The Complete Short Novels

‘‘Will these vermin really be living in our yard for another year and a half? It’s terrible! Terrible!’’

And how much grief the peasants caused us! How many painful disappointments at the very first, in the spring months, when we so wanted to be happy! My wife was building a school. I drew the plan of a school for sixty boys, and the zemstvo¹⁷ council approved of it but advised building the school in Kurilovka, a big village that was only two miles from us; incidentally, the Kurilovka school, in which the children of four villages studied, including those from our Dubechnya, was old and small, and one had to walk warily on its rotted floor. At the end of March, Masha, at her own wish, was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school, and at the beginning of April, we called meetings three times and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was small and old and that it was necessary to build a new one. A member of the zemstvo council came, and an inspector from the state school system, and also tried to persuade them. After each meeting, they surrounded us and asked for a bucket of vodka; it was hot in the crowd, we soon grew weary and returned home displeased and somewhat abashed. In the end, the peasants allotted a piece of land for the school and took it upon themselves to deliver all the building materials from town with their horses. And as soon as they were finished with the spring crops, on the very first Sunday, carts went from Kurilovka and Dubechnya to bring bricks for the foundation. They left at first light and came back late in the evening; the muzhiks were drunk and said they were exhausted.

As if on purpose, the rain and cold continued all through May. The road was ruined, turned to mud. The carts usually stopped by our yard on their way from town—and what a horror that was! Now a horse appears in the gateway, big-bellied, its forelegs splayed; it curtsies before coming into the yard; a thirty-foot beam comes crawling in on a dray, wet, slimy-looking; beside it, wrapped up against the rain, not looking under his feet, not avoiding the puddles, strides a muzhik, his coat skirts tucked up under his belt. Another cart appears with planks, then a third with a beam, a fourth... and the space in front of the house gradually becomes crammed with horses, beams, boards. Muzhiks and women with wrapped heads and tucked-up skirts look angrily at our windows, noisily demand that the lady come out to them; coarse abuse can be heard. And Moisei stands to one side, and it seems to us that he delights in our disgrace.

‘‘We won’t do any more carting!’’ shout the muzhiks. ‘‘We’re exhausted! Go and do your own carting!’’

Masha, pale, distraught, thinking they were about to break into our house, gives them money for a half-bucket of vodka, after which the noise subsides, and the long beams crawl out of the yard one after another.

When I got ready to go to the construction site, my wife became worried and said:

‘‘The peasants are angry. They might do something to you. No, wait, I’ll go with you.’’

We drove off to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us for a tip. The frame was ready, it was time to lay the foundation, but the masons did not come; there was a delay, and the carpenters murmured. But when the masons finally came, it turned out that there was no sand: the need for it had somehow been overlooked. Taking advantage of our helpless position, the peasants asked thirty kopecks per cartload, though it was less than a quarter of a mile from the construction site to the river, where they took the sand, and all told, we needed five hundred cartloads. There was no end of misunderstanding, abuse, and extortion, my wife was indignant, and Titus Petrov, the masonry contractor, a seventy-year-old man, took her by the hand and said:

‘‘Look here! Look here! Just get me the sand, and I’ll round you up ten men at once, and in two days it’ll be ready. Look here!’’

But the sand was delivered, two days, four days, a week went by, and a pit still yawned in the place of the future foundation.

‘‘It could drive you crazy!’’ My wife was agitated. ‘‘What people! What people!’’

During these disorders, the engineer Viktor Ivanych used to visit us. He would bring bags of wine and delicacies, spend a long time eating, and then fall asleep on the terrace and snore so loudly that the workers shook their heads and said:

‘‘Well, now!’’

Masha was usually not glad of his coming, did not trust him, and at the same time asked for his advice; when, having slept after dinner, he woke up out of sorts and said bad things about our farming, or expressed regret that he had bought Dubechnya, which had already caused him so many losses, a look of anguish would come to poor Masha’s face; she complained to him, and he yawned and said that peasants should be whipped.

He called our marriage and our life a comedy, said it was a whim and an indulgence.

‘‘Something like this already happened with her,’’ he told me about Masha. ‘‘She once fancied herself an opera singer and left me; I searched for her for two months and spent, my gentle one, a thousand roubles on telegrams alone.’’

He no longer called me a sectarian or Mr. Housepainter, or approved of my working life as before, but said:

‘‘You’re a strange man! You’re an abnormal man! I wouldn’t venture to prophesy, but you’ll end badly, sir!’’

And Masha slept poorly at night and kept thinking about something, sitting by the window in our bedroom. There was no more laughter over dinner, no making sweet grimaces. I suffered, and when it rained, every drop of rain pierced my heart like birdshot, and I was ready to kneel before Masha and apologize for the weather. When the muzhiks made noise in the yard, I also felt myself guilty. I spent whole hours sitting in one spot, thinking only of what a wonderful, what a magnificent person Masha was. I loved her passionately and admired everything she did, everything she said. She had a penchant for quiet, studious occupations; she liked to spend a long time reading, studying something; she, who knew farming only from books, astonished us all with her knowledge, and the advice she used to give was all useful, and none of it went for naught. And with all that, so much nobility, taste, and good humor, that good humor which occurs only in exceptionally well-brought-up people!

For this woman, with her healthy, positive mind, the disorderly situation we now lived in, with its petty cares and squabbles, was tormenting; I saw it and could not sleep nights myself, my head worked, tears choked me. I thrashed about, not knowing what to do.

I galloped to town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets, flowers; I went fishing with Stepan and waded for hours up to my neck in cold water, under the rain, to catch a burbot in order to diversify our meals; I stooped to asking the muzhiks not to make noise, gave them vodka, bribed them, made them various promises. And did so many other foolish things!

The rain finally stopped, the earth dried. You get up early, at four o’clock—dew glistening on the flowers, birds and insects noising about, not a single cloud in the sky; the orchard, the meadow, and the river so beautiful, but then memories of the muzhiks, the carts, the engineer! Masha and I drove out to the fields in a racing droshky to look at the oats. She was the driver, I sat behind; her shoulders were raised, and the wind played with her hair.

‘‘Keep right!’’ she shouted to oncoming drivers.

‘‘You’re just like a coachman!’’ I said to her once.

‘‘Maybe so! My grandfather, the engineer’s father, was a coachman. Didn’t you know that?’’ she asked, turning to me, and at once imitated the way coachmen shout and sing.

‘‘Thank God!’’ I thought, listening to her. ‘‘Thank God!’’

And again memories of the muzhiks, the carts, the engineer...

XIII

DR. BLAGOVO CAME out on a bicycle. My sister began to visit often. Again there were conversations about physical labor, about progress, about the mysterious X that awaits mankind in the distant future. The doctor didn’t like our farming because it interfered with our arguing, and said that to plow, mow, and tend calves was unworthy of a free man, and that in time people would charge animals and machines with these crude forms of the struggle for existence, and would themselves be occupied solely with scientific studies. And my sister kept asking to be allowed to go home earlier, and if she stayed till late evening or overnight, there was no end to her worrying.

‘‘My God, what a child you still are!’’ Masha would say in reproach. ‘‘It’s even ridiculous, finally.’’

‘‘Yes, ridiculous,’’ my sister would agree, ‘‘I’m aware that it’s ridiculous; but what am I to do if I’m unable to overcome myself? It always seems to me that I act badly.’’

During the haymaking, my whole body ached from lack of habit; sitting on the terrace with everybody in the evening and talking, I would suddenly fall asleep, and they laughed loudly at me. They would wake me up and sit me at the table for supper, drowsiness would come over me, and, as in oblivion, I would see lights, faces, plates, hear voices without understanding them. And getting up early in the morning, I would at once take the scythe or go off to the construction site and work all day.

