About Love and Other Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  All this came back to him when he saw the familiar handwriting. Kovrin went out onto the balcony; the weather was calm and mild and you could smell the sea. The glorious bay reflected the moon and the lights and had a colour that was difficult to pin down. It was a soft, gentle mixture of blue and green; in some parts the colour of the water was like copper sulphate, while in others it seemed that the moonlight had condensed and filled the bay instead of water; but what a harmony of colours in general; what a peaceful, calm, and sublime mood!

  The windows were probably open on the floor beneath the balcony, because women’s voices and laughter could be heard clearly. There was obviously a party going on.

  Kovrin summoned his courage to open the letter, and started reading as he walked back into the room:

  ‘My father has just died. I have you to thank for this, as it was you who killed him. Our gardens are going to ruin, there are already other people running them, so basically everything my poor father feared is coming to pass. I have you to thank for this too. I hate you with all my heart and hope you die soon. How I suffer! My heart is consumed with an unbearable pain… May you be cursed. I took you for someone who was extraordinary and brilliant and grew to love you, but you turned out to be insane…’

  Kovrin could not read further; he tore up the letter and threw it away. He was overcome by an uneasiness bordering on fear. Varvara Nikolayevna was sleeping behind the screen and he could hear her breathing; the sound of women’s voices and laughter was coming up from the floor below, but he had the sensation that he was the only living soul in the entire hotel. He felt dreadful that the unhappy, grief-stricken Tanya had cursed him in her letter and hoped he would die; he looked briefly over towards the door, as if afraid that the mysterious force which had brought about so much destruction in his life and in the life of those close to him over the previous two years was about to enter the room and take control of him again.

  He knew from experience that work was the best way of dealing with strained nerves. What he had to do was to sit down at the desk and, no matter what was going on, force himself to concentrate on some idea or other. He got out a notebook from his red briefcase, in which he had sketched an outline for a small anthology, conceived in case he found himself bored without something to do. He sat down at the desk, started thinking about the outline, and began to feel that his peaceful, submissive, and detached mood was returning to him. The outline in his notebook even prompted him to ponder the question of earthly vanity. He thought about the high price life exacts for the insignificant or very ordinary benefits it can give a person. In order to be appointed to a chair by the age of forty, for example, to be an ordinary professor and articulate ordinary ideas, other people’s ideas moreover, in a language which was stilted, boring, and lifeless–in other words, to reach the position of an average scholar, Kovrin had to study for fifteen years, work day and night, suffer a serious psychiatric illness, experience an unsuccessful marriage, and do a lot of stupid and unfair things which it would be better not to remember. Kovrin now clearly recognized that he was a mediocrity, and he willingly reconciled himself to this, since it was his opinion that people ought to be happy with the way they were.

  Working on the anthology would have succeeded in calming him down, but the white scraps of the torn-up letter were lying there on the floor, preventing him from concentrating. He got up from the desk, picked up the scraps of the letter, and threw them out of the window, but a light breeze was blowing in from the sea and just scattered them along the window-sill. Once again a state of unease, bordering on fear, overcame him, and he started to feel as if he was the only living soul in the whole hotel… He went out onto the balcony. The bay looked at him, with a multitude of sapphire, turquoise, and fire-coloured eyes, as if it was alive, luring him. It was hot and stuffy actually, and going for a dip would not have been a bad thing.

  Suddenly a violin started playing on the floor below and two soft female voices began singing. It was something familiar. The song they were singing below was about a girl with a febrile imagination, who hears mysterious sounds in the garden at night and decides that this is a celestial harmony which we mortals cannot understand… Kovrin held his breath as his heart was gripped by sadness, and then his chest started vibrating with a wonderful sweet joy, such as he had long forgotten.

  A tall black column like a whirlwind or tornado appeared on the other side of the bay. It was coming across the bay with terrifying speed and making for the hotel, becoming smaller and darker, and Kovrin barely had time to duck out of its way… A monk with black eyebrows and a bare head of grey hair, barefoot, arms crossed on his chest, rushed past him and then stopped in the middle of the room.

  ‘Why did you not believe me?’ he asked reproachfully, looking with affection at Kovrin. ‘If you had believed me back then when I said that you were a genius, then these two years would not have been so miserable and unfulfilling for you.’

  Kovrin already believed again that he had been chosen by God, that he was a genius, and he vividly remembered all his previous conversations with the black monk and wanted to speak, but blood was pouring from his throat straight onto his chest; at a loss to know what to do, he was moving his hands up and down his chest and his shirt-cuffs were becoming soaked with blood. He wanted to call out to Varvara Nikolayevna who was sleeping behind the screen, and he made an effort but said:

  ‘Tanya!’

  He fell onto the floor, and raising himself onto his arms, he called out again:

  ‘Tanya!’

