita is beating the patients, and that Moiseika goes around town every day begging for alms.

On the other hand, he knows perfectly well that a fabulous change has come over medicine in the last twenty-five years. When he was studying at the university, it seemed to him that the same lot that had befallen alchemy and metaphysics would soon befall medicine, but now, when he reads at night, medicine touches him and arouses astonishment and even rapture in him. Indeed, what unexpected splendor, what a revolution! Owing to antiseptics, such operations are performed as the great Pirogov⁷ considered impossible even in spe.⁸ Ordinary zemstvo doctors dare to perform resections of the knee, only one out of a hundred Caesarean sections ends in death, and gallstones are considered such a trifle that no one even writes about them. Syphilis can be radically cured. And the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch,⁹ hygiene, and statistics, and our Russian zemstvo doctors? Psychiatry, with its present-day classification of illnesses, its methods of diagnosis and treatment, is a whole Mt. Elbrus¹⁰ compared to what it used to be. No one pours cold water over madmen’s heads now, or puts them in straitjackets: they are kept like human beings and, as the newspapers report, even have performances and balls organized for them. Andrei Yefimych knows that, given present-day views and tastes, such an abomination as Ward No. 6 is perhaps only possible two hundred miles from the railroad, in a town where the mayor and all the councilmen are semi-literate bourgeois, who see a doctor as a sort of priest who is to be believed without any criticism, even if he starts pouring molten tin down people’s throats; anywhere else the public and the newspapers would long ago have smashed this little Bastille to bits.

“Well, so?” Andrei Yefimych asks himself, opening his eyes. “What of it? Antiseptics, and Koch, and Pasteur, but the essence of the matter hasn’t changed at all. The rates of sickness and mortality remain the same. Balls and performances are organized for the mad, but even so they’re not released. That means it’s all nonsense and vanity, and in essence there’s no difference between the best clinic in Vienna and my hospital.”

But sorrow and a feeling akin to envy interfere with his indifference. It must be from fatigue. His heavy head sinks onto the book, he puts his hands under his face to make it softer, and thinks:

“I serve a harmful cause, and I receive a salary from the people I deceive. I am dishonest. But by myself I’m nothing, I’m merely a particle of an inevitable social evil: all provincial officials are harmful and receive their salaries for nothing … So it is not I who am to blame for my dishonesty, but the times … If I had been born two hundred years later, I would be different.”

When it strikes three, he puts out the lamp and goes to the bedroom. He does not feel like sleeping.

VIII

About two years ago the zemstvo waxed generous and decided to allot three hundred roubles annually to subsidize the reinforcement of medical personnel in the town hospital, until such time as the zemstvo hospital opened, and the town invited a district doctor, Evgeny Fyodorych Khobotov, to assist Andrei Yefimych. He is still a very young man—not yet thirty—tall, dark-haired, with broad cheekbones and small eyes; his ancestors probably belonged to a racial minority He arrived in town without a cent, with a small suitcase and a homely young woman whom he calls his cook. This woman had a baby at the breast. Evgeny Fyodorych goes about in a peaked cap and high boots, and in winter wears a short jacket. He has become close with the assistant doctor, Sergei Sergeich, and with the treasurer, and for some reason calls the rest of the officials aristocrats and shuns them. There is only one book in his whole apartment: Latest Prescriptions of the Vienna Clinic for 1881. When he visits a patient, he always takes this book with him. In the evening, he plays billiards at the club, but he does not like cards. He has a great fondness for introducing into his conversation such words as “flim-flam,” “mantifolia with vinegar,” “you’re just blowing smoke,” and so on.

He comes to the hospital twice a week, makes the rounds of the wards, and receives patients. The total absence of antiseptics and the use of cupping glasses¹¹ make him indignant, but he does not introduce any new rules for fear of insulting Andrei Yefimych. He considers his colleague Andrei Yefimych an old swindler, suspects him of having great means, and secretly envies him. He would gladly take over his post.

IX

One spring evening at the end of March, when there was no more snow on the ground and the starlings were singing in the hospital garden, the doctor went outside to see his friend the postmaster to the gate. Just then the Jew Moiseika, returning from his hunt, came into the yard. He was hatless, had low galoshes on his bare feet, and was carrying a small bag of alms.

“Give me a little kopeck!” he addressed the doctor, shivering with cold and smiling.

Andrei Yefimych, who could never say no, gave him ten kopecks.

“This is so wrong,” he thought, looking at his bare legs and red, skinny ankles. “It’s wet out.”

And, moved by a feeling akin to both pity and squeamishness, he followed the Jew to the annex, looking alternately at his bald spot and his ankles. As the doctor came in, Nikita jumped off the pile of rubbish and stood up straight.

“Hello, Nikita,” Andrei Yefimych said softly. “How about giving this Jew some boots, otherwise he’ll catch cold.”

“Yes, Your Honor! I’ll report it to the superintendent.”

“Please do. Ask him on my behalf. Tell him I asked for it.”

The door from the hall to the ward was open. Ivan Dmitrich, who lay in bed propped on one elbow, listened anxiously to the strange voice and suddenly recognized the doctor. He shook all over with wrath, jumped up, and, his face red and angry, his eyes popping, rushed to the middle of the room.

“The doctor has come!” he cried and burst into loud laughter. “At last! Gentlemen, I congratulate you, the doctor has bestowed a visit upon us! Cursed vermin!” he shrieked and stamped his foot in a frenzy such as had not been seen in the ward before. “Kill the vermin! No, killing’s not enough! Drown him in the outhouse!”

Andrei Yefimych, hearing that, peeked into the room and asked softly:

“What for?”

“What for?” cried Ivan Dmitrich, approaching him with a menacing look and convulsively wrapping his robe around him. “What for? Thief!” he said with disgust, pursing his lips as if he were about to spit. “Charlatan! Hangman!”

“Calm yourself,” said Andrei Yefimych, smiling guiltily. “I assure you, I’ve never stolen anything, and as for the rest, you are probably exaggerating greatly. I can see that you are angry with me. Calm yourself, if you can, I beg you, and tell me coolheadedly: why are you angry?”

“And why do you keep me here?”

“Because you are ill.”

“Ill, yes. But dozens, hundreds, of madmen are walking around free, because in your ignorance you are unable to tell them from the sane. Why, then, must I and these unfortunates sit here for all of them, like scapegoats? In the moral respect, you, your assistant, the superintendent, and all your hospital scum are immeasurably lower than any of us, so why do we sit here and not you? Where’s the logic?”

“Logic and the moral respect have nothing to do with it. It all depends on chance. Those who have been put here, sit here, and those who have not are walking around, that’s all. That I am a doctor and you are a mental patient has no morality or logic in it—it’s a matter of pure chance.”

“I don’t understand that gibberish …” Ivan Dmitrich said dully, and he sat down on his bed.

Moiseika, whom Nikita was embarrassed to search in the doctor’s presence, laid out his pieces of bread, scraps of paper, and little bones on the bed and, still shivering with cold, began saying something rapidly and melodiously in Hebrew. He probably imagined he had opened a shop.

“Release me!” said Ivan Dmitrich, and his voice trembled.

“I can’t.”

“But why not? Why not?”

“Because it’s not in my power. Consider, what good will it do you if I release you? Go now. The townspeople or the police will stop you and bring you back.”

“Yes, yes, it’s true …” said Ivan Dmitrich, and he rubbed his forehead. “It’s terrible! But what am I to do? What?”

