Iona heard someone saying: “Driver—you, there!—take me to Vyborg District!”
Iona started, and through his snow-laden eyelashes he made out an officer wearing a military overcoat with a hood.
“Vyborg!” the officer repeated. “Are you asleep, eh? Get on with it—Vyborg!”
To show he had heard, Iona pulled at the reins, sending whole layers of snow flying from the horse’s back and from his own shoulders. The officer sat down in the sleigh. The driver clucked with his tongue, stretched out his neck like a swan, rose in his seat, and more from habit than necessity, he flourished his whip. The little horse also stretched her neck, crooked her sticklike legs, and started off irresolutely.…
“Where are you going, you fool!” Iona was being assailed with shouts from some massive, dark object wavering to and fro in front of him. “Where the devil are you going? Stay on the right side of the road!”
“You don’t know how to drive! Stay on the right side!” the officer shouted angrily.
A coachman driving a private carriage was swearing at him, and a pedestrian, running across the road and brushing his shoulder against the mare’s nose, glanced up at him and shook the snow from his sleeve. Iona shifted about on the box, as though sitting on needles, thrust out his elbows, rolled his eyes like a madman, as though he did not understand where he was or what he was doing there.
“They’re all scoundrels,” the officer laughed. “All trying to shove into you, or fall under your horse. Quite a conspiracy!”
The driver turned towards the officer, his lips moving. He appeared about to say something, but the only sound coming from him was a hoarse wheezing cough.
“What is it?” the officer asked.
Iona’s lips twitched into a smile, and he strained his throat and croaked: “My son, sir. He died this week.”
“Hm, what did he die of?”
Iona turned his whole body round to face his fare.
“Who knows? They say it was fever.… He was in the hospital only three days, and then he died. It was God’s will!”
“Get over, damn you!” came a sudden shout out of the darkness. “Have you gone blind, you old idiot? Keep your eyes skinned!”
“Keep going,” the officer said. “This way we won’t get there till tomorrow morning. Put the whip to her!”
Once more the driver stretched his neck, rose in his seat, and with heavy grace flourished the whip. Several times he turned to watch his fare, but the officer’s eyes were closed and apparently he was in no mood to listen. And then, letting off the passenger in the Vyborg District, the driver stopped by a tavern, and again he remained motionless, doubled up on his box. And again the wet snow splashed him and his mare with its white paint. An hour passed, and then another.
Then three young men came loudly pounding the sidewalk in galoshes, quarreling furiously among themselves. Two were tall and slender, the third was a small hunchback.
“Driver, to the Police Bridge!” the hunchback shouted in a cracked voice. “The three of us for twenty kopecks!”
Iona tugged at the reins and smacked his lips. Twenty kopecks was not a fair price, but he did not care any more. Whether it was a ruble or five kopecks no longer mattered, so long as he had a fare. The young men, jostling and cursing one another, came up to the sleigh, and all three of them tried to jump onto the seat, and then they began to argue about which two should sit down, and who should be the one to stand up. After a long, fantastic, and ill-natured argument they decided that the hunchback would have to stand, because he was the shortest.
“Let’s go!” cried the hunchback in his cracked voice, taking his place and breathing down Iona’s neck. “Get going! Eh, brother, what a funny cap you’re wearing. You won’t find a worse one anywhere in St. Petersburg!”
“Hee-hee-hee,” Iona giggled. “Yes, it’s a funny cap.”
“Then get a move on! Are you going to crawl along all this time at the same pace? Do you want to get it in the neck?”
“My head’s splitting!” said one of the tall ones. “Yesterday at the Dukmassovs’, I drank all of four bottles of cognac with Vaska.”
“I don’t know why you have to tell lies,” the other tall one said angrily. “You lie like a swine!”
“May God strike me dead if I am not telling the truth!”
“A flea coughs the truth, too.”
