She understood and believed me—that I could see from her sudden pallor and the way she abruptly crossed her hands on her breast with fear and entreaty. In a moment, her recent past flashed through her memory, she put things together and saw the whole truth with implacable clarity. But at the same time, she remembered that I was a servant, an inferior being... A rascal with tousled hair, with a face red from fever, maybe drunk, in some sort of banal coat, had rudely interfered in her private life, and that offended her. She said to me sternly:
‘‘Nobody’s asking you. Get out of here.’’
‘‘Oh, believe me!’’ I said impulsively, holding my arms out to her. ‘‘I’m not a servant, I’m as much a free person as you are!’’
I gave my name and quickly, quickly, so that she wouldn’t interrupt me or go to her room, explained who I was and why I was living there. This new discovery struck her more strongly than the first one. Earlier, she still had a hope that the servant was lying or mistaken, or had said something stupid, while now, after my confession, she had no doubts left. By the expression of her unhappy eyes and face, which suddenly became unattractive, because it turned old and lost its softness, I saw that it was unbearably painful for her and that nothing good could come of this conversation. Yet I went on impulsively:
‘‘The senator and the inspection were invented to deceive you. In January, just as now, he didn’t go anywhere, but lived at Pekarsky’s, and I saw him every day and participated in the deception. You were a burden, your presence here was hateful, you were laughed at... If you could have heard how he and his friends here scoffed at you and your love, you wouldn’t have stayed here even one minute! Flee this place! Flee!’’
‘‘Well, so what?’’ she said in a trembling voice and passed her hand over her hair. ‘‘Well, so what? Let it be.’’
Her eyes were filled with tears, her lips trembled, and her whole face was strikingly pale and breathed wrath. Orlov’s crude, petty lie made her indignant and seemed despicable and ridiculous to her; she was smiling, and I didn’t like this smile of hers.
‘‘Well, so what?’’ she repeated and again passed her hand over her hair. ‘‘Let it be. He imagines I’d die of humiliation, but I find it . . . funny. He needn’t be hiding.’’ She stepped away from the piano and said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘‘He needn’t . . . It would be simpler to have a talk than to hide and knock about in other people’s apartments. I have eyes, I saw it long ago...and was only waiting for him to come back to have a final talk.’’
Then she sat in the armchair by the table and, lowering her head onto the armrest of the sofa, wept bitterly. Only one candle was burning in a candelabra in the drawing room, and it was dark around the armchair where she sat, but I saw how her head and shoulders shook and her hair, coming undone, covered her neck, face, hands... In her quiet, regular weeping, not hysterical, but ordinary woman’s weeping, one could hear insult, humiliated pride, offense, and something irreparable, hopeless, which it was impossible to set right and to which it was impossible to become accustomed. In my agitated, suffering soul, her weeping found an echo; I forgot about my illness and about everything in the world, paced about the drawing room, and muttered perplexedly:
‘‘What sort of life is this? . . . Oh, it’s impossible to live this way! Impossible! It’s madness, crime, not life!’’
‘‘What humiliation!’’ she said through her tears. ‘‘To live together... to smile at me, and all the while I’m a burden to him, laughable . . . Oh, what humiliation!’’
She raised her head and, looking at me with tearful eyes through her hair, wet with tears, and straightening a strand of hair that kept her from seeing me, asked:
‘‘Did they laugh?’’
‘‘These people made fun of you, and of your love, and of Turgenev, whom you have supposedly read too much of. And if we both die of despair right now, they’ll also make fun of that. They’ll make a funny story out of it and tell it at your panikhida. Why talk about them?’’ I said with impatience. ‘‘We must flee this place. I can’t stay here a minute longer.’’
She started weeping again, and I stepped towards the piano and sat down.
‘‘What are we waiting for?’’ I asked dejectedly. ‘‘It’s past two o’clock.’’
‘‘I’m not waiting for anything,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m lost.’’
‘‘Why say that? Better let’s think over together what we’re going to do. Neither you nor I can stay here now . . . Where do you intend to go from here?’’