Andrei Yefimych liked Ivan Dmitrich’s voice and his young, intelligent face with its grimaces. He wished to be kind to the young man and calm him down. He sat beside him on the bed, thought a little, and said:

“You ask, what is to be done? The best thing in your situation would be to run away from here. But, unfortunately, that is useless. You’ll be stopped. When society protects itself from criminals, the mentally ill, and generally inconvenient people, it is invincible. One thing is left for you: to rest with the thought that your being here is necessary.”

“Nobody needs it.”

“Since prisons and madhouses exist, someone must sit in them. If not you, then me; if not me, some third person. Wait till the distant future, when there will be no more prisons and madhouses; then there will be no bars on the windows, no hospital robes. Such a time is sure to come sooner or later.”

Ivan Dmitrich smiled mockingly.

“You’re joking,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Gentlemen like you and your helper Nikita don’t care about the future at all, but rest assured, my dear sir, that better times will come! My expressions may be banal, you may laugh, but the dawn of the new life will shine forth, truth will triumph, and—it will be our turn to celebrate! I won’t live to see it, I’ll croak, but somebody’s great-grandchildren will see it. I greet them with all my heart, and I rejoice, I rejoice for them! Forward! May God help you, my friends!”

Ivan Dmitrich, his eyes shining, got up and, stretching his arms towards the window, went on in an excited voice:

“From behind these bars I bless you! Long live the truth! I rejoice!”

“I see no special reason for rejoicing,” said Andrei Yefimych, who found Ivan Dmitrich’s gesture theatrical, but at the same time liked it very much. “There won’t be any prisons and madhouses, and truth, as you were pleased to put it, will triumph, but the essence of things will not change, the laws of nature will remain the same. People will get sick, grow old, and die, just as they do now. However magnificent the dawn that lights up your life, in the end you’ll still be nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole.”

“And immortality?”

“Oh, come now!”

“You don’t believe in it. Well, but I do. In Dostoevsky or Voltaire somebody says if there were no God, people would have invented him.¹² And I deeply believe that if there is no immortality, sooner or later the great human mind will invent it.”

“Well said,” pronounced Andrei Yefimych, smiling with pleasure. “It’s good that you believe. With such faith one can live beautifully even bricked up in a wall. You must have received some education?”

“Yes, I studied at the university, but I didn’t finish.”

“You’re a thinking and perceptive man. You can find peace within yourself under any circumstances. Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world—man has never known anything higher than these two blessings. And you can possess them even if you live behind triple bars. Diogenes¹³ lived in a barrel, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth.”

“Your Diogenes was a blockhead,” Ivan Dmitrich said sullenly. “What are you telling me about Diogenes and some sort of comprehension?” He suddenly became angry and jumped up. “I love life, I love it passionately! I have a persecution mania, a constant, tormenting fear, but there are moments when I’m seized by a thirst for life, and then I’m afraid of losing my mind. I want terribly to live, terribly!”

He paced about the ward in agitation and said in a lowered voice:

“When I dream, I’m visited by phantoms. People come to me, I hear voices, music, and it seems to me that I’m strolling in some forest, on the seashore, and I want so passionately to have cares, concerns … Tell me, what’s new there?” asked Ivan Dmitrich. “How are things?”

“Do you wish to know about the town or generally?”

“Well, first tell me about the town and then generally”

“How is it? In town, excruciatingly boring … There’s nobody to talk to, nobody to listen to. There are no new people. Though the young doctor Khobotov came recently.”

“He came while I was still there. A boor, or what?”

“Yes, an uncultivated man. It’s strange, you know… To all appearances, there is no intellectual stagnation in our capitals, there is movement—meaning that there must be real people there—but for some reason they always send us such people that you can’t stand the sight of them! A wretched town!”

“Yes, a wretched town!” Ivan Dmitrich said and laughed. “And how is it generally? What are they writing in the newspapers and magazines?”

It was already dark in the ward. The doctor got up and, standing, began to tell about what people were writing abroad and in Russia and what trends of thought could be observed at present. Ivan Dmitrich listened attentively and asked questions, but suddenly, as if recalling something terrible, clutched his head and lay down on the bed, his back to the doctor.

“What’s wrong?” asked Andrei Yefimych.

“You won’t hear another word from me!” Ivan Dmitrich said rudely. “Leave me alone!”

“But why?”

“Leave me alone, I tell you! What the devil do you want?”

Andrei Yefimych shrugged, sighed, and went out. Passing through the front hall, he said:

“How about cleaning up here, Nikita … It smells awful!”

“Yes, Your Honor!”

“What a nice young man!” thought Andrei Yefimych as he walked to his own quarters. “In all the time I’ve lived here, it seems he’s the first with whom one can talk. He knows how to reason and is interested in precisely the right things.”

Reading and then lying in bed, he kept thinking about Ivan Dmitrich, and waking up the next morning, he remembered that he had made the acquaintance of an intelligent and interesting man yesterday and resolved to visit him again at the first opportunity

X

Ivan Dmitrich lay in the same posture as yesterday, his head clutched in his hands and his legs drawn up. His face could not be seen.

“Good day, my friend,” said Andrei Yefimych. “Are you asleep?”

“First of all, I’m not your friend,” Ivan Dmitrich said into the pillow, “and second, you’re troubling yourself in vain: you won’t get a single word out of me.”

“Strange …” Andrei Yefimych murmured in embarrassment. “Yesterday we talked so peaceably, but for some reason you suddenly became offended and broke off all at once … I probably expressed myself somehow awkwardly, or perhaps voiced a thought that doesn’t agree with your convictions …”

“Yes, I’ll believe you just like that!” said Ivan Dmitrich, rising a little and looking at the doctor mockingly and with alarm; his eyes were red. “You can do your spying and testing somewhere else, you’ve got no business here. I already understood yesterday why you came.”

“Strange fantasy!” smiled the doctor. “So you think I’m a spy?”

“Yes, I do … A spy or a doctor assigned to test me—it’s all the same.”

“Ah, really, what a … forgive me … what an odd man you are!”

The doctor sat down on a stool by the bed and shook his head reproachfully.

“But suppose you’re right,” he said. “Suppose I treacherously try to snatch at some word in order to betray you to the police. You’ll be arrested and then tried. But will it be worse for you in court or prison than it is here? And if you’re sent into exile or even to hard labor, is that worse than sitting in this annex? I suppose not … So what are you afraid of?”

These words obviously affected Ivan Dmitrich. He quietly sat up.

It was between four and five in the afternoon, the time when Andrei Yefimych usually paced his rooms and Daryushka asked him whether it was time for his beer. The weather outside was calm and clear.

“I went for a stroll after dinner and stopped by, as you see,” said the doctor. “Spring has come.”

“What month is it now? March?” asked Ivan Dmitrich.

“Yes, the end of March.”

“Is it muddy outside?”

“No, not very. There are footpaths in the garden already.”

“It would be nice to go for a ride in a carriage somewhere out of town now,” said Ivan Dmitrich, rubbing his red eyes as if he had just woken up, “then come back home to a warm, cozy study and … have a decent doctor treat your headache … I haven’t lived like a human being for so long. It’s vile here! Insufferably vile!”

After yesterday’s agitation he was tired and sluggish and spoke reluctantly. His fingers trembled, and one could see by his face that he had a bad headache.

“There’s no difference between a warm, cozy study and this ward,” said Andrei Yefimych. “A man’s peace and content are not outside but within him.”

“How so?”

“An ordinary man expects the good or the bad from outside, that is, from a carriage and a study, but a thinking man expects them from himself.”

“Go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it’s warm and smells of wild orange, it doesn’t go with the climate here. Who was I talking about Diogenes with? Was it you, eh?”

“Yes, with me, yesterday.”

