‘‘He-e-elp!’’
‘‘Who’s there?’’ I called.
Two men were fighting. One was pushing the other out, but the other was resisting, and both were breathing heavily.
‘‘Let go!’’ said one, and I recognized Ivan Cheprakov; it was he who had cried in a shrill woman’s voice. ‘‘Let go, curse you, or I’ll bite your hands all over!’’
I recognized the other as Moisei. I pulled them apart and, with that, couldn’t help myself and hit Moisei twice in the face. He fell down, then got up, and I hit him once more.
‘‘He wanted to kill me,’’ he muttered. ‘‘He was getting at mother’s chest... I wish to lock him up in the wing for safety’s sake, sir...’
Cheprakov was drunk, didn’t recognize me, and kept taking deep breaths, as if gathering air in order to cry ‘‘help’’ again.
I left them and went back to the house; my wife was lying in bed, already dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard and did not even conceal that I had struck Moisei.
‘‘It’s frightening to live in the country,’’ she said. ‘‘And God in heaven, what a long night!’’
‘‘He-e-elp!’’ the cry came again a little later.
‘‘I’ll go and calm them down,’’ I said.
‘‘No, let them bite each other’s throats there,’’ she said with a squeamish air.
She was staring at the ceiling and listening, and I was sitting nearby, not daring to start talking with her, feeling as if it was my fault that they were shouting ‘‘help’’ in the yard and that the night was so long.
We were silent, and I waited impatiently for a glow of light in the windows. But Masha looked all the while as if she had just recovered consciousness and was surprised at how it was that she, so intelligent, educated, so neat, could have wound up in this pitiful provincial wasteland, in a gang of petty, worthless people, and how she could have forgotten herself so far that she had even been captivated by one of those people and, for over six months, had been his wife. It seemed to me that it now made no difference to her whether it was me, or Moisei, or Cheprakov; everything had merged for her into this wild, drunken ‘‘help’’—me, and our marriage, and our farming, and the bad autumn roads; and whenever she sighed or stirred in order to lie more comfortably, I read in her face: ‘‘Oh, if only morning would come sooner!’’
In the morning she left.
I stayed in Dubechnya for three more days, waiting for her, then put all our things in one room, locked it, and went to town. When I rang at the engineer’s, it was already evening, and the streetlamps were lit along our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya. Pavel told me there was nobody home: Viktor Ivanych had left for Petersburg, and Marya Viktorovna was most likely rehearsing at the Azhogins’. I remember with what agitation I went to the Azhogins’, how my heart pounded and sank as I went up the stairs and stood for a long time on the upper landing, not daring to enter that temple of the muses! In the reception room, candles were burning on the little table, the grand piano, and the stage, three of them everywhere, and the first performance had been set for the thirteenth, and now the first rehearsal was on a Monday—a black day. The struggle against superstition! All the amateurs of the scenic art were gathered; the eldest, the middle, and the youngest walked about onstage, reading their roles from notebooks. Apart from them all, Radish stood motionless, his temple leaning against the wall, and gazed at the stage with adoration, waiting for the rehearsal to begin. Everything as it used to be!
I made for the hostess—I had to greet her, but suddenly everyone hissed and waved at me not to stamp my feet. Silence fell. The lid of the grand piano was opened, some lady sat down, narrowing her nearsighted eyes at the score, and my Masha went to the piano, decked out, beautiful, but beautiful in some special new way, not at all like the Masha who used to come to me at the mill in the spring. She began to sing:
‘‘Why do I love thee, radiant night?’’25
In all the period of our acquaintance, this was the first time I had heard her sing. She had a good, strong, juicy voice, and it seemed to me while she sang that I was eating a ripe, sweet, fragrant melon. Then she finished, there was applause, and she smiled, very pleased, flashing her eyes, leafing through the scores, straightening her dress like a bird that has escaped its cage at last and preens its feathers in freedom. Her hair was brushed over her ears, and her face had an unpleasant, defiant expression, as if she wanted to challenge us all, or yell at us as at horses: ‘‘Hey, you, my pretty ones!’’