Staying home on holidays, I noticed that my wife and sister were concealing something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was tender with me as before, but she had some thoughts of her own that she did not impart to me. There was no doubt that her irritation with the peasants was growing, life was becoming ever more difficult for her, and yet she no longer complained to me. She now talked with the doctor more willingly than with me, and I didn’t understand why that was so.

There was a custom in our province: at haymaking and harvest time, workers came in the evenings to the master’s yard to be treated to vodka, even young girls drank a glass. We did not observe it; the mowers and women stood in our yard till late in the evening, waiting for vodka, and then went away cursing. Masha frowned sternly during this time and was silent, or said irritably to the doctor in a low voice:

‘‘Savages! Pechenegs!’’¹⁸

In the country, newcomers are given an unfriendly, almost hostile welcome, as at school. We, too, were welcomed in that way. At first we were looked upon as stupid and simple people who had bought an estate only because there was nothing else to do with the money. We were laughed at. The muzhiks let their cattle graze in our woods and even in the orchard, they drove our cows and horses to their village and then came to demand money for damages. They came into our yard in whole companies and noisily complained that, while mowing, we had supposedly encroached on the border of some Bysheevka or Semyonikha that did not belong to us; and since we did not yet know the precise boundaries of our land, we took their word for it and paid the fine; later, it would turn out that we had mowed correctly. They stripped bast ¹⁹ in our woods. One Dubechnya muzhik, a kulak²⁰ who dealt in vodka without a license, bribed our workers and, together with them, deceived us in a most treacherous way: replaced the new wheels on our carts with old ones, took our horse collars and then sold them back to us, and so on. But most offensive of all was what was happening at the Kurilovka construction site; at night the women stole planks, bricks, tiles, sheet iron; the elder searched their houses in the presence of witnesses, the assembly fined each of them two roubles, and then they all drank up the money together.

When Masha learned of it, she would say indignantly to the doctor or my sister:

‘‘What animals! It’s awful! Awful!’’

And more than once I heard her express regret at undertaking the building of the school.

‘‘Understand,’’ the doctor persuaded her, ‘‘understand that if you build this school and generally do good, it’s not for the muzhiks but in the name of culture, in the name of the future. And the worse these muzhiks are, the more reason to build the school. Understand that!’’

In his voice, however, one could hear a lack of assurance, and it seemed to me that he and Masha both hated the muzhiks.

Masha often went to the mill and took my sister with her, and the two of them laughingly said they were going to look at Stepan, how handsome he was. Stepan, it turned out, was slow and taciturn only with men, but in the company of women behaved quite casually and talked incessantly. Once, going to the river to swim, I involuntarily overheard a conversation. Masha and Cleopatra, both in white dresses, were sitting on the bank under a willow, in a broad patch of shade, and Stepan was standing nearby, his hands behind his back, saying:

‘‘Are peasants people? They aren’t people but, excuse me, beastly folk, charlatans. What kind of life does a peasant have? Only eating, drinking, getting cheaper grub, straining his gullet witlessly in the pot-house; and no nice conversation for you, no manners, no form—just boorishness! Sits in dirt himself, and his wife sits in dirt, and his children sit in dirt, he sleeps in whatever he’s got on him, he picks potatoes from the cabbage soup straight out with his fingers, he drinks his kvass with cockroaches—might at least blow it aside!’’

‘‘But that’s poverty!’’ my sister put in.

‘‘What poverty! Want, true, but then there’s want and want, madam. If a man sits in jail or, say, is blind or crippled, that God should better spare us all, but if he’s free, can use his intelligence, has eyes and hands, has strength, has God, then what more does he need? It’s indulgence, madam, ignorance, and not poverty. If you, let’s suppose, as good masters, being educated, want to offer him charitable assistance, he’s so vile that he’ll drink up your money, or worse still, open a drinking establishment himself and use your money to rob people. Poverty, you’re pleased to say. But does the wealthy peasant live better? Excuse me, but he also lives like a pig. A boor, a loudmouth, a blockhead, wider than he is tall, a fat red mug—the scoundrel’s just begging you to haul off and whack him. This Larion from Dubechnya is also rich, but don’t worry, he strips bast in your forest no worse than a poor man; he’s foulmouthed, and his children are foulmouthed, and when he’s had a drop too much, he plunks his nose down in a puddle and sleeps. They’re all worthless, madam. Living in the village with them is like living in hell. It sticks in my craw, this village, and I thank the Lord, the Heavenly King, that I’m fed and clothed, and have served my term as a dragoon, and spent three years as elder, and am now a free Cossack: I live where I like. I have no wish to live in the village, and nobody has the right to make me. Your wife, they say. You, they say, are obliged to live in the cottage with your wife. Why is that? I’m not hired out to her.’’

‘‘Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?’’ asked Masha.

‘‘What kind of love do we have in the village?’’ Stepan asked and grinned. ‘‘As a matter of fact, madam, if you wish to know, I’m married for the second time. I’m not from Kurilovka myself, I’m from Zalegoshche, but I was taken to Kurilovka later as a son-in-law. Meaning my parent had no wish to divide his land among us—we’re five brothers— so I bowed out and took off, went to another village as a son-in-law. But my first wife died young.’’

‘‘What from?’’

‘‘Foolishness. Used to cry, she did, kept crying and crying for no reason, and just withered away. Kept drinking some kind of herbs to get prettier and must have damaged her insides. And my second wife, from Kurilovka—what about her? A village wench, a peasant, nothing more! When they matched me with her, I took a fancy: I thought, she’s young, fair-skinned, they live clean. Her mother was something like a flagellant²¹ and drank coffee, but the main thing was, they lived clean! So I married the girl, and the next day we sat down to dinner, I told my mother-in-law to give me a spoon, she gave me a spoon, and I see she wipes it with her finger. There you have it, I thought, that’s clean for you! I lived with them a year and left. Maybe I should have married a city girl,’’ he went on after a pause. ‘‘They say a wife is her husband’s helpmeet. I don’t need a helpmeet, I’m my own helpmeet, but you’d better talk to me, and not all that blah, blah, blah, but thoroughly, feelingly. Without good talk— what kind of life is it!’’

Stepan suddenly fell silent, and at once came his dull, monotonous ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo.’’ That meant he had seen me.

Masha often went to the mill and evidently found pleasure in conversing with Stepan; Stepan abused the muzhiks so sincerely and with such conviction—and she was attracted to him. Each time she came back from the mill, the peasant simpleton who watched over the orchard shouted at her:

‘‘Wench Palashka! Hi there, wench Palashka!’’ and barked at her like a dog: ‘‘Bow-wow!’’

And she would stop and look at him attentively, as if in that simpleton’s barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and he probably attracted her as did Stepan’s abuse. And at home some news would be waiting for her, such as, for example, that the village geese had trampled our cabbage patch, or that Larion had stolen the reins, and, shrugging her shoulders, she would say with a smile:

‘‘What do you want from these people!’’

