And if you ask the son of a bitch why he’d come in the first place, what universal idea informed his visit, what benefit it brought to mankind—why, he himself doesn’t know.
Of course, in this case—in this boring depiction of urban life—the author focuses on minor, insignificant figures like himself, rather than on government officials, say, or on educators, who really do walk back and forth on important public business.
The author certainly didn’t have such big shots in mind when he spoke of ladies’ knees, for example, or even of crooked mugs in samovars. These important people may indeed be capable of thought, of suffering, of concern. They may want other people’s lives to be more interesting. They may dream of a world with more room for sudden flights of fantasy.
The author, looking ahead in advance, rebuffs presumptuous critics who, out of sheer mischief, will charge him with distorting provincial reality and being unwilling to see the positive side.
The author is not distorting reality. He doesn’t get paid for distortions, dear comrades.
Yes, there’s no question about it: the author sees things as they are.
Take one urban fellow the author knew personally. He lived a quiet life—the kind of life almost everyone lives. He ate and drank, put his hands on his lady’s knees and peered into her eyes, spilled jam on the tablecloth, and borrowed three rubles with no plans of giving them back.
The author’s very short tale will concern this fellow. Perhaps it won’t concern this fellow, exactly, but rather a foolish and insignificant adventure that cost the fellow twenty-five rubles in the course of legal collection. This happened very recently—in August 1923.
Should the author dilute the event with fantasy? Should he wrap it up in a diverting marital affair cut from whole cloth? No! Let the Frenchies have their fun—we’ll go slow, step by step, on a par with Russian reality.
Of course, if the merry reader hungers for lively, sudden flights of fantasy and awaits juicy details and incidents—well, the author refers him, with a light heart, to foreign authors.
2
This short tale begins with a complete, detailed description of the entire life of Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev.
Kotofeyev was a musician by trade. He played the musical triangle in a symphony orchestra.
This instrument may have a very special, particular name—the author doesn’t know it. At any rate, the reader has likely glimpsed a stooping, somewhat slack-jawed individual sitting in front of a small steel triangle in the depths of the orchestra, off to the right. This fellow gives his uncomplicated instrument a sad little jangle at the appropriate moment. Typically, the conductor indicates the moment by winking his right eye.
There are so many strange, surprising professions in this world.
Some of these professions…One shudders to think how a man could arrive at them. How, for example, does a man decide to walk a tightrope, whistle through his nose, or jangle a triangle?
But the author isn’t mocking his hero. Not at all. Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev was a man possessed of a fine heart, intelligence, and a secondary education.
Boris Ivanovich didn’t live in the center of town. He lived in the suburbs—in the bosom of nature, as it were.
This nature, of course, was no great shakes. However, the small gardens in front of the houses, the grass, the ditches, the wooden benches littered with sunflower seed shells—it all contributed to a pleasant, attractive atmosphere.
In springtime the place was just lovely.
Boris Ivanovich had a room at Lukerya Blokhina’s house on Rear Avenue.
Imagine, dear reader, a small wooden house painted yellow, a low, rickety fence, and a wide yellow gate hanging crooked on its hinges. A yard. In the yard, to the right, a little shed. A rake with broken teeth that hasn’t budged since the days of Catherine the Great. A cart wheel. A stone in the middle of the yard. A porch with its lower step torn off.
You get up on the porch and see a door upholstered in bast. Beyond that, you got your inner porch, half-dark, with a green barrel in the corner. A board on top of the barrel. A dipper on top of the board.
A water closet with a flimsy door—just three boards cobbled together. A little latch on the door. A piece of glass in place of a window. Cobwebs all over the glass.
Oh, familiar, heartwarming scene!
There was a certain charm to it all—the charm of a quiet, boring, placid life. To this day, the thought of that torn-off porch step, despite its intolerably sad appearance, still puts the author in a calm, contemplative mood.
