Sisters of the Cross

by Alexei Remizov

  They had all come back; only Verochka was missing, and there was absolutely no news of her. And as early as September Verochka’s room was rented out, according to the green notice hanging on the door of the doorkeeper Nikanor.

  Marakulin’s new neighbor turned out to be Anna Stepanovna Shiianova, married name Leshchova, a teacher from Purkhovets.

  Purkhovets is an ancient town on the River Smugra, and for the singing of its nightingales the first nightingale city. At the girls’ high school in Purkhovets where Anna Stepanovna was teaching there were two famous teachers: the history master Rakov and the literature master Leshchov, both of them friends and both, according to their own definition, “progressive.” Anna Stepanovna’s destiny was closely linked to the fate of Leshchov, while Leshchov and Rakov, like two halves of a single body, were one in spirit and thought. Only Rakov was a little bit older and Leshchov a little bit younger. Both Rakov and Leshchov were living with the same landlady a modest, sober and secluded life.

  Their landlady, Pavlina Polikarpovna, although she was no sixteen years of age, was still spirited and strong. From time immemorial she had served as cook to the civil servant Gerasimov, and Gerasimov just before he died had settled things for her, as Pavlina Polikarpovna put it, and had given her a lottery ticket for her exemplary service. She bought herself a little house, took in lodgers, and that was what she lived on.

  Having found out about Gerasimov’s lottery ticket, Rakov, as a historian, did not neglect to note its number in his notebook and followed the announcement of winning numbers in the newspapers. To Pavlina Polikarpovna he was respectful, serious, and gentle. And the years went by in peaceful seclusion and expectation.

  Pavlina Polikarpovna, although she was no sixteen years of age, still had a little thought running round her head and would sometimes suddenly burst into tears just like that, for no apparent reason. In the spring especially, when the sun began to gain warmth, and the hens all started laying, and the gardens turned green, and the nights became warm, muggy, and langourous, and the nightingales began to sing, and Rakov himself would start to play on his guitar, plucking it like a gusli,2 and begin to sing like a nightingale:

  “Over the blue ocean waves

  Only the stars shine in the sky,

  A ship sails on its lonely way,

  Plowing on at full sail.”

  In the spring, you would think, no heart could resist, and Pavlina Polikarpovna’s heart would swoon in adoration.

  Purkhovets is an ancient town on the River Smugra, and for the singing of its nightingales the first nightingale city.

  In the morning, as Rakov was looking through the Purkhovets Provincial News, he suddenly burst out laughing with the kind of cackle that a man may give way to in great joy when his throat seems too small to express it. And how could he not have done so; Gerasimov’s ticket and none other had won the entire prize of two hundred thousand rubles! Nevertheless, managing to stop in time, Rakov pushed the paper into his pocket, coughed especially loudly and, concealing Pavlina’s good fortune, he went off to give his lessons in the high school as if nothing had happened.

  Come the evening, having scarcely managed to get through his classes, Rakov fell ill with excitement, and Pavlina Polikarpovna had to spend the whole night looking after him. The next morning he was no better, and so it went on all week. Pavlina Polikarpovna tended to Rakov for a whole week and, on the day before Lent, they got married. The first thing he did after the ceremony, when the bride and groom were alone, was ask the question, immodest but entirely natural in a newlywed: “Where is the ticket?” “What ticket?” “What do you mean: ‘What ticket?’ Gerasimov’s ticket!” But Gerasimov’s ticket had been sold off long ago. She was no longer in possession of any such ticket.