She was indignant, she was all seething in her soul, and meanwhile I was getting used to the muzhiks and felt more drawn to them. They were mostly nervous, irritated, insulted people; they were people of suppressed imagination, ignorant, with a poor, dull outlook, with ever the same thoughts about the gray earth, gray days, black bread, people who were sly but, like birds, only hid their heads behind a tree— who didn’t know how to count. They wouldn’t go to your haymaking for twenty roubles, but they would go for a half-bucket of vodka, though for twenty roubles they could buy four buckets. In fact, there was filth, and drunkenness, and stupidity, and deceit, but with all that you could feel, nevertheless, that the muzhiks’ life was generally upheld by some strong, healthy core. However much the muzhik looks like a clumsy beast as he follows his plow, and however much he befuddles himself with vodka, still, on looking closer, you feel that there is in him something necessary and very important that is lacking, for instance, in Masha and the doctor—namely, he believes that the chief thing on earth is truth, and that his salvation and that of all people lies in truth alone, and therefore he loves justice more than anything else in the world. I would tell my wife that she saw the spots on the windowpane, but not the windowpane itself; she would say nothing in reply, or start crooning ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo’’ like Stepan... When this kind, intelligent woman grew pale with indignation and, in a trembling voice, talked with the doctor about drunkenness and deceit, I was puzzled and struck by her forgetfulness. How could she forget that her father, the engineer, also drank, drank a lot, and that the money that had gone to purchase Dubechnya had been acquired by a whole series of brazen, shameless deceptions? How could she forget?

XIV

AND MY SISTER also lived her own life, which she carefully concealed from me. She often whispered with Masha. When I approached her, she shrank back, and her look became guilty, entreating; obviously something was happening in her soul that she was afraid or ashamed of. So as not to meet me somehow in the garden or be left alone with me, she stayed close to Masha all the time, and I rarely had a chance to talk with her, only over dinner.

One evening I was walking slowly through the garden, coming back from the construction site. It was beginning to get dark. Not noticing me, not hearing my footsteps, my sister was walking near an old, spreading apple tree, quite noiselessly, like a phantom. She was dressed in black and walked quickly, along the same line, back and forth, looking at the ground. An apple fell from the tree; she gave a start at the noise, stopped, and pressed her hands to her temples. Just then I came up to her.

In an impulse of tender love that suddenly flooded my heart, in tears, for some reason remembering our mother, our childhood, I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed her.

‘‘What’s the matter with you?’’ I asked. ‘‘You’re suffering, I’ve seen it for a long time. Tell me, what’s the matter?’’

‘‘I’m frightened...’ she said, trembling.

‘‘But what’s the matter?’’ I insisted. ‘‘For God’s sake, be open with me!’’

‘‘I will, I will be open with you, I’ll tell you the whole truth. Concealing it from you is so hard, so painful! Misail, I’m in love...’ she went on in a whisper. ‘‘I’m in love, I’m in love... I’m happy, but why am I so frightened?’’

There was the sound of footsteps, Dr. Blagovo appeared among the trees in his silk shirt and high boots. Evidently they had arranged a meeting here by the apple tree. Seeing him, she rushed to him impulsively, with a pained cry, as if he was being taken from her:

‘‘Vladimir! Vladimir!’’

She pressed herself to him and looked greedily into his face, and only now did I notice how thin and pale she had become recently. It was especially noticeable by her lace collar, which I had long known and which now lay more loosely than ever around her long and slender neck. The doctor became embarrassed but recovered at once and said, smoothing her hair:

‘‘Well, come, come...Why so nervous? You see, I’m here.’’

We were silent, glancing shyly at each other. Then the three of us walked on, and I heard the doctor say to me:

‘‘Cultured life has not yet begun with us. The old men comfort themselves that if there’s nothing now, there was something in the forties or the sixties;²² that’s the old men, but you and I are young, our brains have not yet been touched by marasmus senilis, and we cannot comfort ourselves with such illusions. Russia began in the year 862, ²³ but cultured Russia, in my understanding, has never yet begun.’’

But I didn’t enter into these reflections. Strange as it was, I didn’t want to believe that my sister was in love, that she was now walking and holding this stranger’s hand, looking tenderly at him. My sister, this nervous, intimidated, downtrodden, unfree being, loves a man who is already married and has children! I felt sorry about something, precisely what I didn’t know; the doctor’s presence was now unpleasant for some reason, and I simply couldn’t understand what could come of this love of theirs.

XV

MASHA AND I were driving to Kurilovka for the blessing of the school. ²⁴

‘‘Autumn, autumn, autumn...’ Masha was saying softly, looking around. ‘‘Summer’s over. There are no birds, and only the pussywillows are still green.’’

Yes, summer was over. The days are clear, warm, but the mornings are chilly, the shepherds now go out in sheepskin coats, and in our garden the dew on the asters doesn’t dry the whole day. You hear plaintive noises, and there’s no telling whether it’s a shutter whining on its rusty hinges or the cranes flying—and you feel so good and want so much to live!

‘‘Summer’s over...’ Masha was saying. ‘‘Now you and I can sum things up. We’ve worked a lot, thought a lot, we’re the better for it—honor and glory to us—we’ve succeeded at personal improvement; but did these successes of ours have any noticeable influence on the life around us, were they of any use to anyone? No. The ignorance, the physical filth, the drunkenness, the shockingly high infant mortality—it all remains as it was, and the fact that you plowed and sowed, and I spent money and read books, hasn’t made things better for anyone. Obviously we worked only for ourselves and had broad minds only for ourselves.’’

Such reasoning disconcerted me, and I didn’t know what to think.

‘‘We were sincere from beginning to end,’’ I said, ‘‘and whoever is sincere is right.’’

‘‘Who disputes that? We were right, but we did not rightly accomplish what we were right about. First of all, our external methods themselves—aren’t they mistaken? You want to be useful to people, but the very fact of your buying an estate precludes from the start all possibility of doing anything useful for them. Then, if you work, dress, and eat like a muzhik, by your own authority you legitimize, as it were, these heavy, clumsy clothes of theirs, their terrible cottages, their stupid beards... On the other hand, suppose you work a long time, very long, all your life, and in the end you get some practical results, but what are they, these results of yours, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, degeneracy? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of fighting are needed here, strong, bold, quick! If you really want to be useful, leave the narrow circle of ordinary activity and try to act upon the masses as a whole! What’s needed first of all is loud, energetic preaching. Why is art—music, for instance—so vital, so popular, and in fact so strong? Because a musician or a singer acts upon thousands at once. Dear, dear art!’’ she went on, looking dreamily at the sky. ‘‘Art gives wings and carries you far, far away! Whoever is sick of filth, of petty pennyworth interests, whoever is outraged, insulted, and indignant, can find peace and satisfaction only in the beautiful.’’

As we drove up to Kurilovka, the weather was clear, joyful. In some yards the threshing was under way, there was a smell of rye straw. Bright red rowanberries showed behind the wattle fences, and the trees all around, wherever you looked, were all gold or red. Bells were ringing in the bell towers, icons were being carried to the school, and they were singing ‘‘The Fervent Intercessor.’’ And how transparent the air, how high the pigeons flew!

A prayer service was held in the schoolroom. Then the Kurilovka peasants presented Masha with an icon, and the Dubechnya peasants with a big plaited bread and a gilded salt cellar. And Masha broke into sobs.

‘‘And if anything unnecessary was said, or there was any displeasure, forgive us,’’ said one old man, and he bowed to her and to me.

As we drove home, Masha kept turning to look back at the school; the green roof, which I had painted, now glistened in the sun, and we could see it for a long time. And I felt that the glances Masha cast at it now were farewell glances.

XVI

IN THE EVENING she got ready for town.

Lately she had often gone to town and spent the night there. In her absence, I was unable to work, my hands would drop and go weak; our big yard seemed a dull, disgusting wasteland, the orchard rustled angrily, and without her, the house, the trees, the horses were, for me, no longer ‘‘ours.’’

