He applied the cupping glasses, while the old tailor, Kiryak and the little girls stood watching – they imagined that they could actually see the illness being drawn out of Nikolay. And Nikolay also watched the cup attached to his chest slowly filling with dark blood and he smiled with pleasure at the thought that something was really coming out.
‘That’s fine,’ the tailor said. ‘Let’s hope it does the trick, with God’s help.’
The convert applied twelve cups, then another twelve, drank some tea and left. Nikolay started shivering. His face took on a pinched look, like a clenched fist, as the women put it; his fingers turned blue. He wrapped himself tightly in a blanket and a sheepskin, but he only felt colder. By the time evening came he was very low. He asked to be laid on the floor and told the tailor to stop smoking. Then he fell silent under his sheepskin and passed away towards morning.
IX
What a long harsh winter it was!
By Christmas their own grain had run out, so they had to buy flour. Kiryak, who was living at home now, made a dreadful racket in the evening, terrifying everyone, and in the mornings he was tormented by self-disgust and hangovers; he made a pathetic sight. Day and night a hungry cow filled the barn with its lowing, and this broke Grannie and Marya’s hearts. And, as though on purpose, the frosts never relented in their severity and snowdrifts piled up high. The winter dragged on: a real blizzard raged at Annunciation and snow fell at Easter.
However, winter finally drew to an end. At the beginning of April it was warm during the day and frosty at night – and still winter hadn’t surrendered. But one warm day did come along at last and it gained the upper hand. The streams flowed once more and the birds began to sing again. The entire meadow and the bushes near the river were submerged by the spring floods and between Zhukovo and the far side there was just one vast sheet of water with flocks of wild duck flying here and there. Every evening the fiery spring sunset and rich luxuriant clouds made an extraordinary, novel, incredible sight – such clouds and colours that you would hardly think possible seeing them later in a painting.
Cranes flashed past overhead calling plaintively, as though inviting someone to fly along with them. Olga stayed for a long while at the edge of the cliff watching the flood waters, the sun, the bright church which seemed to have taken on a new life, and tears poured down her face; a passionate longing to go somewhere far, far away, as far as the eyes could see, even to the very ends of the earth, made her gasp for breath. But they had already decided to send her back to Moscow as a chambermaid and Kiryak was going with her to work as a hall porter or at some job or other. Oh, if only they could go soon!
When everything had dried out and it was warm, they prepared for the journey. Olga and Sasha left at dawn, with rucksacks on their backs, and both of them wore bast shoes. Marya came out of the hut to see them off. Kiryak wasn’t well and had to stay on in the hut for another week. Olga gazed at the church for the last time and thought about her husband. She did not cry, but her face broke out in wrinkles and became ugly, like an old woman’s. During that winter she had grown thin, lost her good looks and gone a little grey. Already that pleasant appearance and agreeable smile had been replaced by a sad, submissive expression that betrayed the sorrow she had suffered and there was something blank and lifeless in her, as though she were deaf. She was sorry to leave the village and the people there. She remembered them carrying Nikolay’s body and asking for prayers to be said at each hut, and how everyone wept and felt for her in her sorrow. During the summer and winter months there were hours and days when these people appeared to live worse than cattle, and life with them was really terrible. They were coarse, dishonest, filthy, drunk, always quarrelling and arguing amongst themselves, with no respect for one another and living in mutual fear and suspicion. Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbour, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant. Yes, it was terrible living with these people; nevertheless, they were still human beings, suffering and weeping like other people and there was nothing in their lives which did not provide some excuse: killing work which made bodies ache all over at night, harsh winters, poor harvests, overcrowding, without any help and nowhere to find it. The richer and stronger cannot help, since they themselves are coarse, dishonest and drunk, using the same foul language. The most insignificant little clerk or official treats peasants like tramps, even talking down to elders and churchwardens, as though this is their right. And after all, could one expect help or a good example from the mercenary, greedy, dissolute, lazy people who come to the village now and then just to insult, fleece and intimidate the peasants? Olga recalled how pathetic and downtrodden the old people had looked when Kiryak was taken away for a flogging that winter… and now she felt sorry for all these people and kept glancing back at the huts as she walked away.
