The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

Disturbing the Balance

I

Evening service was in progress at the house of Mikhail Ilich Bondarev, a man of some distinction in the county. Officiating was a young priest, plump and fair-haired, with long curls and a broad nose – rather like a lion. The only singers were the sacristan and parish clerk.

Mikhail Ilich, a very sick man, was sitting motionless in his armchair, pale-faced and with eyes closed, just like a corpse. His wife, Vera Andreyevna, stood by him, her head leaning to one side in the lazy, modest pose of someone indifferent to religion but obliged to stand and make the occasional sign of the cross. Aleksandr Andreich Yanshin, Vera Andreyevna’s brother, and his wife Lenochka, stood behind the armchair, close by. It was Whit Sunday Eve. The trees in the garden softly rustled and a magnificent sunset flamed exuberantly, flooding half the sky.

Whether they could hear the ringing of the city and monastery bells through the open windows, or the peacock crying in the courtyard, or someone coughing in the hall, none of them could help thinking that Mikhail Ilich was seriously ill, that the doctors had ordered him to be taken abroad as soon as he felt a little better. But he felt better one day and worse the next – this they were at a loss to understand – but as time passed the uncertainty began to try everyone’s nerves. At Easter Yanshin had come to help his sister take her husband abroad, but he and his wife had already spent two whole months here and this was about the third service that was being held for him – but still the future was as hazy as before, and it was all a big mystery. Besides, there was no guarantee that this nightmare would not drag on until autumn.

Yanshin was feeling disgruntled and bored. He was sick and tired of getting ready every day to go abroad and he wanted to go back home, to his own place at Novosyolki. True, it wasn’t very cheerful at home, but at least there wasn’t this vast drawing-room with the four columns in the corners, none of these white armchairs with gold upholstery, no yellow door curtains, no chandeliers, none of this parade of bad taste with pretensions to grandeur, no echoes that repeated your every step at night. But above all there was no sickly, sallow, puffy face with closed eyes… At home one could laugh, talk nonsense, have a heated argument with one’s wife or mother – in brief, you could live as you pleased. But here it was just like boarding-school: you had to tiptoe around and talk only in whispers, say only clever things. Or you had to stand there and listen to an evening service that was held not from any religious feeling, but, as Mikhail Ilich himself said, because ‘tradition dictated it’. And there’s nothing more wearisome or degrading than a situation where you have to kowtow to a person you consider – in your heart of hearts – a nobody, and to fuss over an invalid for whom you don’t feel sorry.

And Yanshin was thinking about something else: last night his wife Lenochka had announced that she was pregnant. This piece of news was of interest for the sole reason that it made the problem of the journey abroad even more vexed. What should he do now? Take Lenochka with him – or send her to his mother at Novosyolki? But it would not be wise for her to travel in her condition. However, she wouldn’t go home for anything, since she didn’t get on with her mother-in-law and she would never agree to live in the country on her own, without her husband.

‘Or should I make this an excuse to go home with her?’ Yanshin thought, trying not to listen to the sacristan. ‘No, it would be awkward leaving Vera here on her own,’ he decided, looking at his sister’s shapely figure. ‘What shall I do?’

As he pondered and asked himself this question, his life struck him as an extremely complicated muddle. All these problems – the journey, his sister, his wife, his brother-in-law – each one of them taken separately might possibly be resolved very easily and conveniently, but they were terribly jumbled up and it was like being stuck in a swamp from which there was no climbing out. Only one of them had to be solved for the others to become even more of a tangle.

When the priest turned and said ‘Peace be with you’ before reading from the Gospels, the sick Mikhail Ilich suddenly opened his eyes and started fidgeting in his armchair.

‘Sasha!’ he called.

Yanshin quickly went to him and leant down.

‘I don’t like the way he’s taking the service,’ Mikhail Ilich said in an undertone, but loud enough for his words to clearly carry through the room. His breathing was heavy, accompanied by whistling and wheezing. ‘I’m leaving! Help me out of here, Sasha.’