I didn’t go anywhere out of the house but kept sitting at her desk, by her bookcase with the books on farming, those former favorites, now no longer needed, looking at me so abashedly. For hours at a time, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn night, black as soot, was falling outside the windows, I would examine her old glove, or the pen she always wrote with, or her little scissors; I did nothing and was clearly aware that if I had done something before, if I had plowed, mowed, chopped wood, it was only because she wanted it. And if she had sent me to clean a deep well, where I’d have to stand up to my waist in water, I’d have gone into the well, regardless of whether it was necessary or not. But now, when she was not around, Dubechnya, with its decay, unkemptness, banging shutters, thieves by night and by day, seemed to me a chaos in which any work would be useless. And why should I work here, why worry and think about the future, if I felt that the ground was disappearing from under me, that my role here in Dubechnya had been played, in short, that the same lot awaited me as had befallen the books on farming? Oh, what anguish it was at night, in the hours of solitude, when I listened every moment with anxiety, as if waiting for someone to cry out to me that it was time to go. I wasn’t sorry for Dubechnya, I was sorry for my love, whose autumn had obviously also come. What enormous happiness it is to love and be loved, and how terrible to feel that you’re beginning to fall from that high tower!

Masha came back from town the next day towards evening. She was displeased with something but concealed it, and only asked why all the storm windows had been put in— you could suffocate that way. I removed two of the storm windows. We had no wish to eat, but we sat down and had supper.

‘‘Go and wash your hands,’’ said my wife. ‘‘You smell of putty.’’

She brought new illustrated magazines from town, and we looked at them together after supper. Some had supplements with fashion pictures and patterns. Masha gave them a cursory glance and set them aside in order to give them a separate and proper examination later; but one dress with a wide, smooth, bell-shaped skirt and big sleeves caught her interest, and she looked at it seriously and attentively for a moment.

‘‘That’s not bad,’’ she said.

‘‘Yes, that dress would go very well on you,’’ I said. ‘‘Very well!’’

And, looking at the dress with loving emotion, admiring that gray spot only because she liked it, I went on tenderly:

‘‘A wonderful, charming dress! Beautiful, splendid Masha! My dear Masha!’’

And tears dropped on the picture.

‘‘Splendid Masha...’ I murmured. ‘‘Dear, sweet Masha...’

She went and lay down, and I sat for another hour looking at the illustrations.

‘‘You shouldn’t have removed the storm windows,’’ she said from the bedroom. ‘‘I’m afraid it will be cold. Look how it’s blowing!’’

I read here and there in the ‘‘miscellany’’—about how to make cheap ink, and about the world’s biggest diamond. I again came upon the fashion picture of the dress she liked, and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, bare shoulders, brilliant, magnificent, well versed in music and painting and literature, and how small, how brief, my role seemed to me!

Our meeting, this marriage of ours, was only an episode of which this alive, richly endowed woman would have many in her life. All that was best in the world, as I’ve already said, was at her disposal and came to her perfectly gratis, and even ideas and fashionable intellectual trends served for her pleasure, diversifying her life, and I was merely a coachman who drove her from one enthusiasm to another. Now she no longer needed me, she would flutter off, and I would be left alone.

And as if in answer to my thoughts, a desperate cry came from the yard:

‘‘He-e-elp!’’

It was a shrill woman’s voice, and as if wishing to imitate it, the wind in the chimney also howled in a shrill voice. About half a minute went by, and again I heard through the noise of the wind, but as if from the other end of the yard:

‘‘He-e-elp!’’

‘‘Misail, do you hear?’’ my wife asked softly. ‘‘Do you hear?’’

She came out to me from the bedroom in just her night-gown, her hair undone, and listened, looking at the dark window.

‘‘Somebody’s being strangled!’’ she said. ‘‘Just what we needed.’’

I took a gun and went out. It was very dark in the yard, a strong wind was blowing, so that it was hard to stand. I walked to the gate, listened: the trees rustled, the wind whistled, and in the orchard a dog howled lazily, probably the peasant simpleton’s. Beyond the gate it was pitch dark, not a single light on the tracks. And near the wing where the office was last year, there suddenly came a stifled cry:

‘‘He-e-elp!’’

‘‘Who’s there?’’ I called.

Two men were fighting. One was pushing the other out, but the other was resisting, and both were breathing heavily.

‘‘Let go!’’ said one, and I recognized Ivan Cheprakov; it was he who had cried in a shrill woman’s voice. ‘‘Let go, curse you, or I’ll bite your hands all over!’’

I recognized the other as Moisei. I pulled them apart and, with that, couldn’t help myself and hit Moisei twice in the face. He fell down, then got up, and I hit him once more.

‘‘He wanted to kill me,’’ he muttered. ‘‘He was getting at mother’s chest... I wish to lock him up in the wing for safety’s sake, sir...’

Cheprakov was drunk, didn’t recognize me, and kept taking deep breaths, as if gathering air in order to cry ‘‘help’’ again.

I left them and went back to the house; my wife was lying in bed, already dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not even conceal that I had struck Moisei.

‘‘It’s frightening to live in the country,’’ she said. ‘‘And God in heaven, what a long night!’’

‘‘He-e-elp!’’ the cry came again a little later.

‘‘I’ll go and calm them down,’’ I said.

‘‘No, let them bite each other’s throats there,’’ she said with a squeamish air.

She was staring at the ceiling and listening, and I was sitting nearby, not daring to start talking with her, feeling as if it was my fault that they were shouting ‘‘help’’ in the yard and that the night was so long.

We were silent, and I waited impatiently for a glow of light in the windows. But Masha looked all the while as if she had just recovered consciousness and was surprised at how it was that she, so intelligent, educated, so neat, could have wound up in this pitiful provincial wasteland, in a gang of petty, worthless people, and how she could have forgotten herself so far that she had even been captivated by one of those people and, for over six months, had been his wife. It seemed to me that it now made no difference to her whether it was me, or Moisei, or Cheprakov; everything had merged for her into this wild, drunken ‘‘help’’—me, and our marriage, and our farming, and the bad autumn roads; and whenever she sighed or stirred in order to lie more comfortably, I read in her face: ‘‘Oh, if only morning would come sooner!’’

In the morning she left.

I stayed in Dubechnya for three more days, waiting for her, then put all our things in one room, locked it, and went to town. When I rang at the engineer’s, it was already evening, and the streetlamps were lit along our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya. Pavel told me there was nobody home: Viktor Ivanych had left for Petersburg, and Marya Viktorovna was most likely rehearsing at the Azhogins’. I remember with what agitation I went to the Azhogins’, how my heart pounded and sank as I went up the stairs and stood for a long time on the upper landing, not daring to enter that temple of the muses! In the reception room, candles were burning on the little table, the grand piano, and the stage, three of them everywhere, and the first performance had been set for the thirteenth, and now the first rehearsal was on a Monday—a black day. The struggle against superstition! All the amateurs of the scenic art were gathered; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest walked about onstage, reading their roles from notebooks. Apart from them all, Radish stood motionless, his temple leaning against the wall, and gazed at the stage with adoration, waiting for the rehearsal to begin. Everything as it used to be!

I made for the hostess—I had to greet her, but suddenly everyone hissed and waved at me not to stamp my feet. Silence fell. The lid of the grand piano was opened, some lady sat down, narrowing her nearsighted eyes at the score, and my Masha went to the piano, decked out, beautiful, but beautiful in some special new way, not at all like the Masha who used to come to me at the mill in the spring. She began to sing:

‘‘Why do I love thee, radiant night?’’²⁵

In all the period of our acquaintance, this was the first time I had heard her sing. She had a good, strong, juicy voice, and it seemed to me while she sang that I was eating a ripe, sweet, fragrant melon. Then she finished, there was applause, and she smiled, very pleased, flashing her eyes, leafing through the scores, straightening her dress like a bird that has escaped its cage at last and preens its feathers in freedom. Her hair was brushed over her ears, and her face had an unpleasant, defiant expression, as if she wanted to challenge us all, or yell at us as at horses: ‘‘Hey, you, my pretty ones!’’

