Stories Read online

  I read my French books and keep glancing out the window, which is open; I see the teeth of my fence, two or three scrawny trees, and beyond the fence a road, a field, then a wide strip of evergreen forest. I often admire how a certain little boy and girl, both towheaded and ragged, climb up the fence and laugh at my bald head. In their bright little eyes I read: “Go up, thou bald head!”20They’re probably the only people who care nothing about my rank and renown.

  Now I don’t have visitors every day. I will mention only the visits of Nikolai and Pyotr Ignatievich. Nikolai usually comes on feast days,21 seemingly on business, but more just to see me. He arrives rather tipsy, which never happens with him in the winter.

  “What’s up?” I ask, coming to meet him in the front hall.

  “Your Excellency!” he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with the rapture of a lover. “Your Excellency! May God punish me! May I be struck by lightning on this very spot! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus !”22

  And he greedily kisses me on the shoulders, sleeves, buttons.

  “Is everything all right with you there?” I ask him.

  “Your Excellency! As God lives …”

  He won’t stop swearing needlessly by God, I soon get sick of him and send him to the kitchen, where they serve him dinner. Pyotr Ignatievich also comes on feast days, especially to see how I am and to share his thoughts with me. He usually sits by my desk, modest, neat, sensible, not daring to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and all the while, in his soft, even little voice, smoothly and bookishly, he tells me what he thinks are various extremely interesting and spicy bits of news that he has come across in journals and books. These items are all alike and boil down to this: a certain Frenchman made a discovery; another man—a German—caught him out, by proving that this discovery had already been made in 1870 by some American; and a third—also a German—outwitted them both, proving that they were a pair of dupes who mistook air bubbles for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Pyotr Ignatievich tells everything at length, thoroughly, as if defending a thesis, with a detailed list of his printed sources, trying not to make any mistakes in the dates, or in the numbers of the journals, or in names, and he never simply says Petit, but always Jean-Jacques Petit. Occasionally he stays for dinner with us, and then he tells the same spicy stories all through dinner, which plunges everyone at the table into gloom. If Gnekker and Liza start talking about fugues and counterpoint, about Brahms and Bach, he modestly looks down and gets embarrassed; he’s ashamed that such banalities should be talked about in the presence of such serious people as he and I.

  In my present mood five minutes are enough to make me as sick of him as if I’d seen and heard him for all eternity I hate the wretched fellow. I wither from his soft, even voice and bookish language, I grow dumb from his stories … He has the best feelings for me and talks with me only to give me pleasure, and I pay him back by looking at him point-blank, as if I wanted to hypnotize him, and thinking: “Go away, go away, go away …” But he doesn’t succumb to my mental suggestion and stays, stays, stays …

  All the while he stays with me, I’m unable to rid myself of the thought: “It’s quite possible that when I die, he’ll be appointed to replace me,” and in my imagination my poor auditorium looks like an oasis in which the spring has dried up, and I’m unpleasant, silent, and sullen with Pyotr Ignatievich, as if he were to blame for these thoughts and not I myself. When he begins his habitual praise of German scientists, I no longer joke good-naturedly, as before, but mutter sullenly:

  “Your Germans are asses …”

  This is like the episode when the late professor Nikita Krylov, swimming at Revel23 once with Pirogov, got angry with the water for being very cold and swore: “Scoundrelly Germans!” I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatievich, and only when he leaves, and I see his gray hat flash outside the window, beyond the fence, do I want to call out to him and say: “Forgive me, my dear fellow!”

  Our dinners are more boring than in winter. The same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. Formerly I suffered his presence silently, but now I send little barbs at him, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by spiteful feeling, I often say simply stupid things and don’t know why I say them. It happened once that I gave Gnekker a long, scornful look and then, out of nowhere, fired off at him:

  Eagles may fly lower than the hen,

  But no hen ever soared into the clouds … 24

  And the most vexing thing is that the hen Gnekker proves to be much smarter than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he sticks to the following tactics: he responds to my barbs with an indulgent silence (the old man’s cracked, what’s the point of talking to him?), or good-naturedly makes fun of me. It’s astonishing how paltry a man can become! I’m capable of dreaming all through dinner of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, and how Liza and my wife will realize their mistake, and how I will taunt them—to have such absurd dreams when I’ve got one foot in the grave!

  Misunderstandings also happen now which I knew before only from hearsay Ashamed as I am, I’ll describe one that occurred the other day after dinner.

  I’m sitting in my room smoking my pipe. My wife comes in as usual, sits down, and begins saying how nice it would be now, while it’s still warm and I have free time, to go to Kharkov and there find out what sort of man our Gnekker is.

