I sat down.
‘‘You live opposite us, I believe?’’ she said after some silence.
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘I watch out the window every day, from boredom, and, you must forgive me,’’ she went on, looking into the newspaper, ‘‘I often see you and your sister. She always has such a kind, concentrated expression.’’
Dolzhikov came in. He was wiping his neck with a towel.
‘‘Papa, Monsieur Poloznev,’’ said his daughter.
‘‘Yes, yes, Blagovo spoke to me,’’ he briskly turned to me without offering me his hand. ‘‘But listen, what can I give you? What sort of positions do I have? You’re strange people, gentlemen!’’ he went on loudly, and in such a tone as if he was reprimanding me. ‘‘Twenty men come to me every day, they imagine I’m running a department! I’m running a railway, gentlemen, it’s hard labor, I need mechanics, metal workers, excavators, carpenters, well diggers, and you all can only sit and write, nothing more! You’re all writers!’’
And the same happiness breathed on me from him as from his rugs and armchairs. Full-bodied, healthy, with red cheeks, a broad chest, well scrubbed, in a calico shirt and balloon trousers, like a toy china coachman. He had a rounded, curly little beard—and not a single gray hair—a slightly hooked nose, and dark, clear, innocent eyes.
‘‘What are you able to do?’’ he went on. ‘‘You’re not able to do anything! I’m an engineer, sir, I’m a well-to-do man, but before I got ahead, I worked hard for a long time, I was an engine driver, I worked for two years in Belgium as a simple oiler. Consider for yourself, my gentle one, what kind of work can I offer you?’’
‘‘Of course, that’s so...’ I murmured in great embarrassment, unable to bear his clear, innocent gaze.
‘‘Can you at least manage a telegraph machine?’’ he asked after a little thought.
‘‘Yes, I worked in a telegraph office.’’
‘Hm...Well, we’ll see. Go to Dubechnya, meanwhile. I’ve got a man sitting there already, but he’s terrible trash.’’
‘‘And what will my duties consist of?’ I asked.
‘‘We’ll see about that. Go, meanwhile, I’ll make the arrangements. Only please don’t start drinking, and don’t bother me with any requests. I’ll throw you out.’’
He walked away from me and didn’t even nod his head. I bowed to him and his daughter, who was reading the newspaper, and left. My heart was heavy, so much so that when my sister began asking how the engineer had received me, I couldn’t utter a single word.
In order to go to Dubechnya, I got up early in the morning, with the sunrise. There wasn’t a soul on our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, everybody was still asleep, and my footsteps sounded solitary and muffled. The poplars, covered with dew, filled the air with a delicate fragrance. I felt sad and did not want to leave town. I loved my native town. It seemed to me so beautiful and warm! I loved this greenery, the quiet, sunny mornings, the ringing of our bells; but the people I lived with in this town bored me, were alien and sometimes even repulsive to me. I didn’t love them and didn’t understand them.
I didn’t understand why and from what all these sixty-five thousand people lived. I knew that Kimry subsisted on boots, that Tula made samovars and guns, that Odessa was a seaport, but what our town was and what it did, I didn’t know. Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya and the two other proper streets lived on ready capital and on the salaries the officials received from the treasury; but how the remaining eight streets lived, which stretched parallel to each other for some two miles and disappeared beyond the horizon—that for me had always been an unfathomable enigma. And the way those people lived was shameful to tell about! No park, no theater, no decent orchestra; the town and club libraries were visited only by Jewish adolescents, so that magazines and new books lay uncut for months; rich and educated people slept in stuffy little bedrooms, on wooden beds with bedbugs, the children were kept in disgustingly dirty rooms known as nurseries, and the servants, even old and respected ones, slept on the kitchen floor and covered themselves with rags. On ordinary days, the houses smelled of borscht, and on fast days, of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. The food was not tasty, the water was not good to drink. In the duma,6 at the governor’s, at the bishop’s, in houses everywhere, there had been talk for many years about the fact that our town had no good and cheap water, and that it was necessary to borrow two hundred thousand from the treasury for a water system; very rich people, who numbered up to three dozen in our town, and who chanced to lose entire estates at cards, also drank the bad water and all their lives talked passionately about the loan—and I didn’t understand that; it seemed simpler to me to take the two hundred thousand from their own pockets.