And just then she must have resembled her grandfather the coachman.

‘‘You here, too?’’ she asked, giving me her hand. ‘‘Did you hear me sing? Well, how did you find it?’’ And, not waiting for my reply, she went on: ‘‘It’s very opportune that you’re here. Tonight I’m going to Petersburg for a short time. Will you let me go?’’

At midnight I saw her to the station. She embraced me tenderly, probably grateful that I hadn’t asked her any unnecessary questions, and promised to write to me, and I pressed her hands for a long time and kissed them, barely holding back the tears, not saying a word to her.

And when she was gone, I stood watching the receding lights, caressing her in my imagination, and saying softly:

‘‘My dear Masha, splendid Masha...’

I spent the night in Makarikha at Karpovna’s, and the next morning was already back with Radish, upholstering furniture for some wealthy merchant who was marrying his daughter to a doctor.

XVII

ON SUNDAY AFTER dinner my sister came to see me and we had tea.

‘‘I read a lot now,’’ she said, showing me a book she had taken from the town library on the way to see me. ‘‘Thanks to your wife and Vladimir for awakening my self-awareness. They saved me, they made it so that I now feel myself a human being. Before, I used not to sleep at night from various worries: ‘Ah, we’ve used too much sugar this week! Ah, if only I don’t oversalt the pickles!’ And now I also don’t sleep, but I have different thoughts. I suffer that half of my life has been spent so stupidly, so faintheartedly. I despise my past, I’m ashamed of it, and I look at father now as my enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to your wife! And Vladimir? He’s such a wonderful man! They’ve opened my eyes.’’

‘‘It’s not good that you don’t sleep at night,’’ I said.

‘‘You think I’m sick? Not a bit. Vladimir auscultated me and said I’m perfectly healthy. But health is not the point, it’s not so important... Tell me: am I right?’’

She was in need of moral support—that was obvious. Masha was gone, Dr. Blagovo was in Petersburg, and besides me there was no one left in town who could tell her she was right. She peered intently into my face, trying to read my secret thoughts, and if I became pensive in her presence and was silent, she took it to her account and grew sad. I had to be on my guard all the time, and when she asked me if she was right, I hastened to reply that she was right and that I deeply respected her.

‘‘You know? They’ve given me a role at the Azhogins’,’’ she went on. ‘‘I want to act on the stage. I want to live; in short, I want to drink from the full cup. I have no talent at all, and the role’s only ten lines long, but that’s still immeasurably more lofty and noble than pouring tea five times a day and keeping an eye on the cook lest she eat an extra bite. And above all, let father see, finally, that I, too, am capable of protest.’’

After tea she lay down on my bed and went on lying there for some time with her eyes closed, very pale.

‘‘Such weakness!’’ she said, getting up. ‘‘Vladimir said that all town women and girls are anemic from idleness. What an intelligent man Vladimir is! He’s right, infinitely right. One must work!’’

Two days later she came to the rehearsal at the Azhogins’ with a notebook. She was wearing a black dress with a string of corals around her neck, a brooch that, from a distance, looked like a puff pastry, and big earrings in her ears, with a diamond sparkling in each of them. When I looked at her, I felt awkward: the tastelessness struck me. Others, too, noticed that she was wearing earrings and diamonds inappropriately and was strangely dressed; I saw smiling faces and heard someone say laughingly:

‘‘Cleopatra of Egypt.’’

She tried to be worldly, unconstrained, at ease, and that made her look affected and strange. Her simplicity and comeliness abandoned her.

‘‘I just announced to father that I was going to a rehearsal,’’ she began, coming up to me, ‘‘and he shouted that he was depriving me of his blessing and even all but struck me. Imagine, I don’t know my role,’’ she said, looking into her notebook. ‘‘I’m sure to get confused. And so the die is cast,’’ she went on in strong agitation. ‘‘The die is cast...’

It seemed to her that everyone was looking at her and was amazed at the important step she had ventured upon, that everyone expected something special from her, and it was impossible to convince her that nobody paid attention to such small and uninteresting people as she and I.

She had nothing to do till the third act, and her role as a visiting provincial gossip consisted merely in standing by the door as if eavesdropping and then saying a short monologue. Until her appearance, for at least an hour and a half, while there was walking, reading, tea drinking, arguing onstage, she never left my side and kept murmuring her role and clutching her notebook nervously; and, imagining that everyone was looking at her and waiting for her appearance, she kept straightening her hair with a trembling hand and repeating:

‘‘I’m sure to get confused... How heavy my heart is, if you only knew! I’m as frightened as if I was about to be led out to execution.’’

At last her turn came.

‘‘Cleopatra Alexeevna—you’re on!’’ said the director.

She stepped to the middle of the stage with an expression of terror on her face, unattractive, angular, and for half a minute stood there like a post, completely motionless, and only the big earrings swung under her ears.

‘‘You can use the notebook the first time,’’ somebody said.

It was clear to me that she was trembling and, from trembling, could not speak or open her notebook, and that she was past thinking about her role, and I was just about to go to her and say something when she suddenly sank to her knees in the middle of the stage and burst into loud sobs.

There was movement, there was noise all around, I alone stood leaning against the backdrop, struck by what had happened, not understanding, not knowing what I was to do. I saw her being picked up and led away. I saw Anyuta Blagovo come over to me; earlier I hadn’t seen her in the room, and now it was as if she had sprung from the ground. She was wearing a hat with a veil and, as always, had the air of having stopped by only for a minute.

‘‘I told her not to act,’’ she said crossly, pronouncing each word abruptly and blushing. ‘‘This is madness! You should have stopped her!’’

The Azhogin mother, thin and flat, quickly came over to me, in a short jacket with short sleeves, and with cigarette ashes on her chest.

‘‘My friend, it’s terrible,’’ she said, wringing her hands and, as usual, peering intently into my face. ‘‘It’s terrible! Your sister’s condition... she’s pregnant! Take her away, I implore you...’

She was breathing heavily from agitation. And to one side stood her three daughters, as thin and flat as she, and huddled timorously together. They were alarmed, astounded, as if a convict had just been caught in their house. What a disgrace, how frightful! And yet this respectable family spent all their lives fighting prejudice; obviously they assumed that all of mankind’s prejudices and errors consisted only in three candles, the number thirteen, and the black day—Monday!

‘‘I implore you... implore you...’ Mrs. Azhogin repeated, protruding her lips and drawing out the letter O. ‘‘I implo-o-ore you, take her home.’’

XVIII

A LITTLE LATER, my sister and I went down the stairs. I shielded her with the skirt of my coat; we hurried, choosing back lanes where there were no streetlamps, hiding from passersby, and it was like fleeing. She no longer wept but looked at me with dry eyes. To Makarikha, where I was taking her, it was only a twenty-minute walk, and strangely, in so short a time we managed to recall our whole life, we discussed everything, thought over our situation, considered...

