Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895

Three Years

I

It was dark, but in some houses lights had already been lit, and at the end of the street, behind the barracks, a pale moon was rising. Laptev was sitting on a bench by the gate waiting for evening service to finish at St Peter and St Paul’s. He reckoned that Julia Sergeyevna would pass him on her way home from church, and then he could talk to her and perhaps spend the rest of the evening with her.

He had been sitting there an hour and a half, picturing in his mind his Moscow flat, his Moscow friends, Pyotr his valet, his writing-desk. He looked in bewilderment at the dark, motionless trees and thought it peculiar that he wasn’t living in his villa at Sokolniki¹ any more, but in a provincial town, in a house past which a large herd of cattle was driven every morning and evening, raising dreadful clouds of dust – to the accompaniment of blowing horns. He remembered those long conversations in Moscow in which he had taken part not so very long ago, about the possibility of life without love, about passionate love being a psychosis and, finally, about love not existing at all, being only physical attraction, and so on. As he recalled all this he sadly reflected that if someone had asked him now what love really was, he would have been at a loss for an answer.

The service was over now and the congregation appeared. Laptev looked intently at the dark figures. The Bishop had driven past in his carriage, the bells had stopped ringing, the red and green lights on the belfry had been put out, one after the other – these were the illuminations in celebration of the patronal festival – and people were in no hurry, stopping to talk under the windows. But at last Laptev heard familiar voices, his heart started pounding and he was gripped by despair, since Julia Sergeyevna wasn’t alone, but with two other ladies.

‘That’s terrible, really terrible!’ he whispered jealously. ‘That’s terrible!’

At the corner of a small side-street she stopped to say goodbye to the ladies, and then she glanced at Laptev.

‘I’m going to your place’, he said. ‘To talk to your father. Is he at home?’

‘Probably’, she replied. ‘It’s too early for the club.’

The side-street had an abundance of gardens. Lime trees grew by the fences, casting broad shadows in the moonlight, so that the fences and gates on one side were completely enveloped in darkness, from which came the sound of women, restrained laughter and someone quietly playing the balalaika. It smelt of lime trees and hay. The whispers of those invisible women and the smell excited Laptev. Suddenly he felt a strong urge to embrace his companion, to shower her face, arms and shoulders with kisses, to fall at her feet and tell her how long he had been waiting for her. There was a faint, barely perceptible smell of incense about her, which reminded him of the time when he too had believed in God, had gone to evening service, had dreamed a great deal about pure, poetic love. Because this girl did not love him he felt that any possibility of the kind of love he had dreamt of then had faded for ever.

She sounded very concerned about his sister Nina Fyodorovna’s health – two months ago she had had an operation for cancer and everyone was expecting a relapse now.

‘I was with her this morning’, Julia Sergeyevna said, ‘and it struck me that she hasn’t only grown thinner this past week, she’s simply lost all her colour.’

‘Yes, yes’, Laptev agreed. ‘There hasn’t actually been a relapse, but I can see that she’s growing weaker every day – she seems to be wasting away before my eyes. I can’t understand what the trouble is.’

‘Heavens, how healthy, buxom and rosy-cheeked she used to be!’ Julia Sergeyevna said after a brief silence. ‘Everyone here used to call her “The Moscow Girl”. The way she used to laugh! On holidays she’d wear simple peasant costume and it really suited her.’

Dr Sergey Borisych was at home. A stout, red-faced man, with a long frock-coat that stretched below his knees and made him appear short-legged, he was pacing the study, hands in pockets, humming softly and pensively. His grey side-whiskers were dishevelled and his hair wasn’t combed, as if he’d just got out of bed. And his study, with those cushions on the couches, piles of old papers in the corners and an unhealthy looking, dirty poodle under the table, produced the same scruffy, slovenly impression as the master.

‘Monsieur Laptev would like to see you’, his daughter said, entering the study.

He hummed louder, offered Laptev his hand as he came into the drawing-room and asked, ‘Well, what’s new?’

It was dark in the drawing-room. Laptev did not sit down. Still holding his hat he started apologizing for disturbing him. He asked what could be done to help his sister to sleep at night and why she was growing so terribly thin. He felt embarrassed, as he thought that he had already asked the identical questions when he had called that morning.

‘Tell me’, he asked, ‘shouldn’t we call in some specialist in internal diseases from Moscow? What do you think?’

The doctor sighed, shrugged his shoulders and made some vague gesture with both hands.

He was clearly offended. This doctor was an exceptionally touchy, suspicious person, permanently convinced that no one trusted him, recognized him or respected him enough, that he was being generally exploited and that his colleagues were all hostile towards him. He was always ridiculing himself, maintaining that idiots like himself had been created only for everyone else to trample on.

Julia Sergeyevna lit a lamp. Her pale, languid face and sluggish walk showed how tired she was after the church service. She felt like resting and sat on the couch, put her hands on her lap and became lost in thought. Laptev knew that he wasn’t handsome and now he was physically conscious of his own ugliness. He was short and thin, with flushed cheeks, and his hair had thinned out so much his head felt cold. His expression had none of that natural grace which makes even coarse, ugly faces likeable. In women’s company he was awkward, over-talkative and affected – now he was almost despising himself for this. To stop Julia Sergeyevna from being bored he had to talk about something. But about what? About his sister’s illness again?

He produced some platitudes about medicine, praising hygiene. He said that it had long been his wish to establish a hostel for the poor in Moscow and that he already had estimates for the work. According to this scheme of his, workmen coming to the hostel in the evenings would get (for five or six copecks) a portion of hot cabbage soup, bread, a warm dry bed with blankets and a place to dry their clothes and footwear.

Julia Sergeyevna usually kept silent in his presence and, in some strange way – perhaps it was a man in love’s intuition – he was able to guess her thoughts and intentions. Now he concluded that as she hadn’t gone to her room to change and have tea after the service she must be going out to visit someone that evening.

‘But I’m in no rush with the hostel’, he continued and he felt annoyed and irritated as he turned towards the doctor, who was giving him vague, bewildered looks, evidently unable to see why he needed to talk about hygiene and medicine. ‘It will probably be some time before I put it all into motion. I’m frightened the hostel might fall into the hands of those prigs and lady do-gooders in Moscow who wreck any new undertaking.’

Julia Sergeyevna stood up and offered Laptev her hand. ‘Do excuse me’, she said, ‘but I must be going. Remember me to your sister.’

The doctor started humming pensively again.

Julia Sergeyevna left and not long afterwards Laptev said goodbye to the doctor and went home. When one feels unhappy and disgruntled, how vulgar lime trees, shadows and clouds seem – all these smug, indifferent beauties of nature! The moon was high, clouds scurried beneath it. ‘What a stupid provincial moon!’ Laptev thought. ‘What pathetic, scraggy clouds!’

He was ashamed of having mentioned medicine and working men’s hostels and was horrified at the thought that he wouldn’t be able to resist trying to see her and talk to her tomorrow: once again he would learn that he was like a complete stranger to her. It would be exactly the same the day after tomorrow. What was the point of it all? When and how would it all finish?

When he was home he went to see his sister. Nina Fyodorovna still looked strong and appeared to be a well-built, powerful woman. But that pronounced pallor made her look like a corpse, especially now as she lay on her back with her eyes closed. Her ten-year-old elder daughter Sasha was sitting reading to her from a school book.

‘Aleksey is here’, the sick woman said softly to herself.

A tacit agreement had long been in effect between Sasha and her uncle and they had organized a rota. Sasha now closed her reader and left the room quietly, without a word. Laptev took a historical novel from the chest of drawers, found the page and started reading to her.

Nina Fyodorovna was from Moscow. She and her two brothers had spent their childhood and youth in the family house (they were merchants) on Pyatnitsky Street,² and what a long, boring childhood it had been. Their father was a strict man and had birched her on three occasions. Her mother had died after a long illness. The servants had been dirty, coarse and hypocritical. Priests and monks often called at the house and they too were coarse and hypocritical. They drank, ate their fill and crudely flattered her father, whom they did not like. The boys were lucky enough to go to high school, but Nina had no formal education, had written in a scrawly hand all her life and had read nothing but historical novels. Seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-two, she had met her present husband Panaurov – he came from a landowning family – at a villa in Khimki,³ had fallen in love and was married in secret, against her father’s wishes. Panaurov, a handsome and rather arrogant person, who liked lighting cigarettes from icon-lamps and who was a habitual whistler, struck her father as a complete and utter nobody. Later on, when the son-in-law started demanding a dowry in his letters, the old man had written to tell his daughter that he was sending some fur coats to her place in the country, some silver and odds and ends left by her mother, together with thirty thousand roubles in cash, but without his paternal blessing. Afterwards he had sent a further twenty thousand. The money and dowry were all squandered and Panaurov and family moved to town, where he had taken a job in local government. In town he started another family, which caused many tongues to wag since this illegitimate family didn’t bother to conceal itself at all.

Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. As she listened to the historical novel she thought about how much she had gone through and suffered all this time and what a pathetic narrative her life would make. Since the tumour was in the breast, she was convinced that the cause of her illness was love and family life, and that jealousy and tears had made her bedridden.

Shutting the book, Aleksey Fyodorych said, ‘That’s the end, thank God. We’ll start another tomorrow.’

Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always been easily amused, but Laptev had begun to notice that sometimes her judgement was affected by her illness and she would laugh at the slightest nonsense, for no reason.

‘Julia called just before dinner, while you were out’, she said. ‘I can see that she doesn’t trust her father very much. “All right, let my father treat you,” she says, “yet you still write, without anyone knowing, to an elderly monk and ask him to pray for you.” It’s some wise old man they know who lives locally.’ After a brief pause she continued, ‘Julia left her umbrella behind. Send it over tomorrow… No, if this is the end neither doctors nor holy sages will be any use.’

‘Nina, why don’t you sleep at night?’ Laptev asked, to change the subject.

‘Oh, I just can’t, that’s all. I lie thinking.’

‘What about, my dear?’

‘The children… you… my own life. After all, I’ve been through a lot, haven’t I? When you start remembering… when you… Good heavens!’ She burst out laughing. ‘It’s no joke having five children and burying three. I’d be about to have a baby and my Grigory Nikolaich would be with another woman and there’d be nobody I could send to fetch the midwife, or someone. If you went into the hall or kitchen for the servants you’d find only Jews, tradesmen and money-lenders waiting for him to come home. It quite made my head go round. He didn’t love me, although he never said so. Now I’m reconciled to it, though, and I feel as if a weight has been lifted from me. But it did hurt me when I was younger, it hurt me terribly! Once – we were still living in the country – I caught him in the garden with some woman and I walked away, not caring where I was going, until I found myself in the church porch. There I fell on my knees and repeated “Holy Mother”. It was night, the moon was shining…’

Exhausted, she started gasping for breath. After a little rest she caught hold of her brother’s arm and continued in a faint, almost inaudible voice, ‘How kind you are, Aleksey! You’re so clever… What a fine man you’ve become!’

At midnight Laptev wished her goodnight and on his way out took the umbrella that Julia Sergeyevna had forgotten. Despite the late hour, the servants, male and female, were drinking tea in the dining-room. What chaos! The children hadn’t gone to bed – they were in the dining-room too. Everyone there was softly talking, whispering, and no one noticed that the lamp was growing dim and would soon go out. All these people, large and small, were worried by a whole series of unfavourable omens and they felt very miserable. The mirror in the hall had been broken, the samovar hummed every day and was humming away now as if to annoy them. A mouse had jumped out of Mrs Panaurov’s shoe while she was dressing, so they said. The dreadful significance of these portents was already known to the children. The elder daughter, Sasha, a thin little girl with dark hair, was sitting still at the table with a frightened, mournful look, while seven-year-old Lida, the younger girl, plump and fair-haired, stood by her sister, scowling at the light.

Laptev went down to his low-ceilinged, stuffy rooms on the ground floor – they always smelt of geraniums. Panaurov, Nina Fyodorovna’s husband, was sitting reading the newspaper in his dining-room. Laptev nodded and sat opposite. Neither said a word. They often spent entire evenings like this, unembarrassed by the mutual silence.

The girls came down to say goodnight. Silently, without hurrying, Panaurov made the sign of the cross over both of them several times and let them kiss his hand. This kissing and curtseying ceremony took place every evening.

When the girls had left, Panaurov laid his paper to one side and said, ‘This blessed town is so boring!’ Sighing, he went on, ‘I must confess, my dear man, I’m delighted you’ve at last found some entertainment.’

‘What do you mean?’ Laptev said.

‘Just now I saw you leaving Dr Belavin’s house. I hope you didn’t go there on Papa’s account.’

‘Of course I did’, Laptev replied, blushing.

‘Well, of course. By the way, you’d have a job finding another old mule like that Papa in a month of Sundays. What a filthy, inept, clumsy oaf he is. Words fail me! You Muscovites have only a kind of poetic interest in provincial landscapes, in the wretched existence of yokels whom our writers wax lyrical about.⁴ But you can take it from me, old man, there’s nothing lyrical about this place. There’s only savagery, meanness and vileness – that’s all. Just look at our local high priests of learning, the intelligentsia, so to speak. Can you imagine, we have twenty-eight doctors here, they’ve all become very rich, they’ve bought themselves houses, while the rest of the inhabitants are in the same hopeless situation as they’ve always been. For example, Nina needed an operation, really a very minor one, but we had to send to Moscow for a surgeon because no one here would do it. You can’t imagine what it’s like. They know nothing, understand nothing and are interested in nothing. Just ask them what cancer is, for example, what causes it.’

Panaurov started explaining cancer. He was a specialist in every branch of learning and had a scientific explanation for anything you could think of. His way of solving problems was something quite unique to himself. He had his own special theory of the circulation of the blood, his own chemistry and astronomy. He spoke slowly, softly, convincingly, pronouncing the words ‘you just have no idea about it’ as if he were pleading with you. He screwed his eyes up, sighed languidly and smiled graciously like an emperor: he was evidently highly satisfied with himself and quite untroubled at being fifty years old.

‘I could do with a bite to eat’, Laptev said. ‘Something nice and spicy.’

‘That’s no problem. I can fix you up right away.’

Shortly afterwards, Laptev was upstairs in the dining-room, having supper with his brother-in-law. Laptev drank a glass of vodka and then changed to wine. Panaurov drank nothing. He never drank, never played cards, but in spite of this had managed to run through his own and his wife’s property and accumulate a whole pile of debts. To fritter so much money away in so short a time, something besides sexual craving was needed – some special talent. Panaurov loved tasty food, fine table appointments, music with dinner, bowing waiters to whom he could casually toss ten- or even twenty-rouble tips. He took part in all subscription schemes and lotteries, sent bouquets to ladies he knew on their name-days, bought cups, glass-holders, cufflinks, ties, canes, perfume, cigarette-holders, pipes, dogs, parrots, Japanese goods and antiques. He wore silk nightshirts, his bed was of ebony, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, he had a genuine Bokhara dressing-gown, and so on. Every day he spent ‘heaps of money’, as he put it, on these things.

During supper he kept sighing and shaking his head. ‘Yes, everything in this world comes to an end’, he said softly, screwing up his dark eyes. ‘You’ll fall in love, fall out of love. You’ll be deceived, because faithful women don’t exist. You’ll become desperate and do some deceiving yourself. But the time will come when all this will be only a memory and you’ll coolly reflect that it was all absolutely trivial.’

Laptev was tired and slightly drunk. As he looked at the other man’s fine head, his trimmed beard, he felt that he could understand why women loved that spoilt, self-assured, physically attractive man.

After supper Panaurov didn’t stay at home but went off to his other flat. Laptev accompanied him. Panaurov was the only man in the entire town who wore a top hat, and against a background of grey fences, pathetic three-windowed little houses and nettle clumps his elegant, smart figure, top hat and orange gloves never failed to produce a strange, sad impression.

After saying goodnight, Laptev started off home, without hurrying. The moon shone brightly, making every scrap of straw on the ground visible, and Laptev felt that the moonlight was caressing his uncovered head – it was just as though someone were running feathers over his hair.

‘I’m in love!’ he said out loud and he had a sudden urge to run after Panaurov and embrace him, forgive him and present him with a lot of money – and then dash off into the fields or a copse, forever running, without looking back.

Back home, on a chair, he saw the umbrella that Julia Sergeyevna had forgotten. He seized it and hungrily kissed it. It was made of silk, was not new and had a piece of old elastic tied round it. The handle was of cheap bone. Laptev opened it over his head and it seemed that the sweet scent of happiness was all around.

He settled himself more comfortably in his chair and started writing a letter to one of his Moscow friends, still holding the umbrella.

My dearest Kostya,

Here’s some news for you: I’m in love again. I say ‘again’, because six years ago I was in love with a Moscow actress whom I never even met and over the past eighteen months I’ve been living with a ‘personage’ who is familiar to you, a woman who is neither young nor beautiful. My dear friend, how unlucky I’ve been in love! I’ve never had any success with women and if I say ‘again’, it’s only because it’s so sad, it hurts me so much to have to acknowledge that my youth has passed by without any love at all, and that I’m only really in love now for the first time, at the age of thirty-four. So, may I write that I’m in love ‘again’?

If you only knew the kind of girl she is. One wouldn’t call her a beauty – she has a broad face, she’s terribly thin. But what a wonderfully kind expression, what a smile! Her voice is so resonant, she seems to be singing when she speaks. She never starts a conversation when she’s with me, I don’t really know her, but when I’m close to her I sense she is a rare, unusual person, imbued with intelligence and lofty ideals. She’s religious and you just can’t imagine how deeply this moves me, how much it raises her in my estimation. I’m ready to argue with you endlessly on this point. You’re right, you can think what you like, but I still love her going to church. She’s from the provinces, but she went to school in Moscow – she loves our Moscow – and she dresses in true Muscovite style. For that I love her, love her, love her.

I can see you frowning and getting up to read me a long lecture about the nature of love, whom one may or may not love, and so on. But before I fell in love I too knew exactly what love is, my dear Kostya!

My sister thanks you for your good wishes. She often remembers once taking Kostya Kochevoy to preparatory class. She still calls you ‘poor’, since she still remembers you as the little orphan. So, my poor orphan, I’m in love. It’s a secret for the time being – don’t say anything there to the familiar ‘personage’. That will all come right in the end – or as the servant says in Tolstoy, ‘everything will sort itself out…’⁵

Having finished the letter, Laptev went to bed. He was so tired, his eyes closed of their own accord, but for some reason he couldn’t sleep – the street noises seemed to be disturbing him. The herd of cattle was driven past and the horn blown, and soon after that the bells rang for early mass. A cart would creak past, then he would hear the voice of a woman going to market. And the sparrows never stopped chirping.

II

It was a cheerful, festive morning. At about ten o’clock Nina Fyodorovna, in a brown dress, hair combed, was led into the drawing-room and there she walked up and down. Then she stood by the open window with a broad innocent smile on her face. Looking at her, you were reminded of a local artist, a drunkard, who had called her face a ‘countenance’ and had wanted to include her in a painting of a Russian Shrovetide. Everyone, the children, servants and even her brother Aleksey Fyodorych, even she herself, was suddenly convinced that she was bound to recover. The little girls screamed with laughter as they pursued their uncle and tried to catch him, and the house grew noisy.

People from outside came to inquire about her health. They brought communion bread and said that prayers were being offered for her today in almost every church. She had done a great deal of good in that town and the people loved her. She dispensed charity with the same lack of fuss as her brother, who gave away money very readily, without stopping to consider whether he should or not. Nina Fyodorovna paid poor schoolboys’ fees, took tea, sugar and jam to old ladies, gave indigent brides dresses, and if she happened to see a newspaper she would first look for appeals or stories about anyone in dire straits.