“Hee-hee-hee,” Iona giggled. “What a lot of merry gentlemen.…”
“Pfui!” the hunchback exclaimed indignantly. “Damn you for an old idiot! Will you get a move on, or won’t you? Is that how to drive? Use the whip, dammit! Go on, you old devil, give it to her!”
Iona could feel at his back the hunchback’s wriggling body, and the tremble in the voice. He heard the insults which were being hurled at him, he saw the people in the street, and little by little the feeling of loneliness was lifted from his heart. The hunchback went on swearing until he choked on an elaborate six-story-high oath, and then was overcome with a fit of coughing. The tall ones began to talk about a certain Nadezhda Petrovna. Iona looked round at them. He waited until there was a short pause in the conversation, and then he turned again and murmured: “My son died—he died this week.…”
“We all die,” sighed the hunchback, wiping his lips after his fit of coughing. “Keep going, eh? Gentlemen, we simply can’t go any further like this. We’ll never get there!”
“Give him a bit of encouragement. Hit him in the neck!”
“Did you hear that, old pest? You’ll get it in the neck all right. One shouldn’t stand on ceremony with people like you—one might just as well walk. Do you hear me, you old snake? I don’t suppose you care a tinker’s damn about what we are saying.”
Then Iona heard rather than felt a thud on the nape of his neck.
“Hee-hee-hee,” he laughed. “Such merry gentlemen! God bless them!”
“Driver, are you married?” one of the tall men asked.
“Me, am I married? Hee-hee-hee. You’re all such merry gentlemen. There’s only one wife left to me now—the damp earth. Hee-ho-ho. The grave, that’s what’s left for me. My son is dead, and I’m alive. Strange how death comes by the wrong door. It didn’t come for me, it came for my son.…”
Iona turned round to tell them how his son died, but at that moment the hunchback gave a little sigh of relief and announced that, thank God, they had come to the end of the journey. Having received his twenty kopecks, Iona gazed after the revelers for a long time, even after they had vanished through a dark gateway. Once more he was alone, once more silence fell on him. The grief he had kept at bay for a brief while now returned to wrench his heart with still greater force. With an expression of anxiety and torment, he gazed at the crowds hurrying along both sides of the street, wondering whether there was anyone among those thousands of people who would listen to him. But the crowds hurried past, paying no attention to him or to his grief. His grief was vast, boundless. If his heart could break, and the grief could pour out of it, it would flow over the whole world; but no one would see it. It had found a hiding place invisible to all: even in broad daylight, even if you held a candle to it, you wouldn’t see it.
There was a doorman carrying some kind of sack, and Iona decided to talk to him.
“What time is it, my dear fellow?” he asked.
“Ten o’clock. What the devil are you standing there for? Get a move on!”
Iona drove along the street a bit. His body was bent, and he was surrendering to his grief. He felt it was useless to turn to people for help, but in less than five minutes he had straightened himself up, shaking his head as though he felt a sharp pang of pain, and then he pulled at the reins. He could bear it no longer.
“Back to the stables,” he thought. “Back to the stables.”
The little mare, as though she read his thoughts, started off at a trot.
An hour and a half later Iona was sitting by a large dirty stove. On the stove, on the floor, on benches, men were snoring. The air was noisome,
suffocating. Iona found himself gazing at the sleeping people. He scratched himself, and he was sorry he had come back so early.
“I haven’t earned enough even for the hay,” he thought. “There’s grief for you. But a man who knows his work, and has a full belly, and a well-fed horse besides, he’s at peace with the world all his days.”
From one of the corners a young driver rose, grunting sleepily as he reached for the water bucket.
“You thirsty?” Iona asked him.
“Reckon so.”
“Well, it’s a good thing to be thirsty, but as for me, brother, my son is dead. Did you hear me? This week, at the hospital.… Such a lot of trouble!”