We decided it was no longer possible for us to stay in this town, and that when I earned a little money, we would move somewhere else. In some houses people were already asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these houses, feared them, and spoke of the fanaticism, the coarseness of heart, the nonentity of these respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we frightened so much, and I asked how these stupid, cruel, lazy, dishonest people were better than the drunken and superstitious Kurilovka muzhiks, or how they were better than animals, which are also thrown into consternation when some incident disrupts the monotony of their instinct-bound lives. What would become of my sister now, if she went on living at home? What moral suffering would she experience, talking with father, meeting acquaintances every day? I pictured it to myself, and at once people came to my memory, all people of my acquaintance, who were slowly being pushed out of this world by their families and relations, I recalled tortured dogs driven insane, living sparrows plucked bare by little boys and thrown into the water—and the long, long series of obscure, protracted sufferings I had been observing in this town uninterruptedly since childhood; and it was incomprehensible to me what these sixty thousand inhabitants lived by, why they read the Gospel, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What benefit did they derive from all that had been written and said so far, if there was in them the same inner darkness and the same aversion to freedom as a hundred or three hundred years ago? A building contractor builds houses in town all his life, and yet till his dying day he says ‘‘galdary’’ instead of ‘‘gallery,’’ and so, too, these sixty thousand inhabitants for generations have been reading and hearing about truth, mercy, and freedom, and yet till their dying day they lie from morning to evening, torment each other, and as for freedom, they fear it and hate it like an enemy.

‘‘And so my fate is decided,’’ said my sister when we came home. ‘‘After what has happened, I can’t go back there. Lord, how good that is! I feel easy in my heart.’’

She went to bed at once. Tears glistened on her lashes, but her expression was happy, her sleep was sound and sweet, and you could see that she really did feel easy in her heart and that she was resting. She hadn’t slept like that for a long, long time!

And so we began to live together. She kept singing and saying that she felt very well, and the books we took from the library were returned unread because she could no longer read; all she wanted was to dream and talk about the future. Mending my linen or helping Karpovna at the stove, she either hummed to herself or talked about her Vladimir, about his intelligence, his beautiful manners, his kindness, about his extraordinary learning, and I agreed with her, though I no longer liked her doctor. She wanted to work, to live independently, to support herself, and said she would become a schoolteacher or a doctor’s assistant as soon as her health permitted, and would wash the floors and do the laundry herself. She already passionately loved her little boy; he wasn’t born yet, but she already knew what sort of eyes he would have, what sort of hands, and how he would laugh. She liked to talk about his upbringing, and since Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her reasoning about upbringing came down to the boy turning out as charming as his father. There was no end to this talk, and everything she said aroused a lively joy in her. Sometimes I, too, rejoiced, not knowing why myself.

She must have infected me with her dreaming. I also read nothing and only dreamed; in the evenings, despite my fatigue, I paced up and down the room, my hands thrust into my pockets, and talked about Masha.

‘‘When do you think she’ll come back?’’ I asked my sister. ‘‘I think she’ll come back by Christmas, not later. What does she have to do there?’’

‘‘Since she doesn’t write, she’ll obviously come back very soon.’’

‘‘That’s true,’’ I agreed, though I knew perfectly well that there was no need for Masha to come back to our town.

I missed her terribly, and couldn’t help deceiving myself, and tried to get others to deceive me. My sister waited for her doctor, I for Masha, and the two of us ceaselessly talked, laughed, and didn’t notice that we disturbed the sleep of Karpovna, who lay on her stove²⁶ and kept muttering:

‘‘The samovar hummed in the morning, hum-m-m! Ah, it’s a bad sign, dear hearts, a bad sign.’’

Nobody called on us except the postman, who brought my sister letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who would occasionally come to our room in the evening, look silently at my sister, leave, and, when already in the kitchen, say:

‘‘Every title should remember its learning, and whoever doesn’t wish to understand that in his pride, it’s the vale for him.’’

He liked the word ‘‘vale.’’ Once—this was already at Christmastime—as I was going through the market, he invited me to his butcher shop and, without shaking hands with me, announced that he had to talk with me about a very important matter. He was red from the cold and from vodka; behind the counter next to him stood Nikolka with his robber’s face, holding a bloody knife in his hand.

‘‘I want to express my words to you,’’ Prokofy began. ‘‘This event cannot exist, because you understand yourself that for such a ‘vale’ people won’t praise either us or you. Mama, of course, out of pity cannot say an unpleasantness to you, that your sister should move to other quarters on account of her condition, but I don’t wish it anymore, because I cannot approve of her behavior.’’

I understood him and left the shop. The same day my sister and I moved to Radish’s. We had no money for a cab and went on foot; I carried a bundle of our belongings on my back, my sister had nothing to carry, but she choked, coughed, and kept asking how soon we’d get there.

XIX

AT LAST, A LETTER came from Masha.

‘‘My dear, good M.A.,’’ she wrote, ‘‘kind, meek ‘angel ours,’ as the old housepainter calls you, farewell, I’m going to the exposition in America²⁷ with my father. In a few days I’ll be seeing the ocean—so far from Dubechnya, it’s frightening to think of it! It’s as far and boundless as the sky, and I long to be there, to be free, I’m triumphant, I’m mad, and you see how incoherent my letter is. My dear, my kind one, set me free, quickly break the thread that still holds us, binding me and you. That I met and knew you was a ray from heaven, lighting up my existence; but that I became your wife was a mistake, you understand that, and now the awareness of the mistake weighs on me, and I beg you on my knees, my magnanimous friend, quickly, quickly, before I go off to the ocean, to telegraph that you agree to correct our mutual mistake, to remove this one stone from my wings, and my father, who will take all the bother on himself, promises not to burden you too much with formalities. And so, freedom on all four sides? Yes?

‘‘Be happy, God bless you, forgive me, a sinner.

‘‘I’m alive, I’m well. I squander money, commit many follies, and thank God every moment that such a bad woman as I has no children. I sing and have success, but this isn’t a passion, it is my haven, my cell, where I now withdraw to have peace. King David had a ring with the inscription: ‘Everything passes.’ When one feels sad, these words make one merry, and when one is merry, they make one sad. And I’ve acquired such a ring for myself, with Hebrew lettering, and this charm will keep me from passions. Everything passes, life, too, will pass, therefore there’s no need for anything. Or there is need only for the awareness of freedom, because when a person is free, he needs nothing, nothing, nothing. So break the thread. I warmly embrace you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M.’’

My sister lay in one room, Radish, who had been sick again and was now recovering, in the other. Just as I received this letter, my sister quietly went to the painter’s room, sat down beside him, and began to read. She read Ostrovsky²⁸ or Gogol to him every day, and he listened, staring at the same spot, not laughing, shaking his head and muttering to himself from time to time:

‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s possible!’’

If something unseemly or ugly happened in the play, he would say, as if gloatingly, jabbing his finger at the book:

‘‘There it is, the lie! That’s what it does, the lie!’’

Plays attracted him by their content, by their moral, and by their complex, artful construction, and he was amazed at him, never calling him by name:

‘‘How deftly he put it all together!’’

Now my sister quietly read only one page and couldn’t go on: she didn’t have voice enough. Radish took her by the hand and, moving his dry lips, said barely audibly, in a husky voice:

‘‘The soul of the righteous man is white and smooth as chalk, but the sinner’s is like pumice. The soul of the righteous man is clear oil, but the sinner’s is coal tar. We must labor, we must grieve, we must feel pain,’’ he went on, ‘‘and whichever man does not labor or grieve, his will not be the Kingdom of Heaven. Woe, woe to the sated, woe to the strong, woe to the rich, woe to the moneylenders! They will not see the Kingdom of Heaven. Worm eats grass, rust eats iron...’

‘‘And lying eats the soul,’’ my sister finished and laughed.

I read over the letter once more. At that moment the soldier came into the kitchen who, twice a week, on the part of some unknown person, brought us tea, French bread, and hazel grouse that smelled of perfume. I was out of work, had to spend whole days at home, and the person who sent us these loaves probably knew we were in need.

