On the landing higher up, two schoolboys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov did not care; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to him and started kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.
‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ she said in horror, pushing him away from her. ‘We have both gone completely mad. You must leave today; you must leave now in fact… I swear to you by all that is holy, I beg you… There are people coming!’
There was someone walking up the stairs.
‘You must leave….’ Anna Sergeyevna continued in a whisper. ‘Dmitry Dmitrich, are you listening to me? I’ll come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy, I’m not happy now and I will never ever be happy. Never! Don’t make me suffer even more! I swear, I’ll come and see you in Moscow. But we must part now! My dearest, beloved, dear friend, we must part!’
She pressed his hand and started briskly walking down the stairs, looking back at him all the time, and you could see from her eyes that she really was not happy. Gurov stood for a while, listening, and then when everything had gone quiet he looked for his coat-peg and left the theatre.
IV
So Anna Sergeyevna started to come and visit him in Moscow. Every two or three months she would leave S., telling her husband she was going to see a consultant about a female complaint, and her husband both believed her and did not believe her. When she came to Moscow she stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel * and would immediately send over someone in a red hat to let Gurov know. Gurov would come and see her and no one in Moscow knew about it.
He was going to see her on one of those occasions, one winter morning (the messenger had tried to find him the previous evening, but he had been out). With him was his daughter whom he wanted to take to school, as it was on the way. Snow was falling in thick, wet flakes.
‘It’s now three degrees above zero, but it’s still snowing,’ said Gurov to his daughter. ‘But it’s only the surface of the earth which is warm, you see; there is a quite different temperature in the upper layers of the atmosphere.’
‘Papa, why aren’t there thunderstorms in winter?’
He explained about that too. As he was talking, he was thinking about the fact that he was going to a rendezvous and that there was not one living soul who knew about it; probably no one ever would know about it. He had two lives: one was the public one, which was visible to everybody who needed to know about it, but was full of conditional truth and conditional deceit, just like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, while the other one was secret. And by some strange coincidence—perhaps it was just chance—everything that was important, interesting, and essential to him, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, and which made up the inner core of his life, was hidden from others, while everything that was false—the outer skin in which he hid in order to cover up the truth, like his work at the bank, for example, the arguments at the club, his ‘lesser species’, and going to receptions with his wife—was public. And he judged others to be like himself, not believing what he saw, and always supposing that each person’s real and most interesting life took place beneath a shroud of secrecy, as if under the veil of night. Every individual existence is a mystery, and it is maybe partly for this reason that cultured people take such pains for their secrets to be respected.
Once he had taken his daughter to school, Gurov set off for the Slavyansky Bazaar. He took off his fur coat downstairs, and then went upstairs and knocked on the door. Anna Sergeyevna had been waiting to see him since the previous evening; she was wearing his favourite grey dress and was worn out from the journey and the anticipation of seeing him. She was pale and looked at him without smiling; barely had he walked in through the door when she threw herself on his chest. It was as if they had not seen each other for two years and their kiss was slow and protracted.
‘So, how is life down there?’ he asked. ‘What’s new?’
‘Wait, I’ll tell you in a minute… I can’t now.’
She could not speak as she was crying. She turned away from him and pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.
‘She must have a cry if she needs to; I’ll just sit here for a minute,’ thought Gurov and he went and sat down in an armchair.
Then he rang and asked for some tea to be brought up to him, and while he was drinking the tea she remained standing, in front of the window… She was crying because she was so upset, and because of the painful realization that their life had turned out so sadly; they saw each other only in secret, and had to hide from people like thieves! Their life really was a mess.
‘Come on now, stop!’ he said.
It was clear to him that the love they felt for each other would not come to an end any time soon; it was impossible to say when in fact it would end. Anna Sergeyevna was growing more attached to him, she adored him, and it would be unthinkable to tell her that it all would have to come to an end at some point; she would not have believed it anyway.
He went over to her and took her by the shoulders so he could caress her and make her laugh, and just at that moment he saw himself in the mirror.
His hair had already begun to go grey. He found it strange that he had aged so much in the last few years, and had lost his looks. The shoulders on which his hands were placed were warm, and they were shaking. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably already on the point of fading and wilting, just like his own life. Why did she love him so much? He always seemed to women to be something other than what he was; it was not really him they loved, but a person created in their imagination whom they longed to have in their lives, and when they noticed their mistake they still carried on loving him anyway. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time had gone by, he had got to know women, he had become close to them and then parted from them, but he had never felt love; everything and anything but love in fact.
It was only now, when his hair was turning grey, that he had started to love someone truly and properly—it was the first time in his life.
He and Anna Sergeyevna loved each other like people who were related and very close, like husband and wife, or close friends; they felt that fate had intended them to be together, and found it impossible to understand why they were both married to other people; they were like two migratory birds, a male and a female, who had been caught and made to live in separate cages. They had forgiven each other for things they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave each other for everything in the present, and they felt that their love had changed them both.
