The Duel

II

Laevsky’s lack of love for Nadezhda Fyodorovna manifested itself mainly in that everything she said and did seemed a lie to him, or something resembling a lie, and everything that he read disparaging of women and love seemed as though it couldn’t apply better to himself, to Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to her husband. When he returned home she was sitting at the window, already dressed and coiffed, drinking coffee with an anxious expression on her face and flipping through the pages of a fat journal, and he thought to himself that the act of drinking coffee is not such a stupendous event that it should merit an anxious expression, and that she had wasted time in vain on a fashionable hairstyle, as no one here appreciated it and it was all for nothing. And in the pages of the journal he saw a lie. He thought that just as she dressed and coiffed so that she would appear pretty, she read so that she would appear smart.

“Would it be all right if I went swimming today?” she asked.

“What? You’ll go or you won’t go, it’s not an earth-shattering event either way, I suppose …”

“No, that’s why I’m asking, I wouldn’t want the doctor to be upset with me.”

“Well, go ask the doctor, then. I’m not a doctor.”

This time what Laevsky disliked most of all about Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her white, exposed neck and the curls of hair on the nape of her neck, and he remembered that when Anna Karenina had fallen out of love with her husband, she began to dislike his ears above all else, and he thought to himself: How true it is! How true! Feeling weak and empty headed, he went into his study, lay down on the divan and covered his face with a handkerchief, so that the flies would not irritate him. Languid, torpid thoughts all about one and the same thing stretched out through his brain like a long wagon train in foul autumnal weather and he fell into a drowsy, dejected state. It seemed to him that he was culpable before Nadezhda Fyodorovna and before her husband, and that her husband’s death had been all his fault. It seemed to him that he was culpable before his life, which he’d ruined, before the world of grand ideas, knowledge and labor, and he imagined that wonder-filled world to be possible and to exist not here on this shore, where hungry Turks and lazy Abkhazians wandered about, but there to the north, where there is opera, theater, newspapers and all sorts of cerebral labor. To be honest, smart, outspoken and pure was only possible there, not here. He blamed himself for not having ideals or a master plan in life, as he dimly realized now what this meant. Two years earlier, when he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, he had been convinced that all he had to do was run off with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to set off with her for the Caucasus, thus he would be spared the banality and emptiness of life; he was now equally convinced that all he had to do was cast off Nadezhda Fyodorovna and set off for Petersburg, thereby attaining all that he required.

“Run!” he muttered to himself, sitting and gnawing his nails. “Run!”

His imagination unfurled: there he is boarding a steamship and then sitting down to breakfast, drinking cold beer, chatting with the ladies on deck, then in Sevastopol boarding a train and traveling. Hello, freedom! The stations flicker past one after the other, the air becomes ever colder and harsher, now birch and spruce trees, now Kursk, Moscow … Shchi in the buffets, lamb with kasha, sturgeon, beer—in a word, not the Asiatic, but Russia, the real Russia. The passengers on the train speak of trade, the latest singers, of Franco-Russian affinity; everywhere the feeling of animated, cultured, intelligent, exhilarating life … Faster, faster! Here, at last, is Nevsky, Bolshaya Morskaya, and there’s Kovensky Lane, where he had once lived among students, there’s the dear, gray sky, misty rain, wet coach-drivers …

“Ivan Andreich!” someone called out from the neighboring room. “Are you home?”

“I’m here!” Laevsky answered. “What do you need?”

“Papers.”

Laevsky rose lazily, with a feeling of dizziness and, yawning, his shoes smacking the floor, went to the neighboring room. There in the street, in front of the open window, stood one of his young colleagues, who laid official papers out on the windowsill.

“Just a minute, my good man,” Laevsky said softly, and went to find pen and ink. Returning to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: “It’s hot!”

“Yes sir. Are you coming in today?”

“Unlikely … I think I’m coming down with something … My good man, tell Sheshkovsky that I’ll come see him after dinner.”

The clerk left. Laevsky lay down on the divan in his room again and began to think:

Now then, it’s necessary to weigh all the factors and to figure this out. Before leaving this place, I must pay my debts. I owe nearly two thousand rubles. I have no money … This, of course, isn’t important. I’ll pay half now somehow, and the other half I’ll send from Petersburg. Most important is Nadezhda Fyodorovna … First and foremost, we must determine what our relationship is … Yes.

A little later on, he thought: Wouldn’t it be better to go to Samoylenko for advice?

