XIX
AT LAST, A LETTER came from Masha.
‘‘My dear, good M.A.,’’ she wrote, ‘‘kind, meek ‘angel ours,’ as the old housepainter calls you, farewell, I’m going to the exposition in America27 with my father. In a few days I’ll be seeing the ocean—so far from Dubechnya, it’s frightening to think of it! It’s as far and boundless as the sky, and I long to be there, to be free, I’m triumphant, I’m mad, and you see how incoherent my letter is. My dear, my kind one, set me free, quickly break the thread that still holds us, binding me and you. That I met and knew you was a ray from heaven, lighting up my existence; but that I became your wife was a mistake, you understand that, and now the awareness of the mistake weighs on me, and I beg you on my knees, my magnanimous friend, quickly, quickly, before I go off to the ocean, to telegraph that you agree to correct our mutual mistake, to remove this one stone from my wings, and my father, who will take all the bother on himself, promises not to burden you too much with formalities. And so, freedom on all four sides? Yes?
‘‘Be happy, God bless you, forgive me, a sinner.
‘‘I’m alive, I’m well. I squander money, commit many follies, and thank God every moment that such a bad woman as I has no children. I sing and have success, but this isn’t a passion, it is my haven, my cell, where I now withdraw to have peace. King David had a ring with the inscription: ‘Everything passes.’ When one feels sad, these words make one merry, and when one is merry, they make one sad. And I’ve acquired such a ring for myself, with Hebrew lettering, and this charm will keep me from passions. Everything passes, life, too, will pass, therefore there’s no need for anything. Or there is need only for the awareness of freedom, because when a person is free, he needs nothing, nothing, nothing. So break the thread. I warmly embrace you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M.’’
My sister lay in one room, Radish, who had been sick again and was now recovering, in the other. Just as I received this letter, my sister quietly went to the painter’s room, sat down beside him, and began to read. She read Ostrovsky28 or Gogol to him every day, and he listened, staring at the same spot, not laughing, shaking his head and muttering to himself from time to time:
‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s possible!’’
If something unseemly or ugly happened in the play, he would say, as if gloatingly, jabbing his finger at the book:
‘‘There it is, the lie! That’s what it does, the lie!’’
Plays attracted him by their content, by their moral, and by their complex, artful construction, and he was amazed at him, never calling him by name:
‘‘How deftly he put it all together!’’
Now my sister quietly read only one page and couldn’t go on: she didn’t have voice enough. Radish took her by the hand and, moving his dry lips, said barely audibly, in a husky voice:
‘‘The soul of the righteous man is white and smooth as chalk, but the sinner’s is like pumice. The soul of the righteous man is clear oil, but the sinner’s is coal tar. We must labor, we must grieve, we must feel pain,’’ he went on, ‘‘and whichever man does not labor or grieve, his will not be the Kingdom of Heaven. Woe, woe to the sated, woe to the strong, woe to the rich, woe to the moneylenders! They will not see the Kingdom of Heaven. Worm eats grass, rust eats iron...’
‘‘And lying eats the soul,’’ my sister finished and laughed.
I read over the letter once more. At that moment the soldier came into the kitchen who, twice a week, on the part of some unknown person, brought us tea, French bread, and hazel grouse that smelled of perfume. I was out of work, had to spend whole days at home, and the person who sent us these loaves probably knew we were in need.
I heard my sister talking with the soldier and laughing merrily. Then, lying down, she ate some bread and said to me:
‘‘When you refused to get a job and became a housepainter, Anyuta Blagovo and I knew from the very beginning that you were right, but we were afraid to say it aloud. Tell me, what power keeps us from confessing what we think? Take Anyuta Blagovo. She loves you, she adores you, she knows you’re right; she loves me, too, like a sister, and she knows I’m right, and most likely envies me in her soul, yet some power keeps her from coming to us, she avoids us, fears us.’’