I didn’t know a single honest man in the whole town. My father took bribes and imagined they were given him out of respect for his inner qualities; high school students, in order to pass from grade to grade, boarded with their teachers and paid them big money for it; the wife of the army administrator took bribes from the recruits at call-up time and even let them offer her treats, and once in church was unable to get up from her knees because she was so drunk; the doctors also took bribes during recruitment, and the town physician and the veterinarian levied a tax on the butcher shops and taverns; the district school traded in certificates that provided the benefits of the third category; the dean of the cathedral took bribes from the clergy and church wardens; on the municipal, the tradesmen’s, the medical, and all other boards, they shouted at each petitioner’s back: ‘‘You should say thank you!’’ and the petitioner would come back and give thirty or forty kopecks. And those who didn’t take bribes—for instance, the court administration—were haughty, offered you two fingers to shake, were distinguished by the coldness and narrowness of their judgments, played cards a lot, drank a lot, married rich women, and undoubtedly had a harmful, corrupting influence on their milieu. Only from the young girls came a whiff of moral purity; most of them had lofty yearnings, honest and pure souls; but they didn’t understand life and believed that bribes were given out of respect for inner qualities, and, after marrying, aged quickly, went to seed, and drowned hopelessly in the mire of banal, philistine existence.
III
A RAILWAY WAS being constructed in our parts. On the eves of feast days, the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins who were known as ‘‘railboys’’ and were feared. Not seldom did I happen to see a ragamuffin, hatless, with a bloodied physiognomy, being taken to the police station; and carried behind him, as material evidence, a samovar or some recently washed, still-wet laundry. The ‘‘railboys’’ usually crowded around the pot-houses and markets; they drank, ate, used bad language, and sent a shrill whistle after every woman of light behavior who passed by. Our shopkeepers, to amuse this hungry riffraff, got dogs and cats to drink vodka, or would tie an empty kerosene can to a dog’s tail, give a whistle, and the dog would race down the street squealing with terror, the tin can clanking behind it; believing some monster was chasing at its heels, it would run far out of town, into the fields, till it was exhausted; and we had several dogs in town who trembled constantly, tails between their legs, of whom it was said that they were unable to endure such amusements and lost their minds.
The station was being built three miles from town. It was said that the engineers had asked for a bribe of fifty thousand to have the railway come right to town, but the town administration had agreed to give only forty, a difference of ten thousand, and now the townspeople regretted it, because they had to build a road to the station, for which the estimate was higher. The ties and rails were already laid the whole length of the line, and service trains were running, bringing building materials and workers, and the only holdup was the bridges, which Dolzhikov was building, and here and there a station wasn’t ready yet.
Dubechnya—so our first station was called—was some ten miles from town. I went on foot. The winter and spring crops were bright green, caught by the morning sunlight. The area was level, cheer
ful, and the station, the barrows, and some remote estates were clearly outlined in the distance... How good it was here at liberty! And how I wanted to be filled with the awareness of freedom, at least for this one morning, and not think of what was going on in town, not think of my needs, not want to eat! Nothing so prevented me from living as the acute sense of hunger, when my best thoughts were strangely mingled with thoughts of buckwheat kasha, meat cakes, fried fish. Here I am standing alone in the field and looking up at a lark, which is hanging in one place in the air and pouring itself out as if in hysterics, and I’m thinking: ‘‘It would be good now to have some bread and butter!’’ Or here I am sitting down by the roadside and closing my eyes to rest, to listen to this wonderful Maytime clamor, and I recall the smell of hot potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I generally had little to eat, and therefore my main feeling in the course of a day was hunger, and that may have been why I understood perfectly well why so many people worked only for a crust of bread and could talk only about grub.