“Diogenes didn’t need a study and a warm room; it’s hot there as it is. You can lie in a barrel and eat oranges and olives. But if he lived in Russia, he’d ask for a room not only in December but even in May. He’d be doubled up with cold.”

“No. Like all pain in general, it’s possible not to feel cold. Marcus Aurelius¹⁴ said: ‘Pain is the living notion of pain: make an effort of will to change this notion, remove it, stop complaining, and the pain will disappear.’ That is correct. The wise man, or simply the thinking, perceptive man, is distinguished precisely by his scorn of suffering; he is always content and is surprised at nothing.”

“Then I’m an idiot, since I suffer, am discontent, and am surprised at human meanness.”

“You needn’t be. If you reflect on it more often, you will understand how insignificant is everything external that troubles us. We must strive for the comprehension of life, therein lies the true blessing.”

“Comprehension …” Ivan Dmitrich winced. “External, internal … Excuse me, but I don’t understand that. I only know,” he said, getting up and looking angrily at the doctor, “I know that God created me out of warm blood and nerves, yes, sir! And organic tissue, if it’s viable, must react to any irritation. And I do react! I respond to pain with cries and tears, to meanness with indignation, to vileness with disgust. In my opinion, this is in fact called life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is and the more weakly it responds to irritation, and the higher, the more susceptible it is and the more energetically it reacts to reality. How can you not know that? You’re a doctor and you don’t know such trifles! To scorn suffering, to be always content and surprised at nothing, you must reach that condition”—and Ivan Dmitrich pointed to the obese, fat-swollen peasant—“or else harden yourself with suffering to such a degree that you lose all sensitivity to it, that is, in other words, stop living. Forgive me, I’m not a wise man or a philosopher,” Ivan Dmitrich went on irritably, “and I understand nothing about it. I’m unable to reason.”

“On the contrary, your reasoning is excellent.”

“The Stoics, whom you are parodying, were remarkable people, but their teaching froze two thousand years ago and hasn’t moved a drop further, and it won’t, because it’s neither practical nor vital. It was successful only with the minority who spend their life examining and relishing various teachings, but the majority didn’t understand it. A teaching that preaches indifference to wealth, to the good things in life, scorn of suffering and death, is utterly incomprehensible for the vast majority, since that majority has never known either wealth or the good things in life; and for them scorn of suffering would mean scorn of life itself, because the whole essence of man consists in the sensations of hunger, cold, offense, loss, and a Hamletian fear of death. These sensations are the whole of life: you may be oppressed by it, you may hate it, but you cannot scorn it. Yes, so I repeat, the teaching of the Stoics can have no future, and progress, from the beginning of time down to this day, as you see, belongs to struggle, the sensitivity to pain, the ability to respond to irritation …”

Ivan Dmitrich suddenly lost his train of thought, stopped, and rubbed his forehead vexedly

“I wanted to say something important, but I got confused,” he said. “What was it about? Yes! So, I was saying: one of the Stoics sold himself into slavery in order to buy off his neighbor. You see, so the Stoic, too, reacted to an irritation, because for such a magnanimous act as destroying yourself for the sake of your neighbor, you must have an indignant, compassionate soul. Here in prison I’ve forgotten everything I studied, otherwise I’d remember more. But take Christ? Christ responded to reality by weeping, smiling, grieving, being wrathful, even anguished; he didn’t go to meet suffering with a smile, nor did he scorn death, but he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane for this cup to pass from him.”¹⁵

Ivan Dmitrich laughed and sat down.

“Suppose that man’s peace and content are not outside but within him,” he said. “Suppose that we ought to scorn suffering and be surprised at nothing. But what is your basis for preaching it? Are you a wise man? A philosopher?”

“No, I’m not a philosopher, but everyone ought to preach it, because it’s reasonable.”

“No, I want to know why you consider yourself competent in matters of comprehension, scorn of suffering, and the rest. Have you ever suffered? Do you have any notion of suffering? Excuse me: were you ever birched as a child?”

“No, my parents detested corporal punishment.”

“Well, my father whipped me cruelly. My father was a tough, hemorrhoidal official with a long nose and a yellow neck. But let’s talk about you. In all your life nobody ever laid a finger on you, nobody frightened you, nobody beat you; you’re sturdy as an ox. You grew up under your father’s wing and studied at his expense, and then at once grabbed a sinecure. For more than twenty years you’ve had free quarters, with heat, light, servants, besides having the right to work as you want and as much as you want, or even not to work at all. By nature you’re a lazy man, a soft man, and therefore you tried to shape your life so that nothing would trouble you or make you stir from your place. You shifted all the work onto your assistant and other scum, and you yourself sat around, warm and peaceful, saving up money, reading books, delighting yourself with thoughts about all sorts of nonsense, and” (Ivan Dmitrich looked at the doctor’s red nose) “tippling away. In short, you’ve never seen life, you don’t know anything about it, and you’re only theoretically acquainted with reality And you scorn suffering and are surprised at nothing for a very simple reason: vanity of vanities, external and internal scorn of life, of suffering, and of death, comprehension, the true blessing—all that is a most suitable philosophy for a Russian lie-about. You see a peasant beating his wife, for instance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they’ll both die sooner or later anyway; and besides, the man who beats someone only insults himself, not the one he beats. To be a drunkard is stupid, indecent, but one drinks and dies, or does not drink and dies. A peasant woman comes with a toothache … So what? Pain is the notion of pain, and besides, one cannot live in this world without sickness, and we’ll all die, so go away, woman, don’t interfere with my thinking and my vodka drinking. A young man asks for advice, what to do, how to live; another man would stop and think before answering, but here the answer is ready: strive for comprehension, that is, for the true blessing. And what is this fantastic ‘true blessing’? There is no answer, of course. We’re kept behind bars here, to rot and be tortured, but that’s beautiful and reasonable, because there’s no difference between this ward and a warm, cozy study. A convenient philosophy: no need to do anything, and your conscience is clear, and you feel yourself a wise man … No, sir, that’s not philosophy, not thinking, not breadth of vision, it’s laziness, fakirism, a dreamy stupor … Yes!” Ivan Dmitrich became angry again. “You scorn suffering, but I suppose if you pinched your finger in the door, you’d howl your head off!”

“Maybe I wouldn’t,” said Andrei Yefimych, smiling meekly.

“Oh, surely! And if you were suddenly slapped with paralysis or, say, some brazen fool, taking advantage of his position and rank, insulted you publicly, and you knew he’d go unpunished—well, then you’d understand how it is to fob others off with comprehension and the true blessing.”

“That’s original,” Andrei Yefimych said, laughing with pleasure and rubbing his hands. “I’m pleasantly surprised by your inclination to generalize, and the characterization of me that you’ve just produced is simply brilliant. I confess, conversation with you gives me great pleasure. Well, sir, I’ve heard you out, now you kindly hear me out …”

XI

This conversation went on for another hour or so and evidently made a deep impression on Andrei Yefimych. He began visiting the annex every day He went in the morning and after dinner, and often the evening darkness found him conversing with Ivan Dmitrich. At first Ivan Dmitrich was shy with him, suspected him of evil intentions, and openly expressed his animosity, but then he got used to him and changed his cutting manner to a condescendingly ironic one.

The rumor soon spread through the hospital that Dr. Andrei Yefimych had begun visiting Ward No. 6. No one, neither his assistant, nor Nikita, nor the nurses, could understand why he went there, why he sat there for hours at a time, what he talked about, why he did not make any prescriptions. His behavior seemed strange. Mikhail Averyanych often did not find him at home, something that had never happened before, and Daryushka was very confused, because the doctor no longer drank his beer at a certain time and occasionally was even late for dinner.