Now she was holding a bundle of chits with which various impecunious petitioners had obtained goods at the grocer’s. This grocer had sent these to her yesterday, requesting eighty-two roubles.

‘Heavens, they’ve been taking so much, they really have no shame!’ she said, barely recognizing her own ugly handwriting. ‘That’s no joke, eighty-two roubles! I don’t feel like paying!’

‘I’ll pay it today’, Laptev said.

‘But what on earth for?’ Nina Fyodorovna said anxiously. ‘It’s really enough for me, those two hundred and fifty roubles I get every month from you and our brother. God bless you’, she added in a soft voice, so that the servants wouldn’t hear.

‘Well, I spend two thousand five hundred a month’, he said. ‘Let me tell you again, my dear, you’re just as entitled to spend money as Fyodor and myself. Never forget that. Father has three children, so one in every three copecks belongs to you.’

But Nina Fyodorovna didn’t understand and she looked as if she was trying to do a very complicated piece of mental arithmetic. This obtuseness in financial matters always worried and embarrassed Laptev. Moreover, he suspected that she had some personal debts which she was too ashamed to tell him about and which were distressing her.

They heard footsteps and heavy breathing. It was the doctor coming upstairs, as scruffy and unkempt as ever. He was humming away as usual.

To avoid meeting him, Laptev went into the dining-room, then down to his own rooms. It was quite clear to him that getting on more intimate terms with the doctor and calling informally was impossible. Any encounter with that ‘old mule’, as Panaurov called him, was unpleasant. This was why he saw Julia Sergeyevna so seldom. He reckoned that if he took the umbrella back now, when her father was out, he would catch her alone in the house, and his heart leapt with joy. He must hurry, hurry!

Greatly excited, he took the umbrella and flew off on the wings of love. It was hot in the street. At the doctor’s house, in the huge courtyard overgrown with tall weeds and nettles, about twenty boys were playing ball. They were all children of the tenants – working people who lived in the three old, unsightly outbuildings which the doctor was meaning to repair every year, but was always putting off. Healthy voices rang out. Far to one side, near her front porch, stood Julia Sergeyevna, her arms behind her back as she watched the game.

‘Good morning!’ Laptev called out.

She turned round. Usually she looked cool and indifferent when he saw her, or tired, as yesterday. But now she seemed as lively and playful as those boys at their game. ‘Just look at them’, she said, going over to him. ‘They don’t enjoy themselves like that in Moscow. But they don’t have such large yards there, so there’s no room for running about. Father’s just gone over to your place’, she added.

‘I know, but it’s you I’ve come to see, not him’, Laptev said, admiring her youthfulness, which he hadn’t noticed before, apparently seeing it only for the first time today. And he felt that he was looking at her delicate white neck, with its little golden chain, for the very first time.

‘I’ve come to see you’, he repeated. ‘My sister’s sent this umbrella you forgot yesterday.’

She stretched out her hand to take it, but he pressed the umbrella to his chest and said in a passionate, uncontrolled voice, as he surrendered once again to the exquisite delight experienced the previous night beneath the umbrella, ‘I beg you, give it to me. I shall keep it in memory of you, of our friendship. It’s a really wonderful umbrella!’

‘Keep it’, she said, blushing. ‘I don’t think it’s so wonderful.’

He looked at her in speechless ecstasy.

‘Why am I making you stand in this heat?’ she said after a short silence, laughing. ‘Let’s go inside.’

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

They entered the hall. Julia Sergeyevna ran upstairs, rustling her white dress with its blue flower pattern.

‘You can’t disturb me’, she replied, stopping on the stairs. ‘After all, I never do a thing. Every day’s a holiday for me, from morning to night.’

‘That’s something I can’t understand’, he said, going up to her. ‘I grew up in surroundings where everyone without exception – men and women – had to slave away, every single day.’

‘But supposing there’s nothing to do?’ she asked.

‘Then you must organize your life so that you just can’t avoid working. Without work life can never be honest and happy.’

He pressed the umbrella to his chest again and said in a soft voice that didn’t sound like his, ‘If you would agree to be my wife I would give anything. Just anything. There’s no price I wouldn’t pay, no sacrifice I wouldn’t make.’

She shuddered and looked at him in surprise and fear.

‘What are you saying!’ she exclaimed, turning pale. ‘It’s out of the question, I do assure you. I’m sorry.’

Still rustling her dress as before, she dashed upstairs and vanished through a door.

Laptev understood what this meant and his mood changed abruptly, as if the light had suddenly gone out in his soul. Suffering the shame and humiliation of someone who had been rejected, who wasn’t loved, who was thought unattractive, repulsive and perhaps even hateful, and whom everyone avoided, he walked out of the house. ‘I’d give anything’, he said, mimicking himself as he walked home in the heat and recalled the details of his declaration. ‘ “Give anything” – why, that’s how shopkeepers talk! A fat lot of good your anything is!’

All the things he had said just now struck him as sickeningly stupid. Why had he lied to her about growing up in surroundings where everyone worked ‘without exception’? Why had he adopted that didactic tone about the ‘honest, happy life’? It was silly, boring, hypocritical – typical Moscow pomposity. But gradually he lapsed into the indifference felt by criminals after a harsh sentence. Now, thank God, it was all over, he thought, no longer was there that dreadful uncertainty, no longer would he have to wait day after day, suffer, forever thinking about the same thing. Everything was clear now. He must abandon all hope of personal happiness and live without desire or hope; he must never have yearnings or expectations any more. If he wanted to dispel the boredom that he was so sick and tired of, he could start caring about what other people did, about their happiness. Old age would then creep up on him unnoticed, his life would come to an end – and that was the long and short of it. Now he didn’t care about a thing, he wanted nothing and he could reflect coolly. But he felt a certain heaviness in his face, especially under the eyes. His forehead was as taut as stretched elastic and it seemed that tears would spurt at any moment. Feeling weak all over, he climbed into bed and in five minutes he was fast asleep.

III

Julia Sergeyevna was plunged into despair by Laptev’s proposal, which had been so unexpected.

She didn’t know him very well and they had met by chance. He was rich, a director of the well-known Moscow firm of Fyodor Laptev & Sons. He was always very serious, obviously highly intelligent and preoccupied with his sister’s health. She had thought that he had been completely ignoring her, and on her part she had treated him with the utmost indifference. But suddenly there was that declaration on the stairs, that pathetic, enraptured face…

His proposal had disturbed her by its very suddenness, and she was upset at his using the word ‘wife’ and that she had had to refuse him. She had forgotten what she actually told Laptev, but vestiges of that impetuous, unpleasant feeling she had experienced when refusing him still lingered. She did not like him. He looked like a shop assistant, he was boring, and the only possible reply was no. All the same, she felt awkward, as if she had behaved badly. ‘My God, not even in the flat. Right there, on the stairs’, she said despairingly, turning towards the small icon above the bed-head. ‘And he never paid me any attention before. It’s all rather unusual, strange…’

In her loneliness she felt more uneasy by the hour, unable to cope unaided with those oppressive feelings. She needed someone to listen to her and tell her that she had behaved correctly. But there was no one to talk to. Her mother had died long ago, and she looked on her father as some kind of eccentric with whom she couldn’t have a serious conversation. He embarrassed her with his whims, his excessive touchiness and vague gestures. The moment you started a discussion with him he would start talking about himself. Even in her prayers she hadn’t been completely frank, since she wasn’t sure exactly what she should ask of God.

The samovar was brought in. Very pale and tired, with a helpless-looking face, Julia Sergeyevna entered the dining-room, made the tea – this was her responsibility – and poured her father a glass. In that long frock-coat that reached below the knees, with his red face, uncombed hair, hands in pockets, the doctor paced the dining-room – not from corner to corner, but haphazardly, like a beast in a cage. He would stop by the table, drink with relish from his glass and then pensively pace the room again.

‘Laptev proposed to me today’, Julia Sergeyevna said, blushing.

The doctor looked at her and didn’t seem to understand. ‘Laptev?’ he asked. ‘Nina Panaurov’s brother?’

He loved his daughter. She would most probably marry sooner or later and leave him, but he tried not to think about it. He was scared at the prospect of loneliness and (for some reason) he felt he might have a stroke if he were left alone in that large house, but he didn’t like to say it outright.

‘I’m really very pleased’, he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘My heartiest congratulations! Now you have an excellent chance of abandoning me and that must give you great pleasure. I understand you very well. Living with a senile, sick, half-demented father must be rotten for someone of your age. I understand you perfectly. If only I were to peg out soon, if only the devil would cart me off, everyone would be so delighted. I congratulate you most heartily.’

‘I turned him down.’

The doctor felt relieved, but now he couldn’t stop talking and he continued, ‘I’m amazed. I’ve been asking myself this for a long time now, why haven’t they put me in a lunatic asylum? Why am I wearing this frock-coat, instead of a straitjacket? I still believe in truth, goodness, I’m a stupid old idealist – surely that’s madness in this day and age? And what do I get for my love of truth, for being honest with people? I’m almost stoned in the streets, everyone rides roughshod over me. Even my nearest and dearest walk all over me. So to hell with me, stupid old fool!’

‘It’s impossible to have a proper talk with you!’ Julia said. Abruptly, she stood up from the table and furiously went to her room. She well remembered how often her father had been unfair to her. But after a little while she began to feel sorry for him, and when he left for his club she went downstairs with him and shut the door after him. The weather was bad, very blustery. The door shook from the force of the wind and in the hall there were draughts everywhere which nearly blew the candle out. Julia went all through her rooms upstairs and made the sign of the cross over all windows and doors. The wind howled and someone seemed to be walking about on the roof. Never had she felt so low, never had she felt so lonely.

She wondered if she had behaved badly in refusing a man just because she didn’t care for his looks. She didn’t love him – that was true – and marrying him would have meant saying farewell to her dreams and ideas of a happy married life. But would she ever meet the man of her dreams and fall in love? She was already twenty-one. There were no eligible bachelors in town. She thought of all the men she knew – civil servants, teachers, officers. Some of them were already married and their family life was staggeringly empty and boring. Others were dull, colourless, stupid and immoral. Whatever you said about Laptev, he was a Muscovite, he’d been to university, he spoke French. He lived in Moscow, the capital, where there were so many clever, idealistic, remarkable people, where everything was so lively, with magnificent theatres, musical evenings, first-class dressmakers and patisseries. The Bible says that a wife must love her husband and love is of prime importance in novels. But wasn’t all that going too far? Surely family life without love was somehow possible? Wasn’t it said that love soon passes, that it becomes a mere habit and that the purpose of family life isn’t love and happiness, but responsibility – bringing up children, looking after the house and so on. Perhaps what the Bible meant was loving one’s husband in the same way as one’s neighbour, having respect, making allowances…

That night Julia Sergeyevna attentively read her evening prayers, then she knelt down, clasped her hands to her breast and looked at the icon-lamp. ‘Teach me to understand, Holy Mother. Teach me, O Lord!’ she said, with deep feeling.

In the course of her life she had met poor, pathetic old maids who bitterly regretted having turned down their suitors at some time. Wouldn’t the same thing happen to her? Shouldn’t she enter a convent or become a nurse?

She undressed and got into bed, crossing herself and the air around. Suddenly a bell rang sharply, plaintively, in the corridor. ‘Good God!’ she said, feeling intense irritation all over her body at this sound. She lay there thinking about provincial life, so uneventful and monotonous, yet so disturbing at times: you were always being forced to shudder, to feel angry and guilty and in the end your nerves became so shattered you were too frightened to look out from under the blankets.

Half an hour later the bell rang again, just as sharply. The servants were most probably asleep and didn’t hear it. Annoyed with them and shivering, Julia Sergeyevna lit a candle and started dressing. When she had finished and gone out into the corridor the maid was bolting the downstairs door. ‘I thought it was the master, but it was somebody one of the patients sent over’, she said.

Julia Sergeyevna returned to her room. She took a pack of cards from her chest of drawers and decided that if, after shuffling them well and cutting them, the bottom card turned out red, that would mean yes, that is, she had to accept Laptev. If it was black she must say no. The card was the ten of spades.

This had a calming effect and she fell asleep. But in the morning it was neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ again. She realized that she could change her whole life now if she so wanted. These thoughts wearied her – she felt exhausted and ill. However, just after eleven o’clock, she dressed and went to visit Nina Fyodorovna. She wanted to see Laptev – he might strike her as more attractive now and perhaps she had been making a mistake.

Fighting one’s way against that wind was hard work. She hardly made any progress, and she held her hat with both hands, seeing nothing for dust.

IV

When he entered his sister’s room and unexpectedly saw Julia Sergeyevna there, Laptev again felt the humiliation of someone who has been snubbed. He concluded that if, after yesterday, she had no qualms about visiting his sister and meeting him, then either he didn’t exist as far as she was concerned, or he was considered a complete nonentity. But when he greeted her and she looked at him sadly and guiltily with a pale face and dust under her eyes, he could see that she too was suffering.

She was not feeling well. After sitting there for a very short time – about ten minutes – she made her farewell. ‘Please take me home, Aleksey Fyodorych’, she said on her way out. They walked in silence down the street, holding on to their hats; he kept behind her, trying to shield her from the wind. It was calmer in a side-street and here they walked side by side.

‘Please forgive me if I was unkind yesterday’, she began and her voice shook, as if she were about to cry. ‘It’s sheer torture! I haven’t slept all night.’

‘I had an excellent night’, Laptev replied without looking at her, ‘but that doesn’t mean I feel all right. My life is in shreds, I’m deeply unhappy after your turning me down yesterday, I feel as if I’ve taken poison. The most painful things were said yesterday, but today I don’t feel at all inhibited and can speak quite frankly. I love you more than my sister, more than my late mother. I could – and I did – live without my sister and mother, but life without you makes no sense. I just can’t…’

As usual, he had guessed her intentions. He saw that she wanted to continue yesterday’s conversation: it was only for this that she had asked him to accompany her and now she was taking him to her house. But what could she add to her refusal? Was there any more to say? Her glance, her smile, even the way she held her head and shoulders as she walked with him – everything indicated that she still did not love him, that he was a stranger to her. So what else was there for her to say?

Dr Sergey Borisych was at home. ‘Welcome! Delighted to see you, Fyodor Alekseich’, he said, getting the name wrong. ‘Delighted, absolutely delighted.’

He had never been so friendly before and Laptev concluded that the doctor already knew about the proposal – and he found this unpleasant to think about. He was sitting in the drawing-room now: it produced a strange impression, with its cheap, vulgar furniture and poor pictures. Although there were armchairs and a huge lamp with a shade, it looked unlived-in, rather like a spacious barn. Obviously, only someone like the doctor could feel at home in such a room. Another room, almost twice as big, was called ‘The Ballroom’ – here there were only chairs, as at a dancing-class. And something suspicious began to worry Laptev as he sat in the drawing-room talking to the doctor about his sister. Had Julia Sergeyevna been to see his sister Nina and then brought him here to announce that she had accepted his proposal? This was bad enough, but even worse was having a nature that was prey to such suspicions. He imagined father and daughter having lengthy deliberations yesterday evening and night, long arguments perhaps, and then agreeing that Julia Sergeyevna had behaved recklessly in refusing a rich man. Even the words spoken by parents on such occasions – ‘It’s true, you don’t love him, but on the other hand think of the good deeds you’ll be able to perform!’ – rang in his ears.

The doctor prepared to leave on his rounds. Laptev wanted to go with him but Julia Sergeyevna said, ‘Please stay, I beg you.’

She had been suffering from dreadful depression and now she was trying to reassure herself that to refuse a respectable, kind man who loved her just because he didn’t attract her, especially when this marriage provided the opportunity of changing her life, so cheerless, monotonous and idle, when her youth was passing and the future held no hope of anything brighter – to refuse him in these circumstances was insane, irresponsible and perverse, and God might even punish her for it.

Her father left the house. When his footsteps had died away she suddenly stopped in front of Laptev.

‘I spent a long time thinking it over yesterday, Aleksey Fyodorych, and I accept your proposal’, she said decisively, turning pale.

He bent down and kissed her hand. Awkwardly, she kissed his head with cold lips. He felt that the essential thing, her love, was absent from this amorous declaration, which none the less stated what was superfluous. He felt like shouting, running away, setting off for Moscow immediately. But she was standing close to him and she seemed so beautiful that he was suddenly gripped with desire. He saw that it was too late now for further discussion, embraced her passionately, pressed her to his chest, muttered something, addressed her intimately, kissed her neck, cheek and head…

She retreated to the window, frightened by these caresses. Now they both regretted their declarations. ‘Why did this happen?’ they asked themselves in their embarrassment.

‘If only you knew how unhappy I feel!’ she said, wringing her hands.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, going up to her and wringing his hands too. ‘My dear, tell me what’s wrong, for God’s sake! But only the truth. I beg you, only the truth!’

‘Don’t take any notice’, she said, forcing a smile. ‘I promise to be a faithful, devoted wife. Come over this evening.’

Later, as he sat reading the historical novel to his sister, he remembered all this and felt insulted that his admirable, pure and generous feelings had elicited such a trivial response. He was not loved, but his proposal had been accepted, probably only because he was rich. In other words, they valued that part of him he valued least. The pure, devout Julia had never given any thought to money – he granted her that – but she didn’t love him, did she? No, she did not, and obviously there had been some sort of calculation here – even though it was somewhat vague and not wholly intentional perhaps, it was calculation none the less. The doctor’s house, with its vulgar décor, repelled him and the doctor himself resembled some fat, pathetic miser, rather like the buffoon Gaspard in The Bells of Corneville.⁶ The very name Julia sounded common. He imagined Julia and himself during the wedding, essentially complete strangers and without a scrap of feeling on her part, as if it were an arranged marriage. And now his only consolation (as banal as the marriage itself ) was that he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last and that thousands of men had made similar marriages and that, in time, when she knew him better, Julia might perhaps come to love him.

‘Romeo and Julia!’ he said, closing the book and laughing. ‘I’m Romeo, Nina. You may congratulate me. I proposed to Julia Belavin today.’

Nina Fyodorovna first thought that he was joking, then she believed him and burst into tears. The news didn’t please her. ‘All right, congratulations’, she said. ‘But why so sudden?’

‘It’s not, it’s been going on since March, only you never notice a thing. I’ve been in love since March, when I first met her here in your room.’

‘But I thought you’d marry someone we know, from Moscow’, Nina Fyodorovna said after a brief silence. ‘The girls from our little circle are not so complicated. But the main thing, Aleksey, is for you to be happy, that’s what’s important. My Grigory Nikolaich never loved me, and you can see how we live – it’s an open secret. Of course, any woman would love you for your kindness and intellect. But Julia went to a boarding-school, she’s out of the top drawer. Intellect and kindness don’t mean much to her. She’s young. As for you, Aleksey, you’re neither young nor handsome.’

To soften these last words she stroked his cheek and said, ‘You’re not handsome, but you’re a wonderful person.’

She was so excited her cheeks flushed slightly and she talked enthusiastically about whether it would be correct to bless Aleksey with an icon. All said and done, she was his elder sister and was like a mother to him. And she kept trying to convince her despondent brother that the wedding should be celebrated correctly, cheerfully and with great ceremony, so that people didn’t start criticizing.