But whenever Boris Ivanovich looked at that gnarled, torn-off step, he would shake his head and spit aside in disgust.
It was fifteen years ago that Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev first set foot on this porch and first crossed the threshold of this house. He never did leave. He married his landlady, Lukerya Petrovna Blokhina, becoming lord and master of the entire estate.
The wheel, the shed, the rake, the stone—all these were now his inalienable property.
Lukerya Petrovna observed Boris Ivanovich’s transformation into lord and master with a nervous grin.
In fits of anger, she’d shout and take Kotofeyev to task, saying that he himself was a pauper, without a thing to his name, spoiled by her many favors.
Hurt though he was, Boris Ivanovich would say nothing.
He had come to love this house—to love the yard with the stone. He had come to love living here during those fifteen years.
Some people—well, you can tell their whole story, describe their whole life, in ten minutes’ time, from their first senseless cry to their last days on earth.
That’s just what the author will try to do. Very briefly, in ten minutes’ time, the author will try to tell the whole life story of Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev, without omitting a single detail.
Actually, there’s nothing to tell.
His life ran on, quiet and peaceful.
And if you chop this life up into periods, well, you’d get five or six little parts.
Here you have Boris Ivanovich beginning his life after graduating from trade school. Here you have him as a musician playing in an orchestra. Here’s his affair with a chorus girl. Here’s him marrying his landlady. The war. Then the revolution. And before that, the fire in the suburb.
It was all plain and simple, giving rise to no hesitation or doubt. Most importantly, none of it seemed accidental. To all appearances, it was exactly as it should be, happening, so to speak, in accordance with the outline of history.
Even the revolution, which at first confused Boris Ivanovich considerably, later turned out to be quite plain and simple in its firm insistence on definite, excellent, and very realistic ideas.
And everything else—his choice of profession, friendship, marriage, war—didn’t seem to be merely fate’s game of chance. No, it all appeared to be extraordinarily solid, firm, and unconditional.
Perhaps the only thing that to some degree shattered the orderly system of his firm and not at all accidental life was the love affair. Here, the situation was more complicated. Boris Ivanovich admitted that this particular episode was accidental and could very well not have occurred in his life. The fact is, at the beginning of his musical career, Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev took up with a chorus girl from the Municipal Theater. She was a young, trim blonde with vague, pale eyes.
Boris Ivanovich was twenty-two back then, and still rather handsome. Perhaps the only thing that somewhat marred his appearance was a slack lower jaw. It lent his face a sad, bewildered expression. But his luxuriant upright whiskers concealed the annoying protrusion to a sufficient degree.
How did this love affair start? No one knows for sure. Boris Ivanovich always sat in the depths of the orchestra, and, in the early years, for fear of striking the instrument at the wrong time, never took his eyes off the conductor. So it’s still unclear how he managed to wink at the chorus girl.
Of course, in those years, Boris Ivanovich enjoyed life to the fullest. Footloose and fanc
y free, he would stroll up and down the boulevard in the evenings and would even attend dance parties. Wearing the light-blue ribbon of a master of ceremonies, he would conduct the dances himself, fluttering about the hall like a butterfly.
It’s quite possible that he made the chorus girl’s acquaintance at one such party.
In any event, this acquaintance brought Boris Ivanovich no joy. The romance got off to a fine start, alright. Boris Ivanovich even went so far as to plan out his future life with this pretty little woman. But a month later the blonde suddenly broke off relations, after sarcastically mocking his unfortunate jaw.
Somewhat embarrassed by his beloved’s carefree departure, Boris Ivanovich decided, after some thought, to trade in the life of a provincial lion and desperate paramour for a quieter mode of existence. He didn’t like things that happened by chance, things that could change.
It was then that Boris Ivanovich moved out of town, renting a warm room with a table for a small fee.
And there he married his landlady. This marriage—accompanied by a house, an estate, and a measured life—brought total peace to his anxious heart.
A year after the marriage, there was a fire.