In Dubechnya they were plastering the inside of the station and building a wooden upper story to the pump house. It was hot, there was a smell of lime, and workers wandered sluggishly over heaps of shavings and rubbish; the switchman was asleep by his booth, and the sun burned down directly on his face. Not a single tree. The telegraph wires hummed faintly, and hawks rested on them here and there. Wandering over the same heaps, not knowing what to do, I remembered how the engineer, to my question of what my duties would be, had answered: ‘‘We’ll see.’’ But what could one see in this desert? The plasterers were talking about the foreman and about some Fedot Vassiliev, I didn’t understand, and anguish gradually came over me—physical anguish, when you feel your arms and legs and your whole big body and don’t know what to do with them or where to take yourself.
After wandering around for at least two hours, I noticed that there were telegraph poles going from the station somewhere to the right of the line, which ended after a mile or a mile and a half at a white stone wall; the workers said the office was there, and I finally realized that that was precisely where I had to go.
It was an old, long-neglected estate. The wall of porous white stone was weathered and had fallen down in places, and the roof on the wing, whose blank wall looked into the fields, was rusty, and tin patches shone on it here and there. Through the gate, you could see a spacious yard overgrown with tall weeds, and an old master’s house with jalousies on the windows and a high roof red-brown with rust. At the sides of the house, to right and left, stood two identical wings; one had its windows boarded up; near the other, whose windows were open, laundry hung on a line, and calves were walking around. The last telegraph pole stood in the yard, and its wire went to the window of the wing whose blank wall looked onto the fields. The door was open, and I went in. At a table by a telegraph machine sat some gentleman with dark curly hair, in a canvas jacket; he looked at me sternly from under his brows but smiled at once and said:
‘‘Greetings, Small Profit!’’
This was Ivan Cheprakov, my schoolmate, who had been expelled from the second class for smoking tobacco. In the autumn he and I used to catch siskins, finches, and grosbeaks and sell them at the market early in the morning, while our parents were still asleep. We lay in wait for flocks of migratory starlings and shot them with birdshot, then gathered up the wounded, and some of them died on us in awful torment (I still remember them moaning at night in the cage I had), but others recovered and we sold them, brazenly swearing to God that they were all males. Once, at the market, I had only one starling left, which I kept offering to buyers and finally let go for a kopeck. ‘‘Still, it’s a small profit!’’ I said to console myself, pocketing the kopeck, and after that the street urchins and schoolboys nicknamed me ‘‘Small Profit’’; and even now the street urchins and shopkeepers tease me with it, though no one but me remembers any longer where the nickname came from.
Cheprakov was not strongly built: narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, long-legged. A string tie, no waistcoat at all, and boots worse than mine—with crooked heels. He rarely blinked and had a look of urgency, as if he was about to grab something, and was always in a flurry.
‘‘But wait,’’ he said in a flurry. ‘‘No, listen here!... What was it I was just saying?’’
We got to talking. I found out that the estate we were then on had belonged still recently to the Cheprakovs and had passed only last autumn to the engineer Dolzhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than in securities, and had already bought three considerable estates in our region, with a transfer of mortgages; at the time of the sale, Cheprakov’s mother had negotiated for herself the right to live in one of the wings for another two years and had managed to obtain for her son a position in the office.
‘‘How can he not go buying up?’’ Cheprakov said of the engineer. ‘‘He fleeces the contractors alone for that much! He fleeces everybody!’’
Then he took me to dinner, having decided in a flurry that I would live in the wing with him and board with his mother.
‘‘She’s a niggard,’’ he said, ‘‘but she won’t take much from you.’’
In the small rooms where his mother lived, it was very crowded; all of them, even the entry and the front room, were cluttered with furniture, which, after the sale of the estate, had been brought there from the big house; and it was all old mahogany furniture. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout, elderly lady with slanted Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big armchair by the window and knitting a stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
‘‘This is Poloznev, mama,’’ Cheprakov introduced me. ‘‘He’ll be working here.’’