Then the husband-to-be started calling on the Belavins three or four times a day and he was no longer able to take Sasha’s place reading the historical novel. Julia received him in her own two rooms, away from the drawing-room and her father’s study, and he liked them very much. There were dark walls and a full icon-case in one corner; and there was a smell of fine perfume and lamp oil. She lived in the remotest rooms, her bed and dressing-table were surrounded by screens and her book-case doors were curtained inside with a green material. She had carpets, so that she couldn’t be heard walking about, and all this led him to believe that hers was a secretive nature, that she loved a quiet, peaceful, enclosed life. Legally, she was only a minor in that house. She had no money of her own: during their walks she was sometimes embarrassed at not having a single copeck on her. Her father gave her a little money for dresses and books, not more than a hundred roubles a year. And the doctor himself had hardly any money, despite his first-class practice: every evening he played cards at the club and always lost. Besides that, he bought houses on mortgage through a mutual credit society and rented them out. His tenants were always behind with their payments, but he was confident that the property deals were highly profitable. He had mortgaged his own house, where he lived with his daughter, and had bought a plot of waste ground with the money. He was already building a large, two-storey house there, with the intention of mortgaging it.

Laptev now seemed to be living in some kind of haze, as if replaced by his double, and he was doing many things he would never have attempted before. Three times he accompanied the doctor to the club, had supper with him and volunteered money for the house-building. He even visited Panaurov in his other flat. One day Panaurov invited him to dinner and, without thinking, Laptev accepted. He was greeted by a lady of about thirty-five, tall and thin, slightly greying and with black eyebrows. She was obviously not Russian. She had white powder blotches on her face and a sickly smile, and she shook his hand brusquely, making the bracelets jingle on her white arm. Laptev thought that she smiled that way to hide the fact she was unhappy from others and from herself. He saw two little girls there too, five and three years old, who looked like Sasha. For dinner they had milk soup, cold veal and carrots, and then chocolate. It was all sickly-sweet and not very tasty, but on the table were gleaming gold forks, bottles of soya sauce and cayenne pepper, an exceptionally ornate sauceboat and a golden pepper pot.

Only after he had finished his soup did Laptev realize the mistake he had made in coming here for dinner. The lady was embarrassed and kept smiling and showing him her teeth the whole time. Panaurov offered a scientific explanation of falling in love and its origins.

‘Here we are dealing with an electrical phenomenon’, he said in French, addressing the lady. ‘Everyone’s skin has microscopic glands with currents running through them. If you meet someone whose currents are parallel to yours – there’s love for you!’

Back home, when his sister asked where he had been, Laptev felt awkward and didn’t answer.

Right up to the wedding he had felt in a false position. With every day his love for Julia grew – she seemed ethereal, sublime. All the same, she didn’t return this love: basically, he was buying her, she was selling herself. Sometimes, after much reflection, he simply grew desperate and wondered whether he should run away from it all. Night after night he didn’t sleep, all he did was think of meeting that lady in Moscow after the wedding – that lady he had called a ‘personage’ in letters to friends. And he wondered how his father and brother, both difficult characters, would react to his marriage and to Julia. He was afraid his father might say something rude to Julia at the first meeting. And his brother Fyodor had been acting very strangely lately. In his lengthy letters he wrote about the importance of health, about the influence of illness on one’s state of mind, about the nature of religion, but not one word about Moscow and business. These letters irritated Laptev and he thought that his brother’s character had taken a turn for the worse.

The wedding was in September. The actual ceremony was held after morning service at the Church of St Peter and St Paul and that same day the couple left for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife (she wore a black dress and train and now resembled a grown woman instead of a girl) were saying goodbye to Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid’s whole face twisted, but not one tear flowed from her dry eyes.

‘If I should die, God forbid’, she said, ‘take care of my little girls.’

‘Oh, I promise!’ Julia Sergeyevna replied, her lips and eyelids twitching nervously too.

‘I’ll come and see you in October’, Laptev said, deeply moved. ‘Get better now, my dearest.’

They had a railway compartment to themselves. Both felt sad and embarrassed. She sat in one corner without taking her hat off, pretending to be dozing, while he lay on the couchette opposite, troubled by various thoughts: about his father, about the ‘personage’, about whether Julia would like his Moscow flat. As he glanced at his wife who didn’t love him he gloomily asked himself ‘How did all this happen?’

V

In Moscow the Laptevs ran a wholesale haberdashery business, selling fringes, ribbons, braid, knitting items, buttons and so on. The gross receipts amounted to two million roubles a year. What the net profit was no one knew except the old man. The sons and assistants put it at about three hundred thousand and said that it could have been a hundred thousand more if the old man hadn’t ‘frittered profits away’ by giving credit indiscriminately. Over the past ten years they had accumulated nearly a million worthless bills of exchange alone, and when the matter was discussed the senior assistant would produce a crafty wink and use language that many couldn’t understand: ‘It’s the psychological aftermath of the age.’

The main business was carried on in the city’s commercial quarter, in a building called the warehouse. This was entered from a perpetually gloomy yard that smelt of matting, where hoofs of drayhorses clattered over asphalt. A very modest looking, iron-bound door led from this yard into a room whose walls, brown from the damp, were covered in charcoal scribbles. This room was lit by a narrow, iron-grilled window. To the left was another room, a little larger and cleaner, with a cast-iron stove and two tables, but with a prison-like window too. This was the office and from it a narrow stone staircase led up to the first floor, where the main business was carried on. This was a fairly large room but, because of the perpetual twilight, low ceiling and lack of space caused by crates, packages and people rushing about, it struck newcomers as just as unprepossessing as the two rooms down below. Up on this floor, and on the office shelves too, goods lay in stacks, bales and cardboard boxes. They were all displayed any old how, with no attempt at order or creating a nice show. If it hadn’t been for the crimson threads, tassels and pieces of fringe sticking out of paper-wrapped parcels here and there, no one could have guessed, at first glance, what kind of business was being carried on here. Looking at those crumpled paper parcels and boxes it was hard to believe that millions of roubles were spent on these trifles and that fifty men – excluding buyers – were busy in that warehouse every day.

When Laptev appeared at the warehouse at noon, the day after arriving in Moscow, men were packing goods and making such a racket with the crates no one in the first room or office heard him come in. A postman he knew was going downstairs with a bundle of letters in his hand – he was frowning at the noise and didn’t notice him either. The first person to welcome him upstairs was his brother Fyodor, who was so like him people thought that they were twins. This similarity kept reminding Laptev of his appearance and now, seeing before him a short man with flushed cheeks, thinning on top, with lean thighs of poor pedigree, so dull and unbusinesslike, he asked himself: ‘Surely I don’t look like that?’

‘I’m so glad to see you!’ Fyodor exclaimed, exchanging kisses with his brother and firmly shaking his hand. ‘I’ve been waiting impatiently every day, my dear brother. When you wrote that you were getting married I was racked with curiosity. I’ve really missed you, old man. Just think, we haven’t seen each other for about six months. Well now, what’s new? How’s Nina? Is she very bad?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s God’s will,’ Fyodor sighed. ‘Well, how’s the wife? I dare say she’s a beauty. I love her already. After all, she’s the same as a little sister to me. We’ll spoil her, the two of us.’

Just then Laptev spotted the long familiar, broad, bent back of his father, Fyodor Stepanych. The old man was sitting on a stool by the counter, talking to a customer.

‘Papa, God has sent us joy today!’ Fyodor cried. ‘My brother’s arrived!’

Fyodor Stepanych senior was tall and so very powerfully built that despite his wrinkles and eighty years he still looked like a strong, healthy man. He spoke in a deep, heavy, booming voice that came thunder ing from his broad chest as if from a barrel. He shaved his beard, sported an army-style trimmed moustache and smoked cigars. Since he was always feeling warm, he wore a loose-fitting canvas jacket in the warehouse and at home, at all seasons. Recently he’d had a cataract removed, his sight was poor and he no longer took an active part in the business, merely chatting to people and drinking tea with jam.

Laptev bent down and kissed his hand, then his lips.

‘It’s been such a long time since we saw each other, my dear sir’, the old man said. ‘Yes, such a long time. Well, I suppose I must congratulate you on your marriage? All right. Congratulations.’

He offered his lips to receive a kiss. Laptev bent down and kissed them.

‘Well now, have you brought the young lady with you?’ the old man asked and without waiting for an answer turned to the customer and said, ‘ “I hereby inform you, dear Papa, that I’m marrying Miss So-and-So.” Yes. But asking for Papa’s blessing and advice isn’t in the rules. They just do what they like now. I was over forty when I married and I fell down at my father’s feet and asked his advice. They don’t do that sort of thing these days.’

The old man was delighted to see his son, but thought it improper to display any affection or show that he was pleased. His voice, his manner of speaking and that ‘young lady’ expression put Laptev in the bad mood which invariably came over him in that warehouse. Every little detail here reminded him of the past, when he had been whipped and given plain, lenten food. He knew that boys were still whipped and punched on the nose until it bled, and that when these boys grew up they would do the punching. Only five minutes in that warehouse, so it seemed, was enough for him to expect abuse or a punch on the nose at any moment.

Fyodor slapped the customer on the shoulder and said to his brother, ‘Aleksey, let me introduce Grigory Timofeich, the firm’s right arm in Tambov.⁷ He’s a shining example to the youth of today. He’s in his sixth decade, yet he has children still at their mother’s breast.’

The clerks laughed – and so did the customer, a skinny, pale-faced old man.

‘It’s contrary to the course of nature’, observed the senior clerk, who was also standing behind the counter. ‘Whatever goes in must come out the same.’

This senior clerk, a tall man of about fifty, with a dark beard, spectacles and a pencil behind the ear, usually expressed his thoughts ambiguously, in far-fetched allusions, and it was plain from his cunning smile that he attached some special, subtle meaning to his words. He loved obscuring what he said with bookish expressions that he interpreted in his own peculiar way, often giving common words – ‘furthermore’, for example – a different meaning from their original one. Whenever he said something categorically and didn’t want to be contradicted, he would stretch out his right arm and say ‘Furthermore!’

Most surprising of all, the other clerks and the customers understood him perfectly. His name was Ivan Vasilich Pochatkin and he came from Kashira.⁸ Congratulating Laptev, he expressed himself as follows: ‘It is a valiant service on your part, for a woman’s heart is bold and warlike!’

Another person of consequence in the warehouse was the clerk Makeichev, a stout, fair-haired pillar of the community, with a bald patch on top and side-whiskers. He went over to Laptev and congratulated him respectfully, in a low voice: ‘I have the honour, sir… The Lord has listened to your good father’s prayers, sir. The Lord be praised, sir.’

Then the others came over to congratulate him on his marriage. They were all smartly dressed and all seemed impeccably honest, educated men. They spoke with provincial accents and as they said ‘sir’ after every other word their rapidly delivered congratulations – ‘I wish you, sir, all the best, sir’ – sounded like whiplashes in the air.

Laptev soon grew bored with all this and wanted to go home. But leaving was awkward. For propriety’s sake, he must spend at least two hours in the warehouse. He walked away from the counter and asked Makeichev if they had had a good summer and if there was any news. Makeichev replied politely, without looking him in the eye. A boy with close-cropped hair, in a grey blouse, handed Laptev a glass of tea without a saucer. Soon afterwards another boy stumbled on a crate as he went past and nearly fell over. The stolid Makeichev suddenly pulled a terrifying, vicious, monster-like face and shouted at him, ‘Look where you’re going!’

The clerks were glad that the young master was married now and had finally returned. They gave him inquisitive, welcoming looks, each considering it his duty to make some pleasant, polite remark as he went past. But Laptev was certain that all this was insincere and that the flattery came from fear. He just couldn’t forget how, fifteen years before, a mentally ill clerk had run into the street in his underclothes, barefoot, had waved his fist menacingly at the windows in the boss’s office and shouted that they were tormenting the life out of him. People kept laughing at the poor devil for a long time after he had been cured, reminding him how he had called the bosses ‘explanters’ instead of ‘exploiters’. On the whole, life was very hard for the Laptev employees and this had long been the main topic for discussion in the whole commercial quarter. Worst of all was the oriental deviousness with which old Laptev treated them. Because of this, no one knew what salary his favourites Pochatkin and Makeichev received – actually they got no more than three thousand a year, including bonuses, but he pretended he was paying them seven. The bonuses were paid every year to all the clerks, but in secret, so that those who didn’t get much were forced by pride to say they’d received a lot. Not one of the junior boys knew when he would be promoted to clerk, and none of the staff ever knew whether the boss was satisfied with him or not. Nothing was categorically forbidden the clerks, so they didn’t know what was allowed and what wasn’t. They were not in fact forbidden to marry, but they didn’t marry for fear of displeasing the boss and losing their job. They were allowed to have friends and to pay visits, but the gates were locked at nine in the evening and every morning the boss would eye his staff suspiciously and test them to see if they smelt of vodka: ‘You there, let’s smell your breath!’

Every church holiday the staff had to go to early service and stand in church so the boss could see them all. The fasts were strictly observed. On special occasions – the boss’s or his family’s name-days, for example – the clerks had to club together and buy a cake from Fley’s,⁹ or an album. They lived on the ground floor of the house on Pyatnitsky Street, as well as in the outbuilding, three or four to a room, and they ate from a common bowl, although each had his own plate in front of him. If any of the boss’s family came in during a meal they would all stand up.

Laptev realized that only those ruined by receiving their education through the old man could seriously consider him their benefactor – the remainder saw him as an enemy and ‘explanter’. Now, after a six-month absence, he saw that nothing had improved and that a change had taken place which didn’t augur well. His brother Fyodor, who used to be quiet, thoughtful and exceptionally sensitive, was rushing around the place now, looking extremely efficient and businesslike, pencil behind ear, slapping buyers on the shoulder and calling the clerks ‘My friends!’ Evidently he was acting a part, one in which Aleksey didn’t recognize him at all.

The old man’s voice droned on non-stop. As he had nothing else to do, Laptev senior was instructing a clerk in decent living and the best way to conduct his affairs, setting himself as a good example the whole time.

Laptev had heard that boasting, authoritarian, crushing tone of voice ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. The old man adored himself. What he said invariably gave the impression that he had made his late wife and her family happy, had encouraged his children with rewards, had been a benefactor to his clerks and the rest of the staff, and had made the whole street and all who knew him eternally grateful. Whatever he did was absolutely perfect, and if other men’s business went badly this was only because they hadn’t followed his advice, without which no business enterprise could ever hope to succeed. In church he always stood right in front of the congregation and even rebuked the priests when, according to him, they made mistakes in the ritual. This would please God, he thought, since God loved him.

By two o’clock everyone in the warehouse was busy, except the old man, who was still going on in that thunderous voice. To give himself something to do, Laptev took some braid from a female worker and then sent her away. Then he listened to a buyer – a Vologda¹⁰ merchant – and instructed a clerk to look after him.

The prices and serial numbers of goods were denoted by letters and cries of T-V-A and R-I-T rang out from all sides.

When he left Laptev said goodbye only to his brother.

‘I’m coming to Pyatnitsky Street with the wife tomorrow’, he said. ‘But I’m warning you, if Father says one rude word to her I won’t stay one minute.’

‘Just the same as ever!’ Fyodor sighed. ‘Marriage hasn’t changed you. You must be kind to the old man, dear chap. All right then, see you there tomorrow at eleven. We look forward to it – come straight after church.’

‘I don’t go to church.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. The main thing is, don’t be later than eleven – we have to pray to the Lord before we have lunch. Regards to my little sister-in-law, please kiss her hand for me. I have the feeling I’m going to like her very much’, Fyodor added in complete sincerity. ‘I envy you, my dear brother!’ he shouted as Aleksey was on his way downstairs.

‘Why all that cringing, that shyness, as if he felt naked?’ Laptev wondered as he walked down Nikolsky Street¹¹ trying to fathom the reason for the change in Fyodor. ‘And this new way of speaking – “dear brother”, “old chap”, “God’s mercy”, “Let’s pray to the Lord” – what sanctimonious nonsense!’¹²

VI

At eleven the next day – a Sunday – Laptev drove down Pyatnitsky Street with his wife in a one-horse carriage. He was afraid his father might have tantrums and he felt anxious even before arriving. After two nights in her father’s house, Julia Sergeyevna considered her marriage a mistake, a disaster even. If she’d gone to live anywhere but Moscow with her husband she would not have survived such horrors, she thought. But Moscow did have its diversions. She loved the streets, houses and churches: had it been possible to drive around Moscow in this magnificent sledge with expensive horses, drive all day, from morning till night, at high speed, breathing in the cool, autumn air, she might perhaps have felt a little happier.

The coachman halted the horse near a white, newly plastered two-storey house, then turned right. Here everyone was waiting. A house porter stood at the gate in his new tunic, high boots and galoshes, together with two police constables. The whole area, from the middle of the street to the gate and then across the yard to the porch, was strewn with fresh sand. The house porter doffed his cap, the constables saluted. His brother Fyodor greeted them at the porch with a grave expression.

‘Delighted to meet you, my dear sister-in-law’, he said, kissing Julia’s hand. ‘Welcome.’

He led her upstairs by the arm, then along a corridor, through a crowd of men and women. The vestibule was packed with people too, and there was a smell of incense.

‘I’m going to introduce you to Father now’, Fyodor whispered amid that solemn, funereal silence. ‘A venerable old man, a true paterfamilias.’

In the large hall, near a table prepared for divine service, stood Fyodor Stepanych, a priest with his high hat, and a deacon, all evidently expecting them. The old man offered Julia his hand without a word. Everyone was quiet. Julia felt awkward.

The priest and deacon began robing themselves. A censer, scattering sparks and smelling of incense and charcoal, was brought in. Candles were lit. Clerks entered the hall on tiptoe and stood by the wall, in two rows. It was quiet – no one even coughed.

‘Bless us, oh Lord’, the deacon began.

The service was performed solemnly, with nothing omitted, and two special prayers, ‘Sweetest Jesus’ and ‘Holy Mother’, were chanted. Laptev noticed how embarrassed his wife had just been. While the prayers were being chanted and the choristers sang a triple ‘God have mercy’, in varying harmonies, he felt dreadfully tense, expecting the old man to look round any minute and rebuke him with something like ‘You don’t know how to make the sign of the cross properly.’ And he felt annoyed: what was the point of all that crowd, ceremony, priests, choir? It reeked too much of the old merchant style. But when she joined the old man in allowing the Gospel to be held over her head and then genuflected several times, he understood that it was all to her liking and he felt relieved. At the end of the service, during the prayers for long life, the priest gave the old man and Aleksey the cross to kiss, but when Julia Sergeyevna came up to him he covered it with one hand and apparently wanted to say a few words to her. They waved to the choristers to keep quiet.

‘The Prophet Samuel¹³ came to Bethlehem at the Lord’s command’, the priest began, ‘and the elders of that town besought him, trembling: “Comest thou peaceably, O prophet?” And the Prophet said, “Peaceably, I am come to make sacrifice unto the Lord! Sanctify yourselves and rejoice this day with me.” Shall we question thee, Julia, servant of the Lord, if thou comest peaceably to this house?’

Julia was deeply moved and she blushed. After he had finished, the priest handed her the cross to kiss and then continued in a completely different tone of voice, ‘The young Mr Laptev should get married, it’s high time.’

The choir began to sing again, the congregation moved about and it became noisy. The old man was deeply touched and his eyes were full of tears as he kissed Julia three times and made the sign of the cross before her face. ‘This is your house,’ he said. ‘I’m an old man, I don’t need anything.’