Marya went with them for about two miles and then she made her farewell, prostrating herself and wailing out loud, ‘Oh, I’m all alone again, a poor miserable wretch…’
For a long time she kept wailing, and for a long time afterwards Olga and Sasha could see her still kneeling there, bowing as though someone were next to her and clutching her head, while the rooks circled above.
The sun was high now and it was warm. Zhukovo lay far behind. It was very pleasant walking on a day like this. Olga and Sasha soon forgot both the village and Marya. They were in a gay mood and everything around was a source of interest. Perhaps it was an old burial mound, or a row of telegraph poles trailing away heaven knows where and disappearing over the horizon, with their wires humming mysteriously. Or they would catch a glimpse of a distant farmhouse, deep in foliage, with the smell of dampness and hemp wafting towards them and it seemed that happy people must live there. Or they would see a horse’s skeleton lying solitary and bleached in a field. Larks poured their song out untiringly, quails called to each other and the corncrake’s cry was just as though someone was tugging at an old iron latch.
By noon Olga and Sasha reached a large village. In its broad street they met that little old man who had been General Zhukov’s cook. He was feeling the heat and his sweaty red skull glinted in the sun. Olga and the cook did not recognize one another at first, but then they both turned round at once, realized who the other was and went their respective ways without a word. Olga stopped by the open windows of a hut which seemed newer and richer than the others, bowed and said in a loud, shrill singsong voice, ‘You good Christians, give us charity, for the sake of Christ, so that your kindness will bring the kingdom of heaven and lasting peace to your parents…’
‘Good Christians,’ Sasha chanted, ‘give us charity for Christ’s sake, so that your kindness, the kingdom of heaven…’
[The following two chapters have been taken from incomplete MSS fragments that have survived in draft form; see also note on pp. 332–3.]
X
Olga’s sister, Klavdiya Abramovna, lived in a narrow side-street near Patriarch’s Ponds,18 in a wooden, two-storey house. On the ground floor was a laundry and the entire upper floor was rented by an elderly spinster, a quiet and unassuming gentlewoman, who lived off the income from rooms she in turn rented out. When you went into the dark hall you would find two doors, one on the right, one on the left. One of them opened into the tiny room where Klavdiya Abramovna lived with Sasha; the other room was rented by a typesetter. Then there was a sitting-room, with couch, armchairs, a lamp with shade, pictures on the walls – all thoroughly proper, except that a smell of linen and steam came from the laundry and all day long one could hear singing from down below. The sitting-room, from which there was access to three flats, was used by all the tenants. In one of these flats lived the landlady, in another the old footman Ivan Makarych Matveyevich, a native of Zhukovo, who had found Nikolay a job. A large bar
n lock was suspended by rings on his white, well-thumbed door. Behind the third door lived a young, skinny, eagle-eyed, thick-lipped woman with three children who were constantly crying. On church holidays a monastery priest visited her; all day she normally went around in only a skirt, uncombed and unwashed, but when she was expecting her priest she would put on a nice silk dress and curl her hair.
In Klavdiya Abramovna’s little place there wasn’t room to swing a cat, as they say. There were a bed, chest of drawers, a chair – and nothing else – but still it was cramped. However, the room was kept neat and tidy, and Klavdiya Abramovna called it her ‘boudoir’. She was extremely pleased with her surroundings, particularly with the objects on her chest of drawers: mirror, powder, scent bottles, lipstick, tiny boxes, ceruse and every single luxury that she considered an essential accessory of her profession and on which she spent almost everything she earned. And there were also framed photographs in which she appeared in various poses. There was one of herself with her postman husband, with whom she lived just one year before leaving him, since she felt no vocation for family life. She was photographed, like most women of her sort, with a fringe curled like a lamb’s forelock, in military uniform with drawn sabre, and as a page astride a chair, which made her thighs, sheathed in woollen tights, lie flat over the chair like two fat boiled sausages. And there were male portraits – these she called her visitors and she couldn’t name all of them. Here our friend Kiryak made an appearance: he was photographed full height, in a black suit he had borrowed for the occasion.