  In the week before Lent, almost on the very same day as Rakov’s wedding, Leshchov also got married, to Anna Stepanovna Shiianova. Now the Shiianovs had been the richest people in Purkhovets, but Anna Stepanovna’s father had gambled away all his resources at cards; having once been extremely wealthy, they then lived on in poverty. First Anna’s father died, and then her mother. She was already more than twenty years old, but it was strange: while nothing in her face was repulsive, nothing that you could call ugly or outlandish—the opposite, in fact—she did not seem particularly attractive to men, and in general no one paid court to her. In Purkhovets she was not thought of as the marriageable type, nor did she herself imagine she would get married. She must secretly have reconciled herself to the fact that she was alone and would remain alone forever. Or rather, she did not become reconciled to it (nobody can), but she just convinced herself that that was how things were. Then one fine day she inherited money from some distant aunt of hers, whom she had never heard of—and quite a decent inheritance: fifty thousand-odd rubles. Of course, the high school knew about it—she was the first to tell everyone, and naturally Leshchov also knew. At this point Leshchov weighed in: he began following Anna Stepanovna everywhere. Suddenly turning himself into some kind of victim, he began to weep and moan and invented the notion that he was being persecuted and at the mercy of enemies. He fell ill from every imaginable malady, all of them incurable, and at any moment he might commit suicide. At the same time, he pretended to be desperately in love and began singing like a nightingale, and an amazing nightingale at that….

  Purkhovets is an ancient town on the River Smugra, and for the singing of its nightingales the first nightingale city.

  So Leshchov married Anna Stepanovna, took all her aunt’s money off her—the entire fifty thousand—and then showed her the door: “Do you really think I need you? It’s your money that I need!”

  One felt sorry for Vera Nikolaevna, frightened for Verochka, and hurt for Anna Stepanovna. Somehow she smiled in such a way that one felt sick at heart at the sight of it.

  Vera Nikolaevna wanted to learn. For what purpose? Well, that was what her own Mariia Aleksandrovna told her to do, whom she believed, as she believed in the Iversky Virgin. And she would study as long as she had the strength to do so, and some time in the future she would give up her soul to God, while bent over some physics book by Kraievich.

  Verochka wanted to become a great actress, to become famous all over Russia, the whole of Europe, the whole world, and she wanted this so much because she wanted to revenge herself on Anisim: just for one minute that Anisim Nikitich Vakuiev—for whom everything went well and who never got caught—might feel sorry for himself and repent of the fact that he had traded her in for other women who were fond of him or had sold themselves to him. So now she was trying to make her career through some other tried and tested means and would fight on to do so as long as she had the strength.

  But what did Anna Stepanovna want? She had been left alone and without anything, but that was not the point: she had lived alone and without any money before, but now something else was at stake, something that concerned her heart; she had believed fervently in the innermost depths of her being that she was loved, and that she herself had fallen in love. So what did she want now? What did she want?! What can a person want whose soul has been besmirched, whose soul has been violated?

  When Marakulin looked closely at Anna Stepanovna, he became more and more convinced that she really had no part to play in this world. The fact that she should smile so wonderfully made one feel sick at heart for that smile.

  It was a difficult autumn at the start, and everyone felt the strain. After the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, on September 14, Vasily Aleksandrovich the clown, flying through the circus on a trapeze, fell and hurt himself or, as they said around the flats, he had injured his spine and his pelvis. He felt so bad immediately after the fall that he even asked the priest to give him extreme unction. But the doctor said that he would be laid up for six months and would face a difficult operation.

  “They will cut him up from the heel and then open up the flesh,” announced Akumovna in sympathy for his plight, “then cut out the bone with a chisel and throw it away. Then they�
��ll do the same thing to the other. If only he would drink an infusion of horse manure, then everything would be all right….”

  After his success in the summer Marakulin once again had nothing to live on. The most people did in various places and institutions was to take a note of his address, and as everybody knows, when they write down your address, then there’s no point in expecting anything from them. At that time in Petersburg a census was being taken of all the dogs. So for about a week he walked up and down places like Burkov House and the Belgian factory yard, counting the number of dogs. When he was doing that, he got to know a certain student, one Likhovidov, who was also an accountant.