Suddenly the bell rang in the front hall. My heart skipped a beat. Might it not be Orlov, to whom Kukushkin had complained about me? How would we meet? I went to open the door. It was Polya. She came in, shook the snow off her cape in the front hall, and, without saying a word to me, went to her room. When I returned to the drawing room, Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale as a corpse, was standing in the middle of the room and looked at me with big eyes as I came in.
‘‘Who came?’’ she asked softly.
‘‘Polya,’’ I replied.
She ran her hand over her hair and closed her eyes in exhaustion.
‘‘I’ll leave here at once,’’ she said. ‘‘Be so kind as to take me to the Petersburg side. What time is it now?’’
‘‘A quarter to three.’’
XIV
WHEN WE LEFT the house a little later, the street was dark and deserted. Wet snow was falling, and a damp wind lashed at our faces. I remember it was then the beginning of March, there was a thaw, and for several days the cabs had been driving on wheels. Under the impression of the back stairway, the cold, the darkness of night, and the caretaker in a sheepskin coat, who questioned us before letting us out the gate, Zinaida Fyodorovna became quite faint and dispirited. When we got into the cab and put the top up, she was shivering all over and hastily began telling me how grateful she was to me.
‘‘I don’t doubt your good will, but I’m ashamed that you’re troubling yourself . . .’’ she murmured. ‘‘Oh, I understand, I understand... When Gruzin visited today, I felt he was lying and concealing something. Well, so what? Let it be. But even so, I’m ashamed that you’re going to such trouble.’’
She still had some lingering doubts. To disperse them definitively, I told the cabby to drive down Sergievskaya. Stopping by Pekarsky’s porch, I got out of the cab and rang the bell. When the porter came out, I asked loudly, so that Zinaida Fyodorovna could hear, whether Georgiy Ivanych was at home.
‘‘He’s at home,’’ the porter replied. ‘‘He came about half an hour ago. He must be asleep now. What do you want?’’
Zinaida Fyodorovna couldn’t help herself and stuck her head out of the cab.
‘‘Has Georgiy Ivanovich been living here long?’’ she asked.
‘‘It’s the third week now.’’
‘‘And he never went away anywhere?’’
‘‘No,’’ the porter replied and looked at me in surprise.
‘‘Tell him tomorrow early,’’ I said, ‘‘that his sister from Warsaw has come to see him. Good-bye.’’
Then we drove on. The cab had no front flap, the snow poured on us in big flakes, and the wind, especially on the Neva, pierced us to the bone. It began to seem to me that we had been driving for a long time, suffering for a long time, that I had been listening to Zinaida Fyodorovna’s quavering breath for a long time. Fleetingly, in some sort of half-delirium, as if falling asleep, I looked back over my strange, senseless life, and for some reason I remembered the melodrama The Beggars of Paris, which I had seen twice in my childhood. And for some reason, when, in order to shake off this half-delirium, I peeked from under the top and saw the dawn, all the images of the past, all the dim thoughts, suddenly merged in me into one clear, strong thought: Zinaida Fyodorovna and I were now lost irretrievably. This was a certainty, as if the cold blue sky contained a prophecy, but a moment later I was already thinking something else and believing something else.
‘‘What am I now?’’ Zinaida Fyodorov
na was saying in a voice husky from the cold and damp. ‘‘Where am I to go? What am I to do? Gruzin said: go to a convent. Oh, I would go! I’d change my clothes, my face, name, thoughts... everything, everything, and hide myself forever. But they won’t let me into a convent. I’m pregnant.’’
‘‘Tomorrow you and I will go abroad,’’ I said.
‘‘That’s impossible. My husband won’t give me a passport.’’
‘‘I’ll get you there without a passport.’’
The cab stopped by a two-story wooden house painted a dark color. I rang. Taking from me a light little basket—the only baggage we had brought with us—Zinaida Fyodorovna smiled somehow sourly and said:
‘‘These are my bijoux . . .’’
But she was so weak that she was unable to hold these bijoux. They didn’t open the door for a long time. After the third or fourth ring, light flashed in the windows, and footsteps, coughing, and whispering were heard; at last the lock clicked and a fat woman with a red, frightened face appeared in the doorway. Behind her, at some distance, stood a small, thin old lady with short gray hair, in a white chemise, and with a candle in her hand. Zinaida Fyodorovna rushed into the front hall and threw herself on this old lady’s neck.