I heard my sister talking with the soldier and laughing merrily. Then, lying down, she ate some bread and said to me:

‘‘When you refused to get a job and became a housepainter, Anyuta Blagovo and I knew from the very beginning that you were right, but we were afraid to say it aloud. Tell me, what power keeps us from confessing what we think? Take Anyuta Blagovo. She loves you, she adores you, she knows you’re right; she loves me, too, like a sister, and she knows I’m right, and most likely envies me in her soul, yet some power keeps her from coming to us, she avoids us, fears us.’’

My sister folded her hands on her breast and said with passion:

‘‘How she loves you, if you only knew! She has confessed this love to me alone, and that secretly, in the dark. She used to lead me to a dark alley in the park and start whispering to me how dear you were to her. You’ll see, she’ll never marry, because she loves you. Are you sorry for her?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘It’s she who sent the bread. Funny girl, really, why hide herself? I was also funny and stupid, but now I’ve left that behind, and now I’m not afraid of anybody, I think and say aloud whatever I like—and I’ve become happy. While I lived at home, I had no notion of happiness, but now I wouldn’t change places with a queen.’’

Dr. Blagovo came. He had received his doctor’s degree and was now living in our town with his father, resting and saying he would soon leave for Petersburg again. He wanted to work on vaccines against typhus and, I think, cholera; he wanted to go abroad in order to advance himself, and then take a university chair. He had abandoned military service and wore loose Cheviot jackets, very wide trousers, and excellent neckties. My sister was in raptures over his pins, shirt studs, and the red silk handkerchief he wore in the breast pocket of his jacket, probably out of foppishness. Once, having nothing else to do, she and I started counting up all his outfits we could remember, and decided he must have at least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister, but he never once said, even jokingly, that he would take her with him to Petersburg or abroad, and I could not picture clearly to myself what would become of her if she remained alive, or what would become of her child. But she only dreamed endlessly, without thinking seriously of the future; let him go wherever he liked, she said, let him even abandon her, so long as he himself was happy, and she would be content with what had been.

Usually, when he came to see us, he auscultated her very attentively and demanded that she drink milk with drops in his presence. And this time it was the same. He auscultated her and made her drink a glass of milk, and after that our rooms smelled of creosote.

‘‘There’s a good girl,’’ he said, taking the glass from her. ‘‘You mustn’t talk too much, yet lately you’ve been chattering away like a magpie. Please keep quiet.’’

She laughed. Then he came to Radish’s room, where I was sitting, and patted me gently on the shoulder.

‘‘Well, how’s things, old man?’’ he asked, bending over the sick man.

‘‘Your Honor...’ Radish pronounced, slowly moving his lips, ‘‘Your Honor, I venture to declare... we all walk under God, we’ll all have to die... Allow me to tell you the truth... Your Honor, there’ll be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!’’

‘‘No help for it,’’ the doctor joked, ‘‘somebody has to be in hell as well.’’

And suddenly something happened to my consciousness; as if I was dreaming, it was winter, night, I was standing in the yard of the slaughterhouse, and beside me was Prokofy, who smelled of pepper vodka; I tried to pull myself together and rubbed my eyes, and it immediately seemed to me that I was going to the governor’s for a talk. Nothing like it has ever happened to me either before or since, and I explained this strange, dreamlike remembrance by overexhausted nerves. I experienced the slaughterhouse and the talk with the governor, and at the same time was vaguely aware that it was not real.

When I came to my senses, I saw that I was no longer at home but in the street, and standing with the doctor near a streetlamp.

‘‘It’s sad, sad,’’ he was saying, and tears flowed down his cheeks. ‘‘She’s gay, she’s forever laughing, hoping, but her condition is hopeless, dear heart. Your Radish hates me and wants to bring it home to me that I acted badly with her. He’s right, in his own way, but I also have my point of view, and I don’t regret in the least what has happened. We must love, we all should love—isn’t that so?—without love there would be no life; anyone who fears and avoids love is not free.’’

He gradually passed on to other themes, talked about science, about his thesis, which was liked in Petersburg; he spoke with enthusiasm and no longer remembered my sister, or his grief, or me. He was carried away by life. That one has America and a ring with an inscription, I thought, and this one has his doctoral degree and a scholarly career, and only my sister and I are left with the old things.

After taking leave of him, I went over to the streetlamp and read the letter once more. And I remembered, vividly remembered, how in spring, in the morning, she came to me at the mill, lay down, and covered herself with a sheepskin jacket—she wanted to be like a simple peasant woman. And when, another time—this was also in the morning— we pulled the creel out of the water, and big drops of rain poured down on us from the willows on the bank, and we laughed...

It was dark in our house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya. I climbed over the fence and, as I used to do in former times, went through the back entrance to the kitchen, to take a lamp there. There was no one in the kitchen; the samovar was hissing by the stove, waiting for my father. ‘‘Who pours tea for father now?’’ I wondered. Taking a lamp, I went to the shed, improvised a bed for myself there out of old newspapers, and lay down. The spikes in the walls looked stern, as before, and their shadows wavered. It was cold. I fancied that my sister was to come now and bring me supper, but I remembered at once that she was ill and lying in Radish’s house, and I thought it strange that I had climbed over the fence and was lying in the unheated shed. My mind was confused, and I fancied all sorts of rubbish.

Ringing. Sounds familiar from childhood: first the scraping of the wire against the wall, then a short, pathetic ringing in the kitchen. It was my father coming back from the club. I got up and went to the kitchen. The cook Aksinya, seeing me, clasped her hands and for some reason burst into tears.

‘‘My child!’’ she said softly. ‘‘Dear! Oh Lord!’’

And she began crumpling her apron in her hands from agitation. On the windowsill stood quart bottles with berries and vodka. I poured myself a teacupful and greedily drank it off, because I was very thirsty. Aksinya had only recently washed the tables and benches, and there was the smell of a bright, cozy kitchen kept by a neat cook. And once, in our childhood, this smell and the chirping of a cricket used to entice us children here to the kitchen and disposed us to fairy tales, to playing kings...

‘‘And where is Cleopatra?’’ Aksinya asked softly, hurriedly, with bated breath. ‘‘And where’s your hat, dearie? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg?’’

She had served us back in my mother’s time, and used to bathe me and Cleopatra in a tub, and for her now we were still children who needed admonishing. In a quarter of an hour or so, she laid out for me all her considerations, which she, with the reasonableness of an old servant, had accumulated in the quiet of this kitchen all the while we hadn’t seen each other. She said that the doctor could be made to marry Cleopatra—all we needed was to give him a scare, and if the petition was written properly, the bishop would annul his first marriage; that it would be good to sell Dubechnya in secret from my wife and put the money in the bank under my own name; and if my sister and I bowed down at my father’s feet and begged him properly, he might forgive us; that a prayer service should be offered to the Queen of Heaven...

‘‘Well, go, dearie, talk to him,’’ she said, hearing my father cough. ‘‘Go and talk to him, bow to him, your head won’t fall off.’’

I went. Father was sitting at the table drawing up the plan for a summer house with Gothic windows and a fat turret that resembled a fire tower—something extraordinarily obstinate and giftless. Going into his study, I stopped in such a way that I was able to see this drawing. I didn’t know why I had come to my father, but I remember that, when I saw his fleshless face, his red neck, his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck and, as Aksinya had instructed me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer house with its Gothic windows and fat turret held me back.

‘‘Good evening,’’ I said.

He glanced at me and at once lowered his eyes to his drawing.

‘‘What do you want?’’ he asked after a pause.

‘‘I’ve come to tell you—my sister is very ill. She will die soon,’’ I added in a muted voice.