  This student, Likhovidov, who himself was at the end of his strength, could somehow manage to get bits and pieces of work to do like the dog census, and Marakulin profited by his example. It looked as though things might be about to get better. But then Likhovidov got into a spot of bother. He used to work in an office somewhere, and one day he left quite late after the evening’s business was done. The office manager went out just after him, dressed to the nines in his winter coat with its rich fur collar. “What do you think, Mr Likhovidov?” he says. “What would it be better to drink now, tea or coffee?” And Likhovidov, who had eaten nothing all day and who was as hungry as a horse, not to mention his teeth chattering from the blast of cold Petersburg air, looked at the manager as though he was working out whether it would be better to drink tea or coffee, and landed him a blow to the face, after which he simply disappeared. Once Likhovidov had gone, things came to a halt for Marakulin as well.

  An animal will run straight into the arms of the hunter. After a long search Anna Stepanovna found herself some teaching in a kind of private high school which turned out to be exemplary, and the headmistress, Ledniova, was one of the progressive ones. She possessed the great skill of never spending a single kopeck of her own money. She managed to do that easily and wisely, somehow concealing her dealings in that most real of Petersburg fogs. Of course, people said that she paid the teachers out of some mysterious fund for the provision of uniforms that did not belong to her at all, and that the teachers in her school changed every year without fail. As far as “progressive ideas” were concerned, Rakov and Leshchov were simply nothing compared with Ledniova, just as, in the matter of young female cooks, any guardsmen from the Semionovsky regiment were as nothing compared with Stanislav the clerk and Kazimir the fitter.

  Anna Stepanovna got no pay for two months. They kept on putting her off with various excuses, and only gave her money for the third month and then, of course, not as a normal salary, but as some kind of grant to come out of that fund allocated for uniforms. When she got her first salary, she took Marakulin and Vera Nikolaevna to see an opera at the Mariinsky Theater. The tickets cost her quite a lot. On the other hand, they were good seats, where they could see and hear everything.

  It was on that evening in the theater that Marakulin met Verochka again. How many times during the summer and autumn had he thought about her and sent inquiries to the address bureau, always receiving the same reply: “Gone away.” And now he had met her. For the first moments he was frightened, but then his fear turned into anxiety: Verochka was not alone, but with the cashier Aleksandr Ivanovich Glotov, Marakulin’s friend.

  Verochka had not changed in the slightest, but then do people ever really change? As for Glotov—he hadn’t changed, either, but whether on purpose for some reason clear to him alone, he pretended that he did not recognize his old friend.

  “What an unexpected surprise! And you know, Petrusha, we had written you off long ago!”

  Meanwhile Verochka, when she discovered that Vera Nikolaevna was also in the theater, set off at once to find her and did not come back.

  Glotov took Marakulin into the buffet.

  “Where did you meet her?” Glotov asked his friend.

  “We spent a winter living at the same landlady’s,” Marakulin replied.

  “So you are well acquainted with her?”

  “It depends.”

  All of a sudden their faces were distorted with hatred. They understood each other all too well. There could no longer be any conversation between them. But it was awkward for them to walk away from each other—and awkward for them to say nothing.

  Glotov suggested a drink. Marakulin said “no,” and they went out of the bar alongside each other, shoulder to shoulder, each of them looking for Verochka. Marakulin remained silent. But Glotov, in a studied way and with a certain pleasure, kept on repeating one and the same phrase: “What an unexpected surprise! And you know, Petrusha, we had written you off long ago!”

  In the interval Marakulin did not meet Verochka. She had promised to look in again on Vera Nikolaevna, but didn’t come. And so he saw her no more.

  After leaving the theater Marakulin set off for a coffeehouse on Nevsky Prospekt along with Vera Nikolaevna and Anna Stepanovna.