My sister folded her hands on her breast and said with passion:
‘‘How she loves you, if you only knew! She has confessed this love to me alone, and that secretly, in the dark. She used to lead me to a dark alley in the park and start whispering to me how dear you were to her. You’ll see, she’ll never marry, because she loves you. Are you sorry for her?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘It’s she who sent the bread. Funny girl, really, why hide herself? I was also funny and stupid, but now I’ve left that behind, and now I’m not afraid of anybody, I think and say aloud whatever I like—and I’ve become happy. While I lived at home, I had no notion of happiness, but now I wouldn’t change places with a queen.’’
Dr. Blagovo came. He had received his doctor’s degree and was now living in our town with his father, resting and saying he would soon leave for Petersburg again. He wanted to work on vaccines against typhus and, I think, cholera; he wanted to go abroad in order to advance himself, and then take a university chair. He had abandoned military service and wore loose Cheviot jackets, very wide trousers, and excellent neckties. My sister was in raptures over his pins, shirt studs, and the red silk handkerchief he wore in the breast pocket of his jacket, probably out of foppishness. Once, having nothing else to do, she and I started counting up all his outfits we could remember, and decided he must have at least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister, but he never once said, even jokingly, that he would take her with him to Petersburg or abroad, and I could not picture clearly to myself what would become of her if she remained alive, or what would become of her child. But she only dreamed endlessly, without thinking seriously of the future; let him go wherever he liked, she said, let him even abandon her, so long as he himself was happy, and she would be content with what had been.
Usually, when he came to see us, he auscultated her very attentively and demanded that she drink milk with drops in his presence. And this time it was the same. He auscultated her and made her drink a glass of milk, and after that our rooms smelled of creosote.
‘‘There’s a good girl,’’ he said, taking the glass from her. ‘‘You mustn’t talk too much, yet lately you’ve been chattering away like a magpie. Please keep quiet.’’
She laughed. Then he came to Radish’s room, where I was sitting, and patted me gently on the shoulder.
‘‘Well, how’s things, old man?’’ he asked, bending over the sick man.
‘‘Your Honor...’ Radish pronounced, slowly moving his lips, ‘‘Your Honor, I venture to declare... we all walk under God, we’ll all have to die... Allow me to tell you the truth... Your Honor, there’ll be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!’’
‘‘No help for it,’’ the doctor joked, ‘‘somebody has to be in hell as well.’’
And suddenly something happened to my consciousness; as if I was dreaming, it was winter, night, I was standing in the yard of the slaughterhouse, and beside me was Prokofy, who smelled of pepper vodka; I tried to pull myself together and rubbed my eyes, and it immediately seemed to me that I was going to the governor’s for a talk. Nothing like it has ever happened to me either before or since, and I explained this strange, dreamlike remembrance by overexhausted nerves. I experienced the slaughterhouse and the talk with the governor, and at the same time was vaguely aware that it was not real.
When I came to my senses, I saw that I was no longer at home but in the street, and standing with the doctor near a streetlamp.
‘‘It’s sad, sad,’’ he was saying, and tears flowed down his cheeks. ‘‘She’s gay, she’s forever laughing, hoping, but her condition is hopeless, dear heart. Your Radish hates me and wants to bring it home to me that I acted badly with her. He’s right,
in his own way, but I also have my point of view, and I don’t regret in the least what has happened. We must love, we all should love—isn’t that so?—without love there would be no life; anyone who fears and avoids love is not free.’’
He gradually passed on to other themes, talked about science, about his thesis, which was liked in Petersburg; he spoke with enthusiasm and no longer remembered my sister, or his grief, or me. He was carried away by life. That one has America and a ring with an inscription, I thought, and this one has his doctoral degree and a scholarly career, and only my sister and I are left with the old things.
After taking leave of him, I went over to the streetlamp and read the letter once more. And I remembered, vividly remembered, how in spring, in the morning, she came to me at the mill, lay down, and covered herself with a sheepskin jacket—she wanted to be like a simple peasant woman. And when, another time—this was also in the morning— we pulled the creel out of the water, and big drops of rain poured down on us from the willows on the bank, and we laughed...
