The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  “This won’t do!” he thinks to himself, shuffling in his slippers through the halls. “One has to look at it... from all sides, to chat, discuss... the holy sacrament of marriage, one can’t just approach it with frivolity... I’ll go and talk to the old woman...”

  He shuffles into his wife’s room. Martha Afanasevna is standing before an open trunk, rummaging through heaps of linen with trembling hands.

  “There’s not a single nightshirt here...,” she mumbles. “Good, serious parents will even throw in some baby clothes for the dowry! And us, we’re not even doing handkerchiefs and towels... you’d think she wasn’t our flesh and blood, but some orphan...”

  “We have to talk about serious matters, and you’re nattering on about bits of cloth... I can’t even bear to look at this... our daughter’s future is at stake, and she’s standing here like some market woman, counting bits of cloth!... This won’t do!”

  “And what are we supposed to do?”

  “We have to think, we have to look at it from all sides... have a serious talk...”

  They hear Lidochka unlock her door, tell the maid to take a letter to Fyodor Petrovitch, and then lock the door again.

  “She is sending him a definite answer,” Aleksei Borisitch whispers. “Ha, the simpleminded fools! They don’t have the wherewithal to turn to their elders for advice! So this is what the world has come to!”

  “Oh! I suddenly realized, Aleksei!” the old woman gasps, wringing her hands. “We’re going to have to look for a new apartment in town! If Lidochka will not be living with us, then what do we need eight rooms for?”

  “This is all foolish... balderdash... what we have to do now is to seriously...”

  Until dinnertime they scurry about the house like shad-ows, unable to find a place for themselves. Martha Afana- sevna rummages aimlessly through the linen, whispers things to the cook, and suddenly breaks into sobs, while Aleksei Borisitch grumbles, wants to discuss serious matters, and talks nonsense. Lidochka appears at dinnertime. Her face is pink and her eyes slightly swollen.

  “So here she is!” the old man says, without looking at her.

  They sit down to eat silendy for the first two courses. Their faces, their movements, the cooks walk—everything is touched by a kind of shy solemnity.

  “We should, Lidochka, you know,” the old man begins, “have a serious talk... from all sides... Well, yes!... Um, shall we have some liqueur, huh? Glafira! Bring over the liqueur! Champagne wouldn’t be bad either, though, well, if we don’t have any... well, forget it... well, yes... this won’t do!”

  The liqueur arrives. The old man drinks one glass after another.

  “Um, so let’s discuss things,” he says. “This is a serious matter... your future... This won’t do!”

  “It’s simply awful, Daddy, how you just love to talk nonstop!” Lidochka sighs.

  “Well, yes,” the old man says, startled. “No, you see, I was just... pour se twaddler... don’t be angry....”

  After dinner, the mother has a long whispered conversa-tion with her daughter.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re talking pure balderdash!” the old man thinks, pacing through the house. They don’t realize, the silly things, that this is serious... important... This won’t do! No!”

  Night falls. Lidochka is lying on her bed awake. The old couple is not sleeping either, whispering to each other till dawn.

  “Those damn flies don’t let one sleep!” Aleksei Borisitch grumbles. Yet it is not the flies that keep him awake, but happiness.

  THE

  GOOD

  GERMAN

  IVAN KARLOVITCH SCHWEI, the senior foreman at the Funk & Co. steel mill, had been sent by his boss to the town of Tver to carry out a project. After working on it for some four months, he became so bored without his young wife that he lost his appetite, and on two occasions even burst into tears. During the trip back to Moscow he closed his eyes, imagining how he would arrive home, how Marya the cook would open the door, and how his wife Natasha, with a cry of joy, would throw her arms around his neck.

  “She’s not expecting me,” he thought. “So much the better—unexpected joy is best!”

  He arrived in Moscow in the evening. While the porter went to get his luggage, Ivan Karlovitch had time enough to empty two bottles of beer in the station buffet. The beer made him feel very good, and as the cabman drove him from the station to Presnia he kept muttering: “Cabman, you good cabman! I love Russian peoples! You are a Russian man, my wife is a Russian man, and I am a Russian man. My father is German, but I am a Russian man. I wish to secede from Germany!”

  Marya the cook opened the door just as he had imagined she would.