And just then she must have resembled her grandfather the coachman.
‘‘You here, too?’’ she asked, giving me her hand. ‘‘Did you hear me sing? Well, how did you find it?’’ And, not waiting for my reply, she went on: ‘‘It’s very opportune that you’re here. Tonight I’m going to Petersburg for a short time. Will you let me go?’’
At midnight I saw her to the station. She embraced me tenderly, probably grateful that I hadn’t asked her any unnecessary questions, and promised to write to me, and I pressed her hands for a long time and kissed them, barely holding back the tears, not saying a word to her.
And when she was gone, I stood watching the receding lights, caressing her in my imagination, and saying softly:
‘‘My dear Masha, splendid Masha...’
I spent the night in Makarikha at Karpovna’s, and the next morning was already back with Radish, upholstering furniture for some wealthy merchant who was marrying his daughter to a doctor.
XVII
ON SUNDAY AFTER dinner my sister came to see me and we had tea.
‘‘I read a lot now,’’ she said, showing me a book she had taken from the town library on the way to see me. ‘‘Thanks to your wife and Vladimir for awakening my self-awareness. They saved me, they made it so that I now feel myself a human being. Before, I used not to sleep at night from various worries: ‘Ah, we’ve used too much sugar this week! Ah, if only I don’t oversalt the pickles!’ And now I also don’t sleep, but I have different thoughts. I suffer that half of my life has been spent so stupidly, so faintheartedly. I despise my past, I’m ashamed of it, and I look at father now as my enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to your wife! And Vladimir? He’s such a wonderful man! They’ve opened my eyes.’’
‘‘It’s not good that you don’t sleep at night,’’ I said.
‘‘You think I’m sick? Not a bit. Vladimir auscultated me and said I’m perfectly healthy. But health is not the point, it’s not so important... Tell me: am I right?’’
She was in need of moral support—that was obvious. Masha was gone, Dr. Blagovo was in Petersburg, and besides me there was no one left in town who could tell her she was right. She peered intently into my face, trying to read my secret thoughts, and if I became pensive in her presence and was silent, she took it to her account and grew sad. I had to be on my guard all the time, and when she asked me if she was right, I hastened to reply that she was right and that I deeply respected her.
‘‘You know? They’ve given me a role at the Azhogins’,’’ she went on. ‘‘I want to act on the stage. I want to live; in short, I want to drink from the full cup. I have no talent at all, and the role’s only ten lines long, but that’s still immeasurably more lofty and noble than pouring tea five times a day and keeping an eye on the cook lest she eat an extra bite. And above all, let father see, finally, that I, too, am capable of protest.’’
After tea she lay down on my bed and went on lying there for some time with her eyes closed, very pale.
‘‘Such weakness!’’ she said, getting up. ‘‘Vladimir said that all town women and girls are anemic from idleness. What an intelligent man Vladimir is! He’s right, infinitely right. One must work!’’
Two days later she came to the rehearsal at the Azhogins’ with a notebook. She was wearing a black dress with a string of corals around her neck, a brooch that, from a distance, looked like a puff pastry, and big earrings in her ears, with a diamond sparkling in each of them. When I looked at her, I felt
awkward: the tastelessness struck me. Others, too, noticed that she was wearing earrings and diamonds inappropriately and was strangely dressed; I saw smiling faces and heard someone say laughingly:
‘‘Cleopatra of Egypt.’’
She tried to be worldly, unconstrained, at ease, and that made her look affected and strange. Her simplicity and comeliness abandoned her.
‘‘I just announced to father that I was going to a rehearsal,’’ she began, coming up to me, ‘‘and he shouted that he was depriving me of his blessing and even all but struck me. Imagine, I don’t know my role,’’ she said, looking into her notebook. ‘‘I’m sure to get confused. And so the die is cast,’’ she went on in strong agitation. ‘‘The die is cast...’