It’s easy enough to go, he thought, but what’s the use of it? I’d just start telling him malapropos about the boudoir, about women, about what is or isn’t fair. Damn it, how can there be any question of what is or isn’t fair, when my life requires saving, and fast, when I’m suffocating in this damned captivity and killing myself? … It must, finally, be understood, that to continue a life like mine is underhanded and unrelenting, in the face of which all else is petty and insignificant. Run! he muttered, sitting down. Run!

The emptiness of the seashore, the insatiable swelter and the monotony of the dusky, lilac mountains, eternally the same and silent, eternally lonely, bore on his melancholy and, seemingly, sedated and looted him. It may well have been that he was a very smart, talented, remarkable straight-shooter; it may well have been that were he not surrounded by sea and mountains on all sides, a first-class regional director, a government man, an orator, a public figure, an ascetic would have emerged from within him. Who knows! What if a gifted and industrious man—a musician or an artist, for instance—were to escape captivity by tearing down a wall and tricking his jailers, isn’t it foolish to then expound on what’s fair and what’s not? In such a situation, everything that man does is fair.

At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the scullery maid had served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:

“It’s the same thing every day. Is there any reason why we can’t have shchi?”

“There’s no cabbage.”

“Strange. If they cook shchi with cabbage at Samoylenko’s, and there’s shchi at Maria Konstantinovna’s, it must just be me that’s supposed to eat this sweetish slop for some reason. This isn’t right, my dove.”

As is the case among the vast majority of married couples, before neither Laevsky nor Nadezhda Fyodorovna could get through a dinner without caprices and a scene, but since Laevsky decided that he no longer loved her, he tried to yield to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in all matters, speaking to her gently and politely, smiling at her, and calling her a dove.

“The taste of this soup reminds me of licorice,” he said, smiling; he was straining himself so as to appear amicable, but couldn’t hold back and said: “No one is taking care of this household … If you’re too sick or too busy with your reading, then allow me, I’ll attend to our kitchen.”

Earlier, she would have answered with So attend to it or I see you want to make a scullery maid out of me, but now she merely glanced at him sheepishly and turned red.

“Well, how do you feel today?” he asked tenderly.

“Today is not so bad. There is only a touch of weakness.”

“You need to take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly worried about you.”

Something ailed Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Samoylenko said that she had remittent fever and fed her quinine. Another doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, spindly, misanthropic man, who sat at home by day and strolled quietly along the embankment coughing with his hands folded behind him and his cane stretched lengthwise down his back by night, found that she had a female ailment, and prescribed warm compresses. Before, when Laevsky still loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s illness would arouse feelings of sympathy and fear in him, but now he considered even her illness to be a lie. The jaundiced, sleepy face, the faded expression and the yawning that would occasionally seize Nadezhda Fyodorovna after an onset of fever, and that she, while in the midst of the onset, would lie beneath a plaid blanket and resembled a boy, more than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled bad—all this, in his opinion, destroyed any illusion and was a protest against love and marriage.

For the second course he was served spinach with hard-boiled eggs, but Nadezhda Fyodorovna was served kissel and milk, like an invalid. When she, with an anxious expression, first touched her spoon to the kissel and then began to lazily eat it, washing it down with milk, and he heard her swallows, he was overcome by such an intense feeling of hatred that his head began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would have been insulting even in the society of dogs, although he was not aggravated with himself but with Nadezhda Fyodorovna for having aroused such a feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their beloved. He couldn’t kill her himself, of course, but if he ever found himself serving on a jury, he would exonerate the murderer.

“Merci, my dove,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.

Retiring to his study, he spent about five minutes pacing the room from corner to corner, cast a sidelong glance at his boots, then sat down on the divan and began to mutter:

“Run! Run! I must determine what our relationship is and run!”

He lay down on the divan and again remembered that the death of Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband could have been his fault.

It’s foolish to accuse a man of falling in or out of love, he convinced himself, leaning back and lifting his legs to put on his boots. It’s not in our power to control love and hate. As for the husband, it’s possible that I may have been, in a circumstantial sense, one of the reasons for his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife and the wife with me?

At that he rose and, having located his service cap, set off in the direction of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where the civil servants would gather every day to play Vint and drink cold beer.

My indecision is reminiscent of Hamlet, thought Laevsky en route. How astute Shakespeare’s observation was. Oh, how astute.