‘‘Nina, I’ve been deceived!’’ she sobbed loudly. ‘‘I’ve been crudely, vilely deceived! Nina! Nina!’’
I handed the basket to the woman. The door was locked again, but I could still hear sobbing and the cry: ‘‘Nina!’’ I got into the cab and told the cabby to drive unhurriedly to Nevsky Prospect. I had to think about where to spend the night.
The next day, before evening, I was at Zinaida Fyodorovna’s. She was much changed. Her pale face, now grown very thin, showed no trace of tears, and its expression was different. I don’t know whether it was because I now saw her in different, far from luxurious surroundings, or because our relations were altered, or maybe strong grief had already left its mark on her, but now she did not appear so graceful and well dressed as always; her figure seemed to have become smaller; in her movements, in her gait, in her face, I noticed an unnecessary nervousness, an impulsiveness, as if she was in a hurry, and there was not even the former softness in her smile. I was now dressed in an expensive two-piece suit, which I had bought in the afternoon. Her eyes first took in this two-piece suit and the hat in my hand, then she rested her impatient, searching gaze on my face, as if studying it.
‘‘Your transformation still seems some sort of miracle to me,’’ she said. ‘‘Excuse me for studying you with such curiosity. You really are an extraordinary man.’’
I told her once again who I was and why I had been living at Orlov’s, and I spoke longer and in more detail than the evening before. She listened with great attention and, without letting me finish, said:
‘‘It’s all over for me there. You know, I couldn’t restrain myself and wrote a letter. Here’s the reply.’’
On the sheet of paper she handed me, there was written in Orlov’s hand: ‘‘I will not justify myself. But you must agree: it was you who were mistaken, not I. I wish you happiness and ask you to quickly forget your respectful G.O. —P.S. I am sending your belongings.’’
The trunks and baskets, sent by Orlov, were standing there in the living room, and among them was my pitiful little suitcase as well.
‘‘Which means . . .’’ said Zinaida Fyodorovna and did not finish.
We were silent for a while. She took the note and for a minute or two held it before her eyes, and at that moment her face took on the same haughty, scornful, and proud, hard expression it had had the day before at the beginning of our talk; tears welled up in her eyes, not timid, not bitter, but proud, angry tears.
‘‘Listen,’’ she said, getting up impulsively and going to the window, so that I couldn’t see her face. ‘‘I’ve decided like this: tomorrow I’ll go abroad with you.’’
‘‘That’s splendid. I’m even ready to go today.’’
‘‘Recruit me. Have you read Balzac?’’ she asked suddenly, turning around. ‘‘Have you? His novel Père Goriot24 ends with the hero looking at Paris from the top of a hill and threatening the city: ‘Now we’ll have it out!’ And after that a new life begins. So, too, when I look at Petersburg for the last time from the train, I’ll say to it: ‘Now we’ll have it out!’ ’’
And having said that, she smiled at her joke and, for some reason, shuddered all over.
XV
IN VENICE I began to have pleuritic pains. I had probably caught a cold the evening we went by boat from the train station to the Hotel Bauer. From the first day, I had to take to my bed and stayed in it for about two weeks. Every morning while I was ill, Zinaida Fyodorovna came to me from her room so that we could have coffee together, and then she read aloud to me from French and Russian books, of which we had bought many in Vienna. I had been long familiar with those books or was not interested in them, but beside me was the sound of a dear, kind voice, so that the contents of them all came down to one thing for me: I was not lonely. She would go for a walk, come back in her pale gray dress, in her light straw hat, cheerful, warmed by the spring sun, and, sitting at my bedside, bending low towards my face, would tell me something about Venice or read those books—and I felt good.