The clerks offered their congratulations and added a few words, but the choir sang so loud it was impossible to hear anything. Then they had lunch and drank champagne. Julia sat next to the old man, who told her that living apart was not good, that one should live together, in the same house, and that divisions and disagreements led to ruin.

‘I made my fortune, all my children can do is spend it’, he said. ‘Now you must live in the same house as me and make money. I’m an old man, time I had a rest.’

Julia kept glimpsing Fyodor, who was very much like her husband, but more fidgety and more reserved. He fussed around nearby, repeatedly kissing her hand.

‘My dear sister-in-law!’ he exclaimed, ‘we’re just ordinary people’, and as he spoke red blotches broke out all over his face. ‘We lead simple Russian, Christian lives, dear sister.’

On the way home Laptev felt very pleased everything had gone so well and that, contrary to what he had been expecting, nothing disastrous had happened.

‘You seem surprised’, he told his wife, ‘that such a strong, broad-shouldered father should have such undersized, weak-chested children like myself and Fyodor. That’s easy to explain! Father married Mother when he was forty-five and she was only seventeen. She used to turn pale and tremble in his presence. Nina was first to be born and Mother was comparatively healthy at the time, so she turned out stronger, better than us. But Fyodor and myself were conceived and born when Mother was worn out from being in a perpetual state of terror. I remember Father started giving me lessons – putting it bluntly, he started beating me – before I was five even. He birched me, boxed my ears, hit me on the head. The first thing I did when I woke up every morning was wonder whether I’d be beaten that day. Fyodor and I were forbidden to play games or have any fun. We had to go to matins and early service, kiss the priests’ and monks’ hands, read special prayers at home. Now, you’re religious and you like that kind of thing, but I’m scared of religion and when I pass a church I remember my childhood and I’m frightened. When I was eight they made me start work at the warehouse. I was just a simple factory hand and this was rotten, as I was beaten almost every day. Then, after I’d started high school, I’d sit and do my homework before dinner and from then until very late I’d have to stay in that same warehouse. This went on until I was twenty-two and met Yartsev at university. He persuaded me to leave my father’s house. This Yartsev has done me a lot of good. Do you know what?’ Laptev said, cheerfully laughing. ‘Let’s go and see Yartsev right now. He’s a terribly decent person, he’ll be so touched!’

VII

One Saturday in November, Anton Rubinstein¹⁴ was conducting at the Conservatoire.¹⁵ The concert hall was extremely crowded and hot. Laptev stood behind some pillars, while his wife and Kostya Kochevoy sat far off, in the front, in the third or fourth row. Right at the beginning of the interval the ‘personage’, Polina Nikolayevna Rassudina, came by, quite out of the blue. Since the wedding he had often worried at the thought of meeting her. As she looked at him, openly and frankly, he remembered that he had so far made no attempt to patch things up or write a couple of friendly lines – it was just as if he were hiding from her. He felt ashamed and he blushed. She shook his hand firmly and impulsively, and asked, ‘Have you seen Yartsev?’

Without waiting for a reply she moved swiftly on, with long strides, as if someone were pushing her from behind.

She was extremely thin and ugly, with a long nose, and she looked constantly tired and worn out: apparently she was always having great difficulty in keeping her eyes open and not falling over. She had beautiful, dark eyes and a clever, kind, sincere expression, but her movements were jerky and brusque. She wasn’t easy to talk to since she was incapable of listening or speaking calmly. Loving her had been a difficult proposition. When she stayed with Laptev she used to have long, loud fits of laughter, covering her face with her hands and maintaining that her life didn’t revolve around love. She was as coy as a seventeen-year-old and all the candles had to be extinguished before someone kissed her. She was thirty and had married a teacher, but had long lived apart from her husband. She earned her living from music lessons and playing in quartets.

During the Ninth Symphony she once again went past, as if by accident, but a large group of men standing behind some pillars barred her way and she stopped. Laptev noticed that she was wearing the same velvet blouse she had worn for last year’s concerts, and the year before that. Her gloves were new – and so was her fan, but cheap. She wanted to be smartly dressed, but she had no flair for it and grudged spending money. As a result, she was so badly and scruffily turned out that she could easily be mistaken for a young monk as she strode hurriedly down the street on her way to a lesson.

The audience applauded and demanded an encore.

‘You’re spending this evening with me’, Polina Nikolayevna said, going up to Laptev and eyeing him severely. ‘We’ll go and have tea together when the concert’s finished. Do you hear? I insist on it. You owe me a lot and you have no moral right to refuse me this little trifle.’

‘All right, let’s go then’, Laptev agreed.

After the symphony there were endless encores. The audience rose and left extremely slowly. But Laptev couldn’t leave without telling his wife, so he had to stand at the door and wait.

‘I’m just dying for a cup of tea’, Rassudina complained. ‘I’m simply burning inside.’

‘We can get some tea here’, Laptev said. ‘Let’s go to the bar.’

‘No, I don’t have the money to throw away on barmen. I’m not a businessman’s wife!’

He offered her his arm, but she refused, producing that long, tedious sentence he had heard from her so often before, to the effect that she didn’t consider herself one of the weaker or fair sex and could dispense with the services of gentlemen.

As she talked to him she kept looking at the audience and greeting friends – fellow-students from Guerrier’s courses¹⁶ and the Conservatoire, and her male and female pupils too. She shook their hands firmly, impulsively, with a jerky movement. But then she started twitching her shoulders and trembling as if she were feverish. Finally she looked at Laptev in horror and said softly, ‘Who’s this you’ve married? Where were your eyes, you madman? What did you see in that stupid, insignificant little cow? Didn’t I love you for your mind, for what’s deep down inside you? All that china doll wants is your money!’

‘That’s enough, Polina’, he pleaded. ‘Everything you might say about my marriage I’ve already told myself dozens of times. Don’t cause me any unnecessary pain.’

Julia Sergeyevna appeared in a black dress with a large diamond brooch that her father-in-law had sent her after the prayer service. She was followed by her retinue: Kochevoy, two doctor friends, an officer and a stout young man in student uniform by the name of Kish.

‘You go with Kostya’, Laptev told his wife. ‘I’ll join you later.’

Julia nodded and moved on. Trembling all over and twitching nervously, Polina Nikolayevna followed her with a look of revulsion, hatred and anguish.

Laptev was scared of going to her room as he anticipated some nasty showdown, harsh words and tears, so he suggested having tea in a restaurant. But she said, ‘No, no, come to my place. Don’t you dare mention restaurants to me!’

She didn’t like restaurants, because the air in them seemed poisoned by tobacco and men’s breath. She was peculiarly prejudiced towards strange men, considering them all libertines, capable of pouncing on her at any moment. Besides, the music in restaurants irritated her and gave her headaches.

After leaving the Gentry Club they took a cab to Savelovsky Street, off Ostozhenka Street,¹⁷ where Rassudina lived. Laptev thought about her the whole way. In actual fact, he did owe her a great deal. He had met her at his friend Yartsev’s, whom she was teaching theory. She had fallen deeply in love with him, without ulterior motives, and after becoming his mistress she continued giving lessons and working until she dropped. Thanks to her he began to understand and love music, to which he had been almost completely indifferent.

‘Half my kingdom for a glass of tea!’ she said in a hollowish voice, covering her mouth with her muff to avoid catching cold. ‘I’ve given five lessons today, damn it. My pupils are such clots and blockheads I nearly died of anger. I just don’t know when this hard labour will end. I’m absolutely flaked. The moment I’ve saved three hundred roubles I shall give everything up and go to the Crimea. I shall lie on the beach and gulp oxygen. How I love the sea, how I love it!’

‘You won’t go anywhere’, Laptev said. ‘Firstly, you won’t save a thing and secondly, you’re mean. Forgive me, but I must say it again: your amassing three hundred roubles, a few copecks at a time, from those idlers who only take lessons from you because they have nothing to do – is that any less degrading than borrowing it from your friends?’

‘I have no friends’, she said, irritably. ‘And I would ask you not to talk such rubbish. The working class, to which I belong, has one privilege – consciousness of its own incorruptibility, plus the right to despise shopkeepers and not be beholden to them. No, you can’t buy me, I’m not a Julia!’

Laptev didn’t pay the cab-driver, knowing that this would provoke that all too familiar torrent of words. She paid herself.

She was renting a small furnished room with board, in a flat that belonged to a single lady. Her Becker grand piano was kept at Yartsev’s place in Great Nikitsky Street¹⁸ for the time being and she went there every day to play. In her room were armchairs with covers, a bed with a white summer quilt, and flowers put there by the landlady. On the walls were oleographs, and there was nothing to suggest that a university woman was living in that room. There was no dressing-table, no books, not even a desk. It was obvious that she went to bed immediately she came home and left the house the moment she got up in the morning.

The cook brought in the samovar and Polina Nikolayevna made tea. Still trembling – it was cold in her room – she started criticizing the choir which had sung in the Ninth Symphony. Her eyes closed from weariness and she drank one glass of tea, then another, then a third.

‘So, you’re married’, she said. ‘Don’t worry, though, I shan’t start moping. I’ll manage to tear you out of my heart. But I’m annoyed. It hurts me to discover you’re a lousy rotter like everyone else, that it’s not a woman’s mind and intellect you need, but her body, her beauty, her youth… Youth, youth!’ she said through her nose as if mimicking someone, and she laughed. ‘You need purity, Reinheit!’¹⁹ she added amid loud peals of laughter, leaning back in her chair. ‘Reinheit!’

When she had finished laughing her eyes were full of tears. ‘Are you happy at least?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Does she love you?’

‘No.’

Upset and miserable, Laptev got up and paced the room. ‘No’, he repeated. ‘If you really want to know, Polina, I’m very unhappy. But what can I do? That was a silly thing I did and I can’t repair the damage now. I must be philosophical about it. She didn’t marry for love. It was stupid of her, perhaps. She married me for my money, but without thinking. Now she clearly realizes how wrong she was and she’s suffering for it. That’s painfully obvious. At night we sleep together, but during the day she’s scared of staying alone with me for five minutes. She’s looking for entertainment, some social life. She’s ashamed and scared when she’s with me.’

‘But she takes your money all the same, doesn’t she?’

‘Don’t be silly, Polina’, Laptev shouted. ‘She takes money because she couldn’t care less whether she has any or not. She’s an honest, high-principled person. She married me simply to get away from her father, that’s all.’

‘But are you sure that she would have married you if you hadn’t been rich?’ Rassudina asked.

‘I’m not sure about anything’, Laptev replied wearily. ‘I don’t understand a thing. For God’s sake, Polina, let’s not talk about it.’

‘Do you love her?’

‘Madly.’

Silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he kept pacing the room, thinking that his wife was probably, at that moment, having supper at the Doctors’ Club.

‘But is it possible to love not knowing why?’ Polina asked, shrugging her shoulders. ‘No, it’s the animal passion in you. You’re intoxicated, you’re poisoned by that beautiful body, by that Reinheit! Leave me, you’re filthy! Go to her!’

She waved him away, picked up his hat and threw it at him. Silently, he put on his fur coat and left, but she ran into the hall, feverishly grabbed hold of the upper part of his arm and burst into sobs.

‘Stop it, Polina, that’s enough!’ he said, unable to unclench her fingers. ‘Please calm down!’

She closed her eyes and turned pale; her long nose took on the nasty waxen colour of a corpse. And still Laptev couldn’t unclench her fingers. She had fainted. Carefully, he lifted her, laid her on the bed and sat by her side for about ten minutes until she came round. Her hands were cold, her pulse weak and irregular.

‘Go home’, she said, opening her eyes. ‘Go home, or I’ll start howling again. I must take a grip on myself.’

After leaving her he did not go to the Doctors’ Club, where they were expecting him, but straight home. All the way he kept reproaching himself with the question: why had he settled down with another woman instead of this one, who loved him so much, who was his real wife and true friend? She was the only person at all attached to him. And besides, wouldn’t it have been a rewarding, worthy undertaking to bring happiness and quiet sanctuary to this clever, proud, overworked woman? That longing for beauty, youth and impossible happiness which seemed to be punishing or mocking him by keeping him in a dreadful state of depression for three months – was that in character? The honeymoon was long over and he still didn’t know what kind of person his wife really was, which was quite ludicrous. She penned long letters, on five sheets of paper, to her old boarding-school friends and her father, so there was plenty to write about, in fact. But all she could find to talk to him about was the weather, that it was time for lunch or supper. When she took a long time over her prayers before going to bed and then kissed her nasty little crosses and icons, he would look at her with loathing and think: ‘There she is praying, but what, what is she praying about?’ He was insulting the two of them by telling himself – when he went to bed with her and took her in his arms – that he was only getting what he was paying for. That was a shocking thought. If she’d been a healthy, uninhibited, loose woman it wouldn’t have mattered. But here was youth, religious devotion, gentleness, those pure, innocent eyes. When they had become engaged he had been touched by her religious faith, but now the conventional, definitive nature of her views and convictions was a barrier between him and the truth. His whole domestic life was sheer hell now. When his wife sighed or laughed heartily as she sat by him in the theatre, he was embittered by her enjoying herself on her own, by her reluctance to share her pleasure with him. Remarkably, she had got on well with all his friends. All of them knew the kind of person she was, whereas he did not. All he could do was mope and feel jealous without saying anything about it.

When he arrived home Laptev put on his dressing-gown and slippers and sat down in his study to read a novel. His wife was out, but barely half an hour passed before he heard the bell ring in the hall, and then the hollow patter of Pyotr’s footsteps as he ran to open the door. It was Julia. She entered the study in her fur coat and her cheeks were red from the frost.

‘There’s a big fire at Presnya’,²⁰ she said, gasping for breath. ‘The glow is really enormous. I’m going there with Kostya Kochevoy.’

‘Good luck, then.’

Her fresh, healthy look and the childlike fear in her eyes calmed Laptev. He read for another half hour and then went to bed.

Next day Polina Nikolayevna sent two books she had once borrowed from him to the warehouse, and all his letters and photographs, together with a note consisting of one word: basta.²¹

VIII

At the end of October, Nina Fyodorovna had a pronounced relapse. She was rapidly losing weight and her face was changing. Despite the severe pain she imagined that she was recovering and every morning she dressed herself as if she was well and then lay in bed the whole day in her clothes. Towards the end she had become very talkative. She would lie on her back and after a great effort managed to talk quietly, gasping the whole time.

She died suddenly, in the following circumstances.

It was a bright, moonlit night. Out in the street people were riding in sleighs over the fresh snow, and the noises from outside drifted into the room. Nina Fyodorovna was lying in bed, on her back, while Sasha, who had no one to take her place, was sitting nearby dozing.

‘I can’t remember his second name’, Nina Fyodorovna said softly, ‘but his Christian name was Ivan and his surname Kochevoy. He was a poor clerk, a terrible drunkard, God rest his soul. He used to call on us and every month we’d give him a pound of sugar and a few ounces of tea. Of course, we gave him money too. Yes… Well now, this is what happened after that. Kochevoy hit the bottle really hard and he popped off – it was vodka that finished him. He left a son, a little seven-year-old. That poor little orphan! We took him in and hid him in the clerks’ place and he managed to get by a whole year without Father finding out. But the moment Father saw him he dismissed him with a wave of the arm and said nothing. When Kostya, this poor little orphan, was eight – I was engaged then – I tried to get him into high school. I took him here, there and everywhere, but they just wouldn’t accept him. He wouldn’t stop crying. “You silly little boy, why are you crying?” I asked. I took him to the Second High School on Razgulyay Square²² and there, God bless them, they accepted him. Every day the little lad would walk from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyay Square and back. Aleksey paid his fees. Thank God, the boy was good at his work, very quick to learn, so everything turned out all right in the end. Now he’s a lawyer in Moscow and a friend of Aleksey’s. They’re both of them very bright. We didn’t turn our noses up at him, we took him in, and now he’s surely mentioning us in his prayers. Oh, yes…’

Nina Fyodorovna began to speak more and more softly, with long pauses. Then, after one brief silence, she suddenly lifted herself up in bed. ‘Mm… I don’t feel so good’, she said. ‘Oh God, I just can’t breathe!’

Sasha knew that her mother was soon going to die. When she saw how her face had sunk she guessed that this was the end and she panicked.

‘Mama, please don’t!’ she sobbed. ‘Please don’t!’

‘Run into the kitchen and tell them to send for your father. I feel really shocking.’

Sasha tore through every room in the house calling out, but not one of the servants was in. Only Lida was there, and she was sleeping in her clothes, without any pillow, on a chest in the dining-room. Just as she was, without galoshes, Sasha ran into the yard, then out into the street. Her nanny was sitting on a bench outside the gate watching the sleighs drive past. From the river, where there was a skating-rink, came the sound of a military band.

‘Nanny, Mama’s dying!’ sobbed Sasha. ‘We must fetch Papa.’ Nanny went upstairs to the bedroom, took one look at the sick woman and thrust a lighted wax candle into her hand. Sasha was horrified and rushed around begging someone – anyone – to go and fetch Father. Then she put on her coat and scarf and ran into the street. The servants had told her that her father had another wife and two little children with whom he was living in Market Street. At the gate she ran to the left, weeping and terrified of the strange people. Soon she was sinking into the snow and shivering with cold.

An empty cab came along but she didn’t take it. Perhaps the driver would take her right out of town, rob her and throw her into the cemetery – the servants had spoken of such things over tea. She walked on and on, exhausted, gasping for breath and sobbing. When she came out on to Market Street she asked where Mr Panaurov lived. Some woman she didn’t know gave her lengthy directions, but seeing that she didn’t understand a thing took her by the hand and led her to a one-storey house with a porch. The door wasn’t locked. Sasha ran through the hall, across a corridor, until finally she found herself in a bright warm room where her father was sitting by a samovar with a lady and two little girls. But by now she was unable to produce one word and all she did was sob. Panaurov understood.

‘Mother’s ill, isn’t she?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, Mother’s not well then?’

He grew alarmed and sent for a cab.

When they reached the house Nina Fyodorovna was sitting surrounded by pillows, candle in hand. Her face had grown dark, her eyes were closed. Nanny, cook, the chambermaid, the peasant Prokofy and some other ordinary working folk she didn’t know crowded at the door. Nanny was whispering some orders which no one understood. Looking pale and sleepy, Lida was standing at the other end of the room by the window, grimly eyeing her mother.

Panaurov took the candle from Nina’s hands, frowned disgustedly and flung it behind the chest of drawers.

‘This is dreadful!’ he said, his shoulders trembling. ‘Nina, you must lie down’, he said tenderly. ‘Please lie down, dear.’

She looked at him without recognizing him. They laid her back on the bed. When the priest and Dr Sergey Borisych arrived, the servants were devoutly crossing themselves and saying prayers for the dead.

‘A fine thing!’ the doctor remarked thoughtfully as he came out into the drawing-room. ‘She was so young, not yet forty.’

The loud sobbing of the little girls was heard. Pale-faced, with moist eyes, Panaurov went up to the doctor and said in a weak, lifeless voice, ‘My dear man, please do me a favour and send a telegram to Moscow. I’m just not up to it at the moment.’

The doctor obtained some ink and wrote the following telegram to his daughter: NINA PANAUROV DIED 8 PM TELL HUSBAND HOUSE ON DVORYANSKY STREET FOR SALE WITH TRANSFERABLE MORTGAGE STOP BALANCE NINE THOUSAND TO PAY AUCTION ON TWELFTH ADVISE NOT TO MISS OPPORTUNITY.