‘‘Are you a nobleman?’’ she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice; it seemed to me as if fat was gurgling in her throat.
‘‘Yes,’’ I said.
‘‘Be seated.’’
The dinner was bad. All that was served was a pie with rancid cottage cheese and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, the hostess, blinked somehow strangely, now with one eye, now with the other. She talked, ate, but there was something already dead in her whole figure, and it was as if you could even sense the smell of a corpse. There was barely a glimmer of life in her, along with a glimmer of awareness that she was a landowner who had once had her own serfs, that she was a general’s widow whom the servants were obliged to call ‘‘Your Excellency’’; and when these pathetic remnants of life lit up in her for a moment, she would say to her son:
‘‘Jean, you’re holding your knife the wrong way!’’
Or else she would tell me, breathing heavily, with the mincing manner of a hostess wishing to entertain a guest:
‘‘And we, you know, have sold our estate. Of course, it’s a pity, we’re used to it here, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean the stationmaster of Dubechnya, so we won’t be leaving the place, we’ll live here at the station, and it’s the same as on the estate. The engineer is so kind! Don’t you find him very handsome?’’
Still recently the Cherpakovs lived a wealthy life, but after the general’s death, everything changed. Elena Nikiforovna started quarreling with the neighbors, went to court, paid less than she owed to her stewards and hired hands, kept fearing she would be robbed—and in some ten years, Dubechnya became unrecognizable.
Behind the big house was an old garden, grown wild, stifled with tall weeds and bushes. I strolled about the terrace, still strong and beautiful; through the glass door, a room with a parquet floor could be seen, probably the drawing room; an old piano, and on the walls, etchings in wide mahogany frames—and nothing more. All that was left of the former flowerbeds were peonies and poppies that lifted their white and scarlet heads from the grass; on the pathways, stretching themselves out, hindering each other, grew young maples and elms, already plucked by the cows. The growth was thick, and the garden looked impenetrable, but that was only near the house, where poplars, pines, and old lindens, all of an age, survivors from the former alleys, still stood, but further
behind them the garden had been cleared for hayfields, and here it was no longer so close, the cobwebs did not get into your eyes and mouth, a breeze blew; the further on, the more spacious it became, and here cherries, plums, and spreading apple trees grew in abandon, disfigured by props and canker, and pear trees so tall it was even hard to believe they were pear trees. This part of the garden was rented by our town marketwomen and was guarded from thieves and starlings by a peasant simpleton who lived in a brush hut.
The garden, growing ever sparser, turned into a real meadow, descending to the river, where green bulrushes and willows grew; by the dam there was a pool, deep and full of fish, a small mill with a thatched roof made an angry clamor, frogs croaked furiously. From time to time, the water, smooth as a mirror, would be covered with rings, and the water lilies would shake, disturbed by playful fish. On the other side of the river was the small village of Dubechnya. The quiet blue pool enticed you, promising coolness and peace. And now all of it—the pool, and the mill, and the cozy-looking banks—belonged to the engineer!
And so my new work began. I received telegrams and sent them further on, kept various records, and made clean copies of the requests, claims, and reports sent to our office by illiterate foremen and workmen. But the greater part of the day I did nothing but walk around the room waiting for telegrams, or I’d get a boy to sit there and go to the garden myself, and stroll until the boy came running to tell me the telegraph was tapping. I ate dinners with Mrs. Cheprakov. Meat was served very rarely, the dishes were all from dairy products, but on Wednesdays and Fridays they were lenten, and on those days pink plates, which were known as lenten plates, were set out on the table. Mrs. Cheprakov blinked constantly—such was her habit—and I felt ill at ease each time I was in her presence.
Since there was not enough work in the wing even for one person, Cheprakov did nothing but sleep or go to the pool with a gun to shoot ducks. In the evenings he would get drunk in the village or at the station and, before going to bed, would look in the mirror and shout:
The Complete Short Novels Page 47