It seemed to her that everyone was looking at her and was amazed at the important step she had ventured upon, that everyone expected something special from her, and it was impossible to convince her that nobody paid attention to such small and uninteresting people as she and I.
She had nothing to do till the third act, and her role as a visiting provincial gossip consisted merely in standing by the door as if eavesdropping and then saying a short monologue. Until her appearance, for at least an hour and a half, while there was walking, reading, tea drinking, arguing onstage, she never left my side and kept murmuring her role and clutching her notebook nervously; and, imagining that everyone was looking at her and waiting for her appearance, she kept straightening her hair with a trembling hand and repeating:
‘‘I’m sure to get confused... How heavy my heart is, if you only knew! I’m as frightened as if I was about to be led out to execution.’’
At last her turn came.
‘‘Cleopatra Alexeevna—you’re on!’’ said the director.
She stepped to the middle of the stage with an expression of terror on her face, unattractive, angular, and for half a minute stood there like a post, completely motionless, and only the big earrings swung under her ears.
‘‘You can use the notebook the first time,’’ somebody said.
It was clear to me that she was trembling and, from trembling, could not speak or open her notebook, and that she was past thinking about her role, and I was just about to go to her and say something when she suddenly sank to her knees in the middle of the stage and burst into loud sobs.
There was movement, there was noise all around, I alone stood leaning against the backdrop, struck by what had happened, not understanding, not knowing what I was to do. I saw her being picked up and led away. I saw Anyuta Blagovo come over to me; earlier I hadn’t seen her in the room, and now it was as if she had sprung from the ground. She was wearing a hat with a veil and, as always, had the air of having stopped by only for a minute.
‘‘I told her not to act,’’ she said crossly, pronouncing each word abruptly and blushing. ‘‘This is madness! You should have stopped her!’’
The Azhogin mother, thin and flat, quickly came over to me, in a short jacket with short sleeves, and with cigarette ashes on her chest.
‘‘My friend, it’s terrible,’’ she said, wringing her hands and, as usual, peering intently into my face. ‘‘It’s terrible! Your sister’s condition... she’s pregnant! Take her away, I implore you...’
She was breathing heavily from agitation. And to one side stood her three daughters, as thin and flat as she, and huddled timorously together. They were alarmed, astounded, as if a convict had just been caught in their house. What a disgrace, how frightful! And yet this respectable family spent all their lives fighting prejudice; obviously they assumed that all of mankind’s prejudices and errors consisted only in three candles, the number thirteen, and the black day—Monday!
‘‘I implore you... implore you...’ Mrs. Azhogin repeated, protruding her lips and drawing out the letter O. ‘‘I implo-o-ore you, take her home.’’
XVIII
A LITTLE LATER, my sister and I went down the stairs. I shielded her with the skirt of my coat; we hurried, choosing back lanes where there were no streetlamps, hiding from passersby, and it was like fleeing. She no longer wept but looked at me with dry eyes. To Makarikha, where I was taking her, it was only a twenty-minute walk, and strangely, in so short a time we managed to recall our whole life, we discussed everything, thought over our situation, considered...
We decided it was no longer possible for us to stay in this town, and that when I earned a little money, we would move somewhere else. In some houses people were already asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these houses, feared them, and spoke of the fanaticism, the coarseness of heart, the nonentity of these respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we frightened so much, and I asked how these stupid, cruel, lazy, dishonest people were better than the drunken and superstitious Kurilovka muzhiks, or how they were better than animals, which are also thrown into consternation when some incident disrupts the monotony of their instinct-bound lives. What would become of my sister now, if she went on living at home? What moral suffering would she experience, talking with father, meeting acquaintances every day? I pictured it to myself, and at once people came to my memory, all people of my acquaintance, who were slowly being pushed out of this world by their families and relations, I recalled tortured dogs driven insane, living sparrows plucked bare by little boys and thrown into the water—and the long, long series of obscure, protracted sufferings I had been observing in this town uninterruptedly since childhood; and it was incomprehensible to me what these sixty thousand inhabitants lived by, why they read the Gospel, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What benefit did they derive from all that had been written and said so far, if there was in them the same inner darkness and the same aversion to freedom as a hundred or three hundred years ago? A building contractor builds houses in town all his life, and yet till his dying day he says ‘‘galdary’’ instead of ‘‘gallery,’’ and so, too, these sixty thousand inhabitants for generations have been reading and hearing about truth, mercy, and freedom, and yet till their dying day they lie from morning to evening, torment each other, and as for freedom, they fear it and hate it like an enemy.