Yanshin helped him up and took his arm.

‘You stay here, dear,’ Mikhail Ilich feebly begged his wife, who wanted to support him from the other side. ‘Stay here!’ he repeated irritably, looking at her indifferent face. ‘I’ll manage without you.’

The priest stood with his Gospels open, waiting. In the ensuing silence the harmonious singing of a male voice choir could be clearly heard: they were singing somewhere beyond the garden, by the river, no doubt. And it was so delightful when the bells in the neighbouring monastery suddenly pealed and their soft, melodious chimes blended with the singing. Yanshin’s heart seemed to miss a beat in sweet anticipation of something fine and he almost forgot that he was supposed to be helping an invalid. The sounds from outside that floated into the room somehow reminded him how little freedom and enjoyment there was in his present life and how trivial, insignificant and boring were the tasks with which he so furiously grappled every day, from dawn to dusk. When he had led the sick man out, while the servants made way and looked on with that morbid curiosity with which village people usually survey corpses, he suddenly felt hatred, a deep, intense hatred for the invalid’s puffy, clean-shaven face, for his waxen hands, for his plush dressing-gown, for his heavy breathing, for the tapping of his black cane. This feeling, which he was experiencing for the first time in his life and which had taken possession of him so suddenly, made his head and legs go cold and his heart pound. He passionately wanted Mikhail Ilich to drop dead that very minute, to utter a last cry and slump onto the floor, but in a flash he pictured that death for himself and recoiled in horror. When they left the room no longer did he want the sick man to die, but craved life for himself. If only he could tear his hand from that warm armpit and run away, to run and run without looking back.

A bed had been made up for Mikhail Ilich on an ottoman in the study, as the sick man felt hot and uncomfortable in his bedroom.

‘He can’t make up his mind whether he’s a priest or an officer in the hussars!’ he said, settling himself heavily on the ottoman. ‘How pretentious! God, I’d demote that fop in priest’s vestments to grave-digger if I had my way!’

As he looked at his wilful, unhappy face Yanshin felt like answering him back, saying something impertinent, admitting his hatred for him, but he remembered the doctors’ orders that the patient wasn’t to be upset, so he held his peace. However, the problem wasn’t to do with doctors. He would have really told him a thing or two if his sister’s fate hadn’t been so permanently, so hopelessly bound up with that hateful man.

Mikhail Ilich was in the habit of constantly sticking out his tightly pressed lips and moving them from side to side, as if he were sucking a boiled sweet. And this pouting of fleshy lips set in a clean-shaven face irritated Yanshin now.

‘You ought to go back now,’ Mikhail Ilich said. ‘You’re indifferent towards the church, it seems. You couldn’t care less who officiates… Go now…’

‘But aren’t you indifferent towards the church too?’ Yanshin softly murmured, trying to control himself.

‘No, I believe in Providence and I recognize the church.’

‘Precisely. It strikes me that you don’t need God or truth in religion, but words like “Providence” and “from on high”.’

Yanshin felt like adding: ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have offended that priest the way you did this evening’, but he said nothing. He had already allowed himself to say more than enough.

‘Please go!’ Mikhail Ilich said impatiently – he disliked it when anyone didn’t agree with him or talked personally about him. ‘I don’t want to cramp anyone’s style… I know how difficult it is to sit with an invalid… I know, my friend! As I’ve always said and will keep on repeating: there’s no harder or saintlier work than a nurse’s. Now, do me a favour and go.’

Yanshin left the study. After going downstairs to his room he put on his hat and coat and went out into the garden through the front door. It was already past eight o’clock. Upstairs they were singing the Consecration. Making his way between flowerbeds, rose bushes, the initials V and M (that is, Vera and Mikhail) formed from blue heliotrope, and past a profusion of magnificent flowers which gave no one on the estate any pleasure, but simply grew and blossomed – most probably because it was as ‘tradition dictated’ – Yanshin hurried, afraid that his wife might call him from upstairs. But now, cutting through a park, he came out onto a long, dark avenue of firs, through which one could see the sun set in the evenings. Here the ancient, decrepit firs always produced a light, forbidding rustle, even in calm weather; there was the smell of resin and one’s feet slipped over the dry needles.