  “All right, I’ll go …” I agree.

  My wife, pleased with me, gets up and goes to the door, but comes back at once and says:

  “Incidentally, one more request. I know you’ll be angry, but it is my duty to warn you … Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanych, but there has begun to be talk among all our neighbors and acquaintances that you visit Katya rather often. She’s intelligent, educated, I don’t dispute it, one may enjoy spending time with her, but at your age and with your social position, you know, it’s somehow strange to find pleasure in her company … Besides, her reputation is such that …”

  All the blood suddenly drains from my brain, sparks shoot from my eyes, I jump up and, clutching my head, stamping my feet, shout in a voice not my own:

  “Leave me! Leave me! Get out!”

  My face is probably terrible, my voice strange, because my wife suddenly turns pale and cries out loudly in a desperate voice, also somehow not her own. At our cries, Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor come running in …

  “Leave me!” I shout. “Get out! Out!”

  My legs go numb, as if they’re not there, I feel myself fall into someone’s arms, briefly hear someone weeping, and sink into a swoon that lasts for two or three hours.

  Now about Katya. She calls on me every day towards evening, and, of course, neighbors and acquaintances cannot fail to notice it. She comes for just a minute and takes me for a ride with her. She has her own horse and a new charabanc, bought this summer. Generally, she lives in grand style: she has rented an expensive separate summer house with a big garden and moved all her town furniture into it; keeps two maids, a coachman … I often ask her:

  “Katya, how are you going to live when you’ve squandered all your father’s money?”

  “We’ll see then,” she replies.

  “That money deserves a more serious attitude, my friend. A good man earned it by honest labor.”

  “You already told me about that. I know.”

  First we drive through the field, then through the evergreen forest that can be seen from my window. I still find nature beautiful, though a demon whispers to me that none of these pines and firs, birds and white clouds in the sky will notice my absence when I die three or four months from now. Katya enjoys driving the horse and is pleased that the weather is nice and that I’m sitting beside her. She’s in fine spirits and doesn’t say anything sharp.

  “You’re a very good man, Nikolai Stepanych,” she says. “You’re a rare specimen, and there’s no actor who could play you. Even a bad actor could play me, o
r Mikhail Fyodorych, for instance, but no one could play you. And I envy you, envy you terribly! Because what am I the picture of? What?”

  She thinks for a moment and asks:

  “I’m a negative phenomenon—right, Nikolai Stepanych?”

  “Right,” I answer.

  “Hm … What am I to do?”

  What answer can I give her? It’s easy to say “work,” or “give what you have to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it’s easy to say, I don’t know how to answer.

  My general-practitioner colleagues, when they teach medical treatment, advise one “to individualize each particular case.” One need only follow that advice to be convinced that the remedies recommended by textbooks as the best and wholly suitable for the standard case, prove completely unsuitable in particular cases. The same is true for moral illnesses.

  But answer I must, and so I say:

  “You have too much free time, my friend. You must occupy yourself with something. Why indeed don’t you become an actress again, since you have the calling?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Your tone and manner make it seem that you’re a victim. I don’t like that, my friend. It’s your own fault. Remember, you started by getting angry at people and their ways, but you did nothing to make them better. You didn’t fight the evil, you got tired, and you are the victim not of the struggle, but of your own weakness. Well, of course, you were young then, inexperienced, but now everything might go differently. Really, try it again! You’ll work and serve holy art …”

  “Don’t dissemble, Nikolai Stepanych,” Katya interrupts me. “Let’s agree once and for all: we can talk about actors, about actresses, or writers, but we’ll leave art alone. You’re a wonderful, rare person, but you don’t understand art well enough to regard it in good conscience as holy. You have neither the feel nor the ear for art. You’ve been busy all your life, and you’ve had no time to acquire the feel for it. Generally … I don’t like these conversations about art!” she goes on nervously. “I really don’t! It has been trivialized enough, thank you!”

  “Trivialized by whom?”

  “Some have trivialized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by familiarity, clever people by philosophy.”

  “Philosophy has nothing to do with it.”

  “Yes, it has. If anybody starts philosophizing, it means he doesn’t understand.”

  To keep things from turning sharp, I hasten to change the subject and then remain silent for a long time. Only when we come out of the forest and turn towards Katya’s place do I come back to the former conversation and ask:

  “You still haven’t answered me: why don’t you want to be an actress?”