IX

Laptev lived on one of the side-streets off Little Dmitrovka Street,²³ not far from Old St Pimen’s Church.²⁴ Besides that large house facing the street, he rented a two-storey lodge in the courtyard for his friend Kochevoy, a junior barrister called simply Kostya by the Laptevs, as they had all seen him grow up. Opposite the lodge was another, also with two storeys, where a French family lived – husband, wife and five daughters.

It was twenty degrees below freezing and the windows were frosted over. When he woke up in the mornings, Kostya would drink fifteen drops of medicine with an anxious look, then he would take two dumb-bells from a book-case and do his exercises. He was tall and very thin, with a large reddish moustache, but the most striking thing about him was the exceptional length of his legs.

Pyotr, a middle-aged handyman, in a jacket and with cotton trousers tucked into his high boots, brought in the samovar and made the tea.

‘Very fine weather it is we’re ’aving, Konstantin Ivanych’, he said.

‘Yes, very fine it is, only it’s a pity you and I aren’t coping too well, old chap.’

Pyotr sighed out of politeness.

‘What are the girls doing?’ Kochevoy asked.

‘The priest ’asn’t come. Aleksey Fyodorych’s teaching them ’imself.’

Kostya found a part of the window free of ice and looked through his binoculars, directing them at the French family’s windows.

‘Can’t see them’, he said.

Just then Aleksey Fyodorych was giving Sasha and Lida a scripture lesson downstairs. They had been living in Moscow for about six weeks with their governess, on the ground floor of the lodge, and three times a week a priest and a teacher from a municipal school came to give them lessons. Sasha was studying the New Testament, while Lida had recently started the Old. At the last lesson Lida had been asked to revise everything up to Abraham.

‘So, Adam and Eve had two sons’, Laptev said. ‘Good, but what were their names? Please try and remember.’

Grim-faced as ever, Lida gazed silently at the table and just moved her lips. But her elder sister Sasha peered into her face and suffered torments.

‘You know it very well, only you mustn’t be so nervous’, Laptev said. ‘Well now, what were Adam’s sons called?’

‘Abel and Cabel’, Lida whispered.

‘Cain and Abel’, Laptev corrected.

A large tear trickled down Lida’s cheek and dropped on to the book. Sasha looked down and blushed, on the verge of tears too. Laptev didn’t have the heart to say anything and he gulped back the tears. He got up from the table and lit a cigarette. Just then Kochevoy came down with a newspaper. The little girls stood up and curtsied without looking at him.

‘For heaven’s sake, Kostya, you try and teach them’, Laptev said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll burst out crying as well and I must call at the warehouse before lunch.’

‘All right.’

Aleksey Fyodorych left. Frowning, with a very serious expression, Kostya sat at the table and drew the Bible over to him. ‘Well’, he asked, ‘what are you doing now?’

‘She knows all about the Flood’, Sasha said.

‘The Flood? Good, we’ll give that a good bash then. Let’s do the Flood.’

Kostya ran through the brief account of the Flood in the Bible and said, ‘I must point out that no flood like this ever took place. And there wasn’t any Noah. Several thousand years before Christ was born there was an extraordinary inundation of the earth which is mentioned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the books of other ancient peoples such as the Greeks, Chaldees and Hindus. No matter what kind of inundation this may have been, it couldn’t have flooded the whole earth. Okay, the plains were flooded, but the mountains remained, you can be sure of that. Carry on reading your little book if you like, but don’t put too much faith in it.’

Lida’s tears flowed again. She turned away and suddenly started sobbing so loudly that Kostya shuddered and rose from his chair in great confusion.

‘I want to go home’, she said. ‘To Papa and Nanny.’

Sasha cried too. Kostya went up to his room and telephoned Julia Sergeyevna. ‘The girls are crying again, my dear. It’s quite impossible!’

Julia Sergeyevna came running across from the main house, just in her dress and with a knitted scarf. Half-frozen, she comforted the girls.

‘Believe me, you must believe me’, she pleaded, pressing first one, then the other to her. ‘Your Papa is coming today, he’s sent a telegram. You’re sad about your Mama. So am I. My heart is breaking. But what can one do? You can’t go against what God has willed!’

When they had stopped crying, she wrapped them up and took them for a cab ride. First they drove down Little Dmitrovka Street, then past Strastnoy Boulevard²⁵ to the Tver Road. They stopped at the Iverian Chapel²⁶ and each of them placed a candle there and knelt in prayer. On the way back they called at Filippov’s²⁷ and bought some lenten poppy-seed rolls.

The Laptevs usually had lunch between two and three, with Pyotr serving at table. During the day this same Pyotr would run errands to the post office, then to the warehouse, or the local court for Kostya, and helped out with lots of jobs. In the evening he packed cigarettes, at night he would run back and forwards to open the door, and after four o’clock in the morning would see to the stoves: no one knew when he actually slept. He loved opening bottles of soda water, which he did easily, noiselessly, without spilling a drop.

‘Cheers!’ Kostya said, drinking a glass of vodka before his soup.

Julia Sergeyevna had at first taken a dislike to Kostya, his deep voice, the crude expressions he would come out with, such as ‘clear off’, ‘sock on the jaw’, ‘dregs of humanity’, ‘ginger up the samovar’, as well as his habit of waxing sentimental after vodka. All of it seemed so trite. But after she knew him better she began to feel much more at ease with him. He was quite open with her, loved a quiet talk in the evenings, and even let her borrow novels that he had written himself and which up to now had been kept a complete secret – even from friends like Laptev and Yartsev. She would read and praise them in order not to upset him, which pleased him, since he had aspirations of becoming a famous writer – sooner or later. He wrote only about the countryside and manor houses, although he saw the country very seldom, when he was visiting friends in their holiday villas. Only once in his life had he stayed on a country estate, when he had gone to Volokolamsk²⁸ on some legal business. Avoiding any love interest, as if ashamed of it, he filled his novels with nature descriptions and showed a great partiality for expressions such as ‘the hills’ intricate outlines’, ‘quaint shapes of clouds’ and ‘chord of mysterious harmonies’. No one published his novels, for which he blamed the censorship.

He liked being a barrister, but he considered novels, not legal work, his true vocation in life. He felt that he possessed a subtle, artistic make-up and constantly felt drawn to the fine arts. He didn’t sing, nor did he play an instrument, and he had no ear at all for music. However, he went to all the symphony and philharmonic concerts, organized charity performances and kept company with singers.

During lunch they talked. ‘It’s really amazing’, Laptev said. ‘My brother Fyodor’s completely stumped me again! He says we must find out when our firm’s going to celebrate its centenary, so that we can apply to become gentlefolk. He’s really serious! What’s happening to him? To be honest, it worries me.’

They discussed Fyodor and the current fashion for self-dramatization. Fyodor, for example, was trying to act the simple merchant, although he wasn’t one any more, and when the teacher came from the school (where old Laptev was a governor) for his salary, he would even alter his walk and speech, behaving as if he were the teacher’s superior officer.

After lunch there was nothing to do, so they went into the study. They discussed the Decadent Movement and the Maid of Orleans.²⁹ Kostya delivered a whole monologue and felt that he gave a very good imitation of Marya Yermolov.³⁰ Then they sat down to cards. The little girls didn’t return to the lodge. Instead, they sat there, pale-faced and sad, in the same armchair, listening to the street noises and trying to hear if their father was coming. They felt miserable in the dark evenings, when candles were alight. The conversation over cards, Pyotr’s footsteps, the crackle in the fireplace – all this irritated them and they didn’t want to look at the fire. In the evenings they didn’t even feel like crying, and were uneasy and heavy at heart. They couldn’t understand how people could talk and laugh when Mother had died.

‘What did you see today through your binoculars?’ Julia Sergeyevna asked Kostya.

‘Nothing. But yesterday the old Frenchman himself took a bath.’

At seven o’clock Julia Sergeyevna and Kostya went off to the Maly Theatre. Laptev stayed behind with the girls.

‘It’s time your father was here’, he said, glancing at his watch. ‘The train must be late.’

The girls sat silently in the chair, snuggling close to each other like tiny animals feeling the cold, while Laptev kept pacing the rooms, looking impatiently at his watch. The house was quiet, but just before nine someone rang the bell. Pyotr went to open the door.

When they heard that familiar voice the girls shrieked, burst out sobbing and ran into the hall. Panaurov was wearing a splendid fur coat and his beard and moustache were white with frost.

‘Just a moment, just a moment’, he muttered while Sasha and Lida, sobbing and laughing, kissed his cold hands, his cap, his fur coat.

A handsome, languid sort of man who had been spoilt by love, he unhurriedly caressed the girls and went into the study. Rubbing his hands he said, ‘It’s only a brief visit, my dear friends. Tomorrow I’m off to St Petersburg. I’ve been promised a transfer to another city.’

He was staying at the Dresden Hotel.³¹

X

Ivan Gavrilych Yartsev was a frequent visitor at the Laptevs’. He was a sturdy, strongly-built, black-haired man with a clever, pleasant face. People thought him handsome, but recently he’d put on weight, which spoilt his face and figure, as did the way he had his hair cut very short, almost to the scalp. At one time his fellow-students at university called him ‘Muscle Man’, on account of his strength and powerful build.

He had graduated from the arts faculty together with the Laptev brothers and had then changed to science; he had a master’s degree in chemistry. Without any aspirations to a professorship, he had never been a laboratory assistant even, but taught physics and zoology at a boys’ secondary school and at two high schools for girls. Thrilled with his students – especially the girls – he used to say that a remarkable generation was growing up. Besides chemistry, he also studied sociology and Russian history at home and his short papers were sometimes published in newspapers and learned journals under the signature ‘Ya’. Whenever he talked about botany or zoology, he resembled a historian; when he was trying to settle some historical problem, he looked like a scientist.

Kish, who was nicknamed the ‘eternal student’, was also a close friend of the Laptevs. He had studied medicine for three years, then had changed to mathematics, taking two years for each year of the course. His father, a provincial pharmacist, sent him forty roubles a month, and his mother (unbeknown to the father) sent him ten. This money sufficed for everyday expenses and was even enough for luxuries such as an overcoat with Polish beaver trimmings, gloves, scent and photography – he often had his portrait done and sent copies around to his friends. Neat, slightly balding, with golden whiskers around the ears, he was a modest man, who always seemed ready to oblige. He was forever helping others, running round collecting subscriptions, freezing at dawn outside a theatre box-office to buy a ticket for a lady friend. Or he would go and order a wreath or bouquet at someone’s command. All one heard about him was: ‘Kish will fetch it’, or ‘Kish will do it’, or ‘Kish will buy it’. He usually made a mess of the errands, for which he was showered with reproaches. People often forgot to pay him for purchases. But he never said a word, and in particularly ticklish situations all he would do was sigh. He was never very pleased, never annoyed and he was always telling long, boring stories: his jokes invariably made people laugh, but only because they weren’t at all funny. Once, for example, trying to be witty, he told Pyotr, ‘You are not a sturgeon.’³² Everyone burst out laughing and he himself couldn’t stop laughing, so pleased he was with his highly successful joke. At professors’ funerals he liked walking in front, with the torch-bearers.

Yartsev and Kish usually came over for tea in the afternoon. If the master and mistress weren’t going out to the theatre or a concert the tea would drag on until supper-time. One evening in February the following conversation took place in the dining-room:

‘Works of art are only significant and useful when they are concerned with some serious social problem’, Kostya said, angrily looking at Yartsev. ‘If there’s some protest against serfdom in a book, or if the author takes up arms against high society and all its vulgarity, then that work is significant and useful. But novels and short stories which contain nothing but moaning and groaning, about her falling in love with him, or him falling out of love with her – I maintain those types of work are worthless and to hell with them.’

‘I agree with you, Konstantin Ivanych’, Julia Sergeyevna said. ‘One writer will describe a lover’s assignation, another a betrayal, another a meeting after separation. Surely there are other things to write about, aren’t there? There’s lots of sick, unhappy, wretchedly poor people who must feel revolted when they read all that stuff.’

Laptev didn’t like it when his wife, a young woman, not yet twenty-two, argued so seriously, so coolly, about love. But he guessed the reason for it.

‘If poetry doesn’t solve problems that strike you as important’, Yartsev said, ‘then you’d better turn to technical books, to criminal and financial law. You should read scientific papers. There’s no point at all in Romeo and Juliet containing discussions about freedom of education or disinfecting prisons if you can find it all in specialized articles or reference books.’

‘But that’s going too far, old chap’, Kostya interrupted. ‘We’re not discussing giants like Shakespeare or Goethe, we’re talking about a hundred or so talented or less talented writers who’d be a lot more use if they steered clear of love and concentrated on bringing knowledge and humane ideals to the masses.’

Talking slightly through his nose and burring his r’s, Kish began to relate the plot of a story he had recently read. He gave a detailed account and took his time. Three minutes passed, then five, then ten, but he rambled on and on, and no one had the faintest idea what he was talking about. His face became more and more apathetic, his eyes grew dim.

Julia Sergeyevna could stand it no longer and said, ‘Come on, Kish, make it short! It’s sheer torment!’

‘Pack it in, Kish’, Kostya shouted.

Everyone laughed – including Kish.

In came Fyodor. He had red blotches on his face. Hurriedly, he greeted them all and led his brother into the study. Recently he had been avoiding large gatherings, preferring the company of just one person.

‘Let those young people laugh, you and I must have a heart-to-heart’, he said, settling into a deep armchair away from the lamp. ‘When were you last in the warehouse? I should think it must be a week now.’

‘Yes, there’s nothing for me to do and I must confess I’m sick and tired of the old man.’

‘Of course, they can cope without you and me in the warehouse, but you must have some sort of occupation. “In the sweat of thy face³³ shalt thou eat bread” as it is said. God likes hard-working people.’

Pyotr brought in a glass of tea on a tray. Fyodor drank it without sugar and asked for some more. He liked to drink a lot of tea and could polish off ten glasses in an evening.

‘Do you know what, old man?’ he said, getting up and going over to his brother. ‘Why don’t you just stand as candidate for the city council? We’ll gradually get you on to the board and after that you’ll be deputy mayor. The further you go, the bigger you’ll be. You’re an intelligent, educated man. They’ll take notice of you, they’ll invite you to St Petersburg. Local and municipal officials are in fashion there now. Before you know it you’ll be a privy councillor with a ribbon over your shoulder – before you’re fifty.’

Laptev didn’t reply. He realized that Fyodor himself had set his heart on promotion to privy councillor, on wearing a ribbon, and he was at a loss for an answer.

The brothers sat in silence. Fyodor opened his watch and scrutinized it for an interminably long time, as if he wanted to check that the hands were moving correctly. His expression struck Laptev as peculiar.

They were called in to supper. Laptev entered the dining-room, while Fyodor remained in the study. The argument had finished and Yartsev was speaking like a professor delivering a lecture.

‘Because of differences of climate, energy, tastes and age, equality among people is a physical impossibility. But civilized man can render this inequality harmless, just as he has done with swamps and bears. One scientist has succeeded in getting a cat, a mouse, a falcon and a sparrow to eat from the same bowl. So we can only hope that education can achieve the same with human beings. Life is forever marching on, we are witnesses to the great progress that culture is making, and obviously the time will come when the present condition of factory workers, for example, will strike us as just as absurd as serfdom – when girls were exchanged for dogs – does now.’

‘That won’t be soon, all that’s a long way off’, Kostya laughed. ‘It’ll be a long time before Rothschild will think that his vaults with all their gold are absurd and until then the worker will have to bend his back and starve till his belly swells. No, old man, we mustn’t stand doing nothing, we must fight. If a cat eats from the same saucer as a mouse would you say it does it from a sense of community? Never. Because it was forced to.’

‘Fyodor and I are rich, our father’s a capitalist, a millionaire, so it’s us you have to fight!’ Laptev said, wiping his forehead with his palm. ‘A battle against myself – that’s what I find so hard to accept! I’m rich, but what has money given me up to now? What has this power brought me? In what way am I happier than you? My childhood was sheer purgatory and money never saved me from birching. Money didn’t help Nina when she fell ill and was dying. If I’m not loved I can’t force anyone to love me, even if I were to spend a hundred million.’

‘On the other hand you can do a lot of good’, Kish said.

‘What do you mean by good? Yesterday you asked me to help some musician looking for work. Believe me, I can do as little for him as you can. I can give him money, but that’s not what he’s after, is it? Once I asked a well-known musician to find a position for an impecunious violinist and all he said was, “You only turned to me for help because you’re not a musician yourself.” So I’m offering you the same answer: you feel so confident when you ask me for help precisely because you’ve never known what it’s like to be rich yourself.’

‘But why this comparison with a famous musician?’ Julia said, blushing. ‘What’s a famous musician got to do with it?’

Her face quivered with rage and she lowered her eyes to hide her feelings. However, her expression was understood not only by her husband, but by everyone sitting at the table.

‘What’s a famous musician got to do with it?’ she repeated softly. ‘There’s nothing easier than helping the poor.’

Silence followed. Pyotr served hazel-grouse. No one ate any, however – they just had some salad. Now Laptev couldn’t remember what he’d said, but he saw quite clearly that it wasn’t his words that made her hate him, but the mere fact that he had joined in the conversation.

After supper he went to his study. His heart pounded as he listened – very tensely – to what was happening in the drawing-room, and he anticipated fresh humiliations. Another argument started. Then Yartsev sat at the piano and sang a sentimental song. He was jack-of-all-trades – he could sing, play and even do conjuring tricks.

‘Please yourself what you do, gentlemen, but I don’t want to stay at home’, Julia said. ‘Let’s go for a drive.’

They decided to drive out of town and sent Kish to the Merchants’ Club³⁴ for a troika. Laptev wasn’t invited, as he hardly ever went on such trips and because he had his brother with him. But he took it that they found him boring and that he was completely out of place among that cheerful, young crowd. He was so annoyed and bitter he almost wept. He even felt pleased that they were being so nasty to him, that he was despised, that he was looked upon as a stupid, boring husband, as an old moneybags. He would have been even more pleased, he felt, if his wife were to betray him that night with his best friend and admit it with loathing in her eyes… He was jealous of the students, actors and singers she knew, of Yartsev – even of chance acquaintances – and he dearly longed for her to be unfaithful now. He wanted to surprise her with someone, then poison himself to rid himself of the nightmare for good.

Fyodor gulped his tea noisily and then he too started leaving.

‘There’s something wrong with the old man’, he said, putting on his fur coat. ‘His eyesight’s very poor.’

Laptev put on his coat too and left. After seeing his brother as far as Strastnoy Boulevard he took a cab to Yar’s³⁵ restaurant.

‘And they call this domestic bliss!’ he said, laughing at himself. ‘This is supposed to be love.’

His teeth were chattering – whether from jealousy or something else he didn’t know. At Yar’s he walked up and down by the tables and listened to a ballad singer in the ballroom. He didn’t have one sentence ready in case he should meet his wife or friends and was convinced in advance that if she did happen to turn up he would only smile pathetically and stupidly – then everyone would understand what kind of feeling had compelled him to come here. The electric lights, the loud music, the smell of powder, those staring women – all this made his head go round. He stopped by the doors, trying to spy and overhear what was going on in the private rooms: he felt that he was acting in concert with that singer and those women, playing some vile, despicable role. Then he went on to the Strelna,³⁶ but met none of his friends there either. Only when he was on his way home and approaching Yar’s restaurant again did a troika noisily overtake him – the drunken coachman was shouting and he could hear Yartsev’s loud guffaws.

Laptev returned home after three in the morning. Julia Sergeyevna was in bed, but when he saw that she wasn’t sleeping he went over and snapped, ‘I can understand your revulsion, your hatred. But you might have spared me before strangers, you might have tried to hide your feelings.’