Klavdiya Abramovna had been in the habit of going to masked balls and to Filippov’s19 and she spent entire evenings on Tversky Boulevard.20 As the years passed she gradually became a stay-at-home and now that she was forty-two she very rarely had visitors – there were just a few friends from earlier days who visited her for old time’s sake. They, alas, had aged too and visits became increasingly rare, because every year their number dwindled. The only new visitor was a very young man without a moustache. He would enter the hall quietly, sullenly – like a conspirator – with the collar of his school coat turned up, endeavouring to avoid being seen from the sitting-room. Later, when he left, he would place a rouble on the chest of drawers.
For days on end Klavdiya Abramovna would stay at home doing nothing. But in good weather she would sometimes stroll down the Little Bronny21 and Tversky, her head proudly held high, feeling that she was a solid and imposing lady. Only when she looked in at the chemist’s to ask in a whisper if they had any ointment for wrinkles or red hands did she show any sign of shame. In the evenings she would sit in her little room with the lamp unlit, waiting for someone to come. And between ten and eleven o’clock – this happened rarely, only once or twice a week – you could hear someone quietly going up or down stairs, rustling at the door as he looked for the bell. The door would open, a muttering would be heard and a stout, old, ugly and usually bald visitor would gingerly enter the hall and Klavdiya Abramovna would hurriedly take him to her room. She adored good visitors. For her there was no nobler or worthier being. To receive a good visitor, to treat him tactfully, to respect and please him, was a spiritual necessity, a duty, her happiness and pride. She was incapable of refusing a visitor or failing to make him welcome, even when fasting in preparation for Communion.
When she was back from the country Olga lodged Sasha with her for the time being, her mother supposing that while the girl was little she would not understand if she happened to see something bad. But now Sasha was thirteen and the time had really come to find alternative accommodation for her; but she and her aunt had grown attached to each other and now it was hard to separate them. In any event, there was nowhere to take Sasha to, since Olga herself was sheltering in the corridor of an establishment with furnished rooms, where she slept on some chairs. Sasha would spend the day with her mother, or out in the street, or downstairs in the laundry: she spent the nights on her aunt’s floor, between the bed and chest of drawers, and if a visitor came she would go and sleep in the entrance hall.
In the evenings she loved going to Ivan Makarych’s place of work and watching the dancing from the kitchen. There was always music and it was cheerful and noisy, with a tasty smell of food around the cook and washers-up. Grandpa Ivan Makarych would give her tea or ice-cream and pass her assorted titbits that he brought back into the kitchen on plates and dishes. One evening in late autumn, after returning from Ivan Makarych, she brought a little parcel containing a chicken leg, a piece of sturgeon and a slice of cake. Auntie was already in bed.
‘Auntie dear,’ Sasha said sadly. ‘I’ve brought you something to eat.’
They lit the lamp. Sitting up in bed, Klavdiya Abramovna started eating. Sasha looked at her curlers, which made her look dreadful, at her withered, aged shoulders. She looked long and sadly, as if she were seeing a sick woman; suddenly tears flowed down her cheeks.
‘Auntie dear,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘Auntie dear, this morning the laundry girls were saying that when you’re old you’ll end up begging in the streets and that you’ll die in hospital. It’s not true, Auntie, it’s not true,’ Sasha continued, sobbing now. ‘I won’t leave you, I’ll feed you, I won’t let you go into hospital.’
Klavdiya Abramovna’s chin quivered and tears shone in her eyes. But she immediately took hold of herself and with a stern look she told Sasha: ‘You shouldn’t listen to laundry girls!’
XI
In the ‘Lisbon’ furnished rooms the tenants were gradually quietening down. There was the smell of burning from extinguished lamps and the lanky attendant was already stretched out on some chairs in the corridor. Olga took off her white ribboned cap and her apron, covered her head with a kerchief and went off to see Sasha and Klavdiya Abramovna at Patriarch’s Ponds. Every day from morning to late evening she was busy working at the ‘Lisbon’ rooms and was rarely able to visit her family – and then only at night. Her work took up all her time, leaving her without a single free minute, so that since her return from the country she had not once gone to church.