  The meeting with Verochka and Glotov, seeing them both together, along with the performance and the coffeehouse—all this agitated Marakulin, and the emotion that had begun to boil up in him invisibly when he had been standing in the bar with Glotov turned into black despair. His suffering made him feel that if someone were now to get up from his table, someone like Glotov or Glotov’s brother or some matchmaker of Glotov, anyone who knew Verochka and with whom she was well acquainted, if he were to get up, come up to him and land him a blow in the face, just as the student Likhovidov had done to his manager, then he, Marakulin, would kiss his foot gratefully and offer him his neck at the same time: let him beat him with his fists as much as he wanted, or let him hit Marakulin in the teeth, so that his jaws cracked. Then, feeling all the burning pain that he had freely taken upon himself, in his cruel suffering, he remembered the irresistible image of that unfortunate woman, the general’s wife, who had become so hateful to him, and he suddenly lost the desire to be beaten; he no longer needed to receive a slap in the face, or a punch, or a kick either from the well-trimmed moustache engaged in self-important conversation with the scrawny-looking absence of moustache, or from the devil-may-care, upward-curling, ginger-colored whiskers who knew Verochka and with whom Verochka was well acquainted. No, he was thinking in his despair how good it would be to scald the general’s wife just a bit with boiling water, or just pour a little bit of boiling water over her, and with what savagery she would rush to bite him and every single one of them.

  “Why is Verochka’s surname no longer Vekhoriova, but a different one, Rogova?”

  “Because she is the general’s wife,” Marakulin replied.

  “What general’s wife?” replied Vera Nikolaevna uncomprehendingly, looking now at him and now at Anna Stepanovna, who was smiling with a smile that made one feel sick at heart.

  And Marakulin suddenly wanted to get up himself and gouge out the eyes of one of the women—those lost eyes of wandering Holy Russia, so meek in her wandering beggary, Holy Russia, engirdled by poverty in its pilgrim’s belt from the Bogoliubsky monastery, Holy Russia, so humble, long-suffering, and patient, who will not make her own coffin, but can only build a funeral pyre and burn herself upon it. The other woman he wanted to stifle to make her stop smiling, and then there would be no more of that smile, proclaiming with barefaced effrontery that here is a besmirched soul that has been violated; she had no reason to live, she had nothing to do, she had no place in this world.

  But perhaps he himself had no place in this world any more?

  “And what do you think, Vera Nikolaevna?”

  “Verochka gave us her address and told us that we were not to ask for Vekhoriova, but for Rogova.”

  Marakulin closed his eyes; he suddenly felt an immense tiredness and a kind of complete indifference to what was happening. If a fire, he thought, were to start in the coffeehouse, he would not move from the spot, and if the ceiling were to begin to fall in, he would not even glance at it.

  Noticing that he was out of sorts, Vera Nikolaevna and Anna Stepanovna did not want to alarm him and,
trying to leave him in peace, they talked quietly between themselves.

  Vera Nikolaevna was talking about one of the nurses:

  “They brought a child into the hospital who had been scalded with boiling water. They would have to operate on him and replace some of his skin, but where could you get fresh skin? Surely not from the child? He couldn’t have stood it, since he was very weak. Then the nurse offered some of her skin, and they cut some of hers away, as much as they needed.”

  “So, what happened then?”

  “Everything went well, thank God! They are both alive.”

  Anna Stepanovna gave a smile as she crossed herself: “Thank God!”

  Marakulin stood up, and they went out on to the Fontanka.

  Verochka was living in furnished rooms on the Moika3—quite a small apartment with just her and her landlady. The rooms were full of all sorts of little sofas and tables, and crammed with all sorts of trifles, very probably just like the things the Oshurkovs had amassed in their ten rooms. And everything was the same canary yellow: yellow cushions, yellow screens—everything was yellow.

  Marakulin had finally managed to track down Verochka. As soon as he entered the hall, he realized that she was living there, not of her own choice, but that someone had installed her in this yellow furnished apartment.

  He found her in and rejoiced at his success: she was on her own. He got talking to her in an easy and natural way. As usual, she began by being extremely defiant, but she was somehow always saying different things, and you couldn’t fathom where the real truth was and what was just her imagination. She had changed her name because she was now on stage, working in the theater, in a café chantant in Petersburg.

  “I do my dancing there. You must come and watch me sometime.”