Once—this was already at the end of June—Dr. Khobotov came to see Andrei Yefimych on some business; not finding him at home, he went to look for him in the yard; there he was told that the old doctor had gone to visit the mental patients. Khobotov went into the annex and, stopping in the front hall, heard the following conversation:

“We’ll never see eye to eye, and you won’t succeed in converting me to your faith,” Ivan Dmitrich was saying vexedly “You’re totally unacquainted with reality, and you’ve never suffered, but, like a leech, have only fed on the sufferings of others, while I have suffered constantly from the day of my birth to this very day. Therefore I tell you frankly that I consider myself superior to you and more competent in all respects. It’s not for you to teach me.”

“I make no pretense of converting you to my faith,” Andrei Yefimych said softly, regretting that the other refused to understand him. “And that is not the point, my friend. The point is not that you have suffered and I have not. Sufferings and joys are transient; let’s drop them, with God’s blessing. The point is that you and I think; we see in each other people who are able to think and reason, and that makes for solidarity between us, however different our views may be. If you knew, my friend, how tired I am of the general madness, giftlessness, obtuseness, and with what joy I talk with you each time! You’re an intelligent man, and I delight in you.”

Khobotov opened the door an inch and peeked into the room. Dr. Andrei Yefimych and Ivan Dmitrich in his nightcap were sitting side by side on the bed. The madman grimaced, twitched, and convulsively wrapped his robe around him, while the doctor sat motionless, his head bowed, his face red, helpless, and sad. Khobotov shrugged, grinned, and exchanged glances with Nikita. Nikita also shrugged.

The next day Khobotov came to the annex together with the assistant doctor. The two stood in the front hall and eavesdropped.

“It seems our grandpa’s gone completely loony,” said Khobotov, leaving the annex.

“God have mercy on us sinners!” sighed the beauteous Sergei Sergeich, carefully sidestepping the puddles to avoid muddying his brightly polished boots. “I confess, my esteemed Evgeny Fyodorych, I’ve long been expecting that!”

XII

After that Andrei Yefimych began to notice a certain mysteriousness around him. The peasants, the nurses, and the patients, when they met him, glanced at him inquisitively and then whispered. The little girl Masha, the superintendent’s daughter, whom he enjoyed meeting in the hospital garden, now, when he came up to her with a smile to pat her on the head, for some reason ran away from him. The postmaster, Mikhail Averyanych, listening to him, no longer said: “Quite right,” but muttered in inexplicable embarrassment: “Yes, yes, yes …” and looked at him wistfully and sadly. For some reason he began advising his friend to give up vodka and beer, but, being a delicate man, spoke not directly but in hints, telling now about a certain battalion commander, an excellent man, now about a regimental priest, a nice fellow, both of whom drank themselves sick, but when they stopped drinking became completely well. Two or three times Andrei Yefimych’s colleague Khobotov came to see him; he, too, advised him to give up alcohol and, for no apparent reason, recommended that he take potassium bromide.

In August Andrei Yefimych received a letter from the mayor with a request that he kindly come on a very important matter. Arriving at the town hall at the appointed time, Andrei Yefimych found there the military commander, the inspector of the district high school, a member of the town council, Khobotov, and yet another stout, blond gentleman, who was introduced to him as a doctor. This doctor, who had a Polish name that was very hard to pronounce, lived on a stud farm twenty miles away and was just passing through town.

“Here’s a little application along your lines, sir,” the member of the council addressed Andrei Yefimych, after they had all exchanged greetings and sat down at the table. “Evgeny Fyodorych says here that there’s not enough room for the dispensary in the main building, and that it ought to be transferred to one of the annexes. That’s all right, of course, the transfer is possible, but the main concern is that the annex will need renovation.”

“Yes, it won’t do without renovation,” Andrei Yefimych said, after some reflection. “If, for example, we decide to fit out the corner annex as a dispensary, we’ll need a minimum of five hundred roubles. An unproductive expense.”

A short silence ensued.

“I already had the honor of reporting ten years ago,” Andrei Yefimych went on in a low voice, “that this hospital in its present state is a luxury beyond the town’s means. It was built in the forties, but the means were different then. The town spends too much on unnecessary buildings and superfluous jobs. I think that with a different system it would be possible to run two model hospitals on the same money.”

“Then let’s set up a different system!” the member of the council said briskly.

“As I’ve already had the honor of reporting, the medical area should be transferred to the jurisdiction of the zemstvo.”

“Yes, transfer the money to the zemstvo, and let them steal it,” the blond doctor laughed.

“That’s just what they’ll do,” said the council member, and he also laughed.

Andrei Yefimych gave the blond doctor a dull and listless look and said:

“We must be fair.”

Another silence ensued. Tea was served. The military commander, very embarrassed for some reason, touched Andrei Yefimych’s hand across the table and said:

“You’ve quite forgotten us, doctor. You’re a monk, anyhow: you don’t play cards, you don’t like women. You’re bored with our sort.”

Everybody began talking about how boring it was for a decent man to live in this town. No theater, no music, and at the last club dance there were some twenty ladies and only two gentlemen. The young people do not dance but spend all their time crowding around the buffet or playing cards. Slowly and softly, without looking at anyone, Andrei Yefimych began to say how regrettable, how deeply regrettable, it was that the townspeople put their life’s energy, their hearts and minds, into playing cards or gossiping, and neither can nor wish to spend time in interesting conversation or reading, to enjoy the delights furnished by the mind. The mind alone is interesting and remarkable, while the rest is petty and base. Khobotov listened attentively to his colleague and suddenly asked:

“Andrei Yefimych, what is the date today?”

Having received an answer, he and the blond doctor, in the tone of examiners aware of their incompetence, began to ask Andrei Yefimych what day it was, how many days there were in a year, and whether it was true that a remarkable prophet was living in Ward No. 6.

In answer to the last question, Andrei Yefimych blushed and said:

“Yes, he’s ill, but he’s an interesting young man.”

They did not ask him any more questions.

As he was putting his coat on in the front hall, the military governor placed his hand on his shoulder and said with a sigh:

“It’s time we old men had a rest!”

On leaving the town hall, Andrei Yefimych realized that this had been a commission appointed to verify his mental abilities. He recalled the questions he had been asked, blushed, and now, for some reason, for the first time in his life felt bitterly sorry for medicine.

“My God,” he thought, remembering how the doctors had just tested him, “they took courses in psychiatry so recently, passed examinations—why this total ignorance? They have no idea what psychiatry is!”

And for the first time in his life he felt insulted and angry.

That same evening Mikhail Averyanych came to see him. Without any greeting, the postmaster went up to him, took him by both hands, and said in a worried voice:

“My dear friend, prove to me that you believe in my genuine sympathy and consider me your friend … My friend!” and stopping Andrei Yefimych from speaking, he went on worriedly: “I love you for your education and nobility of soul. Listen to me, my dear. The rules of science demand that the doctors conceal the truth from you, but I, being a military man, come straight out with it: you’re not well! Forgive me, my dear, but it’s true, everybody around you noticed it long ago. Dr. Evgeny Fyodorych has just told me that for the sake of your health you need rest and diversion. Absolutely right! Excellent! In a few days I’ll be taking a leave, to go and sniff a different air. Prove to me that you’re my friend, come with me! Come along, we’ll dust off the old days.”

“I feel perfectly well,” Andrei Yefimych said, after thinking a little. “I can’t go. Allow me to prove my friendship for you in some other way.”