It was dark in our house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya. I climbed over the fence and, as I used to do in former times, went through the back entrance to the kitchen, to take a lamp there. There was no one in the kitchen; the samovar was hissing by the stove, waiting for my father. ‘‘Who pours tea for father now?’’ I wondered. Taking a lamp, I went to the shed, improvised a bed for myself there out of old newspapers, and lay down. The spikes in the walls looked stern, as before, and their shadows wavered. It was cold. I fancied that my sister was to come now and bring me supper, but I remembered at once that she was ill and lying in Radish’s house, and I thought it strange that I had climbed over the fence and was lying in the unheated shed. My mind was confused, and I fancied all sorts of rubbish.
Ringing. Sounds familiar from childhood: first the scraping of the wire against the wall, then a short, pathetic ringing in the kitchen. It was my father coming back from the club. I got up and went to the kitchen. The cook Aksinya, seeing me, clasped her hands and for some reason burst into tears.
‘‘My child!’’ she said softly. ‘‘Dear! Oh Lord!’’
And she began crumpling her apron in her hands from agitation. On the windowsill stood quart bottles with berries and vodka. I poured myself a teacupful and greedily drank it off, because I was very thirsty. Aksinya had only recently washed the tables and benches, and there was the smell of a bright, cozy kitchen kept by a neat cook. And once, in our childhood, this smell and the chirping of a cricket used to entice us children here to the kitchen and disposed us to fairy tales, to playing kings...
‘‘And where is Cleopatra?’’ Aksinya asked softly, hurriedly, with bated breath. ‘‘And where’s your hat, dearie? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg?’’
She had served us back in my mother’s time, and used to bathe me and Cleopatra in a tub, and for her now we were still children who needed admonishing. In a quarter of an hour or so, she laid out for me all her considerations, which she, with the reasonableness of an old servant, had accumulated in the quiet of this kitchen all the while we hadn’t seen each other. She said that the doctor could be made to marry Cleopatra—all we needed was to give him a scare, and if the petition was written properly, the bishop would annul his first marriage; that it would be good to sell Dubechnya in secret from my wife and put the money in the bank under my own name; and if my sister and I bowed down at my father’s feet and begged him properly, he might forgive us; that a prayer service should be offered to the Queen of Heaven...
‘‘Well, go, dearie, talk to him,’’ she said, hearing my father cough. ‘‘Go and talk to him, bow to him, your head won’t fall off.’’
I went. Father was sitting at the table drawing up the plan for a summer house with Gothic windows and a fat turret that resembled a fire tower—something extraordinarily obstinate and giftless. Going into his study, I stopped in such a way that I was able to see this drawing. I didn’t know why I had come to my father, but I remember that, when I saw his fleshless face, his red neck, his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck and, as Aksinya had instructed me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer house with its Gothic windows and fat turret held me back.
‘‘Good evening,’’ I said.
He glanced at me and at once lowered his eyes to his drawing.
‘‘What do you want?’’ he asked after a pause.
‘‘I’ve come to tell you—my sister is very ill. She will die soon,’’ I added in a muted voice.
‘‘Well, then?’’ my father sighed, taking off his spectacles and putting them on the table. ‘‘As you sow, so shall you reap. As you sow,’’ he repeated, getting up from the table, ‘‘so shall you reap. I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and in this very same place I begged you, I implored you to abandon your errors, reminding you of duty, honor, and your responsibility to your ancestors, whose traditions we should sacredly preserve. Did you obey me? You scorned my advice and stubbornly went on holding to your wrong views; what’s more, you dragged your sister into your errors as well and caused her to lose her morality and shame. Now you’ve both gotten into a bad way. Well, then? As you sow, so shall you reap!’’