The fire destroyed nearly half the suburb.
Boris Ivanovich, drenched in sweat, personally dragged the furniture and quilts out of the house and placed them in the bushes.
But the house didn’t burn down. The windows burst and the paint peeled, but that was all.
And in the morning, Boris Ivanovich, cheerful and radiant, dragged his belongings back inside.
That fire left quite a trace. For years on end, Boris Ivanovich would share his experiences with friends and neighbors. But that, too, has now faded away.
And so, if you close your eyes and think about the past, all of these things—the fire, the marriage, the revolution, the music, the light-blue ribbon of a master of ceremonies—they’ve all faded away, merging into one continuous straight line.
Even the amorous incident has now faded away, transforming into some sort of annoying recollection, a boring anecdote about how the chorus girl had asked for a patent leather handbag, and how Boris Ivanovich had put aside ruble after ruble, saving up the necessary sum.
That’s how the man lived.
That’s how he lived until the age of thirty-seven—until that very moment, that exceptional occurrence for which he was fined twenty-five rubles by the court. That was his life—all the way up to that very adventure for the sake of which the author has taken the risk of ruining a few sheets of paper and of draining a small phial of ink.
3
And so Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev lived to the age of thirty-seven. In all likelihood, he’ll live a good while longer. He’s a hale man, strong and big-boned. As for the limp—which is, anyhow, hardly noticeable—that’s just a sore foot. It dates back to the tsarist regime.
The foot didn’t bother him any, and Boris Ivanovich led a good, measured life. There was nothing he couldn’t handle, and nothing to give him pause. But then, in the last few years, Boris Ivanovich began to think. He suddenly felt that life wasn’t as firm in its grandeur as he had assumed.
He was always afraid of chance and tried to avoid it, but now it seemed to him that life was lousy with chance. Many events in his own life now appeared to be purely accidental, having occurred for absurd, meaningless reasons that needn’t have existed.
These thoughts troubled and frightened Boris Ivanovich.
Once, he even broached the subject in the company of his closest friends.
This happened at his own birthday party.
“It’s all rather strange, gentlemen,” Boris Ivanovich said. “Everything in our lives is somehow, you know, accidental. What I’m saying is—it all happens by chance…For example, my marriage to Lukerya…I’m not saying I’m dissatisfied—I’m not saying anything at all. But it happened by chance. I mean, I could have taken a room elsewhere. I turned down this street purely by chance…Does that—does that make this an accident?”
His friends grinned at each other crookedly, awaiting a domestic disturbance. But there was no disturbance. Lukerya Petrovna, keeping her composure, simply left the room in a pointed manner, drank a dipper of cold water, and came back to the table merry and refreshed. At night, however, she let him have it good and strong, so that the neighbors even tried to summon the fire department in order to tamp down the family strife.
But even after the strife Boris Ivanovich lay on the couch with his eyes open and continued to ponder his thought. He was thinking that not only his marriage, but also his playing the triangle and, in general, all his vocations were merely an accident, a mere concurrence of circumstances.
“And if it’s all accidental,” thought Boris Ivanovich, “then nothing is certain. There’s no solidity to it. It can all change tomorrow.”
The author has no desire to prove the correctness of Boris Ivanovich’s contentious thoughts. But, at first glance, everything in our venerable life does indeed seem partly accidental. Our birth is accidental, our existence is accidental—composed as it is of accidental circumstances—and our death, too, is accidental. This forces one to contemplate the fact that there isn’t a single strict, rigid law on earth that would protect our lives.
And indeed, what strict law could there be, when everything constantly changes, constantly wavers before our eyes, from the grandest of things to the most minor of human inventions?
For instance, many generations, and even entire remarkable peoples, had been brought up on the fact that god exists.
And now any more or less competent philosopher can easily, with one stroke of the pen, prove the opposite.
Or take science. Here everything might seem terribly convincing and certain, but you look back—and nothing is certain. It all changes, over and over again, from the earth’s rotation to some theory of relativity or probability or what have you.