To go somewhere, for no known reason, without books, without Daryushka, without beer, to sharply disrupt an order of life established for twenty years—this idea at first seemed wild and fantastic to him. But he recalled the conversation he had had in the town hall, and the painful mood he had experienced as he returned home, and the thought of a brief absence from this town, where stupid people considered him mad, appealed to him.

“And where, in fact, do you intend to go?” he asked.

“To Moscow, to Petersburg, to Warsaw … I spent the five happiest years of my life in Warsaw. What an amazing city! Let’s go, my friend!”

XIII

A week later it was suggested to Andrei Yefimych that he get some rest—that is, retire—which suggestion he met with indifference, and a week after that he and Mikhail Averyanych were sitting in a stagecoach heading for the nearest railway station. The days were cool, clear, with blue sky and a transparent view. They made the hundred and fifty miles to the railway station in two days, stopping twice for the night. When the tea at the posting stations was served in poorly washed glasses, or the harnessing of the horses took too long, Mikhail Averyanych turned purple, shook all over, and shouted: “Silence! no argument!” And sitting in the coach, he talked non-stop about his travels around the Caucasus and the Kingdom of Poland. So many adventures, such encounters! He spoke loudly and made such astonished eyes that one might have thought he was lying. Besides, as he talked, he breathed into Andrei Yefimych’s face and guffawed in his ear. This bothered the doctor and interfered with his thinking and concentration.

On the train they traveled third class for economy, in a nonsmoking car. Half the people were of the clean sort. Mikhail Averyanych soon made everyone’s acquaintance and, going from seat to seat, said loudly that one ought not to travel by these outrageous railways. Cheating everywhere! No comparison with riding a horse: you zoom through sixty miles in a day and afterwards feel healthy and fresh. And our crop failures were caused by the draining of the Pinsk marshes. Generally, there were terrible disorders. He got excited, spoke loudly, and did not let others speak. This endless babble interspersed with loud guffaws and expressive gestures wearied Andrei Yefimych.

“Which of us is the madman?” he thought with vexation. “Is it I, who try not to trouble the passengers with anything, or this egoist, who thinks he’s the most intelligent and interesting man here and so won’t leave anyone in peace?”

In Moscow Mikhail Averyanych donned a military jacket without epaulettes and trousers with red piping. He went out in a military cap and greatcoat, and soldiers saluted him. Andrei Yefimych now thought that this was a man who, of the grand manners he once possessed, had squandered all the good and kept only the bad. He liked to be waited on, even when it was quite unnecessary. A box of matches would be lying before him on the table, and he would see it, yet he would call for a servant to hand him matches; he was not embarrassed to walk about in his underwear in front of the maid; all manservants without distinction, even the old ones, he addressed familiarly, and, getting angry, dubbed them blockheads and fools. It seemed to Andrei Yefimych that this was grand, but vile.

Before anything else, Mikhail Averyanych took his friend to see the Iverskaya icon. He prayed ardently, bowing to the ground and with tears, and when he finished, sighed deeply and said:

“Even if you don’t believe, you feel somehow more at ease once you’ve prayed. Kiss it, my dear.”

Andrei Yefimych became embarrassed and kissed the icon, while Mikhail Averyanych pursed his lips and, nodding his head, prayed in a whisper, tears coming to his eyes again. Then they went to the Kremlin and there looked at the Tsar-cannon and the Tsar-bell and even touched them with their fingers, admired the view of Zamoskvorechye, visited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Rumiantsev Museum.¹⁶

They had dinner at Testov’s. Mikhail Averyanych spent a long time studying the menu, stroking his side-whiskers, and said in the tone of a gourmand who feels in a restaurant as if he were at home:

“Let’s see what you can offer us to eat today, my angel!”

XIV

The doctor walked, looked, ate, drank, but had only one feeling: vexation with Mikhail Averyanych. He wanted to have a rest from his friend, to leave him, to hide, but the friend considered it his duty not to let him go a step away and to provide him with as many diversions as possible. When there was nothing to look at, he diverted him with talk. Andrei Yefimych held out for two days, but on the third he announced to his friend that he was sick and wanted to stay home all day. The friend said that in that case he, too, would stay home. Indeed, one had to rest or one’s legs would fall off. Andrei Yefimych lay on the sofa, face to the wall, and with clenched teeth listened to his friend hotly insisting that France was certain to defeat Germany sooner or later, that there were a great many swindlers in Moscow, and that one cannot judge a horse by its color. The doctor had a buzzing in his ears, his heart pounded, but out of delicacy he dared not ask his friend to be quiet. Fortunately, Mikhail Averyanych got bored sitting in the hotel room, and after dinner he went out for a stroll.

Left alone, Andrei Yefimych gave himself up to a feeling of relief. How pleasant to lie motionless on the sofa and realize that you are alone in the room! True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know. Andrei Yefimych wanted to think about what he had seen and heard in the last few days, but he could not get Mikhail Averyanych out of his head.

“He took a leave and came with me out of friendship, out of magnanimity,” the doctor thought with vexation. “There’s nothing worse than this friendly solicitude. It seems he’s a kind, magnanimous, and merry fellow, and yet he’s a bore. An insufferable bore. Just as there are people who always say only nice and intelligent things, yet you can sense that they’re quite obtuse.”

In the days that followed, Andrei Yefimych gave himself out as ill and never left the room. He lay facing the back of the sofa and languished while his friend amused him with conversation, or rested while his friend was absent. He was annoyed with himself for having come along and with his friend for growing more talkative and casual every day; he simply could not manage to attune his thoughts to anything serious and lofty.

“The reality Ivan Dmitrich spoke about is getting to me,” he thought, angry at his own pettiness. “However, it’s nonsense … I’ll go home and everything will be as before …”

In Petersburg it was the same: he spent whole days without leaving the hotel room, lay on the sofa, and got up only to have some beer.

Mikhail Averyanych kept urging him to go to Warsaw.

“My dear, why should I go there?” Andrei Yefimych said in an imploring tone. “Go by yourself and let me go home! I beg you!”

“Not for anything!” protested Mikhail Averyanych. “It’s an amazing city. I spent the five happiest years of my life in it.”

Andrei Yefimych did not have enough character to stand up for himself and, sick at heart, went to Warsaw. There he never left the hotel room, lay on the sofa, angry with himself, with his friend, and with the servants who stubbornly refused to understand Russian, while Mikhail Averyanych, hale, hearty, and cheerful as ever, went around the city from morning till evening, looking up his old acquaintances. Several times he stayed away all night. After one such night, spent who knows where, he came home early in the morning, greatly agitated, red-faced, and disheveled. He paced up and down the room for a long time, muttering something to himself, then stopped and said:

“Honor before all!”

After pacing a little more, he clutched his head and said in a tragic voice:

“Yes, honor before all! Cursed be the moment I first thought of coming to this Babylon! My dear,” he turned to the doctor, “despise me: I lost at cards! Give me five hundred roubles!”

Andrei Yefimych counted out five hundred roubles and silently handed them to his friend. The man, still crimson with shame and wrath, uttered some needless oath incoherently, put his cap on his head, and went out. Returning about two hours later, he collapsed into an armchair, sighed loudly, and said:

“My honor is saved! Let’s go, my friend. I don’t want to stay a minute longer in this cursed city. Crooks! Austrian spies!”

When the friends returned to their town, it was already November and the streets were deep in snow. Andrei Yefimych’s post had been taken over by Dr. Khobotov. He was still living in his old apartment, waiting for Andrei Yefimych to come and vacate the hospital apartment. The homely woman whom he called his cook was already living in one of the annexes.