He was saying this and pacing the study. He probably thought I had come to him to acknowledge my guilt, and he probably expected me to start interceding for myself and my sister. I was cold, I was trembling as in a fever, and I spoke with difficulty, in a hoarse voice.
‘‘And I, too, ask you to remember,’’ I said, ‘‘how in this same place I implored you to understand me, to think, to decide together how we should live and for what, and in response you began talking about our ancestors, about our grandfather who wrote poetry. You have now been told that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and again you talk about ancestors, traditions... And such light-mindedness in old age, when death is not far off, when you have some five or ten years left to live!’’
‘‘What have you come here for?’’ my father asked sternly, obviously offended that I had reproached him for light-mindedness.
‘‘I don’t know. I love you, I’m inexpressibly sorry that we are so distant from each other—and so I’ve come. I still love you, but my sister has broken with you definitively. She doesn’t forgive and will never forgive. Your name alone arouses loathing in her for the past, for this life.’’
‘‘And who is to blame?’’ my father cried. ‘‘You yourself are to blame, you scoundrel!’’
‘‘Yes, let me be to blame,’’ I said. ‘‘I confess, I’m to blame in many ways, but why is this life of yours, which you also consider obligatory for us—why is it so dull, so giftless, why is it that there are no people in any one of these houses you’ve been building for thirty years now from whom I could learn how to live so as not to be to blame? Not a single honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are cursed nests in which mothers and daughters are pushed out of this world, children are tortured... My poor mother!’’ I went on desperately. ‘‘My poor sister! You have to stupefy yourself with vodka, cards, gossip, you have to fawn, play the hypocrite, or spend decade after decade drawing plans, to ignore all the horror hidden in these houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and in all that time it hasn’t given our motherland a single useful man—not one! You’ve stifled in the womb everything that had the least bit of life or brightness! A town of shopkeepers, tavern keepers, clerks, hypocrites, a needless, useless town, for which not a single soul would be sorry if it suddenly sank into the earth.’’
‘‘I do not wish to listen to you, you scoundrel!’’ said my father and picked up the ruler from the table. ‘‘You’re drunk! You dare not appear this way before your father! I tell you for the last time, and you tell it to your immoral sister, that you will get nothing from me. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer from their disobedience and stubbornness, I am not sorry for them. You can go back where you came from! God has been pleased to punish me
with you, but I endure this test with humility and, like Job, find consolation in suffering and continual toil. You must not cross my threshold until you mend your ways. I am a just man, everything I say is useful, and if you want good for yourself, then you should remember all your life what I have said and am saying to you.’’
I waved my hand and left. After that, I don’t remember what happened during the night and the next day.
They say I walked the streets hatless, staggering, and singing loudly, and that crowds of boys followed me and shouted:
‘‘Small Profit! Small Profit!’’
XX
IF I HAD THE desire to order myself a ring, I would choose this inscription: ‘‘Nothing passes.’’ I believe that nothing passes without a trace and that each of our smallest steps has significance for the present and the future.
What I have lived through has not gone in vain. My great misfortunes, my patience, have touched the hearts of the townspeople, and they no longer call me ‘‘Small Profit,’’ they don’t laugh at me, and when I go through the market, they no longer pour water on me. They’ve grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing odd in the fact that I, a nobleman, carry buckets of paint and put in windowpanes; on the contrary, they willingly give me orders, and I’m now considered a good craftsman and the best contractor after Radish, who, though he has recovered from his illness and, as always, paints the cupolas of bell towers without scaffolding, is no longer able to manage his boys; in place of him, I run around town and look for orders, I hire and pay the boys, I borrow money at high interest. And now, having become a contractor, I understand how it’s possible, for the sake of a pennyworth job, to run around town for three days hunting up roofers. People are polite to me, they address me formally, and I’m treated to tea in the houses I work in, and they send to ask if I’d like to have dinner. Children and young girls often come and look at me with curiosity and sadness.
The Complete Short Novels Page 55