  “You’re a Russian man and I’m a Russian man,” he muttered, handing over his luggage to her. “We’re all Russian peoples, and we have Russian languages! Where is Natasha?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “In that case, don’t wake her... shhh... I’ll wake her myself. I want to frighten her, I’ll be a surprise! Shhh...”

  Sleepy Marya took the luggage and went into the kitchen.

  Smiling to himself, blinking, rubbing his hands together, Ivan Karlovitch tiptoed to the bedroom door and opened it carefully, fearing it would creak. It was dark and quiet inside.

  “I’m going to starde her,” he thought to himself, and lit a match.

  But poor German! As the blue sulfur flame of his match flared up, this was the picture he saw: in the bed nearest to the wall, his wife was sleeping, her head covered and only her bare feet showing. In the other bed lay a red-haired giant with long whiskers.

  Ivan Karlovitch did not believe his eyes, and lit another match. He lit five matches, one after the other, but the picture remained just as unbelievable, horrifying, and shocking. The Germans feet started shaking, and a chill ran down his spine. The beer cloud suddenly lifted, and he felt as if his soul was fluttering up and down his legs. His first thought, his first urge, was to seize a chair and smash it over the sleeping man’s red head with all his might, and then grab his unfaithful wife by her bare feet and fling her through the window with such force that she would go crashing down onto the pavement.

  “Oh, no! That’s not enough!” he decided after some reflection. “First I’ll disgrace them! I’ll go calling the police and her family, and then I’ll be killing them!”

  He flung on his coat, and a minute later was out in the street again. He started crying bitterly. He wept and thought of human ingratitude. That barefoot woman had once been a poor seamstress, and he had brought her happiness, turning her into the wife of an educated foreman with a yearly salary of750 rubles at Funk & Co.! She had been a nobody! She had run around in cotton dresses like some parlor maid, and now, thanks to him, she wore a hat and gloves, and even Funk &c Co. called her “Madam.”

  He thought, “How spiteful and crafty women are!” Natasha acted as if she had married him out of passionate love, and every week she had sent him tender letters in Tver.

  “Oh, the snake!” Schwei thought as he walked down the street. “Oh, why did I marry a Russian person? Russian persons are bad! Barbarian, peasant! I wish to secede from Russia, damn me!”

  Then he thought, “And what’s really surprising is that she exchanged me for some red-haired bastard! If it were Funk & Co. she fell in love with, well, that I could forgive! But to be falling in love with the dog who doesn’t have ten kopecks in his pocket! Oh, wretch that I am!”

  Schwei dried his eyes and went into a tavern.

  “Give me pen and papers,” he told the barkeep. “I wish to write!”

  With a trembling hand he first wrote a letter to his wife’s parents, who lived in Serpukhov. He wrote that a respectable and learned foreman like himself did not wish to live with a tramp of a woman, that they, her parents, were swine, that their daughters were swine, that as far as he was concerned, they could all, they knew what... In conclusion, he demanded that they come and remove their daughter along with the redheaded basta
rd whom he hadn’t killed only because he did not wish to soil his hands!

  He left the tavern and dropped the letter in a mailbox. He wandered through the streets until four in the morning, thinking of his sorrow. He looked gaunt and haggard, and came to the conclusion that life, that bitter mockery of fate—that being alive—was foolish and not worthy of a decent German.

  He decided not to take revenge on his wife or on the red-headed man. The best thing would be to punish her with a show of great magnanimity.

  “I shall go and say to her all I have to say,” he thought as he walked home, “and then I’ll take my own life! May she be happy with her redheaded man! I shall not stand in their way!”

  He imagined how he would die, and how his wife would be tormented by her guilty conscience.

  “Yes, I shall leave her my worldly possessions!” he muttered, ringing his doorbell. “The redhead is a better man than I, maybe he earns 750 rubles a year too!”

  This time, when Marya the cook opened the door, she was surprised to see him.

  “Call Natalia Petrovna,” he said, not taking his coat off. “I wish to converse!”

  Within minutes his young wife stood in front of him barefoot and in her nightgown, with a startled look on her face. Weeping, throwing his arms in the air, the deceived husband said to her, “I know everything! You can’t trick me! With my own eyes I saw the redheaded brute with the long mustache!”