She sat up in bed, her legs dangling. In the lamplight her eyes were large and black.

‘Please forgive me’, she said.

He couldn’t say one word for agitation and trembling, and he stood silently in front of her. She too was trembling and she sat there like a criminal waiting to be charged.

‘This is sheer torture!’ he said at last, clutching his head. ‘I seem to be in hell. I feel I’ve gone mad!’

‘And do you think it’s easy for me?’ she asked, her voice shaking. ‘God only knows how I feel.’

‘You’ve been my wife for six months, but there’s no spark of love in your heart, no hope of any – not even a glimmer! Why did you marry me?’ Laptev continued despairingly. ‘Why? What demon drove you into my arms? What were you hoping for? What did you want?’

She looked at him in horror, as if frightened he might kill her.

‘Did you ever like me? Did you ever love me?’ he gasped. ‘No! Then what was it? Tell me, what?’ he shouted. ‘Yes, it was that damned money!’

‘I swear to God it wasn’t!’ she cried and crossed herself. The insult made her wince and for the first time he heard her cry. ‘I swear to God it wasn’t!’ she repeated. ‘I wasn’t thinking about money, I don’t need any. I simply thought that it would be nasty of me to refuse you. I was afraid of spoiling your life and mine. And now I’m suffering for my mistake, suffering unbearably!’

She sobbed bitterly. Not knowing what to say and realizing how painful everything was for her, he sank before her on the carpet.

‘Please don’t. Please don’t!’ he muttered. ‘I insulted you because I love you madly.’ Suddenly he kissed her foot and passionately embraced her. ‘All I want is just one spark of love!’ he said. ‘Well, tell me lies! Don’t say it was a mistake!’

But she went on crying and he felt that she was only putting up with his caresses because they were the unavoidable consequence of her mistake. Like a bird she drew in beneath her that foot he had kissed. He felt sorry for her.

She lay down and covered herself with the blanket. He undressed and lay down as well. In the morning they both felt awkward – neither knew what to talk about. He even had the impression that she was treading unsteadily with the foot he had kissed.

Before lunch Panaurov dropped in to say goodbye. Julia had an irresistible urge to go back home to her native town. It would be nice to leave, she thought, to have a rest from married life, from all this embarrassment, from the ever-present awareness of having behaved badly. Over lunch they decided that she should leave with Panaurov and stay with her father for two or three weeks, until she got bored.

XI

Panaurov and Julia travelled in a private railway compartment. He was wearing a rather odd lambskin cap.

‘Yes, St Petersburg was a letdown’, he sighed, speaking slowly and deliberately. ‘They promise you a lot, but nothing definite. Yes, my dear, I’ve been Justice of the Peace, a Permanent Secretary, President of the Court of Appeal and finally adviser to the district council. I think I’ve served my country and have a right to some attention. But would you believe it, there’s just no way I can get a transfer to another town.’

Panaurov closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘They won’t recognize me’, he continued and he seemed to be dozing off. ‘Of course, I’m no administrative genius, but on the other hand I’m a respectable, honest man and even that’s quite rare these days. I must admit I’ve deceived women just a little, but I’ve always been a perfect gentleman in my relations with the Russian government. But enough of that’, he added, opening his eyes. ‘Let’s talk about you. What made you suddenly want to go and visit your dear papa?’

‘I’m not getting on very well with my husband’, Julia said, glancing at his cap.

‘Yes, he’s a queer fish. All the Laptevs are weird. Your husband’s not so bad really, he’ll pass. But that brother of his, Fyodor, is a real idiot.’

Panaurov sighed and asked seriously, ‘And do you have a lover?’

Julia looked at him in astonishment and laughed. ‘Good God, what a thing to ask!’

After ten, at some large station, they both got out and had supper. When the train moved off Panaurov took off his coat and cap and sat next to Julia.

‘You’re very nice, I must say’, he began. ‘Pardon the pub simile, but you put me in mind of a freshly salted gherkin. It still has the smell of the hothouse, so to speak, but it’s already a bit salty and smells of dill. You’re gradually developing into a wonderful woman, so marvellous and refined. If this journey had taken place about five years ago’, he sighed, ‘then I’d have considered it my pleasant duty to join the ranks of your admirers. But now, alas, I’m just an old pensioner.’

He gave her a smile that was at once sad and kind, and he put his arm around her waist.

‘You’re out of your mind!’ she said, blushing. She was so frightened that her hands and feet went cold. ‘Stop it, Grigory Nikolaich!’

‘Why are you so scared, my dear?’ he asked softly. ‘What’s so dreadful about it? You’re just not used to this sort of thing.’

If a woman happened to protest, then for him that only meant that he had made a good impression and that she liked him. Holding Julia around the waist, he kissed her firmly on the cheek, then the lips, quite certain he was giving her great pleasure. Then Julia recovered from her fright and embarrassment and started laughing. He kissed her again and as he donned his comical cap he said, ‘That’s all an old campaigner can give you. There was a Turkish Pasha, a kind old man, who was once presented with – possibly as an inheritance – a whole harem. When his beautiful young wives paraded before him, he inspected them, saying as he kissed each one, “That’s all I’m able to give you now.” That’s what I’m saying too.’

She thought all this stupid but unusual, and it cheered her up. Feeling rather playful, she stood on the seat humming, took a box of sweets from the luggage rack and shouted, ‘Catch’ as she threw him one.

He caught it. Laughing out loud, she threw him another, then a third, and he caught them all, popping them in his mouth and looking at her with imploring eyes.

She felt that there was much that was feminine and childlike about his face, features and expression. When she sat down, out of breath, and kept looking at him and laughing, he touched her cheek with two fingers and said in mock annoyance:

‘You naughty little girl!’

‘Take it’, she said, handing him the box. ‘I don’t like sweets.’

He ate the whole lot and then locked the empty box in his trunk – he loved boxes with pictures on them.

‘Enough of this larking about’, he said. ‘Time for bye-byes, for the old campaigner!’

He took his Bokhara dressing-gown and a cushion from a holdall, lay down and covered himself with the dressing-gown.

‘Goodnight, my sweet!’ he said softly, sighing as if his whole body were aching.

The sound of his snoring soon followed. Without feeling in the least inhibited she lay down too and was soon fast asleep.

Next morning, as she was driving home from the station in her native town, the streets seemed deserted and empty, the snow grey and the houses small, with a squashed look about them. She met a funeral procession – the body was in an open coffin, with banners.

‘They say a funeral brings good luck’, she thought.

The windows of the house where Nina Fyodorovna had once lived had white posters stuck all over them.

Her heart sank as she drove into the yard and rang the doorbell. A strange, sleepy-looking maid in a warm quilted jacket opened the door. As she went upstairs Julia remembered that Laptev had declared his love there. But now the stairs were unwashed, with footmarks all over them. In the cold corridor on the first floor patients in fur coats were waiting. For some reason her heart pounded and she could barely walk for agitation.

The doctor – stouter than ever, red as a brick, his hair dishevelled – was drinking tea. He was delighted to see his daughter and even shed a few tears. She was his only joy, she thought. Deeply moved, she firmly embraced him and told him she would be staying for a long time, until Easter. After she had changed in her room she went into the dining-room to have tea with him. He kept pacing up and down, hands in pockets, humming away – this meant he was annoyed about something.

‘You’re having quite a gay time in Moscow’, he remarked. ‘I’m so pleased for you, but an old man like me doesn’t need anything. I’ll soon peg out and free the lot of you. Aren’t you amazed that I’ve such a tough skin, that I’m still in the land of the living! It’s really amazing!’

He said that he was a robust old beast of burden, whom everyone liked to ride. He had been lumbered with Nina Fyodorovna’s treatment, with looking after her children and taking care of the funeral: that dandified Panaurov just didn’t want to know and had even borrowed a hundred roubles from him which, up to now, he hadn’t returned.

‘Take me to Moscow and put me in a lunatic asylum’, the doctor said. ‘You must think I’m mad, a simple child, believing as I do in truth and justice!’

Then he reproached her husband with lack of foresight – he had failed to buy houses that were being offered at very favourable prices. And now Julia realized that she was no longer the old man’s only joy. While he was receiving patients or on his rounds she roamed through the house, not knowing what to do or think. She had become a stranger in her home town, in her own house. She felt no urge to go out into the street, to call on old friends, and when she remembered her former girl friends and her life as a young girl she did not feel sad, nor did she regret the past.

In the evening she put on a smart dress and went to late service. But there was no one of importance in the church and her magnificent fur coat and hat were wasted there. She thought that both she and the church had undergone a transformation. In the past she had been fond of hearing the canon read out at vespers, when the choirboys sang hymns such as ‘I Shall Open My Lips’. Once she had loved slowly moving with the congregation towards the priest who stood in the middle of the church and then feeling the holy oil on her forehead. But now she couldn’t wait for the service to finish. As she left the church she felt frightened that beggars might approach her for money – rummaging through her pockets would have been a nuisance. In any case, she had no small change, only roubles.

She went early to bed but fell asleep very late, constantly dreaming of certain portraits and the funeral procession she had seen that morning. The open coffin with the corpse was borne into the yard, the bearers stopped at a door, rocked the coffin on some sheets for some time and then swung it against the door as hard as they could. Julia woke and jumped up in terror. Someone was in fact knocking on the downstairs door and the bell-wire was rustling along the wall, although she hadn’t heard anyone ring.

The doctor coughed. After this she heard the maid going downstairs and coming back.

‘Madam!’ she exclaimed, knocking at the door.

‘What is it?’ Julia asked.

‘It’s a telegram!’

Julia went out with a candle. Behind the maid stood the doctor, his coat over his underclothes. He was also holding a candle.

‘The bell’s broken’, he yawned, half-asleep. ‘It should have been repaired ages ago.’

Julia opened the telegram and read it.

WE DRINK YOUR HEALTH. YARTSEV, KOCHEVOY

‘Oh, the idiots!’ she said, laughing out loud.

She began to feel relaxed and cheerful.

Back in her room she quietly washed and dressed, and then spent a long time packing – right until dawn broke. At noon she set off for Moscow.

XII

During Easter week the Laptevs went to a painting exhibition at the School of Art.³⁷ The whole household went – in Moscow style – and both little girls, the governess and Kostya were taken along.

Laptev knew the names of all the famous artists and never missed an exhibition. During the summers at his country villa he sometimes painted landscapes himself, believing that he had superb taste and that he would have made an excellent painter had he studied. When abroad he sometimes dropped into antique shops, inspected their contents and expressed his opinion with the air of an expert. He would buy some object and the dealer would charge him as much as he liked. Subsequently, the piece would be stuffed into a box and lie in the coach-house until it disappeared no one knew where. Or he would call at a print shop, spend a long time carefully inspecting the prints and bronzes, make various remarks and then suddenly buy some cheap frame or box of worthless paper. All the pictures at home were of ample dimensions, but poorly painted. Those that were any good were badly hung. More than once he had paid dearly for what afterwards turned out to be crude forgeries. Strangely enough, although a timid person on the whole, he was particularly bumptious and outspoken at exhibitions. Why?

Julia Sergeyevna looked at the paintings in the same way as her husband, through parted fingers or opera glasses, and she was amazed that the people in them seemed so alive, the trees so real. But she didn’t understand them and thought that many paintings at the exhibition were really identical and that the whole aim of art was making people and objects appear real when viewed through the fingers.

‘This wood is a Shishkin’,³⁸ her husband explained. ‘He always paints the same old thing… Just look, you’ll never find snow as violet as that. And that boy’s left arm is shorter than his right.’

When everyone was exhausted and Laptev had gone to look for Kostya, so that they could all go home, Julia stopped by a small landscape and looked at it rather indifferently. In the foreground was a small stream with a wooden bridge across it and a path disappearing into dark grass on the far bank. There were fields and a strip of wood on the right with a bonfire near it – horses were probably being pastured for the night over there. In the distance the sunset glow was dying…

Julia imagined herself crossing the bridge, then walking further and further down the path. It was quiet all around, sleepy landrails cried and a distant fire flickered. Suddenly she had the feeling that many times, long ago, she had seen those clouds stretching across the red sky, that wood, those fields. She felt lonely and wanted to go on and on, down that path. And there, near the sunset glow, lay the reflection of something unearthly and eternal.

‘How well painted!’ she exclaimed, amazed that she suddenly understood the picture. ‘Look, Aleksey! See how calm it is!’

She tried to explain why she liked that landscape so much, but neither her husband nor Kostya understood. She continued looking at the painting, sadly smiling: she was upset at the others seeing nothing special in it. Then she went through the rooms again and looked at the paintings. She wanted to understand them. There no longer seemed to be so many identical pictures at the exhibition. When she was home she turned her attention (for the first time ever) to the large picture above the grand piano in the hall. It made her feel hostile.

‘How can anybody want that sort of picture!’ she said.

On top of that, the golden cornices, the Venetian mirrors with flowers, paintings like the one over the piano – all this, plus her husband’s and Kostya’s arguments about art, made her feel bored, irritable and sometimes even full of loathing.

Life ran its normal course, from day to day, and promised nothing special. The theatre season was over and warm days had arrived – the weather was always fine now. One morning the Laptevs went off to the local assizes to hear Kostya, who had been appointed by the court, defend someone. They had taken their time before leaving and arrived when the cross-examination of witnesses had already started. A soldier from the reserves was accused of burglary. Many of the witnesses were laundresses, who testified that the accused often visited their employer, the laundry proprietress. Late on the eve of the Exaltation of the Cross³⁹ this soldier had come to ask for money to buy himself a drink for the ‘morning after’, but no one gave him any. Then he had left, but returned an hour later with some beer and peppermint cakes for the girls. They drank and sang almost till dawn, but in the morning they noticed that the lock to the loft entrance had been broken and some linen was missing – three men’s nightshirts, a skirt and two sheets. Kostya sarcastically asked each witness if she had drunk any of the beer that the accused had brought that night. He was obviously trying to make it look as if the laundresses had robbed their own laundry. He delivered his speech coolly, angrily eyeing the jury.

He explained burglary and petty larceny. He spoke in great detail and with conviction, displaying an outstanding talent for expatiating long and solemnly about what was common knowledge to everyone. And it was difficult to make out what precisely he was getting at. The jurors were able to draw only the following conclusion from his lengthy speech: either there had been a burglary, but no petty larceny, since the money from the sale of the linen was spent by the laundresses on drink; or that there had been larceny, but no burglary. But Kostya was evidently on the right tack, since his speech deeply moved the jury and public and pleased everyone. Julia nodded to Kostya when an acquittal was brought and afterwards shook him firmly by the hand.

In May the Laptevs went to their villa at Sokolniki, as Julia was pregnant.

XIII

More than a year passed. At Sokolniki, not far from the main Yaroslavl⁴⁰ railway line, Julia and Yartsev were sitting on the grass. Kochevoy was lying nearby, his hands under his head, gazing up at the sky. All three had had enough of walking and were waiting for the six o’clock suburban train so that they could go home for tea.

‘Mothers always think their children are exceptional, Nature’s arranged it that way’, Julia said. ‘A mother will stand by the cot for hours on end looking rapturously at her baby’s tiny ears, eyes and nose. If some stranger kisses her baby the poor woman thinks this gives him the utmost pleasure. And mothers can talk of nothing but babies. I know that mothers tend to have this weakness and I’m guarding against it myself. But my Olga really is exceptional, honestly! The way she looks at me when she’s feeding, the way she laughs! She’s only eight months old, but I swear to you I’ve never seen such clever eyes, even in a three-year-old.’

‘Incidentally, whom do you love more?’ asked Yartsev. ‘Your husband or your baby?’

Julia shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know’, she said. ‘I never felt deep affection for my husband and Olga’s really my first love. You know I didn’t marry Aleksey for love. I used to be stupid, I went through absolute hell and I couldn’t stop thinking that I had ruined his life and mine. But I realize now that one doesn’t need love, it’s a lot of nonsense.’

‘So, if it isn’t love, then what kind of feeling attaches you to your husband? Why do you stay with him?’

‘I don’t know… Must be force of habit, I think. I respect him, I miss him when he’s away for a long time, but that’s not love. He’s a clever, honest man and that’s enough to make me happy. He’s very kind and unpretentious…’

‘Aleksey’s clever, Aleksey’s kind’, Kostya said, lazily raising his head. ‘But you need to know him for ages before you ever find out that he’s intelligent, kind and fascinating, my dear. And what’s the use of his kindness or his brains? He’ll stump up as much money as you want – he’s capable of that. But when it comes to showing strength of character, seeing off some cheeky devil or smart aleck, then he fights shy and loses heart. Men like your dear Aleksey may be fine people, but they’re absolutely useless in battle. Yes, they’re actually fit for absolutely nothing.’

At last the train came into sight. Bright pink steam poured from its funnel and rose over the small patch of forest. Two windows in the last carriage suddenly flashed so brilliantly in the sun it hurt one’s eyes.

‘Teatime!’ Julia Sergeyevna said, standing up.

She had recently put on weight and now she walked rather lazily, like a middle-aged lady.

‘All the same, it’s not much of a life without love’, Yartsev said, following her. ‘We’re always talking and reading about love, but we don’t put it into practice – and that’s a bad thing, I must say.’

‘That’s not important, Ivan’, Julia said. ‘You won’t find happiness there.’

They drank tea in the little garden, where mignonette, stocks and tobacco plants were in flower and early gladioli were opening out. From the expression on Julia Sergeyevna’s face, Yartsev and Kochevoy could tell that this was a happy time of spiritual calm and equilibrium for her and that she needed nothing besides what she already possessed; they too began to feel relaxed, tranquil at heart. Whatever one might think, things were turning out very well – just right, in fact. The pines were beautiful, the smell of resin was more wonderful than ever, the cream was delicious. Sasha was a clever, fine girl.

After tea Yartsev sang some sentimental songs, accompanying himself on the piano, while Julia and Kochevoy listened in silence – only Julia got up now and then and quietly left the room to have a look at the baby, and at Lida, who had had a temperature for two days and wasn’t eating.

‘ “My dear, tender love”’,⁴¹ Yartsev sang. Then he shook his head and said, ‘By the life of me I can’t understand what you have against love. If I weren’t busy fifteen hours a day I’d fall in love myself – no question about it.’

Supper was laid on the terrace. It was warm and quiet, but Julia wrapped herself in her shawl and complained of the damp. When it was dark she grew rather restless, kept shivering and asked her guests to stay on. She regaled them with wine and after supper had them served with brandy to stop them leaving. She didn’t want to be on her own with the children and servants.

‘We lady villa-dwellers are organizing a show for the children’, she said. ‘We already have everything – theatre, actors. All that’s missing is a play. We’ve been sent a score of different ones, but none is any good.’ Turning to Yartsev she said, ‘Now, you love the theatre and you’re a history expert. Why don’t you write a historical play for us?’

‘All right.’

The guests finished all the brandy and prepared to leave. It was past ten, which was late for people in holiday villas.

‘It’s so dark, it’s pitch-black’, Julia said, seeing them through the gate. ‘I don’t know how you’ll find the way back, my friends. It’s really very cold!’

She wrapped herself more tightly and went back to the porch.

‘My Aleksey must be playing cards somewhere!’ she exclaimed. ‘Goodnight!’

After the bright lights in the house they couldn’t see a thing. Yartsev and Kostya groped along like blind men until they reached the railway line, which they crossed.

‘Can’t see a damned thing!’ Kostya said in a deep voice, stopping to gaze at the sky. ‘Look at those stars – like new fifteen copeck pieces! Yartsev!!’