‘‘Well, then?’’ my father sighed, taking off his spectacles and putting them on the table. ‘‘As you sow, so shall you reap. As you sow,’’ he repeated, getting up from the table, ‘‘so shall you reap. I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and in this very same place I begged you, I implored you to abandon your errors, reminding you of duty, honor, and your responsibility to your ancestors, whose traditions we should sacredly preserve. Did you obey me? You scorned my advice and stubbornly went on holding to your wrong views; what’s more, you dragged your sister into your errors as well and caused her to lose her morality and shame. Now you’ve both gotten into a bad way. Well, then? As you sow, so shall you reap!’’

He was saying this and pacing the study. He probably thought I had come to him to acknowledge my guilt, and he probably expected me to start interceding for myself and my sister. I was cold, I was trembling as in a fever, and I spoke with difficulty, in a hoarse voice.

‘‘And I, too, ask you to remember,’’ I said, ‘‘how in this same place I implored you to understand me, to think, to decide together how we should live and for what, and in response you began talking about our ancestors, about our grandfather who wrote poetry. You have now been told that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and again you talk about ancestors, traditions... And such light-mindedness in old age, when death is not far off, when you have some five or ten years left to live!’’

‘‘What have you come here for?’’ my father asked sternly, obviously offended that I had reproached him for light-mindedness.

‘‘I don’t know. I love you, I’m inexpressibly sorry that we are so distant from each other—and so I’ve come. I still love you, but my sister has broken with you definitively. She doesn’t forgive and will never forgive. Your name alone arouses loathing in her for the past, for this life.’’

‘‘And who is to blame?’’ my father cried. ‘‘You yourself are to blame, you scoundrel!’’

‘‘Yes, let me be to blame,’’ I said. ‘‘I confess, I’m to blame in many ways, but why is this life of yours, which you also consider obligatory for us—why is it so dull, so giftless, why is it that there are no people in any one of these houses you’ve been building for thirty years now from whom I could learn how to live so as not to be to blame? Not a single honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are cursed nests in which mothers and daughters are pushed out of this world, children are tortured... My poor mother!’’ I went on desperately. ‘‘My poor sister! You have to stupefy yourself with vodka, cards, gossip, you have to fawn, play the hypocrite, or spend decade after decade drawing plans, to ignore all the horror hidden in these houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and in all that time it hasn’t given our motherland a single useful man—not one! You’ve stifled in the womb everything that had the least bit of life or brightness! A town of shopkeepers, tavern keepers, clerks, hypocrites, a needless, useless town, for which not a single soul would be sorry if it suddenly sank into the earth.’’

‘‘I do not wish to listen to you, you scoundrel!’’ said my father and picked up the ruler from the table. ‘‘You’re drunk! You dare not appear this way before your father! I tell you for the last time, and you tell it to your immoral sister, that you will get nothing from me. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer from their disobedience and stubbornness, I am not sorry for them. You can go back where you came from! God has been pleased to punish me with you, but I endure this test with humility and, like Job, find consolation in suffering and continual toil. You must not cross my threshold until you mend your ways. I am a just man, everything I say is useful, and if you want good for yourself, then you should remember all your life what I have said and am saying to you.’’

I waved my hand and left. After that, I don’t remember what happened during the night and the next day.

They say I walked the streets hatless, staggering, and singing loudly, and that crowds of boys followed me and shouted:

‘‘Small Profit! Small Profit!’’

XX

IF I HAD THE desire to order myself a ring, I would choose this inscription: ‘‘Nothing passes.’’ I believe that nothing passes without a trace and that each of our smallest steps has significance for the present and the future.

What I have lived through has not gone in vain. My great misfortunes, my patience, have touched the hearts of the townspeople, and they no longer call me ‘‘Small Profit,’’ they don’t laugh at me, and when I go through the market, they no longer pour water on me. They’ve grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing odd in the fact that I, a nobleman, carry buckets of paint and put in windowpanes; on the contrary, they willingly give me orders, and I’m now considered a good craftsman and the best contractor after Radish, who, though he has recovered from his illness and, as always, paints the cupolas of bell towers without scaffolding, is no longer able to manage his boys; in place of him, I run around town and look for orders, I hire and pay the boys, I borrow money at high interest. And now, having become a contractor, I understand how it’s possible, for the sake of a pennyworth job, to run around town for three days hunting up roofers. People are polite to me, they address me formally, and I’m treated to tea in the houses I work in, and they send to ask if I’d like to have dinner. Children and young girls often come and look at me with curiosity and sadness.

Once I was working in the governor’s garden, painting the gazebo in false marble. The governor, strolling, came into the gazebo and, having nothing to do, began talking to me, and I reminded him of how he had once invited me for a talk. He peered into my face for a moment, then formed his lips into an O, spread his arms, and said:

‘‘I don’t remember!’’

I’ve aged, become silent, stern, severe, I rarely laugh, and they say I’ve come to resemble Radish and, like him, bore the boys with my useless admonitions.

Marya Viktorovna, my former wife, now lives abroad, and her father the engineer is building a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces and buying up estates there. Dr. Blagovo is also abroad. Dubechnya has gone back to Mrs. Cheprakov, who bought it after negotiating with the engineer for a twenty percent discount. Moisei now goes about in a bowler hat; he often comes to town in a racing droshky on business of some sort and stops near the bank. They say he has already bought himself an estate with a transfer of mortgage, and constantly inquires at the bank about Dubechnya, which he also intends to buy. Poor Ivan Cheprakov loitered around town for a long time, doing nothing and drinking. I attempted to introduce him to our work, and for a time he painted roofs with us, put in windowpanes, and even developed a taste for it and, like a real housepainter, stole drying oil, asked for tips, and drank. But he soon got sick of the work and went back to Dubechnya, and later the boys confessed to me that he had incited them to go with him one night to kill Moisei and rob the general’s widow.

My father has aged greatly, become bent, and at night strolls about near his house. I never visit him.

During a cholera epidemic, Prokofy treated the shopkeepers with pepper vodka and tar, and took money for it, and, as I learned from our newspaper, was punished with a flogging because he sat in his butcher shop and spoke badly of doctors. His assistant, Nikolka, died of cholera. Karpovna is still alive and still loves and fears her Prokofy. Seeing me, she shakes her head woefully each time and says with a sigh:

‘‘It’ll be your head!’’

On weekdays I’m usually busy from early morning till evening. But on feast days, if the weather is good, I take my little niece in my arms (my sister had hoped for a boy but gave birth to a girl) and walk unhurriedly to the cemetery. There I stand or sit, and look for a long time at the dear grave, and tell the girl that her mama lies there.

Sometimes I find Anyuta Blagovo by the grave. We greet each other and stand silently, or talk about Cleopatra, about her girl, and about how sad it is to live in this world. Then, leaving the cemetery, we walk silently, and she slows her steps—on purpose, in order to spend a longer time walking with me. The girl, joyful, happy, squinting from the bright daylight, laughs and reaches her little arms out to her, and we stop and together caress the dear girl.

But when we come to town, Anyuta Blagovo, worrying and blushing, takes leave of me and continues walking alone, staid, stern. And none of those we meet, looking at her, would think that she had just been walking beside me and had even caressed the child.

1896

NOTES

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

RICHARD PEVEAR has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture.

LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY was born in Leningrad. She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian.

Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Idiot, and The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky. They have been twice awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, for their version of The Brothers Karamazov and more recently for Anna Karenina. They are married and live in France.

TITLES IN EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY

1 ‘‘Good boy, what is your name?’’

2 ‘‘I am Christopher.’’

3 ;‘‘Then we have the same name.’’

4 By military force.

5 ‘‘Come thinking secretly of me!’’

6 ‘‘Madame has left.’’

7 Make a career.

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