New hospital rumors went around town. It was said that the homely woman had quarreled with the superintendent, and that the man had supposedly crawled on his knees before her, begging forgiveness.

The first day after his arrival, Andrei Yefimych had to find himself an apartment.

“My friend,” the postmaster said to him timidly, “forgive my indiscreet question: what means do you have at your disposal?”

Andrei Yefimych silently counted his money and said:

“Eighty-six roubles.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Mikhail Averyanych said in embarrassment, not understanding the doctor. “I’m asking what means you have in general.”

“But I told you: eighty-six roubles … That’s all I have.”

Mikhail Averyanych considered the doctor an honest and noble man, but even so he suspected him of having a capital of some twenty thousand at least. Learning now that Andrei Yefimych was destitute, that he had nothing to live on, he suddenly wept for some reason and embraced his friend.

XV

Andrei Yefimych lived in the little three-windowed house of the tradeswoman Belov. There were only three rooms in this little house, not counting the kitchen. The doctor occupied the two with windows on the street, and in the third and the kitchen lived Daryushka, the tradeswoman, and her three children. Sometimes the landlady’s lover came to spend the night with her, a drunken lout who got violent during the night and terrified the children and Daryushka. When he came, settled himself in the kitchen, and started demanding vodka, everybody felt very crowded, and out of pity the doctor would take the crying children to his rooms and bed them down on the floor, and this gave him great pleasure.

He got up at eight o’clock, as formerly, and after tea sat down to read his old books and magazines. He now had no money for new ones. Either because the books were old, or perhaps because of the change of circumstances, reading wearied him and no longer interested him deeply. So as not to spend his time in idleness, he made a detailed catalogue of his books and glued labels to their spines, and this mechanical, painstaking work seemed to him more interesting than reading. This monotonous, painstaking work lulled his mind in some incomprehensible way, he did not think of anything, and the time passed quickly. He even found it interesting to sit in the kitchen and peel potatoes with Daryushka or sort buckwheat. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to church. Standing by the wall, eyes closed, he listened to the singing and thought about his father, his mother, the university, religion; he felt peaceful, sad, and afterwards, leaving the church, was sorry the service had ended so soon.

Twice he went to the hospital to see Ivan Dmitrich and talk with him. But both times Ivan Dmitrich was unusually upset and angry; he begged to be left alone, having long since grown weary of empty chatter, and for all his sufferings he asked only one reward of cursed, mean people—solitary confinement. Was even that to be denied him? Both times, when Andrei Yefimych took leave of him and wished him a good night, he snarled and said:

“Go to the devil!”

And now Andrei Yefimych did not know whether he should go a third time or not. But he wanted to go.

Formerly, in the time after dinner, Andrei Yefimych had paced his rooms and reflected, but now he spent the time between dinner and evening tea lying on the sofa, face to the back, giving himself up to petty thoughts, which he was unable to fight off. He felt offended that for his more than twenty years of service he had been given neither a pension nor a one-time payment. True, he had served dishonestly, but everyone who served got a pension, whether they were honest or not. Contemporary justice consisted in granting rank, decorations, and pensions not to moral qualities or abilities but to service in general, however it was performed. Why should he be the only exception? He had no money at all. He was ashamed to pass the grocery shop and look at the shopkeeper. He had already run up a bill of thirty-two roubles for beer. He also owed money to the tradeswoman Belov. Daryushka sold old clothes and books on the sly and lied to the landlady that the doctor was soon to receive a very large sum of money.

He was angry with himself for having spent the thousand roubles he had saved on a trip. How useful that thousand would have been to him now! He was vexed that people would not leave him alone. Khobotov considered it his duty to visit his sick colleague occasionally. Everything about him disgusted Andrei Yefimych: his well-fed face, and his bad, condescending tone, and the word “colleague,” and his high boots; most disgusting was that he considered it his duty to treat Andrei Yefimych and thought that he was indeed treating him. On each of his visits he brought a bottle of potassium bromide and rhubarb pills.

Mikhail Averyanych also considered it his duty to visit his friend and divert him. He always entered Andrei Yefimych’s with affected nonchalance and a forced guffaw and began assuring him that he looked very well today and, thank God, things were improving, from which it could be concluded that he considered his friend’s condition hopeless. He had not yet paid back his Warsaw debt and was weighed down by heavy shame, felt tense, and therefore tried to guffaw more loudly and talk more amusingly. His jokes and stories now seemed endless and were a torment both to Andrei Yefimych and for himself.

In his presence Andrei Yefimych usually lay on the sofa with his face to the wall and listened with clenched teeth; layers of scum settled on his soul, and after each visit from his friend he felt this scum rising higher, as if reaching to his throat.

To stifle his petty feelings, he hastened to reflect that he himself, and Khobotov, and Mikhail Averyanych, must die sooner or later, without leaving even a trace on nature. If one should imagine some spirit, a million years from now, flying through space past the earth, that spirit would see only clay and bare cliffs. Everything—including culture and moral law—would have perished, and no burdock would even be growing.¹⁷ What, then, was this shame before the shopkeeper, the worthless Khobotov, the painful friendship of Mikhail Averyanych? It was all nonsense and trifles.

But such reasoning no longer helped. As soon as he imagined the earth a million years from now, Khobotov appeared in high boots from behind a bare cliff, or else the forcedly laughing Mikhail Averyanych, and he even heard his shamefaced whisper: “I’ll pay back the Warsaw debt one of these days, my dear … Without fail.”

XVI

Once Mikhail Averyanych came after dinner, when Andrei Yefimych was lying on the sofa. It so happened that Khobotov also arrived at the same time with the potassium bromide. Andrei Yefimych got up heavily, sat on the sofa, and propped himself with both hands.

“And today, my dear,” Mikhail Averyanych began, “your color has much improved over yesterday. Well done, by God! Well done!”

“It’s high time, high time you got better, colleague,” Khobotov said, yawning. “You must be tired of this flim-flam yourself.”

“We’ll get better,” Mikhail Averyanych said cheerfully. “We’ll live another hundred years! Yes, sir!”

“Hundred or no hundred, there’s enough in him for twenty,” Khobotov reassured. “Never mind, never mind, colleague, don’t be so glum … Stop blowing smoke.”

“We’ll still show ourselves!” Mikhail Averyanych guffawed and patted his friend’s knee. “We’ll show ourselves! Next summer, God willing, we’ll take a swing through the Caucasus and cover it all on horseback—hup! hup! hup! And when we come back from the Caucasus, for all I know, we’ll dance at a wedding.” Mikhail Averyanych winked slyly. “We’ll get you married, dear friend … married …”

Andrei Yefimych suddenly felt the scum rise to his throat; his heart was pounding terribly.

“This is all so banal!” he said, getting up quickly and going to the window. “Don’t you understand that you’re speaking in banalities?”

He wanted to go on gently and politely, but against his will suddenly clenched his fists and raised them above his head.

“Leave me alone!” he shouted in a voice not his own, turning purple and trembling all over. “Get out! Get out, both of you!”

Mikhail Averyanych and Khobotov stood up and stared at him first in bewilderment, then in fear.

“Get out, both of you!” Andrei Yefimych went on shouting. “Obtuse people! Stupid people! I need neither your friendship nor your medicine, obtuse man! Banality! Filth!”

Khobotov and Mikhail Averyanych, exchanging perplexed looks, backed their way to the door and went out into the front hall. Andrei Yefimych seized the bottle of potassium bromide and hurled it after them; the bottle smashed jingling on the threshold.

“Go to the devil!” he shouted in a tearful voice, running out to the front hall. “To the devil!”