  He was calling out to Tanya, calling out to the large gardens with their luxurious flowers, sprinkled with dew, he was calling out to the park, to the fir trees with the furry roots, to the rye field, to his wonderful scholarship, to his youth, to his daring, to his joy, and he was calling out to his life which was so beautiful. He could see a large pool of blood on the floor near his face, and he was so weak that he could not even say a single word, but an inexpressible, boundless happiness was filling his whole being. Underneath the balcony on the floor below they were playing the serenade, while the black monk was whispering to him that he was a genius, and that he was dying only because his weak human body had lost its equilibrium and could no longer serve as the vessel for genius.

  When Varvara Nikolayevna woke up and came out from behind the screen, Kovrin was already dead, and a beatific smile had frozen on his lips.

  ROTHSCHILD’S VIOLIN

  The town was very small—worse than a village really—and the people who lived in it were mostly old folk who died so rarely it was quite annoying. There was a very low demand for coffins from the hospital and from the jail. So things were pretty bad, basically. If Yakov Ivanov had been a coffinmaker in a proper town, then he would probably have had his own house and people would have called him Yakov Matveyich, but here in this little town they just called him Yakov, and for some strange reason he also got called Bronza by everybody. He lived in poverty like an ordinary peasant, in a little old hut with just one room, which had to accommodate him, Marfa, the stove, a double bed, the coffins, a workbench, and all their household goods.

  Yakov did make good solid coffins. For peasants and lower–class people he measured them according to his own height and was never wrong, because there was no one taller or stronger than him anywhere, not even in the jail, even though he was already seventy years old. For those who were more well–to–do and for women he took measurements, using an iron ruler. He did not like taking orders for children’s coffins at all, and would go straight ahead and make them without measurements, with a sneer, and when he was paid for his work, he would say: ‘I have to confess, I don’t like having to bother with such trivial things.’

  As well as his trade, his violin playing also brought him a small income. A Jewish band usually played at weddings in the town, run by Moisey Ilyich Shakhkes the tinsmith, who used to keep more than half the takings for himself. Since Yakov played the violin very well, especially Russian songs, Shakhkes sometimes invit
ed him to play with the band at a rate of fifty kopecks a day, not including tips from the guests. When Bronza sat in the band his face would first become all sweaty and red. It would be hot, there would be an overpowering smell of garlic, the violin would squeal, a double bass would wheeze away by his right ear, and by his left would wail a flute, played by a red–haired, skinny yid who had a whole network of red and blue veins on his face and bore the name of the famous millionaire Rothschild. This wretched Jew managed to play even the most lighthearted tune mournfully. For no good reason, Yakov had gradually been filled with a hatred and contempt for Jews, and especially for Rothschild. He began picking on him and swearing at him using unpleasant words, and once he was on the point of beating him up, but then Rothschild got very upset and said, glaring at him ferociously: ‘If I didn’t have respect for your talent, I would have hurled you through the window a long time ago.’

  Then he started crying. So Bronza did not get invited to play with the band very often, in fact only at times of extreme necessity, when one of the Jews could not make it.

  Yakov was never in a good mood, because he had to put up with terrible losses the whole time. On Sundays and public holidays, for example, it was a sin to work, then Mondays were always hard, and so that meant there were about two hundred days in the year when you had to put your feet up whether you liked it or not. That was a dreadful loss! And if someone in the town had a wedding without music, or Shakhkes did not invite Yakov, that was also a loss. The police chief had been ill for two years and was on his last legs, so Yakov had been impatiently waiting for him to die, but he had decided to travel into the city for treatment and then he had gone and died there. That was a loss all right, at least ten roubles or so, because it would have been an expensive coffin, with brocade. Thoughts about losses particularly got to Yakov at night; so he used to put his violin next to him on the bed, and whenever his head began to fill with any kind of nonsense he could touch the strings, the violin would make a noise in the darkness and he would feel better.

  On the sixth of May the previous year, Marfa had suddenly fallen ill. The old woman was breathing with difficulty and drinking a lot of water and she was unsteady on her feet, but she still got the stove going in the morning, and even went to fetch water. By evening she had taken to bed. Yakov played the violin all day; when it was completely dark, he picked up the book in which he recorded his losses every day and started totting up the annual total out of sheer boredom. It came out at more than one thousand roubles. He was so devastated by this that he flung all his accounts on the floor and stamped on them. Then he picked them up and again spent ages making calculations, sighing deeply with the strain of it all. His face was crimson and wet with perspiration. He realized that if he had put those wasted thousand roubles into the bank, he would have got the minutest amount of interest–forty roubles. So those forty roubles were a loss then too. Basically, whichever way you looked at it, it was just losses everywhere, nothing but losses.