As Yanshin walked on he thought that he would never shake off that hatred which had so unexpectedly taken hold of him during the service that day and it was something that could not be ignored. It introduced into his life a further complication and promised little that was good. But peace and a sense of grace wafted from these firs, from that calm, distant sky and that exuberant sunset. With pleasure he listened to his own footsteps that gave out a solitary, hollow ring in the dark avenue and no longer did he wonder what to do.

Almost every evening he would go to the station to fetch newspapers and letters – while living with his brother-in-law this was his only diversion. The mail train arrived at a quarter to ten, just when the unbearable boredom of evening had set in at home. There was no one to play cards with, no supper was served, he didn’t feel like sleeping and therefore, whether he liked it or not, he was forced either to sit with the invalid or read out loud to Lenochka novels in translation, of which she was very fond. It was a large station, with buffet and bookstall. One could have a bite to eat, drink beer, look at some books. Most of all Yanshin liked meeting the train and envying the passengers who were travelling somewhere and were apparently happier than he was. When he arrived at the station people whom he had grown used to seeing there every evening were already strolling along the platform, waiting for the train. They were the owners of summer cottages who lived near the station, two or three officers from the town, a certain landowner with a spur on his right foot and with a mastiff that followed him, its head sadly bowed. The cottage owners, male and female, who evidently knew each other very well, were noisily chatting and laughing. As always, an engineer cottage owner – a very corpulent gentleman of about forty-five, with whiskers and a broad pelvis, with a cotton shirt over his belt, and wide velveteen trousers – was liveliest of all and laughed louder than anyone else. When he walked past Yanshin, his large belly sticking out, stroking his whiskers as he amiably glanced at him with his oily eyes, Yanshin thought that here was a man with a very healthy appetite. The engineer even wore a distinctive expression which one could only interpret as saying: ‘Aha! How very tasty!’ He had an absurd triple-barrelled surname and the only reason Yanshin remembered it was because the engineer, who was very partial to ranting about politics and engaging in quarrels, would often swear and say:

‘If I weren’t Bitny-Kushle-Suvryomovich!’

He was said to be a very convivial fellow, a generous host and a fanatical whist player. Yanshin had long wanted to make his acquaintance, but he never ventured to go up and talk to him, although he guessed that he was not averse to making friends with him… As he wandered on his own down the platform and listened to the holiday-makers, for some reason Yanshin remembered that he was thirty-one now and that, from the age of twenty-four, when he graduated, not one day of his life had ever given him the slightest pleasure: either there was a lawsuit with the neighbours over boundaries, or his wife miscarried, or his sister appeared unhappy. And now Mikhail Ilich was ill and had to be taken abroad. He imagined that all this would continue and be endlessly repeated, in one way or another, and that at forty or fifty he would be plagued with precisely the same worries and preoccupations as at thirty-one. In brief, he wouldn’t escape from that hard shell until his dying day. In order to view things differently he needed to be able to deceive himself. And he wanted to stop being an oyster – at least for one hour. He wanted to look into someone else’s world, to be involved in things that did not concern him personally, to talk to people who were strangers to him – if only to that fat engineer, or to the female holiday-makers in the twilight who all looked so pretty, gay and, above all, young.

The train arrived. The landowner with the single spur met a fat, elderly lady who embraced him and repeated several times in an emotional voice: ‘Alexis!’ It was probably his mother. With great ceremony, like a jeune premier in ballet, jingling his spur, he offered her his hand, telling the porter in a cloying, velvety baritone: ‘Please be so good as to take our luggage!’