Iona looked to see whether the words were producing any effect, but saw none—the young man had covered up his face and was asleep again. The old man sighed and scratched himself. Just as the young man wanted to drink, so he wanted to talk. Soon it would be a week since his son died, and still no one had let him talk about it properly. He would have to tell it slowly, very carefully. He would tell them how his son fell ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died. He would have to describe the funeral, and how he went to the hospital to collect his son’s clothes. His daughter Anissya was still in the country. He wanted to talk about her, too. Yes, there was so much to talk about. And the listener would have to gasp and sigh and bewail the fate of the dead man. And maybe it would be better to talk about it to women. Even though women are so foolish, you can bring the tears to their eyes with a few words.
“Now I’ll go and look at my horse,” Iona thought to himself. “There’s always time for sleep—nothing there to be afraid of.”
He threw on his coat and went down to the stable to look after her, thinking about such things as hay, oats, and the weather. Alone, he dared not let his mind dwell on his son. He could talk about him to anyone, but alone, thinking about him, conjuring up his living presence, no—no, that was too painful for words.
“Filling your belly, eh?” he said, seeing the mare’s shining eyes. “Well, eat up! We haven’t earned enough for oats, but we can eat hay. Oh, I’m too old to be driving. My son should be driving, not me. He was a real cabdriver, and he should be alive now.…”
Iona was silent for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s how it is, old girl. My son, Kuzma Ionich, is no more. He died on us. Now let’s say you had a foal, and you were the foal’s mother, and suddenly, let’s say, the same little foal departed this life. You’d be sorry, eh?”
The little mare munched and listened and breathed on his hands.
Surrendering to his grief, Iona told her the whole story.
January 1886
Anyuta
IN one of those very cheap rooms in the Lisbon rooming house, Stepan Klochkov, a third-year medical student, was pacing up and down as he applied himself zealously to cramming from a medical textbook. The strain of memorizing the words made his mouth dry, and sweat dampened his forehead.
Anyuta, who roomed with him, sat on a stool by the window, where the edges were white with icy tracery. She was a small, thin brunette, twenty-five years old, very pale, with gentle gray eyes. Head bent, she was embroidering the collar of a man’s shirt with red thread. She was working hurriedly, against time. It was afternoon, and the clock in the passageway outside drowsily struck two o’clock, but the room was still in disorder. Rumpled bedclothes, pillows scattered everywhere, books, clothes, a large filthy washbasin filled with soapy slop water in which cigarette butts were floating, filth on the floor—everything seemed to have been hurled down in a heap, crumpled, deliberately thrown into confusion.
“The right lung consists of three lobes …” Klochkov recited. “Boundaries! Upper lobe on anterior wall of the chest reaches fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib … behind up to the spina scapulae …”
Klochkov tried to visualize what he was reading, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Unable to form a clear picture, he began to feel his upper ribs through his waistcoat.
“These ribs resemble the keys of a piano,” he said. “To avoid being confused by them, you simply must make a mental picture of them. You have to study them on the skeleton and on the living body. Come here, Anyuta! Let’s get this thing straight!”
Anyuta put down her sewing, removed her jacket, and straightened her shoulders. Kluchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began to count her ribs.
“Hm! The first rib can’t be felt.… It’s behind the collarbone. This must be the second rib.… Oh yes, and here is the third, and the fourth.… Hm … Well, why are you shivering?”
“Your fingers are cold!”
“Nonsense, it won’t kill you! Don’t wriggle about so much. This must be the third, and here’s the fourth.… You’re so thin, and yet I can hardly feel your ribs.… Here’s the second.… Here’s the third.… No, you are getting confused. You don’t see the thing clearly. I shall have to draw it. Where is my piece of charcoal?”
Klochkov took the charcoal crayon and began to sketch some parallel lines corresponding to the ribs on Anyuta’s chest.
“Wonderful! Now everything is clear as daylight. Now let me sound your chest. Stand up!”