‘What?’ came back Yartsev’s voice.

‘I said I can’t see a thing. Where are you?’

Whistling, Yartsev went up to him and took his arm.

‘Hey, all you holiday-makers!’ Kostya suddenly shouted at the top of his voice. ‘We’ve caught a socialist!’

Whenever he’d had a few drinks he was boisterous, shouting and picking quarrels with policemen and cabbies, singing and laughing furiously.

‘To hell with Nature!’ he shouted.

‘Now now’, Yartsev said, trying to calm him down. ‘That’s enough. Please!’

The friends soon grew used to the dark and began to make out the silhouettes of lofty pines and telegraph poles. Now and then whistles could be heard from railway stations in Moscow, and telegraph wires hummed mournfully. But no sound came from that patch of forest and there was something proud, strong and mysterious about the silence. And now, at night, the tops of the pines seemed almost to touch the sky. The friends found the correct cutting and went down it. Here it was pitch-black and only the long strip of star-strewn sky and the well-trodden earth beneath their feet told them that they were on the path. Silently they walked, side by side, both imagining that people were coming towards them. Yartsev had the idea that souls of Muscovite tsars, boyars and patriarchs might be wandering around the forest. He wanted to tell Kostya, but stopped himself.

When they reached the city gate dawn was just glimmering. Still without a word, Yartsev and Kochevoy walked down a road past cheap holiday villas, pubs and timber yards. Under the branch-line railway bridge they suddenly experienced a pleasant dampness, smelling of lime trees. Then a long, broad street opened up without a soul or light on it. When they reached Krasny Prud,⁴² dawn was breaking.

‘Moscow’s a city that will have to go through a lot more suffering in the future!’ Yartsev said, looking at the Alekseyev Monastery.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I just do. I love Moscow.’

Both Yartsev and Kostya were born in Moscow and they adored it – for some reason they felt hostile towards other cities. They were convinced that Moscow was a remarkable city, and Russia a remarkable country. Away in the Crimea or the Caucasus, or abroad, they felt bored, uncomfortable, out of place, and their beloved Moscow’s dreary grey weather was the most pleasant and healthy of all, they thought. Days when the cold rain beats on windows and dusk comes on early, when walls of houses and churches take on a sombre, brownish colour, when you don’t know what to wear when you go out into the street – days like these pleasantly stimulated them. In the end they took a cab near the station.

‘Actually, I’d like to write a historical play’, Yartsev said, ‘but without all those Lyapunovs and Godunovs. I’d write about the times of Yaroslav or Monomakh. I hate all Russian historical plays, except for Pimen’s soliloquy.⁴³ When you’re dealing with some historical source or reading text books on Russian history, everything Russian appears so incredibly talented, competent and interesting. But when I see a historical play at the theatre, Russian life strikes me as inept, morbid and uninspiring.’

The friends parted at Dmitrovka Street and Yartsev drove on to his rooms in Nikitsky Street. He rocked to and fro, dozing, his whole mind on that play. Suddenly he imagined a terrible noise, clanging, shouts in some incomprehensible language – Kalmuck, most likely. There was a village engulfed in flames, and the nearby woods, covered in hoar frost and faint pink in the conflagration, could be so clearly seen for miles around that every little fir tree was distinguishable. Some wild savages, on horse and on foot, tore through the village: both they and their steeds were as crimson as the glow in the sky.

‘They’re Polovtsians’,⁴⁴ thought Yartsev.

One of them – old, bloody-faced and covered all over with burns – was tying a young, white-faced Russian girl to his saddle. The old man was ranting and raving, while the girl looked on with sad, intelligent eyes.

Yartsev shook his head and woke up.

‘ “My dear, tender love”’, he chanted.

He paid the cab-driver and went up to his rooms, but he just couldn’t return to reality and saw the flames spreading to the trees. The forest crackled and began to smoke. An enormous wild boar, maddened with fear, charged through the village. And the girl who was tied to the saddle was still watching.

It was light when Yartsev entered his rooms. Two candles were burning low on the piano, near some open music books. In a dark dress with a sash, a newspaper in her hands, Polina lay fast asleep on the couch. She must have been playing for some time waiting for Yartsev and fallen asleep.

‘God, she looks worn out!’ he thought.

Carefully removing the paper from her hands, he covered her with a rug, snuffed the candles and went to his bedroom. As he lay down he thought of that historical play and couldn’t get that line – ‘My dear, tender love’ – out of his head.

Two days later Laptev dropped in for a moment to say that Lida had diphtheria and that Julia Sergeyevna and the baby had caught it from her. Five days later came the news that Lida and Julia were recovering, but that the baby had died and the Laptevs had dashed back to town from the villa at Sokolniki.

XIV

Laptev didn’t like spending much time at home now. His wife often went over to the lodge, saying that she had to see to the girls’ lessons. However, she didn’t go there for that, but to cry at Kostya’s. The ninth, twentieth, fortieth day passed and still he had to go to the St Alexis Cemetery⁴⁵ for requiem mass, after which he had a hellish twenty-four hours thinking only of that unfortunate baby and uttering various platitudes to console his wife. He seldom went to the warehouse now and busied himself solely with charitable work, inventing sundry little jobs or worries for himself, and he was delighted when he had to ride around the whole day on some trivial matter.

Recently he had been intending to go abroad to learn about organization of hostels for the poor and now this idea provided some diversion.

It was one day in autumn. Julia had just gone to the lodge to cry, while Laptev was lying on his study couch wondering where to go. Then Pyotr announced that Polina had arrived. Absolutely delighted, Laptev leapt up and went to greet his unexpected visitor, that former friend he had almost forgotten now. Since that evening when he had seen her last she hadn’t changed at all.

‘Polina!’ he said, stretching out both hands. ‘It’s been so long! You just can’t imagine how glad I am to see you. Welcome!’

Rassudina greeted him by tugging at his hand, entered the study and sat down without taking off her coat or hat.

‘I’ve only dropped in for a minute, I’ve no time for chit-chat. Please sit down and listen. I couldn’t care less whether you’re pleased or not to see me, as I don’t give a damn for the gracious attentions of members of the male sex. The reason I’m here now is that I’ve already called at five places today and was refused in every one of them. It’s an urgent matter. Now, listen’, she added, looking him in the eye. ‘Five students I know, all with limited brain-power, but indubitably poor, haven’t paid their fees and have been expelled. Your wealth makes it incumbent on you to go to the university immediately and pay their fees for them.’

‘With pleasure, Polina.’

‘Here are their names’, Rassudina said, handing Laptev a note. ‘You must go this minute, you can wallow in domestic bliss later.’

Just then came a vague rustling sound from behind the door into the drawing-room – it was most probably the dog scratching itself. Rassudina blushed and leapt to her feet. ‘Your little Dulcinea’s trying to eavesdrop’, she said. ‘That’s a rotten trick!’

Laptev felt insulted on Julia’s behalf.

‘She’s not here, she’s at the lodge’, he said. ‘And don’t talk about her like that. We’ve lost our baby and she’s terribly depressed.’

‘You can set her mind at rest’, Rassudina laughed, sitting down again. ‘She’ll have another dozen of them. You don’t need brains to have babies!’⁴⁶

Laptev remembered hearing this, or something similar, many times before, long ago, and he recaptured that idyllic past, his free bachelor life when he had felt young and capable of anything, when love for a wife and memories of a child just didn’t exist for him.

‘Let’s go together’, he said, stretching himself.

When they reached the university Rassudina waited at the gates, while Laptev went to the bursar’s office. After a short time he returned and handed Rassudina five receipts.

‘Where are you off to now?’ he asked.

‘To see Yartsev.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘But you’ll interrupt him in his work.’

‘I won’t, I assure you!’ he replied, looking at her imploringly.

She was wearing a black mourning hat with crêpe trimmings, and a very short, shabby coat with bulging pockets. Her nose seemed longer than ever and her face had no colour, in spite of the cold. Laptev liked following and obeying her, and listening to her grumbling. On the way he reflected on the inner strength she must have if, despite her ugliness, clumsiness and restlessness, despite her lack of dress sense, despite her hair always being dishevelled and despite her rather ungainly figure, she was still a woman of great charm.

They made their way into Yartsev’s rooms by the back door – through the kitchen, where they were welcomed by the cook, a neat old woman with grey curls. Deeply embarrassed, she smiled sweetly at them and this made her small face look like a piece of puff pastry.

‘Please come in’, she said.

Yartsev was out. Rassudina sat at the piano and started some boring, difficult exercises, having instructed Laptev not to interrupt. He didn’t distract her with conversation, but sat to one side leafing through the European Herald.⁴⁷ After practising for two hours – that was her daily stint – she ate something in the kitchen and went off to give some lessons. Laptev read an instalment of some novel, then sat there for some time, neither reading nor feeling bored, but pleased that he was already late for dinner at home.

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ he heard Yartsev laugh – and then the man himself came in. He was healthy, hearty, red-cheeked, and wore a new tailcoat with shiny buttons. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’

The friends dined together. Then Laptev lay on the couch, while Yartsev sat near him and lit a cigar. Twilight fell.

‘I must be getting old’, Laptev said. ‘Since my sister Nina died I’ve taken to thinking about death, for some reason.’

They talked of death and immortality, about how lovely it would be if they were resurrected and then flew off to Mars or somewhere to enjoy eternal idleness and happiness – and, most of all, if they could think in some special, non-terrestrial way.

‘But I don’t want to die’, Yartsev said softly. ‘No philosophy can reconcile me to death and I look upon it simply as destruction. I want to live.’

‘Do you love life, old man?’

‘Yes, I love life.’

‘Well, in that respect I just can’t make myself out. Gloomy moods alternate with apathetic ones. I’m timid, I’ve no self-confidence, I’m cowardly in matters of conscience, I cannot adapt to life at all or become master of it. Other people talk rubbish or behave like rogues – and with such gusto! As for me, sometimes I consciously perform good deeds, but in the event I experience only anxiety or complete indifference. My explanation for all this is that I’m a slave – a serf’s grandson. Many of us rank and file will fall in battle before we find the right path.’

‘That’s all very well, dear man’, Yartsev sighed. ‘It only goes to show yet again how rich and varied Russian life is. Yes, very rich! Do you know, every day I’m more convinced that we’re on the threshold of some fantastic triumph. I’d like to survive till then and take part in it myself. Believe it or not, in my opinion a remarkable generation is growing up now. It’s a pleasure teaching children, especially girls. Wonderful children!’

Yartsev went over to the piano and struck a chord.

‘I’m a chemist’, he continued. ‘I think like a chemist and I’ll die a chemist. But I’m greedy, I’m afraid I’ll die without having gorged myself. Chemistry alone isn’t enough for me. I clutch at Russian history, at the history of art, at educational theory, music. Your wife told me this summer to write a historical play and now I want to write, write, write. I feel I could sit down and write for three days and nights, without ever getting up. Images have exhausted me, my head is crammed with them, I feel a pulse beating in my brain. I don’t want to make anything special out of myself or achieve something really great. All I want is to live, dream, hope, to be everywhere at the same time. Life, my dear man, is short and we must live it as best we can.’

After this friendly chat, which finished only at midnight, Laptev began calling at Yartsev’s almost every day. He felt drawn to the place. He usually arrived just before evening, lay down and waited impatiently for Yartsev to arrive, not feeling bored in the least. When he had returned from the office and eaten, Yartsev would sit down to work. But Laptev would ask him something, a conversation would start, work would be forgotten and the friends would part at midnight feeling very pleased with each other.

But this didn’t last long. Once, after arriving at Yartsev’s, Laptev found only Rassudina there, sitting practising at the piano. She gave him a cold, almost hostile look. Without shaking hands she asked, ‘Please tell me when all this will end?’

‘All what?’

‘You come here every day and stop Yartsev working. Yartsev’s no lousy little shopkeeper, he’s a scholar – every minute of his life is precious. Try and understand that, show some consideration at least!’

‘If you think I’m interfering’, Laptev replied curtly, somewhat embarrassed, ‘then I’ll put a stop to these visits.’

‘That’s all right by me. Leave now or he might come and find you here.’

The tone in which Rassudina said this, her apathetic look, was the finishing touch to his embarrassment. She had no feeling at all for him, all she wanted was for him to leave as soon as possible – what a difference from their former love! He left without shaking hands, thinking she might call him back. But he heard the scales again and as he slowly made his way downstairs he realized that he was a stranger to her now.

Three days later Yartsev came over to spend the evening with him.

‘I’ve news for you’, he laughed. ‘Polina Nikolayevna has moved in with me.’ He became rather embarrassed and added in a low voice, ‘Well now, we’re not in love of course but… hm… that doesn’t matter. I’m glad I can offer her a quiet sanctuary and the chance to stop working if she becomes ill. Well, she thinks there’ll be a lot more order in my life now that she’s living with me and that I’ll become a great scholar under her influence. If that’s what she thinks, then let her. There’s a saying down south: Idle thoughts give wings to fools. Ha, ha, ha!’

Laptev said nothing. Yartsev paced the study, glanced at the paintings he had seen many times before and heaved a sigh as he said, ‘Yes, my friend. I’m three years older than you and it’s too late for me to start thinking about true love. Really, a woman like Polina is a godsend and I’ll live happily with her until old age, of course. But to hell with it, I have regrets and I’m always hankering after something and imagining that I’m lying in a valley in Daghestan,⁴⁸ dreaming I’m at a ball. In short, one’s never satisfied with what one has.’

He went into the drawing-room and sang some songs, as if he had no worries at all, while Laptev stayed in the study, eyes closed, trying to fathom why Rassudina had moved in with Yartsev. Then he kept mourning the fact that there was no such thing as a firm, lasting attachment. He was annoyed about Rassudina having an affair with Yartsev and he was annoyed with himself for feeling quite differently towards his wife now.

XV

Laptev was sitting in his armchair, rocking himself as he read. Julia was also in the study reading. Apparently there was nothing to discuss and neither had said a word since morning. Now and then he looked at her over his book and wondered if it made any difference if one married from passionate love or without any love at all. That time of jealousy, great agitation and suffering seemed remote now. He had already managed a trip abroad and was now recovering from the journey, hoping to return to England, which he had liked very much, at the beginning of spring.

Julia Sergeyevna had grown inured to her grief and no longer went to the lodge to cry. That winter she didn’t visit the shops, or go to the theatre or concerts, but stayed at home. She didn’t like large rooms and was always either in her husband’s study or in her own room, where she had some icon-cases that were part of her dowry and where the landscape painting she had admired so much at the exhibition hung on the wall. She spent no money on herself and got through as little as in her father’s house.

Winter passed cheerlessly. All over Moscow people were playing cards, but whenever some other entertainment was devised – singing, reciting, sketching, for example – this made life even more boring. Because there were so few talented people in Moscow and because the same old singers and reciters were to be found at every soirée, enjoyment of the arts gradually palled and for many was transformed into a boring, monotonous duty.

Besides this, not one day passed at the Laptevs without some upset. Old Fyodor Stepanych’s eyesight was very poor, he no longer went to the warehouse and the eye surgeons said he would soon go blind. For some reason Fyodor stopped going there too, staying at home the whole time to write. Panaurov had obtained his transfer – he had been promoted to Councillor of State – and he was living at the Dresden Hotel now. Almost every day he called on Laptev to borrow money. Kish had finally left university and while he was waiting for the Laptevs to find him a job would hang around for days on end, regaling them with long, boring stories. All this was very irritating and wearisome, and made everyday life most unpleasant.

Pyotr entered the study to announce the arrival of a lady they didn’t know: the name on her visiting card was ‘Josephine Milan’. Julia Sergeyevna lazily stood up and went out, limping slightly from pins and needles in one leg. A thin, very pale lady with dark eyebrows, dressed completely in black, appeared at the door. She clasped her breast and said pleadingly, ‘Monsieur Laptev, please save my children!’

Laptev was familiar with the clink of those bracelets and that powder-blotched face. He recognized her as the lady at whose house he had been so stupid as to dine just before the wedding. She was Panaurov’s second wife.

‘Save my children!’ she repeated and her face trembled and suddenly looked old and pathetic. Her eyes reddened. ‘Only you can save us and I’ve spent my last rouble to come and see you in Moscow. My children will starve!’

She made as if to go down on her knees. This scared Laptev and he gripped her arms above the elbows.

‘Please sit down, I beg you’, he muttered as he gave her a chair.

‘We have no money for food now,’ she said. ‘Grigory Nikolaich is leaving to take up his new position but he doesn’t want to take me or the children, and that money you were so generous to send us he only spends on himself. What on earth can we do? I’m asking you. Those poor, unfortunate children!’

‘Please calm yourself ! I’ll tell the people at the office to send the money direct to you.’

She burst out sobbing, then calmed down, and he noticed that the tears had made little channels on her powdered cheeks and that she had a little moustache.

‘You’re infinitely generous, Monsieur Laptev. But please be our guardian angel, our good fairy. Persuade Grigory Nikolaich not to leave me, to take me with him. I do love him, I’m mad about him. He’s the light of my life.’

Laptev gave her a hundred roubles and promised he would have a talk with Panaurov. As he saw her into the hall he became frightened she might start sobbing again or fall on her knees.

Kish was next to arrive. Then in came Kostya, with a camera. Recently he’d become keen on photography and would take snaps of everyone in the house several times a day. This new hobby was causing him a great deal of distress and he’d even lost weight.

Fyodor arrived before afternoon tea. He sat down in a corner of the study, opened a book and stared at the same page for ages, obviously not reading. Then he lingered over his tea; his face was red. Laptev felt depressed in his presence and even found his silence unpleasant.

‘You can congratulate Russia on her new pamphleteer’, Fyodor remarked. ‘Joking aside, old man, it’s to put my pen to the test, so to speak, and I’ve come here to show you it. Please read it, dear chap, and tell me what you think. Only please be quite frank.’

He took an exercise book from his pocket and handed it to his brother. The article was called ‘The Russian Soul’ and it was written in that dull flat style usually employed by untalented people who are secretly conceited. Its main idea was as follows: intellectuals have the right not to believe in the supernatural, but they are obliged to conceal their lack of belief so as not to lead others astray or shake them in their faith. Without faith there is no idealism, and idealism is destined to save Europe and show humanity the true path.

‘But you don’t say from what Europe must be saved’, Laptev commented.

‘That’s self-evident.’

‘No it’s not’, Laptev said, walking up and down excitedly. ‘It’s not at all clear why you wrote it. However, that’s your affair.’

‘I want to have it published as a pamphlet.’

‘That’s your affair.’

For a minute they didn’t speak, then Fyodor sighed and said, ‘I deeply, infinitely regret that we see things differently. Oh, Aleksey, my dear brother Aleksey! We’re both Russians, we belong to the Orthodox Church, we have breadth of vision. Those rotten German and Jewish ideas – do they really suit us? We’re not a pair of blackguards, are we? We’re representatives of a distinguished family.’

‘Distinguished my foot!’ Laptev exclaimed, trying to keep back his irritation. ‘Distinguished family! Our grandfather was knocked around by rich landowners, the most miserable little clerk used to hit him in the face. Grandfather beat Father, Father beat you and me. What ever did this “distinguished family” of yours give you or me? What kind of nerves and blood did we inherit? For close on three years you’ve been blethering away like some wretched parish priest, spouting no end of drivel. And now this thing you’ve penned – why, it’s the ravings of a lackey! And what about me? Just take a look. I’m quite unadaptable, I’ve no spirit or moral fibre.