In the past, when there had been moments of sadness, he had reassured her with the first rationalization which came into his head, but he had no time for rationalizations now; he felt deep compassion and wanted to be sincere and gentle…
‘Stop it, my love,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough crying now… Let’s talk now, let’s see what we can come up with.’
Then they spent a long time conferring and talking about how they could extricate themselves from the need to hide and deceive, from having to live in different towns and not see each other for long stretches. How could they free themselves from these unbearable bonds?
‘How are we going to do it? How?’ he asked, holding his head in his hands. ‘How?’
And it seemed that in a little while a solution would be found and then a new, wonderful life would begin, but it was clear to both of them that the end was still a long way off and that the most complex and difficult part was only just beginning.
AT CHRISTMAS TIME
I
‘What shall I write?’ Yegor asked, dipping his pen.
Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years now. Her daughter Yefimya had gone to live in Petersburg with her husband after their wedding, and she had sent two letters, but then it was if she had disappeared without trace; there had been no news at all. And whether the old lady was milking the cow at sunrise, lighting the stove, or lying in bed awake at night, the only thing she ever thought about was how Yefimya was doing, whether she
was alive or not. They needed to send her a letter, but her old man could not write, and there was no one to ask.
But then Christmas came, and Vasilisa could bear it no longer, so she went to the inn to see Yegor, the landlady’s brother, who had been sitting at home in the inn doing nothing ever since he had finished his military service; people said he could write a good letter if you paid him enough. Vasilisa had a word in the inn with the cook, then with the landlady, and finally with Yegor. They settled on fifteen kopecks.
And now, the day after Christmas, here was Yegor sitting at the table in the kitchen in the inn, holding a pen in his hand. Vasilisa was standing in front of him, deep in thought, with an expression of sadness and worry on her face. With her had come her old man Pyotr, who was tall and very thin, with a bald patch in his brown hair; he stood there motionless, staring straight in front of him as if he was blind. There was some pork frying in a pan on the stove; it was spitting and hissing, and it sounded almost as if it was saying ‘floo-floo-floo’. It was stuffy.
‘What shall I write?’ asked Yegor again.
‘Hang on!’ said Vasilisa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously. ‘Don’t rush me! It’s not as if you are writing for nothing, we are paying you after all! Well all right, I’m ready now. Dear son-in-law Andrey Khrisanfych and our beloved only daughter Yefimya Petrovna, we bow deeply to you and send you our love and our parental blessing, which will be there always.’
‘Right, got that. Fire away.’
‘And we wish you a Happy Christmas, we are alive and well, and we hope you are too, with all the blessing of the Lord… the King of Heaven.’
Vasilisa stopped to think and exchanged glances with the old man.
‘We hope you are too, with all the blessing of the Lord… the King of Heaven,’ she said again and burst into tears.
She could say nothing more. Before when she had been lying there at night thinking, it had seemed to her that she would not be able to say everything there was to say even if she wrote ten letters. Much water had gone under the bridge since the time that her daughter and her husband had left. Her old folk had been living like orphans, and they sighed so deeply at night it was as if they had buried their daughter. And to think of all the events in the village during that time, all the weddings, and all the deaths! To think of all those long winters! And such long nights!
‘It’s hot!’ said Yegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. ‘Must be getting on for seventy degrees. So what else?’
The old people were silent.
‘What does your son-in-law do?’ asked Yegor.
‘He was in the army, if you remember,’ replied the old man in a feeble voice. ‘He finished his service the same time as you. He was a soldier, and now he’s in Petersburg at a clinic where they have water treatments. The doctor treats sick people with water. He works for the doctor as the doorman.’
‘It’s all written here…’ said the old woman, taking a letter from her handkerchief. ‘We got it from Yefimya, goodness knows when. Maybe they aren’t even alive anymore.’
Yegor thought for a while, then started writing quickly.
‘At the present time,’ he wrote; ‘seeing that fate has sent you to the Milittary Spheere, we advise you to have a look at the Statutes of Dissiplinary Penelties and the Criminal Laws of the War Dipartment, and you will see in the Law there a sivilization of the Ranks of the War Dipartment.’
After he had written it all down, he read it out loud, and Vasilisa realized they ought to be writing about the hardships of the previous year, about the shortage of grain which had continued right up until Christmas, and how they had been forced to sell the cow. They ought to be asking for money, they ought to be writing about how her old husband was often sick, and would probably soon be giving up his soul to God… But how could you put that into words? What do you say before and afterwards?
‘Pay attention to the fifth volume of the Milittary Regulations,’ Yegor carried on writing. ‘Soldier is a Common and Universel Term. The General at the Topp and the Private at the Bottom is called a soldier…’
The old man moved his lips and said softly:
‘Wouldn’t be a bad thing to see our grandchildren.’