She hurried to show Sasha the letter she had received from Marya in the village. In it there were only greetings – and complaints of poverty, of grief, and that the old folk were still alive and getting fed without doing any work. But for some reason these crooked lines, where every letter resembled a cripple, held a special, hidden charm and besides those greetings and complaints she also read of the warm clear days in the country now, of quiet fragrant evenings when you could hear the church clock striking the hour on the other side of the river. She could visualize the village cemetery where her husband lay. The green graves breathed peace and one envied the dead – such space, such open expanses! And the strange thing was, when they had lived in the country she had dearly wished to go to Moscow, but now it was the opposite and she longed for the country.
Olga woke Sasha. Alarmed and afraid that the whispers and light might disturb someone, she read her the letter twice. Then they both went down the dark, evil-smelling stairs and left the house. Through the wide open windows they could see the laundry girls ironing. Two girls were standing outside the gates, smoking. Olga and Sasha hurried down the street, discussing what a good idea it would be to save up two roubles and send them to the village: one for Marya and one to pay for memorial prayers over Nikolay’s grave.
‘Oh, I’ve had to put up with so much lately!’ Olga was saying, clasping her hands. ‘We’d only just started dinner, my sweet, when all of a sudden in comes Kiryak, like a bolt from the blue, drunk as a lord! “Give me some money, Olga!” he says. And he shouts and stamps his feet. “Give me some – now!” But where was I to get money from? I don’t get any wages, I just live on what nice gents give me – that’s all my wealth! But he wouldn’t listen: “Give me some!” The tenants look out of their rooms, the boss comes – it was real punishment – and the shame of it! I begged thirty copecks from the students and gave them to him. He left… All day long I’ve been walking around whispering: “Soften his h
eart, O Lord.” That’s what I’ve been whispering.’
It was quiet in the streets. Now and then a night cab drove past, and somewhere far off, most probably in the pleasure gardens, the band was still playing and you could hear the vague crackle of fireworks.
Man in a Case
Two men who had come back very late from a hunting expedition had to spend the night in a barn belonging to Prokofy, the village elder, at the edge of Mironositskoye. They were Ivan Ivanych, the vet, and Burkin, the schoolteacher. The vet had a rather strange double-barrelled surname – Chimsha-Gimalaysky – that did not suit him at all, and everyone simply called him Ivan Ivanych. He lived on a stud farm near the town and had come on the expedition just to get some fresh air, while Burkin, the teacher, regularly stayed every summer with a local count and his family, and knew the area very well.
They were still awake. Ivan Ivanych, who was tall and thin, with a long moustache, was sitting outside the door, smoking his pipe in the full light of the moon. Burkin was lying on the hay inside, invisible in the dark.
They were telling each other different stories and happened to remark on the fact that Mavra, the village elder’s wife, a healthy, intelligent woman, had never left her native village in her life, had never seen a town or a railway, had been sitting over her stove for the past ten years and would only venture out into the street at night.
‘And what’s so strange about that!’ Burkin said. ‘There’s so many of these solitary types around, like hermit crabs or snails, they are, always seeking safety in their shells. Perhaps it’s an example of atavism, a return to the times when our ancestors weren’t social animals and lived alone in their dens. Or perhaps it’s simply one of the many oddities of human nature – who knows? I’m not a scientist and that kind of thing’s not really my province. I only want to say that people like Mavra are not unusual. And you don’t have to look far for them – take a certain Belikov, for example, who died two months ago in my home town. He taught Greek at the same high school. Of course, you must have heard of him. His great claim to fame was going around in galoshes, carrying an umbrella even when it was terribly warm, and he invariably wore a thick, padded overcoat. He kept this umbrella in a holder and his watch in a grey chamois leather pouch. And the penknife he used for sharpening pencils had its own little case. His face seemed to have its own cover as well, as he always kept it hidden inside his upturned collar. He wore dark glasses, a jersey, stuffed his ears with cottonwool and always had the top up when he rode in a cab. Briefly, this man had a compulsive, persistent longing for self-encapsulation, to create a protective cocoon to isolate himself from all external influences. The real world irritated and frightened him and kept him in a constant state of nerves. Perhaps, by forever praising the past and what never even happened, he was trying to justify this timidity and horror of reality. The ancient languages he taught were essentially those galoshes and umbrella in another guise, a refuge from everyday existence.
The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904 Page 10