The Undiscovered Chekhov

A HYPNOTIC

SEANCE

THE LARGE HALL WAS LIT with torches and bursting with people. In the center was the hypnotist. Despite his scrawny, unprepossessing physique, he shone, glowed, and sparkled. People smiled, applauded, obeyed his every order; everyone turned pale in his presence.

He literally performed miracles. Some people he hypno-tized, some he paralyzed, others he had balancing on chairs by their necks and heels; he tied a thin, tall journalist into a knot. In a word, he did whatever he pleased. He had an especially strong effect on the ladies. One glance from him and they dropped like flies. Oh, women’s nerves! If it weren’t for these nerves, how boring life would be!

Having exercised his demonic art on everyone else, the hypnotist came over to me.

“You seem to be of a suggestive nature,” he said. “You are so nervous, so overwrought... wouldn’t you like to take a nap?”

Why not? With pleasure, my good man, let’s try. I sat down on a chair in the middle of the hall. The hypnotist sat on another chair facing me, took hold of my hands, and gazed into my eyes with his terrifying snakelike glare.

The audience surrounded us.

“Shh! Please, ladies and gentlemen! Shh... quiet!”

Silence falls. He and I sit staring at each other. A minute passes, two... Shivers run down my spine, my heart pounds, but I’m not in the least tired!

We keep sitting there. Five minutes pass, seven minutes...

“He’s not giving in!” somebody shouted. “Bravo! Good man!

We sit, we stare. I’m not tired, not even drowsy.... A local council session would have put me to sleep long ago. The audience starts whispering and sniggering. The hypnotist is distracted, and his eyes flicker. Poor man! Nobody likes losing! Save him, O spirits! Come to my eyelids, O Morpheus!

“He’s not giving in!” the same voice shouted. “That’s enough! Let it be! I said right away that these are nothing but conjuring tricks!”

Then, just as I heard my friends voice in the crowd and moved to get up, my hand felt a strange object in its palm. My sense of touch responding, I realized that the object was a piece of paper. My father was a doctor, and doctors can sniff out a bank note at a touch. According to Darwin’s theory, I must have inherited this superb faculty, along with many other talents, from my father. The bill, I could tell, was a five- ruble note, so I immediately nodded off.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

The doctors present in the hall rushed up, walked around me, prodded me, and proclaimed: “Hmm, yes... he’s asleep....” The hypnotist, pleased at his success, waved his hands over my head, and I, in a trance, began walking about the room.

“Tetanize his arm!” someone suggested.

“Yes, can you do that? Can you paralyze his arm?”

The hypnotist (not a timid man!) pulled at my right arm and started doing his machinations over it: rubbing it, blowing on it, slapping it. But my arm wouldn’t obey. It just hung there dangling, and refused to become rigid.

“He’s not tetanized! Wake him up! This is dangerous! He’s a sensitive, high-strung boy!”

Suddenly my other palm, the left one, felt a five-ruble note brush against it. A reflex shot from my left hand to my right, and miraculously my arm went rigid.

“Bravo! Look how rigid and cold his hand is! Like a corpse!”

“We have full anesthesia, the lowering of bodily temperature and weakening of the pulse,” the hypnotist announced.

The doctors checked my wrist.

“Yes, his pulse is still weak,” one of them remarked.

“We have complete rigidity. His temperature is much lower...”

“How do you explain it?” one of the ladies asked.

A doctor shrugged his shoulders portentously, sighed, and said, “All we can give you is the facts! Rational explanations? Alas, there are none!”

You have the facts, and I have two fivers in my pocket, and all thanks to hypnotism—I don’t need any rational explanations! Poor hypnotist! It was just your luck to tangle with a viper like me!

P.S.: Damn, what a mess!

It was only afterward that I realized it wasn’t the hypnotist but my boss, Peter Fedorovitch, who slipped me the five-ruble bills.

“I did it to test your honesty,” he told me.

Damn.

“This is terrible,” Peter Fedorovitch said.

“Disgraceful.... I would never have expected this from you!”

“But sir, I have children! A wife... a mother... and things are so expensive nowadays!”

“This is disgusting! And you want to publish your own newspaper... you who cry at sentimental dinner speeches... A disgrace!... I thought you were an honest man, and it turns out that you... you are worse than... haben Sie gewesen!”

So I had to return the two fivers. What else could I do? One’s reputation is, after all, more precious than money.

“It’s not you I’m angry at!” my boss said. “You can go to hell for all I care—that’s what you’re like! But how could she have fallen into the same trap! She, of all people! She who is so gende, so innocent, all rice pudding! She was tempted by money too! She ‘fell asleep’ too!”

By “she,” my boss was referring to his wife, Matryona Nikolayevna...