‘What grandchildren?’ asked the old woman, looking at him crossly. ‘Maybe there aren’t any!’
‘Grandchildren, you mean? But maybe there are. Who knows?’
‘And so therefor you can tell,’ hurried Yegor, ‘who is our External enemy and who is our Innternal enemy. Our most Innternal Enemy is Bacchus.’
The pen scratched away, making great flourishes that looked like fish-hooks. Yegor was racing through it and reading out every line several times. He was sitting there on the stool, all well fed, chubby-cheeked, and healthy-looking, with a red neck, and his legs splayed out wide beneath the table. He was vulgarity itself—crude, arrogant, unassailable vulgarity, proud to have been born and brought up in an inn, and Vasilisa knew very well that that he was vulgar, but could not put it into words, and just kept looking at Yegor with anger and suspicion. Her head had started aching from his voice, the unintelligible words, the heat, and the stuffiness, her thoughts had become confused, she could not say anything, she could not think straight, and was just dying for him to finish all his scratching. But the old man was looking on with complete faith. He trusted his old woman, who had brought him here, and he trusted Yegor; and when he had mentioned the water treatment clinic just now, it was clear from the expression on his face that he trusted the clinic and the healing power of water.
When he had finished writing, Yegor stood up and read the whole letter out from the beginning. The old man did not understand anything, but he nodded his head trustingly.
‘That’s all right, that is; real smooth,’ he said; ‘Yes, it’s all right. Your good health.’
They put three five-kopeck pieces on the table and left the inn; the old man stared straight ahead of him, like a blind man, and there was complete trust written all over his face, but when they went outside Vasilisa raised her hand at the dog and said angrily:
‘Ugh… what scum!’
Worried by her thoughts, the old woman could not sleep all night, then at dawn she got up and said her prayers and set off for the station to post the letter.
The station was eight miles away.
II
Dr B. O. Moselweiser’s Water Treatment Clinic was open for business at New Year just like on other days, and the only thing which was different was that the doorman, Andrey Khrisanfych, was wearing a uniform with new piping on his lapels, and his boots were particularly shiny; he wished everybody who arrived a Happy New Year and season’s greetings.
It was morning. Andrey Khrisanfych was standing by the door and reading the newspaper. On the stroke of ten arrived the familiar figure of a general who was a regular visitor, followed by the postman. Andrey Khrisanfych helped the general off with his coat and said:
‘Happy New Year and season’s greetings to you, your excellency!’
‘Thank you, my friend. And the same to you.’
As he was going up the stairs, the general nodded towards a door and asked (he asked every day and forgot every time):
‘What’s in this room?’
‘That’s the massage room, your excellency!’
When the general’s footsteps had died away, Andrey Khrisanfych looked through the letters which had been delivered, and found one addressed to him. He unsealed it, read a few lines, and then, without hurrying, still looking at the newspaper, went along to his room, which was right there downstairs, at the end of the corridor. His wife Yefimya was sitting on the bed feeding a baby; another child, the eldest one, was standing by her, with his curly head resting on her lap, while a third child was sleeping on the bed.
As he came into the room, Andrey Khrisanfych held out the letter to his wife and said:
‘Must be from the village.’
Then he went out, still not taking his eyes off the newspaper, and stood in the corridor, not far fr
om the door. He could hear Yefimya reading the first lines in a shaking voice. She could read no further; just those lines were enough, her eyes had filled with tears; hugging her eldest child and kissing him, she started talking, and it was impossible to work out whether she was laughing or crying.
‘It’s from granny and grandpa…’ she said; ‘from the village… There will be snow all piled up beneath the roofs by now… the trees will be all white. The kiddies will be out on their little sledges… And bald old grandpa will be lying on the stove… with the little yellow dog… My dear family!’
As he was listening to this, Andrey Khrisanfych remembered that his wife had given him letters and asked him to send them to the village about three or four times, but something important had always got in the way and he had not sent them, so the letters were left lying about somewhere.
‘And there will be little hares jumping in the fields,’ lamented Yefimya, wiping away her tears and kissing her little boy. ‘Grandpa is kind and gentle, Granny is kind too, and very understanding. They live a good life in the country, they fear God… And there is a little church in the village, and the men sing in the choir. Holy Mother of God, heavenly protector, if only you could take us away from here!’
Andrey Khrisanfych came back to his room for a smoke before anyone else arrived, and Yefimya immediately stopped talking and became quiet; she wiped her eyes, and only her lips continued to tremble. She was very scared of him, she was so scared of him!
Andrey Khrisanfych had lit his cigarette, but just at that moment the bell rang upstairs. He put out his cigarette, put on a serious expression, and sped off to the front door.
The general, looking all pink and fresh from his bath, was coming down the stairs.
‘And what goes on in this room?’ he asked, pointing to a door.
Andrey Khrisanfych stood up straight to attention and said loudly:
About Love and Other Stories Page 26