‘For every step I take I’m scared of being flogged. I cringe before nonentities, idiots, swine who are immeasurably inferior to me both intellectually and morally. I’m afraid of house porters, janitors, city police. I’m scared of everyone because I was born of a persecuted mother – from childhood I’ve been beaten and bullied. We’d both do well not to have children. Let’s hope, God willing, that this distinguished merchant house comes to an end with us!’

Julia Sergeyevna entered the study and sat by the desk.

‘Were you having an argument?’ she asked. ‘I’m not interrupting, am I?’

‘No, my dear sister-in-law’, Fyodor replied. ‘We’re discussing questions of principle. So, you were saying’, he went on, turning to his brother, ‘that our family is this and that. But this family built up a million-rouble business. That’s something!’

‘Blast your million-rouble business! A man without any special intelligence or ability becomes a merchant by accident, makes his fortune and does his business day in day out without any method or purpose – without even any craving for wealth. He carries on like a machine and the money just pours in, without him lifting a finger. His whole life is business and he likes it only because he can lord it over his clerks and make fun of customers. He’s a churchwarden only because he can bully the choir and keep them under his thumb. He’s a school governor because he likes to see the schoolmaster as his subordinate and can order him around. It’s not business you merchants care for, it’s being the boss. That warehouse of yours is no business premises, it’s a torture-chamber! Yes, for your sort of business you need clerks with no personality, deprived of any material share in it, and you train them to be that way. From childhood you force them to prostrate themselves before you for every crust of bread, from childhood you bring them up to believe that you are their benefactors. I could never imagine you having university men in your warehouse – no question about that!’

‘Graduates are no good in our kind of business.’

‘That’s not true!’ Laptev shouted. ‘That’s a lie!’

‘I’m sorry, but you seem to be fouling your own water’, Fyodor said, getting up. ‘You find our business hateful, yet you still enjoy the profits!’

‘Aha, so now we’ve come to the point!’ Laptev laughed and gave his brother an angry look. ‘Yes, if I didn’t belong to your distinguished family, if I had one iota of willpower and courage, I’d have chucked away all these profits of yours years ago and gone out to earn my own living. But you in your warehouse have been stripping me of all individuality since I was a child. I’m yours now!’

Fyodor glanced at his watch and hurriedly made his farewell. He kissed Julia’s hand and left the room. But instead of going into the hall he went into the drawing-room, then into a bedroom.

‘I’ve forgotten which rooms are which here’, he said, deeply embarrassed. ‘It’s a strange house, don’t you think? Most peculiar.’

While he was putting on his fur coat he seemed stunned by something and his face was full of pain. Laptev no longer felt angry: he was afraid and at the same time he felt sorry for Fyodor. That fine, heartfelt love for his brother that had seemingly died within him during those past three years awoke now and he felt a strong urge to express it.

‘Fyodor, come and have lunch tomorrow’, he said, stroking his brother’s shoulder. ‘Will you come?’

‘Oh, all right. But please fetch me some water.’

Laptev dashed into the dining-room himself, picked up the first thing he found on the sideboard – a tall beer jug – poured some water and took it to his brother. Fyodor started drinking thirstily, but suddenly he bit on the jug and then the gnashing of teeth could be heard, followed by sobbing. The water spilt onto his fur coat and frock-coat. Laptev, who had never seen a man weep before, stood there embarrassed and frightened, at a loss what to do. In his bewilderment he watched Julia and the maid remove Fyodor’s fur coat and take him back into the house. He followed them, feeling that he was to blame.

Julia helped Fyodor lie down and sank to her knees before him.

‘It’s nothing, it’s only nerves’, she said comfortingly.

‘My dear, I feel so low’, he said. ‘I’m so unhappy, but I’ve been trying to keep it a secret the whole time.’

He put his arms round her neck and whispered in her ear, ‘Every night I dream of my sister Nina. She comes and sits in the armchair by my bed.’

An hour later, when he was putting on his fur coat again in the hall, he was smiling and he felt ashamed because of the maid. Laptev drove with him to Pyatnitsky Street.

‘Please come and have lunch tomorrow’, he said on the way, holding his arm, ‘and let’s go abroad together at Easter. You must get some fresh air – you’ve really let yourself go.’

‘Yes, of course I’ll come. And we’ll take sister-in-law Julia with us.’

Back home Laptev found his wife terribly overwrought. That incident with Fyodor had shocked her and she just wouldn’t calm down. She wasn’t crying, but she looked very pale, tossing and turning in bed and clutching at the quilt, pillow and her husband’s hands with cold fingers. Her eyes were dilated with fear.

‘Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me’, she said to her husband. ‘Tell me, Aleksey, why have I stopped saying my prayers? Where is my faith? Oh, why did you have to talk about religion in my presence? You and those friends of yours have muddled me. I don’t pray any more.’

He put compresses on her forehead, warmed her hands and made her drink tea, while she clung to him in terror…

By morning she was exhausted and fell asleep with Laptev sitting by her holding her hand. So he didn’t get any sleep. All next day he felt shattered and listless, his mind a blank as he sluggishly wandered round the house.

XVI

The doctors said that Fyodor was mentally ill. Laptev didn’t know what was happening at Pyatnitsky Street, but that dark warehouse, where neither the old man nor Fyodor appeared any more, reminded him of a crypt. Whenever his wife told him that he should visit the warehouse and Pyatnitsky Street every day, he either said nothing or talked irritably about his childhood, about his inability to forgive his father the past, about his hatred for Pyatnitsky Street and the warehouse, and so on.

One Sunday morning Julia went to Pyatnitsky Street herself. She found old Fyodor Stepanych in the same room where the service to celebrate her arrival had once been held. Without any tie, in canvas jacket and slippers, he was sitting motionless in an armchair, blinking his blind eyes.

‘It’s me, your daughter-in-law’, she said, going over to him. ‘I’ve come to see how you are.’

He was breathing heavily from excitement. Touched by his unhappiness and loneliness, she kissed his hand, while he felt her face and head. Then, as if having convinced himself that it really was her, he made the sign of the cross over her.

‘Thank you so much’, he said. ‘I’ve lost my sight, I can hardly see a thing. I can just make out the window and the light too, but not people and things. Yes, I’m going blind and Fyodor’s ill. It’s really bad without the boss’s eye on them – if there’s trouble and no one to take charge they’ll just run wild. And what’s wrong with Fyodor? Got a cold, has he? As for me, I’ve never been ill, never been to the doctor’s. No, can’t say I’ve had anything to do with doctors.’

As usual, the old man started boasting. Meanwhile the servants hurriedly began laying the table in that large room, placing savouries and bottles of wine on it. They brought in about a dozen bottles, one of which was the same shape as the Eiffel Tower. Then they brought a whole plateful of hot pies that smelt of boiled rice and fish.

‘Please have something, my dear’, the old man said.

She took his arm, led him to the table and poured him some vodka. ‘I’ll come again tomorrow’, she said, ‘and I’ll bring your granddaughters Sasha and Lida. They’ll pamper and comfort you.’

‘Oh, no, don’t go bringing them here, they’re not legitimate.’

‘What? Not legitimate? Surely their father and mother were married?’

‘Yes, but without my permission. I never blessed them and I don’t want anything to do with them, blast them.’

‘What a strange way to speak, Father’, Julia sighed.

‘According to the Gospels children must honour and fear their parents.’

‘Nothing of the sort. The Gospels say that we must forgive even our enemies.’

‘In our kind of business you can’t forgive anyone. If you started forgiving everyone you’d go bust within three years.’

‘But forgiving, saying a kind, friendly word to someone – even if he’s done wrong – that’s better than business and wealth!’

Julia wanted to mollify the old man, to inspire him with compassion and make him feel repentant, but he listened to what she had to say condescendingly, like a parent listening to a child.

‘Father, you’re an old man’, Julia said decisively. ‘God will soon be calling you to him. He won’t ask what kind of business you had, or if you made a profit. He’ll ask whether you’ve been kind to others. Haven’t you been hard on those weaker than yourself – your servants or clerks, for example?’

‘I’ve always been generous to my staff. They should always mention me in their prayers’, the old man said with great conviction. However, he was touched by Julia’s sincere tone of voice and, to please her, he added, ‘Good, bring my little granddaughters tomorrow. I’ll see they get some presents.’

The old man was untidily dressed and there was cigar ash on his chest and lap. Evidently no one cleaned his shoes or clothes. The rice in the pies was undercooked, the tablecloth smelt of soap, the servants trod noisily. The old man, the whole house on Pyatnitsky Street, had a neglected look. Sensing this, Julia felt ashamed on her own and her husband’s account.

‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow, without fail’, she said.

She walked through the house and ordered the servants to tidy up the old man’s bedroom and light his icon-lamp. Fyodor was sitting in his room looking at an open book without reading. Julia spoke to him and ordered his room to be tidied too. Then she went down to the clerks’ quarters. In the middle of the room where they ate stood an unpainted wooden column, which propped up the ceiling. The ceilings here were low and the walls cheaply papered, and there was a smell of fumes from the stove and cooking. As it was Sunday, all the clerks were at home, sitting on their beds waiting for their meal. When Julia came in they jumped up, timidly answered her questions, lowering at her like convicts.

‘Heavens, what a dreadful place you live in!’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands. ‘Don’t you feel cramped here?’

‘Yes, it’s cramped all right’, Makeichev said, ‘but it don’t do us no harm. We’re very thankful to you and we lift up our prayers to all-merciful God.’

‘Corresponding to the plenitude of the personality’, Pochatkin said.

Noticing that Julia hadn’t understood Pochatkin, Makeichev hastened to explain, ‘We’re humble folk and must live according to our station in life.’

She inspected the boys’ quarters and the kitchen, met the housekeeper and was highly dissatisfied.

At home she told her husband, ‘We must move to Pyatnitsky Street as soon as possible. And you’ll go to the warehouse every day.’

Afterwards they sat next to each other in the study without speaking. Laptev felt miserable and didn’t want to go to Pyatnitsky Street or the warehouse. But he guessed what his wife was thinking and didn’t have the strength to offer any opposition.

‘I feel as if our life’s over and that some dull half-life is just beginning. When I heard that my brother Fyodor is hopelessly ill, I just wept. We spent our childhood and youth together. I once loved him deeply. Now this catastrophe comes along and I feel that losing him is the final break with the past. When you spoke just now about moving to Pyatnitsky Street, to that prison, I began to think that I’ve no future either.’

He stood up and went over to the window.

‘Whatever happens, I can say goodbye to any hope of happiness’, he said, looking into the street. ‘It doesn’t exist. I’ve never experienced happiness, so there probably isn’t such a thing. However, I was happy once in my life, when I sat under your umbrella that night. Do you remember leaving your umbrella at my sister Nina’s?’ he asked, turning towards his wife. ‘I was in love with you then and I remember sitting up the whole night under that umbrella in a state of bliss.’

In the study, by the bookcases, stood a mahogany chest of drawers, with bronze handles, where Laptev kept various things that weren’t needed, including the umbrella. He took it out and handed it to his wife.

‘There you are.’

Julia looked at the umbrella for about a minute and recognized it with a sad smile. ‘I remember’, she said. ‘You were holding it when you said you loved me.’

When she saw that he was preparing to leave she added, ‘Please come home early if you can. I miss you.’

Then she went to her room and stared at the umbrella for a long time.

XVII

Despite the complexity of the business and the enormous turnover, there was no accountant at the warehouse and it was impossible to make any sense of the ledger clerk’s books. Every day commission agents – German and English, with whom the clerks discussed politics and religion – called at the warehouse. An alcoholic nobleman (a sick, pathetic man) would come to translate the office’s foreign correspondence. The clerks called him ‘Midget’ and gave him tea with salt in it. On the whole, the business struck Laptev as one vast operation in eccentricity.

Every day he called at the warehouse and tried to introduce a new system. He forbade them to whip the boys or make fun of customers, and he lost his temper whenever the clerks laughed as they cheerfully despatched useless old stock to the provinces, trying to pass it off as new and fashionable. Now he was in charge at the warehouse, but he still had no idea how much he was worth, whether the business was prospering or what salary his chief clerks received. Pochatkin and Makeichev thought him young and inexperienced, concealed many things from him, and had mysterious whispering sessions with the blind old man every evening.

One day in early June, Laptev and Pochatkin went to Bubnov’s inn for a business lunch. Pochatkin had been with the Laptevs for ages, having joined the firm when he was eight. He was really part of the place and was trusted implicitly: when he took all the money from the cash-box on his way out and stuffed his pockets this didn’t arouse the least suspicion. He was boss at the warehouse, at home and in church too, where he stood in as warden for the old man. Because of his cruel treatment of his inferiors he had been nicknamed Ivan the Terrible⁴⁹ by the clerks and boys.

When they arrived at the inn he nodded to the waiter and said, ‘Look here, old chap, bring us half a prodigy and twenty vexations.’

After a short while, the waiter brought them half a bottle of vodka on a tray and various plates of savouries.

‘Now look here, old fellow-me-lad’, Pochatkin said, ‘bring us a portion of the leading expert in slander and scandal with some mashed potatoes.’

The waiter didn’t understand, grew embarrassed and looked as if he wanted to say something. But Pochatkin eyed him sternly and said, ‘Furthermore!’

The waiter racked his brains and then went off to consult his colleagues. Finally he guessed correctly and brought a portion of tongue. When they had each drunk two glasses and eaten, Laptev asked, ‘Tell me, Pochatkin, is it true our business has been in decline over the past few years?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Now, be quite straight with me, don’t equivocate. Tell me how much profit we used to make, how much we’re making now, and how much capital we have. We can’t go around like blind men, can we? The warehouse accounts were done not so long ago, but I’m very sceptical, I’m sorry to say. You feel you must hide something from me and you only tell my father the truth. You’ve been mixed up in shady dealings since you were young and now you can’t do without them. But what’s the use? Now, I’m asking you. Please be open with me. What’s the state of the business?’

‘That depends on oscillation of credit’, Pochatkin replied after pausing for thought.

‘What do you mean, “oscillation of credit”?’

Pochatkin began explaining, but Laptev understood nothing and sent for Makeichev. He came at once, said a short prayer, ate some savouries and, in his rich, pompous baritone expatiated chiefly on the clerks’ duty to pray night and day for their benefactors.

‘Fine, but please don’t include me among your benefactors’, Laptev said.

‘Every man must remember what he is and be conscious of his station in life. By the grace of God you are our father and benefactor and we are your slaves.’

‘I’m just about sick and tired of all this!’ Laptev fumed. ‘Now, you be my benefactor for a change and tell me how the business stands. Please stop treating me like a child or I’ll close down the warehouse tomorrow. My father’s gone blind, my brother’s in a mad-house, my nieces are still very young. I hate the business and I’d love to get out of it. But there’s no one to replace me, you know that too well. So, enough of your fiddling, for God’s sake!’

They went into the warehouse to check the accounts and that evening they were still working on them in the house – the old man himself helped them. As he initiated his son into his business secrets he gave the impression he had been practising black magic, not commerce. It turned out that the profits were increasing yearly by about ten per cent and that the Laptevs’ wealth, in cash and securities alone, amounted to six million roubles.

It was about one o’clock in the morning when Laptev went out into the fresh air after doing the accounts, and he felt hypnotized by those figures. It was a calm, moonlit, fragrant night. The white walls of the houses in Moscow’s suburbs south of the river, the sight of heavy, locked gates, the silence and those black shadows created the general impression of a fortress – only a sentry with rifle was missing. Laptev went into the little garden and sat on a bench near the fence separating it from next door’s garden. The bird-cherry was in bloom. Laptev remembered that this cherry had been just as gnarled and exactly the same height when he was a child – it hadn’t changed at all since then. Every corner of the garden and yard reminded him of the remote past. In his childhood, just as now, the whole yard, flooded in moonlight, had been visible through the sparse trees, with shadows that were as mysterious and menacing as before. And just as then, a black dog lay in the middle of the yard and the clerks’ windows were all wide open. But all these were sombre memories.

Beyond the fence, the sound of footsteps came from next door.

‘My dearest, my darling’, a man’s voice whispered – so close to the fence that Laptev could hear breathing.

Then there was a kiss. Laptev was sure that all those millions of roubles, that business he disliked so much, would ruin his life and turn him into a slave in the end. He imagined gradually settling down in his new position, gradually assuming the role of head of a business house, growing dull and old, and finally dying the way mediocrities usually do – shabbily, miserably, depressing all his associates. But what was stopping him abandoning all those millions and the business, and leaving that garden and yard he had hated since he was a boy?

The whispering and kissing on the other side of the fence disturbed him. He went into the middle of the yard, unbuttoned his shirt and looked at the moon: he felt that he wanted to order the gate to be unlocked immediately so that he could leave and never return. His heart thrilled at the prospect of freedom and he laughed with joy as he imagined how wonderful, idyllic and perhaps even saintly that life might be.

But he did not make a move and asked himself, ‘What in heaven’s name is keeping me here?’ He felt annoyed with himself and with that black dog which lay sprawled over the stones instead of running off into fields and forest where it would be free and happy. Obviously, the same thing was preventing both him and the dog from leaving that yard – the habit of bondage, slavery.

Next day, at noon, he went to his wife’s and invited Yartsev to come along too, in case he got bored. Julia Sergeyevna was living in a villa at Butovo and he hadn’t been there for five days. When they arrived at the station the friends entered a carriage and Yartsev waxed lyrical about the wonderful weather the whole way. The villa was in a park, not far from the station. Julia Sergeyevna was sitting under a poplar waiting for her guests right at the beginning of the main avenue, about twenty yards from the gate. She was wearing a light, elegant, cream-coloured, lace-trimmed dress and was holding that familiar umbrella. Yartsev greeted her and went towards the villa, from which he could make out Sasha and Lida’s voices, while Laptev sat beside her to talk business.

‘Why have you been so long?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been waiting here for days on end. I really miss you!’

She got up, ran her hand through his hair and looked quizzically at his face, shoulders, hat.

‘You know, I do love you’, she said, blushing. ‘You’re very dear to me. You’re here, I can see you now and I’m too happy for words! Well, let’s talk. Tell me something.’

As she declared her love he felt as though he had already been married for ten years; and he wanted his lunch. She put her arms round his neck, tickling his cheek with her silk dress. He carefully removed her hand, stood up and went off towards the villa without a word. The girls came running to meet him.

‘How they’ve grown!’ he thought. ‘There’s been so many changes over these three years. But perhaps I’ve another thirteen, thirty years left. What does the future hold in store? Time will tell.’

He embraced Sasha and Lida, who clung to his neck.

‘Grandfather sends his regards’, he said. ‘Uncle Fyodor is going to die soon. Uncle Kostya has sent us a letter from America and sends his regards. He’s bored with the Exhibition⁵⁰ and he’ll be back soon. And Uncle Aleksey is hungry.’

Afterwards he sat on the terrace and saw his wife strolling down the path towards the villa. She seemed deep in thought and wore an enchantingly sad expression. Tears glistened in her eyes. She wasn’t the delicate, fragile, pale-faced girl of before, but a mature, beautiful, strong woman. Laptev noticed how rapturously Yartsev was looking at her and how her fresh, beautiful expression was reflected on his face, which displayed a similar sad enchantment. As they had lunch on the terrace Yartsev smiled a somewhat timid, happy smile and he couldn’t take his eyes off Julia and her beautiful neck. Laptev felt compelled to watch him closely as he thought of the thirteen or thirty years he might have left. And what would he have to go through during that time? What does the future hold for us? And he thought, ‘Time will tell.’