At night I was cold, bored, and in pain, but by day I reveled in life—I can’t think of a better expression. The bright, hot sun beating in through the open windows and the balcony door, the shouts below, the splashing of oars, the ringing of bells, the rolling thunder of the cannon at noon, and the feeling of total, total freedom worked miracles with me; I felt strong wide wings at my sides, which carried me God knows where. And what enchantment, how much joy sometimes at the thought that next to my life now went another life, that I was the servant, the guardian, the friend, the needed companion of a beautiful and rich but weak, insulted, lonely young being! It is even pleasant to be ill when you know there are people who wait for your recovery as for a feast. Once I heard her and my doctor whispering outside the door, and then she came into my room with tearful eyes—a bad sign—but I was moved and felt extraordinarily light in my soul.
But now I was allowed to go out on the balcony. The sun and the light breeze from the sea pamper and caress my ailing body. I look down on the long-familiar gondolas, which float with feminine grace, smoothly and majestically, as if they are alive and feel all the luxury of this original, charming culture. There is a smell of the sea. Somewhere a stringed instrument is being played and two voices are singing. How good! How unlike that Petersburg night when wet snow was falling and lashing my face so rudely! Now, if you look directly across the channel, you can see the seashore, and over the vastness of the horizon, the sun ripples so brightly on the water that it hurts to look. My soul is drawn there, to the dear, good sea to which I gave my youth. I want to live! To live—and nothing more!
In two weeks I began going wherever I wanted. I liked to sit in the sun, to listen to a gondolier without understanding, and to spend whole hours looking at the little house where they say Desdemona lived—a naïve, sad little house with a virginal expression, light as lace, so light that it seems you could move it from its spot with one hand. I would stand for a long time by the tomb of Canova,25 not tearing my eyes from the mournful lion. And in the Doges’ Palace, I was always drawn to the corner where the unfortunate Marino Faliero26 was daubed over with black paint. It’s good to be an artist, a poet, a playwright, I thought, but if that’s inaccessible to me, I could at least throw myself into mysticism! Ah, if only there was a bit of some sort of faith to add to this untroubled peace and satisfaction that fills my soul.
In the evenings we ate oysters, drank wine, went for boat rides. I remember our black gondola quietly rocking in one spot, the water splashing barely audibly under it. Here and there, reflections of the stars and coastal lights tremble and sway. Not far from us, in a gondola hung with colorful lanterns, which are reflected in the water, some people are sitting and singing. The sounds of guitars, violins, mandolins, m
ale and female voices ring out in the darkness, and Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale, with a serious, almost stern face, sits beside me, tightly clenching her lips and hands. She’s thinking about something, and won’t even stir an eyebrow, and doesn’t hear me. Her face, her posture, her immobile gaze, expressive of nothing, and her memories—unbelievably dismal, eerie, cold as snow—and around us gondolas, lights, music, the song with its energetic, passionate cry: ‘‘Jam-mo!... Jam-mo! . . .’’ What contrasts of life! When she sat that way, with her hands clenched, stony, grief-stricken, I imagined both of us participating in some novel in the old-fashioned taste, entitled An Ill-fated Woman, An Abandoned Woman, or something of the sort. Both of us: she ill-fated, abandoned, and I a true, faithful friend, a dreamer, and, if you like, a superfluous man,27 a luckless fellow, incapable of anything but coughing and dreaming, and maybe also of sacrificing himself... but to whom and for what are my sacrifices needed now? And what am I to sacrifice, may I ask?
Each time, after the evening promenade, we drank tea in her room and talked. We weren’t afraid of touching old, stillunhealed wounds—on the contrary, for some reason, I even felt pleasure when I told her about my life at Orlov’s or openly referred to relations that were known to me and could not have been concealed from me.
‘‘There were moments when I hated you,’’ I said. ‘‘When he fussed, condescended, and lied, it struck me how it could be that you didn’t see anything, didn’t understand, when everything was so clear. You kiss his hands, go on your knees, flatter...’’
‘‘When I ... kissed his hands and went on my knees, I loved him . . .’’ she said, blushing.
‘‘Could it have been so hard to see through him? A fine sphinx he is! A kammerjunker sphinx! I’m not reproaching you for anything, God forbid!’’ I went on, feeling that I had been a bit crude, that I lacked worldliness and that delicacy which was so necessary when dealing with another person’s soul; before I met her, I had never noticed this shortcoming in myself. ‘‘But how could you not have guessed?’’ I repeated, more softly now and with less assurance.
The Complete Short Novels Page 33