After his visitors left, Andrei Yefimych, trembling as in a fever, lay down on the sofa and for a long time went on repeating:

“Obtuse people! Stupid people!”

When he calmed down, it occurred to him first of all that poor Mikhail Averyanych must now be terribly ashamed and dispirited and that all this was terrible. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Where were his intelligence and tact? Where were his comprehension of things and his philosophical indifference?

The doctor was unable to sleep all night from shame and vexation with himself, and in the morning, around ten o’clock, he went to the post office and apologized to the postmaster.

“We’ll forget what happened,” the moved Mikhail Averyanych said with a sigh, firmly pressing his hand. “Let bygones be bygones. Lyubavkin!” he suddenly shouted so loudly that all the postal clerks and clients jumped. “Fetch a chair! And you wait!” he shouted at a peasant woman who was passing him a certified letter through the grille. “Can’t you see I’m busy? We’ll forget the bygones,” he went on tenderly, addressing Andrei Yefimych. “Sit down, my dear, I humbly beg you.”

He patted his knees in silence for a moment and then said:

“It never occurred to me to be offended with you. Illness is nobody’s friend, I realize. Your fit yesterday frightened me and the doctor, and we talked about you for a long time afterwards. My dear friend, why don’t you want to attend seriously to your illness? This can’t go on! Excuse my friendly candor,” Mikhail Averyanych whispered, “but you live in the most unfavorable circumstances: it’s crowded, dirty, nobody looks after you, there’s no money for treatment … My dear friend, the doctor and I beg you with all our hearts to heed our advice: go to the hospital! The food there is wholesome, they’ll look after you and treat you. Evgeny Fyodorovich may be in mauvais ton,¹⁸ just between us, but he’s well-informed and totally reliable. He gave me his word he’d look after you.”

Andrei Yefimych was touched by this genuine concern and by the tears that suddenly glistened on the postmaster’s cheeks.

“My esteemed friend, don’t believe it!” he whispered, placing his hand on his heart. “Don’t believe them! It’s not true! My only illness is that in twenty years I’ve found only one intelligent man in the whole town, and he’s mad. There is no illness at all, I simply got into a magic circle that I can’t get out of. It makes no difference to me, I’m ready for everything.”

“Go to the hospital, my dear.”

“Or to the pit—it makes no difference to me.”

“Give me your word, my dearest friend, that you’ll obey Evgeny Fyodorych in all things.”

“If you please, I give my word. But I repeat, my esteemed friend, I got into a magic circle. Now everything, even the genuine sympathy of my friends, leads to one thing—my perdition. I’m perishing, and I have enough courage to realize it.”

“You’ll get well, my friend.”

“Why say that?” Andrei Yefimych said vexedly “It’s a rare man who doesn’t experience the same thing towards the end of his life as I am experiencing now. When you’re told that you have something like a bad kidney or an enlarged heart, and you start getting treated, or that you’re a madman or a criminal, that is, in short, when people suddenly pay attention to you, then you should know that you’ve gotten into a magic circle and you’ll never get out of it. If you try to get out, you’ll get more lost. Give up, because no human effort can save you. So it seems to me.”

Meanwhile people were crowding to the grille. Andrei Yefimych, not wishing to hinder anyone, got up and began to take his leave. Mikhail Averyanych once again asked him for his word of honor and saw him to the front door.

That same day, before evening, Andrei Yefimych received an unexpected visit from Khobotov, in his short jacket and high boots, who said, as if nothing had happened the day before:

“I’m here on business, colleague. I’ve come to ask you if you’d like to join me in a consultation. Eh?”

Thinking that Khobotov wanted to divert him with a stroll, or indeed give him a chance to earn some money, Andrei Yefimych put on his coat and went out with him. He was glad of the chance to smooth over his fault of the day before and make peace, and in his heart was grateful to Khobotov, who did not utter a peep about the day before and was obviously sparing him. He would hardly have expected such delicacy from this uncultivated man.

“Where’s your patient?” asked Andrei Yefimych.

“In the hospital. I’ve been wanting to show you for a long time … A most interesting case.”

They went into the hospital yard and, going around the main building, made their way to the annex where the insane were housed. And all this, for some reason, in silence. When they went into the annex, Nikita jumped up as usual and stood at attention.

“One of them has developed a lung complication,” Khobotov said in a low voice, as he and Andrei Yefimych went into the ward. “Wait here, I’ll be back at once. I must get my stethoscope.”

And he went out.

XVII

It was twilight. Ivan Dmitrich lay on his bed, his face in the pillow; the paralytic sat motionless, weeping softly and moving his lips. The fat peasant and the former sorter were asleep. It was quiet.

Andrei Yefimych sat down on Ivan Dmitrich’s bed and waited. But about half an hour went by, and instead of Khobotov, Nikita came into the ward carrying a hospital robe, someone’s underwear and slippers.

“Please put these on, Your Honor,” he said softly. “Here’s your little bed, if you please,” he added, pointing to an empty bed, obviously brought in recently. “Never mind, God willing, you’ll get well.”

Andrei Yefimych understood everything. Without saying a word, he went over to the bed Nikita had pointed to and sat down; seeing that Nikita was standing and waiting, he undressed completely and felt embarrassed. Then he put on the hospital clothes. The drawers were very short, the shirt long, and the robe smelled of smoked fish.

“You’ll get well, God willing,” Nikita repeated.

He gathered up Andrei Yefimych’s clothes, went out, and closed the door behind him.

“It makes no difference …” thought Andrei Yefimych, shyly wrapping himself in the robe, and feeling that his new costume made him look like a prisoner. “It makes no difference … no difference whether it’s a tailcoat, a uniform, or this robe …”

But what about his watch? And the notebook in the side pocket? And the cigarettes? Where had Nikita taken his clothes? Now, perhaps, he would not put on his trousers, waistcoat, and shoes till his dying day. All this was somehow strange and even incomprehensible at first. Andrei Yefimych was still convinced that there was no difference between the house of the tradeswoman Belov and Ward No. 6, and that everything in this world was nonsense and vanity of vanities, and yet his hands shook, his feet were cold, and he felt eerie at the thought that Ivan Dmitrich would soon get up and see him in the robe. He stood up, paced a little, and sat down.

Now he had been sitting for half an hour, an hour, and he was sick of it to the point of anguish. Could one really live here for a day, a week, and even years, like these people? Well, so he sat, paced, and sat down again; he could go and look out the window, and again pace up and down. And then what? Go on sitting this way all the time, like an idol, and thinking? No, that was hardly possible.

Andrei Yefimych lay down, but got up at once, wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and felt that his whole face smelled of smoked fish. He paced again.

“This is some sort of misunderstanding …” he said, spreading his arms in perplexity. “It must be explained, there’s a misunderstanding here …”

Just then Ivan Dmitrich woke up. He sat up and propped his cheeks on his fists. He spat. Then he glanced lazily at the doctor and for the first moment apparently understood nothing; but soon his sleepy face turned malicious and jeering.

“Aha, so they’ve stuck you in here, too, my dear!” he said in a voice hoarse from sleep, squinting one eye. “Delighted. You used to suck people’s blood, now they’ll suck yours. Excellent!”

“This is some sort of misunderstanding…” said Andrei Yefimych, frightened by Ivan Dmitrich’s words; he shrugged and repeated: “A misunderstanding of some sort…”

Ivan Dmitrich spat again and lay down.

“Cursed life!” he growled. “And what’s so bitter and offensive is that this life will end not with a reward for suffering, not with an apotheosis, as in the opera, but with death; peasants will come and drag your dead body by the arms and legs to the basement. Brr! Well, never mind … But in the other world it will be our turn to celebrate … I’ll come from the other world as a ghost and scare these vipers. I’ll give them all gray hair.”