  “You’re out of your mind!” his wife shouted. “Stop yelling! You’ll wake up our boarders!”

  “The redheaded bastard!”

  “I told you, stop yelling! Look at you, you’re drunk out of your mind and yelling your head off! Go to bed immediately!”

  “I have no wish to sleep in the same bed with the redhead! Farewell!

  “You’ve gone completely insane!” his wife shouted furiously. “I told you I’ve taken in boarders! A locksmith and his wife have moved into what used to be our bedroom!”

  “Huh... huh? What locksmith?”

  “A red-haired locksmith with his wife! I’ve rented out the room for four rubles a month! So stop yelling, you’ll wake them up!”

  The German’s eyes bulged as he stared at his wife; then he lowered his head.

  “Oh,” he whispered.

  Soon Ivan Karlovitch’s German soul revived again, and he was in a splendid mood.

  “For me, you’re my little Russian,” he muttered. “The cook’s a Russian, I’m a Russian, we all have our Russian languages. The locksmith, he’s a good locksmith, and I wish to embrace him. Funk & Co. is also a good Funk & Co.! Russia is magnificent land! I wish to secede from Germany!”

  FIRST

  AID

  “MAKE WAY!MAKE WAY! Here comes the sergeant major with his clerk!”

  “The compliments of the season, Gerasim Alpatitch!” the crowd shouts. “Let us pray, Gerasim Alpatitch, that the Lord will bless, not you, not us—but whomever he chooses!”

  The tipsy sergeant major tries to say something but can-not. He vaguely waves his fingers, goggles his eyes, and forcefully puffs out his fat red cheeks as if he were about to blast the highest note on a trumpet. His clerk, a squat little red-nosed man in a peaked jockey cap, assumes an energetic expression and plunges into the crowd.

  “Which of you here is the drowned man?” he asks. “Where’s the drowned man?”

  “Here! Here!”

  The peasants have just pulled a gaunt old man in a blue shirt and bast shoes out of the water. The man is soaked from head to toe and sits on the meadow babbling, his arms spread out and his legs apart. “O saints in heaven! O Christian countrymen of the province of Ryzan and the district of Zaraysk. I’ve given all I own to my two sons, and now I’m working for Prokor Sergeyev... as a plasterer! Now, as I was saying, he gives me seven rubles and says, ‘You, Fedya,’ he says, ‘you must now worship me like a father!’ May a wolf eat him alive!”

  “Where are you from?” Egor Makaritch, the clerk, asks him.

  “‘Like a father!’ he says. ‘May a wolf eat him alive! And that for seven rubles!”’

  “He’s babbling! He doesn’t even know what language he’s talking!” Anisim the squadron leader shouts in a cracked voice, soaked to the waist and obviously upset by the event. “Let me tell you what happened, Egor Makaritch! Come on now, let’s have some quiet! I want to explain everything to Egor Makaritch. So the old man’s walking over from Kurnevo—come on now, boys, quiet!—Well, so there he is walking over from Kurnevo, and the devil made him cross the river, there where it’s shallow. The old man, being a bit tipsy and out of his mind, walked, like an idiot, right into the water, and the current knocked him off his feet and he rolls over like a top! Next thing he starts shouting like crazy. So there I am with Lyksander—what the hell’s going on? Why is this man shouting? We look—he’s drowning! What are we to do! ‘Hey, Lyksander!’ I shout, ‘Holy Mother of God! Dump that goddamn harmonica and let’s go save that peasant!’ So we both throw ourselves right into the water, and by God, it’s churning and swirling, churning and swirling—O save us, Holy Mother of Heaven! So we get to where it’s swirling the most, Lyksander grabs him by the shirt, I by the hair. Then the others here present, who saw what happened, come running up the bank, shouting—all eager to save his soul—what torture, Egor Makar- itch! If we hadn’t gotten there in time, the old man would have drowned completely, never mind the holiday!”

  “What’s your name?” the clerk asks the drowned man. “And what is your domicile?”

  The old man stares dully into the crowd.