The author never received a higher education and is hard pressed for exact chronological dates and proper names, so he won’t try to prove any of this in vain.
It would be especially vain since it’s highly unlikely that Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev actually thought about any of this. He was a clever enough fellow, and possessed of a secondary education, but he wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as certain men of letters.
Still, he did perceive a kind of shrewd little pitfall in life. And at some point he even began to doubt the certainty of his fate.
One day this doubt broke out in flames.
That day, returning home down Rear Avenue, Boris Ivanovich Kotofeyev bumped into a dark, hatted figure.
The figure stopped in front of Boris Ivanovich and, in a frail voice, asked for help.
Boris Ivanovich reached into his pocket, drew out some change, and gave it to the beggar. Then he gave the beggar a closer look.
Suddenly embarrassed, the beggar shielded his throat with his hand, as if apologizing for the absence of a collar and tie. Then, in the same frail voice, he said that he was a former landowner—that he himself used to give beggars handfuls of silver, but now, thanks to the new democratic way of life, he was forced to ask for help, since the revolution had taken away his estate.
Boris Ivanovich began to question the beggar, taking a keen interest in the details of his former life.
“What can I say?” said the beggar, flattered by the attention. “I tell you, I was filthy rich, rolling in it—and now, well, you see I’m dead broke, starving. Eh, good citizen…how things change…”
Handing the beggar another coin, Boris Ivanovich quietly set off for home. He didn’t really pity the man, but he was overcome by some sort of vague uneasiness.
“How things change,” kind Boris Ivanovich kept muttering.
Back home, Boris Ivanovich told his wife, Lukerya Petrovna, all about the encounter. One must say that he exaggerated a bit, adding some touches of his own, such as his description of the landowner tossing gold at the beggars and even breaking a few noses with the weightier coins.<
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“So what?” asked the wife. “He used to live well, now he lives badly—nothing odd about that. You don’t have to go far—our neighbor’s in mighty bad shape, too.”
And Lukerya Petrovna began to tell her husband about Ivan Semyonovich Kushakov, the former teacher of calligraphy who had fallen on hard times. He used to live pretty well himself, and even smoked cigars.
Kotofeyev somehow took this teacher close to heart, too. He began to ask his wife all about Kushakov’s descent into poverty.
Boris Ivanovich even wanted to pay the teacher a visit. He wanted to take immediate action in regard to his awful life.
He begged his wife Lukerya Petrovna to go and fetch the teacher straightaway, so that they could treat him to tea.
After scolding her husband and calling him a “lout,” just to keep up appearances, Lukerya Petrovna, devoured by curiosity, threw on her shawl and scarf and ran out to fetch the teacher.
The teacher, Ivan Semyonovich Kushakov, came almost immediately.
He was a gray-haired, dried-up little old man in a worn-out long coat with no vest. His dirty, collarless shirt was bunched up on his chest. And the lump of his yellow, terribly bright copper tiepin somehow flashed far out in front of him.
The graying stubble on the calligraphy teacher’s cheeks had not been shaved for a long time and grew out in little shrubs.
The teacher entered the room, rubbing his hands and chewing on something as he walked. He bowed to Kotofeyev slowly, though almost gaily, and, for some reason, winked at him.
Then he sat down at the table, reached for a plate of raisin bread, put a piece in his mouth, and began to chew it, quietly chuckling to himself.
After the teacher had eaten his fill, Boris Ivanovich began to interrogate him with keen curiosity about his former life, asking how and why he had sunk so low, going about without a collar, in a dirty shirt, with one naked tiepin.
Rubbing his hands and winking gaily, though slyly, the teacher responded that he did indeed used to live pretty well and even smoked cigars, but, due to a shift in demand for calligraphy and by decree of the People’s Commissars, the subject was stricken from the curriculum.
Sentimental Tales Page 9