Moiseika came back and, seeing the doctor, held out his hand.

“Give me a little kopeck!” he said.

XVIII

Andrei Yefimych walked over to the window and looked out at the field. It was getting dark, and on the horizon to the right a cold, crimson moon was rising. Not far from the hospital fence, no more than two hundred yards away, stood a tall white building surrounded by a stone wall. This was the prison.

“Here is reality!” thought Andrei Yefimych, and he felt frightened.

The moon was frightening, and the prison, and the nails on the fence, and the distant flame of the bone-burning factory. He heard a sigh behind him. Andrei Yefimych turned around and saw a man with stars and decorations gleaming on his chest, who smiled and slyly winked his eye. This, too, was frightening.

Andrei Yefimych assured himself that there was nothing special about the moon or the prison, and that mentally sound people also wore decorations, and that in time everything would rot and turn to clay, but despair suddenly overwhelmed him, he seized the grille with both hands and shook it with all his might. The strong grille did not yield.

Then, not to feel so frightened, he went to Ivan Dmitrich’s bed and sat down.

“I’ve lost heart, my dear,” he murmured, trembling and wiping off the cold sweat. “Lost heart.”

“Try philosophizing,” Ivan Dmitrich said jeeringly

“My God, my God … Yes, yes … You once said there’s no philosophy in Russia, yet everybody philosophizes, even little folk. But little folk’s philosophizing doesn’t harm anyone,” Andrei Yefimych said, sounding as if he wanted to weep and awaken pity “Why, then, this gleeful laughter, my dear? And how can little folk help philosophizing, if they’re not content? An intelligent, educated, proud, freedom-loving man, the likeness of God,¹⁹ has no other recourse than to work as a doctor in a dirty, stupid little town, and deal all his life with cupping glasses, leeches, and mustard plasters! Charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, banality! Oh, my God!”

“You’re pouring out nonsense. If you loathe being a doctor, you should have become a government minister.”

“Impossible, it’s all impossible. We’re weak, my dear … I used to be indifferent, I reasoned cheerfully and sensibly, but life had only to touch me rudely and I lost heart … prostration … We’re weak, we’re trash … And you, too, my dear. You’re intelligent, noble, you drank in good impulses with your mother’s milk, but as soon as you entered into life, you got tired and fell ill … Weak, weak!”

Something persistent, apart from fear and a feeling of offense, oppressed Andrei Yefimych all the while as evening drew on. Finally, he realized that he wanted to drink some beer and smoke.

“I’m getting out of here, my dear,” he said. “I’ll tell them to bring a light here … I can’t take this … I’m not able …”

Andrei Yefimych went to the door and opened it, but Nikita immediately jumped up and barred his way.

“Where are you going? You can’t, you can’t!” he said. “It’s bedtime!”

“But I’ll only go out for a minute to stroll in the yard!” said Andrei Yefimych, quite dumbstruck.

“You can’t, you can’t, it’s against orders. You know it yourself.”

Nikita slammed the door and leaned his back against it.

“But if I go out, what’s that to anyone?” Andrei Yefimych asked, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t understand! Nikita, I have to go out!” he said in a quavering voice. “I must!”

“Don’t start any disorder, it’s not good!” Nikita said admonishingly

“What the devil is all this!” Ivan Dmitrich suddenly shouted and jumped up. “What right does he have not to let you out? How dare they keep us here? I believe the law clearly states that no one can be deprived of freedom without a trial! This is coercion! Tyranny!”

“Of course it’s tyranny!” said Andrei Yefimych, encouraged by Ivan Dmitrich’s shout. “I must go out, I have to! He has no right. Let me out, I tell you!”

“Do you hear, you dumb brute?” shouted Ivan Dmitrich, and he banged on the door with his fist. “Open up, or I’ll break the door down! Butcher!”

“Open up!” cried Andrei Yefimych, trembling all over. “I demand it!”

“Keep talking!” Nikita answered from outside the door. “Keep talking!”

“At least call Evgeny Fyodorych here! Tell him I ask him kindly … for a minute!”

“He’ll come himself tomorrow.”

“They’ll never let us out!” Ivan Dmitrich went on meanwhile. “They’ll make us rot here! O Lord, can it be there’s no hell in the other world and these scoundrels will be forgiven? Where is the justice? Open up, scoundrel, I’m suffocating!” he shouted in a hoarse voice and leaned his weight against the door. “I’ll smash my head! Murderers!”

Nikita quickly opened the door, rudely shoved Andrei Yefimych aside with his hands and knee, then swung and hit him in the face with his fist. Andrei Yefimych felt as if a huge salt wave had broken over him and was pulling him towards the bed; in fact, there was a salt taste in his mouth: his teeth were probably bleeding. He waved his arms as if trying to swim and got hold of someone’s bed, and just then he felt Nikita hit him twice in the back.

Ivan Dmitrich gave a loud cry. He, too, must have been beaten.

Then all was quiet. Thin moonlight came through the grille, and a shadow resembling a net lay on the floor. It was frightening. Andrei Yefimych lay there with bated breath: he waited in terror to be hit again. It was as if someone had taken a sickle, plunged it into him, and twisted it several times in his chest and guts. He bit his pillow in pain and clenched his teeth, and suddenly, amidst the chaos, a dreadful, unbearable thought flashed clearly in his head, that exactly the same pain must have been felt day after day, for years, by these people who now looked like black shadows in the moonlight. How could it happen that in the course of more than twenty years he had not known and had not wanted to know it? He had not known, he had had no notion of pain, and therefore was not to blame, but his conscience, as rough and intractable as Nikita, made him go cold from head to foot. He jumped up, wanted to shout with all his might and run quickly to kill Nikita, then Khobotov, the superintendent, and the assistant doctor, then himself, but no sound came from his chest and his legs would not obey him; suffocating, he tore at the robe and shirt on his chest, ripped them, and collapsed unconscious on his bed.

XIX

The next morning his head ached, there was a ringing in his ears, and his whole body felt sick. Recalling his weakness yesterday, he was not ashamed. He had been fainthearted yesterday, afraid even of the moon, had sincerely uttered feelings and thoughts he had previously not suspected were in him. For instance, thoughts about the discontent of the philosophizing little folk. But now it made no difference to him.

He did not eat or drink, lay motionless and was silent.

“It makes no difference to me,” he thought, when he was asked questions. “I won’t answer … It makes no difference to me.”

After dinner Mikhail Averyanych came and brought a quarter of a pound of tea and a pound of fruit jellies. Daryushka also came and stood by his bed for a whole hour with a look of dumb grief on her face. Doctor Khobotov visited him, too. He brought a bottle of potassium bromide and told Nikita to fumigate the ward with something.

Towards evening Andrei Yefimych died of apoplexy. First he felt violent chills and nausea; something disgusting, which seemed to pervade his whole body, even his fingers, welled up from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. Everything turned green before him. Andrei Yefimych understood that his end had come and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mikhail Averyanych, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it was so? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it for only a moment. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, which he had read about the day before, ran past him; then a peasant woman reached out to him with a certified letter … Mikhail Averyanych said something. Then everything vanished and Andrei Yefimych lost consciousness forever.

Peasants came, picked him up by the arms and legs, and carried him to the chapel. He lay there on a table, his eyes open, and the moon shone on him at night. In the morning Sergei Sergeich came, prayed piously before the crucifix, and closed his former superior’s eyes.

The following day Andrei Yefimych was buried. Only Mikhail Averyanych and Daryushka attended the funeral.

NOVEMBER 1892