Anyuta stood up, raising her chin. Klochkov began to tap her chest, becoming so deeply immersed in the task that he did not notice that her lips, nose, and fingers were turning blue with cold. She shivered, and then she was afraid the student would see her shivering, stop drawing lines on her chest, stop tapping her, and then perhaps he would fail miserably in the examinations.
“Now it’s all clear,” Klochkov said, and he stopped tapping her. “Just sit there, don’t rub off the charcoal, and I’ll learn some more.”
Once again the student began pacing up and down the room, memorizing. Anyuta had black stripes across her chest, and looked as though she had been tattooed. She sat there thinking, huddled up, shivering with cold. She was never talkative, always silent, thinking, thinking.…
In six or seven years of wandering from one furnished room to another, she had known five students like Klochkov. Now they had finished their courses, had gone out into the world, and being respectable people, they had put her out of their minds. One of them lived in Paris, two were doctors, a fourth was an artist, and they said the fifth was already a professor. Klochkov was the sixth. Soon he too would leave the medical school and go out into the world. No doubt a beautiful future awaited him, and no doubt he would become a great man, but the present prospects did not look promising. He had no tobacco, no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left. She must hurry up with her embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered it, and then with the quarter ruble she would get for it buy tea and tobacco.
“Can I come in?” said a voice from the door.
Anyuta quickly pulled a woolen shawl round her shoulders.
Fetissov, an artist, walked in.
“Do me a favor,” he began, addressing Klochkov and glaring like a wild beast through the hair hovering over his forehead. “Do me the kindness of lending me that pretty woman of yours for an hour or two! You see, I am painting a picture, and I can do nothing without a model.”
“With pleasure,” the student said. “Go along, Anyuta.”
“What I have to put up with,” Anyuta murmured softly.
“That’s enough! He wants you for the sake of his art, not for some nonsense or other. Why not help him when you can?”
Anyuta began dressing.
“What are you painting?” Klochkov said.
“Psyche. Wonderful subject. It’s not going along well, though. I have to keep working with different models. Yesterday there was one with blue legs. I asked how the legs got blue, and she said it was the dye from her stockings. Still learning away, eh? Happy man, with all that patience!”
“Medicine is one of those things you have to keep pegging away at.”
“Hm … Excuse me, Klochkov, but you are really living in a terrible pigsty. The devil alone knows how you live!”
“What do you mean? I can’t live any other way. I only get twelve rubles a month from my father, and it’s difficult to live decently on that money.”
“Well, so it is,” the artist said, knitting his brows with an air of disgust. “Still, you should be able to live better. A civilized man should have some measure of aesthetic taste, surely? Only the devil knows what this room is like! The bed’s not made. Slops, filth … Yesterday’s porridge still in the plates! Pfui!”
“It’s true enough,” the student said, embarrassed. “Anyuta did not wash up today. All her time was taken.”
When Anyuta and the artist had left, Klochkov threw himself down on the divan and went on with his lessons, lying down. Unexpectedly he fell asleep, waking up an hour later. He propped his head in his fists and gave himself up to gloomy reflections. He remembered the artist saying that all civilized men were obliged to have a measure of aesthetic taste, and yet here in the room everything was revolting and loathsome. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as he would be in the future: receiving patients in his consulting room, drinking tea in a vast drawing room with his wife, a very proper woman, beside him—and now here was the washbasin with cigarette butts swimming around, and it was unbelievably nauseating. He thought of Anyuta—ugly, unprepossessing, pitiful. He decided to get rid of her at once, whatever the cost.
When she returned from the artist, she took off her coat. He got up and spoke very seriously: “My dear, sit down and listen to me. We have to separate. I don’t want to live with you any longer.”
Anyuta came back from the artist worn out and close to fainting. From long standing in a suitable pose, her face looked thin and sallow, her chin sharper than ever. She did not reply to the student, but her lips trembled.
“You knew it would have to come sooner or later,” the student said. “You’re a good, fine person, and you’re nobody’s fool. You’ll understand.”
Forty Stories Page 13