‘‘And so my fate is decided,’’ said my sister when we came home. ‘‘After what has happened, I can’t go back there. Lord, how good that is! I feel easy in my heart.’’
She went to bed at once. Tears glistened on her lashes, but her expression was happy, her sleep was sound and sweet, and you could see that she really did feel easy in her heart and that she was resting. She hadn’t slept like that for a long, long time!
And so we began to live together. She kept singing and saying that she felt very well, and the books we took from the library were returned unread because she could no longer read; all she wanted was to dream and talk about the future. Mending my linen or helping Karpovna at the stove, she either hummed to herself or talked about her Vladimir, about his intelligence, his beautiful manners, his kindness, about his extraordinary learning, and I agreed with her, though I no longer liked her doctor. She wanted to work, to live independently, to support herself, and said she would become a schoolteacher or a doctor’s assistant as soon as her health permitted, and would wash the floors and do the laundry herself. She already passionately loved her little boy; he wasn’t born yet, but she already knew what sort of eyes he would have, what sort of hands, and how he would laugh. She liked to talk about his upbringing, and since Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her reasoning about upbringing came down to the boy turning out as charming as his father. There was no end to this talk, and everything she said aroused a lively joy in her. Sometimes I, too, rejoiced, not knowing why myself.
She must have infected me with her dreaming. I also read nothing and only dreamed; in the evenings, despite my fatigue, I paced up and down the room, my hands thrust into my pockets, and talked about Masha.
‘‘When do you think she’ll come back?’’ I asked my sister. ‘‘I think she’ll come back by Christmas, not later. What does she have to do there?’’
‘‘Since she doesn’t write, she’ll obviously come back very soon.’’
‘‘That’s true,’’ I agreed, though I knew perfectly well that there was no need for Masha to come back to our town.
I missed her terribly, and couldn’t help deceiving myself, and tried to get others to deceive me. My sister waited for her doctor, I for Masha, and the two of us ceaselessly talked, laughed, and didn’t notice that we disturbed the sleep of Karpovna, who lay on her stove26 and kept muttering:
‘‘The samovar hummed in the morning, hum-m-m! Ah, it’s a bad sign, dear hearts, a bad sign.’’
Nobody called on us except the postman, who brought my sister letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who would occasionally come to our room in the evening, look silently at my sister, leave, and, when already in the kitchen, say:
‘‘Every title should remember its learning, and whoever doesn’t wish to understand that in his pride, it’s the vale for him.’’
He liked the word ‘‘vale.’’ Once—this was already at Christmastime—as I was going through the market, he invited me to his butcher shop and, without shaking hands with me, announced that he had to talk with me about a very important matter. He was red from the cold and from vodka; behind the counter next to him stood Nikolka with his robber’s face, holding a bloody knife in his hand.
‘‘I want to express my words to you,’’ Prokofy began. ‘‘This event cannot exist, because you understand yourself that for such a ‘vale’ people won’t praise either us or you. Mama, of course, out of pity cannot say an unpleasantness to you, that your sister should move to other quarters on account of her condition, but I don’t wish it anymore, because I cannot approve of her behavior.’’
I understood him and left the shop. The same day my sister and I moved to Radish’s. We had no money for a cab and went on foot; I carried a bundle of our belongings on my back, my sister had nothing to carry, but she choked, coughed, and kept asking how soon we’d get there.
The Complete Short Novels Page 54