Soon the train left. The holiday-makers collected their papers and letters and went home. It became quiet. Yanshin strolled a little further down the platform and then entered the first-class waiting-room. He didn’t feel hungry, but he ate a piece of veal all the same and drank some beer. Those ceremonious, affected manners of the landowner with the spur, his sickly sweet baritone and that politeness which was so artificial produced a morbid impression that was very hard to shake off. He recalled his long whiskers, his kind and quite intelligent face which was somehow strange and inscrutable, his habit of rubbing his hands as if it were cold, and he concluded that if that plump, elderly lady were in fact that man’s mother, then she was probably most unhappy. Her excited voice said but one word – Alexis – but her timid, distracted face and loving eyes said all there was left to be said…

II

Vera Andreyevna had looked out of the window and seen her brother leave. She knew that he was going to the station and visualized the whole avenue of firs from start to finish, then the slope down to the river, the broad vista, and the feeling of peace and simplicity that the river and water meadows always evoked – and beyond them the station and the birch forest where the summer cottage owners lived, and far away to the right that small provincial town and the monastery with its golden onion domes. Then again she visualized that avenue, the darkness, her fear and shame, those familiar footsteps and everything that might be repeated, even that same day perhaps. And she left the room for a moment to see to the priest’s tea. When she was in the dining-room she took from her pocket a letter folded in two, in a stiff envelope, bearing a foreign stamp. This letter had been handed to her five minutes before the service and she had already managed to read it twice.

‘My dearest, my darling, my torment, my anguish,’ she read, holding the envelope in both hands and letting them both be intoxicated at the touch of those dear, ardent lines. ‘My dearest,’ she began again right from the beginning:

my dearest, my darling, my torment, my anguish, you write convincingly, but I still don’t know what to do. At the time you said that you would definitely go to Italy and like a madman I dashed on ahead to meet you here and to love my darling, my joy… Here, I thought, you wouldn’t be afraid of your husband or brother seeing my shadow from the window on moonlit nights. Here you and I could stroll along the streets and you wouldn’t be afraid of Rome or Venice finding out that we love one another. Forgive me, my treasure, but there are two Veras: one is timid, faint-hearted, indecisive; and there’s an indifferent Vera, who’s cold and proud, who addresses me formally in front of strangers and pretends she hardly notices me. I want this other Vera – the proud and beautiful one – to love me… I don’t want to be an eagle that can enjoy itself only in the evening and at night. Give me some light! The dark oppresses me, my precious, and this fitful, clandestine love of ours keeps me half-starving… I’m irritated… I’m suffering, I’m going out of my mind… Well, to cut it short, I thought that my Vera – not the first but the second, here abroad, where it’s easier to escape from prying eyes than at home – would grant me at least one hour of total, unstinting, true love, without the need for caution, so that I might at least once be entitled to feel that I’m a lover and not a smuggler. And so that when you embrace me you don’t say: ‘It’s time I left!’ These were my thoughts, but then a whole month went by since I was living in Florence, you weren’t there, and there was no news of you. You write: ‘This month we’ll hardly get out of this mess.’

What is this? My despair, what are you doing to me? Please understand that I can’t go on without you. I can’t! I can’t! They say that Italy is beautiful, but I’m bored. It’s as if I’m an exile and my powerful love grows weary, as if it were in exile. You’ll say this joke isn’t funny, but then, I do have a clownish sense of humour. I rush first to Bologna, then to Venice, then to Rome and the whole time I keep trying to see if there’s a woman in the crowd like you. Out of sheer boredom I’ve visited all the art galleries and museums – five times each – and all I see is you in the paintings. In Rome I clamber breathlessly up Monte Pincio¹ and from there I survey the Eternal City. But eternity, beauty, the sky – all these things blend with your face and dress into a single image. Here, in Florence, I visit all the shops where they sell sculptures and when there’s no one there I embrace the statues and I feel as though I’m embracing you. I need you this very minute, this very minute… Vera, I’m behaving like a madman, but please forgive me, I cannot cope any more, I’m coming to see you tomorrow… This letter isn’t really necessary, but what of it! So, my precious, it’s all decided. I’m coming tomorrow.