  ‘Yakov!’ called out Marfa suddenly. ‘I’m dying!’

  He looked round at his wife. Her face was pink with fever, and extraordinarily clear and radiant. Bronza now felt embarrassed, as he was used to seeing her look pale, timid, and unhappy. It looked as if she really was dying and was glad to be finally leaving forever the hut, the coffins, and Yakov… She was looking at the ceiling and moving her lips and her expression was happy, as if she had seen death, her deliverer, and was whispering to it.

  It was dawn already and the morning sun was shining through the window. As he looked at the old woman, Yakov for some reason recalled that over the course of their lives together he had never once caressed her or felt compassion for her; not once had he thought of buying her a scarf or bringing her home a piece of cake from a wedding. All he had done was shout at her, blame her for the losses, and shake his clenched fists at her. It is true that he had never actually hit her, but he had certainly scared her, and she froze with fear every time. He had also forbidden her to drink tea, because their outgoing expenses were already heavy, so she had to just drink hot water. And he understood why she now had such a strange and joyful expression, and he started to feel terrible.

  When morning came, he borrowed his neighbour’s horse and took Marfa to the hospital. There were not very many patients there, and so he did not have to wait long, only about three hours. He was very pleased to learn that it was not the doctor seeing patients that day, as he was sick himself, but the medical attendant Maxim Nikolayevich. He was an old man and everyone in the town said about him that although he drank and got into fights, he knew more than the doctor.

  ‘Your good health sir,’ said Yakov, as he brought the old woman into the surgery. ‘Sorry to be troubling you with our trifling concerns, Maxim Nikolayevich, sir. It’s my companion here who has been taken ill, you see. My better half, as they say, pardon the expression…’

  Wrinkling his grey eyebrows and stroking his sideburns, the attendant started to examine the old woman, who was sitting hunched over on the stool. Emaciated and sharp–nosed, with her mouth open, she looked in profile like a bird wanting to drink.

  ‘Hmm… I see,’ said the orderly slowly. He sighed. ‘Influenza, but maybe it is a fever. There is a lot of typhoid going round the town at the moment. Anyway, the old lady has done pretty well for herself, praise the Lord. How old is she?’

  ‘A year off seventy, sir.’

  ‘Well, then. She has done all right for herself… Time for her to say her farewells.’

  ‘It’s totally right, what you are remarking upon, Maxim Nikolayevich, sir,’ said Yakov, smiling out of politeness. ‘And we thank you most deeply for your kindness, sir, but if you will permit me to say so, every little insect wants to live.’

  ‘Don’t I know it!’ said the attendant, in such a way as if the old woman’s life or death depended on him. ‘Well, I tell you what, my friend, you just go and put a cold compress on her head and give her some of these here powders twice a day. Right, bye–bye for now, bonjour.’

  Yakov could see from the expression on his face that the situation was bad, and that no amount of powders were going to help; it was clear to him now that Marfa would die very soon, in fact any day now. He tapped the attendant on the elbow, winked at him, and whispered:

  ‘Hey, Maxim Nikolayevich, oughtn’t she to have some cupping–glasses put on her?’

  ‘No time for that, absolutely not, my friend. Now you just take your old woman off home and God bless you. Cheerio.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be so kind, though?’ Yakov asked beseechingly. ‘You must know yourself–if it was her stomach hurting or something inside like, then you give powders and drops, but it’s a chill she’s got after all! The first thing you do with a chill is get the blood going, Maxim Nikolayevich.’

  But the orderly had already called in the next patient, and a woman had come in with her little boy.

  ‘Come on, it’s time you were off,’ he said to Yakov, frowning. ‘No point in dragging it out.’

  ‘In that case, you could at least put some leeches on her! Give us a reason to pray eternally to God!’

  The attendant lost his temper and shouted:

  ‘One more word and I’ll… Wretched idiot!’

  Yakov also lost his temper and turned completely crimson, but he did not say a word. Instead he took Marfa by the hand and led her out of the room. Only when they were already sitting in the cart did he look back at the hospital, and say:

  ‘What a lot of frauds they’ve got in there! I’m sure they’d put glass cups on someone well—off, but they can’t even spare a single leech for someone poor. The brutes!’ When they arrived home, Marfa went into the hut, and then stood for about ten minutes, holding on to the stove. She thought that if she lay down Yakov would start talking to her about losses, and tell her off for lying down and not wanting to work. But Yakov was looking at her with complete boredom and remembering that tomorrow was the feast day of St John the Evangelist, then the day after that was St Nich
olas the Miracle—Worker, * and then it was Monday, which was a bad day. He would not be able to work for four days, and Marfa was bound to die on one of them; which meant he had better make the coffin today. He picked up his iron ruler and went up to the old woman to take her measurements. Then she lay down, and he crossed himself and started working.