  “He’s out of his mind!” Anisim says. “And how can you expea him not to be! Here he is, his belly hill of water! My dear man, what’s your name—no answer! He has hardly any life left in him, only a semblance thereof! But half his soul has already left his body! What a calamity, despite the holiday! What do you want us to do now? He’ll die, yes he very well might! His mug is all blue!”

  “Hey! You!” the clerk shouts, grabbing the drowned man by the shoulders and shaking him. “You! I’m talking to you! Your domicile, I said! Say something! Is your brain waterlogged? Hey!”

  “Ha, for seven rubles, can you believe that?” the drowned man mumbles. “So I say to him, a dog upon you! We have no wish, thank you very much, no wish...!”

  “No wish to do what? Answer clearly!”

  The drowned man is silent and begins to shiver with cold, his teeth chattering.

  “You can call him alive if you want,” says Anisim, “but if you take a good look at him, he doesn’t even look like a human being any more! Maybe some drops might help!”

  “Drops?” the clerk mimics in disgust. “What do you mean, ‘drops’? The man’s drowned, and he wants to give him drops! We have to get the water out of him! What are you staring at? You don’t have an ounce of compassion, the lot of you! Run over to the village, on the double, and get a rug so we can give him a good shaking!”

  A group of men pull themselves away from the crowd and run over to the village to find a rug. The clerk is suddenly fdled with inspiration. He rolls up his sleeves, rubs his palms against his sides, and does a series of litde movements designed to show his brisding vigor and decisiveness.

  “Don’t crowd me, don’t crowd me!” he mumbles. “All those who are in excess, leave! Did anyone go to the village? Good!

  “Gerasim Alpatitch,” he adds, turning to the sergeant major. “Why don’t you just go home? You’re totally soused, and in your delicate condition it’s best to stay home!”

  The sergeant major vaguely waves his fingers and,wanting to say something, puffs his face up as if it were about to explode in all directions.

  “Put him on it!” the clerk barks as the rug arrives. “Grab him by the arms and legs! Yes, that’s right. Now put him on it!” “And I tell him, a dog upon you!” the drowned man mumbles, without resisting or even noticing that he is being lifted onto the rug. “We have no wish to!”

  “There, there! Don’t worry!” the clerk tells him. “No need
to be frightened! We’re only going to shake you a bit, and with the help of God you’ll come back to your senses. The constable will be over any minute now, and will draw up an official report according to the regulations. Shake him, and praise be the Lord!”

  Eight robust men, among them Anisim the squadron leader, grab hold of the corners of the rug. At first they shake him timidly, as if they are not sure of their own strength. But then, bit by bit, they get a taste for it, their faces taking on an intense, bestial expression as they start shaking him with voracious passion. They stretch, stand on tiptoe, and jump up and down as if they want to fly up in the air with the drowned man.

  “Heave-ho! Heave-ho! Heave-ho! Heave-ho!”

  The squat clerk runs around them, trying with all his might to get hold of the rug, shrieking in a cracked voice: “Harder! Harder! All together now! Keep up the rhythm! Heave-ho! Heave-ho! Anisim! You’re lagging! Heave-ho!”

  In the split seconds between heaves, the old man’s tussled head and pale puzzled face—filled with horror and physical pain—bob up from the rug, but immediately disappear again as the rug flies up to the right, plunges straight down, and then with a snap flies up to the left. The crowd cheers. “Go for it! Save your soul! Yes!”

  “Well done, Egor Makaritch! Save your soul! Yes, go for it!”

  “Well, boys, and once he’s better he’ll have to stay right here! Yes, the moment he can stand on his feet, the moment he comes back to his senses, he’ll have to buy us all a bucket of vodka for our trouble!”

  “Damn! Harnessed poppies on a shaft! Look over there, brothers! It’s the lady from Shmelyovo with her bailiff! Yes, it’s him. He’s wearing a hat!”

  A carriage draws up. In it sits a heavy, middle-aged lady wearing a pince-nez and holding a colorful parasol. Sitting next to the driver on the coach box, with his back to her, is Stepan Ivanitch, the bailiff—a young man wearing a straw hat. The lady looks shocked.

  “What is going on?” she asks. “What are they doing over there?

  “We’re reviving a drowned man! Happy holidays, your ladyship! He was a bit tipsy, you see, this is what led to it! We were marching all around the village carrying icons! What a feast!”