  “Nikolai Stepanych, this is cruel, finally!” she cries out and suddenly blushes all over. “You want me to speak the truth aloud? All right, if that … if that’s your pleasure! I have no talent! No talent and … and enormous vanity! There!”

  Having made this confession, she turns her face away from me and grips the reins hard to hide the trembling of her hands.

  As we approach her place, we can already see Mikhail Fyodorovich in the distance, strolling about the gate, impatiently waiting for us.

  “Again this Mikhail Fyodorych!” Katya says with vexation. “Rid me of him, please! I’m sick of him, he’s played out … Enough of him!”

  Mikhail Fyodorovich should have gone abroad long ago, but he keeps postponing his departure each week. Certain changes have taken place in him lately: he has become somehow pinched, wine now makes him tipsy, which never happened before, and his black eyebrows have begun to turn gray When our charabanc stops at the gate, he doesn’t conceal his joy and impatience. He bustles about, helps me and Katya out of the carriage, hurriedly asks questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that meek, prayerful, pure something that I noticed only in his eyes before is now spread all over his face. He’s glad, and at the same time ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of this habit of visiting Katya every evening, and he finds it necessary to motivate his coming by some obvious absurdity, such as: “I was passing by on business, thought why don’t I stop for a moment.”

  The three of us go in; first we have tea, then on the table appear the two long-familiar decks of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle of Crimean champagne. Our topics of conversation are not new, they’re all the same as in the winter. The university, students, literature, theater all come in for it; the air gets thicker and stuffier with malignant gossip, it is poisoned by the breath not of two toads now, as in the winter, but of all three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the laugh that resembles a harmonica, the maid who serves us also hears an unpleasant, cracked laughter, like that of a vaudeville general: haw, haw, haw …

  V

  There are terrible nights of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which among the people are known as sparrow nights. There was one such sparrow night in my personal life …

  I wake up past midnight and suddenly jump out of bed. It seems to me for some reason that I’m suddenly just about to die. Why does it seem so? There’s not a feeling in my body that would point to an imminent end, but my soul is oppressed by such terror as if I had suddenly seen some enormous, sinister glow.

  I quickly light the lamp, drink water straight from the carafe, then rush to the open window. The weather outside is magnificent. There’s a smell of hay and of something else very good. I can see the teeth of the fence, the sleepy, scrawny trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of the forest; a calm, very bright moon in the sky, and not a single cloud. Silence, not a leaf stirs. I feel as if everything is looking at me and listening in on how I’m going to die …

  Eerie. I close the window and run to my bed. I feel my pulse and, not finding it in my wrist, search for it in my temples, then under my chin, then again in my wrist, and it’s all cold, clammy with sweat. My breath comes quicker and quicker, my body trembles, all my insides are stirred up, my face and bald head feel as if they’re covered with cobwebs.

  What to do? Call the family? No, no need. I don’t know what my wife and Liza will do if they come to me.

  I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes, and wait, wait … My back is cold, it’s as if it were being drawn into me, and I have the feeling that death will surely come at me from behind, on the sly …

  “Kee-wee, kee-wee!” a piping suddenly sounds in the silence of the night, and I don’t know where it is—in my breast, or outside?

  “Kee-wee, kee-wee!”

  My God, how frightening! I’d drink more water, but I’m scared to open my eyes and afraid to raise my head. The terror I feel is unconscious, animal, and I’m unable to understand why I’m frightened: is it because I want to live, or because a new, still unknown pain awaits me?

  Upstairs, through my ceiling, someone either moans or laughs … I listen. Shortly afterwards I hear footsteps on the stairs. Someone hurriedly comes down, then goes back up. A moment later there are footsteps downstairs again; someone stops by my door, listening.

  “Who’s there?” I cry.

  The door opens, I boldly open my eyes and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes tearful.

  “You’re not asleep, Nikolai Stepanych?” she asks.

  “What is it?”

  “For God’s sake, go and look at Liza. Something’s the matter with her …”

  “All right … with pleasure …” I mutter, very pleased that I’m not alone. “All right… this minute.”

  I follow my wife, listen to what she tells me, and understand nothing in my agitation. Bright spots from her candle leap over the steps of the stairway, our long shadows quiver, my legs get tangled in the skirts of my dressing gown, I’m out of breath, and it seems to me as if something is pursuing me and wants to seize me by the back. “I’m going to die right now, here on the stairs,” I think. “Right now …” But the stairs and the dark corridor with the Italian window are behind us, and we go into Liza’s room. She’s sitting on her bed in nothing but her nightgown,
her bare feet hanging down, and moaning.

  “Oh, my God … oh, my God!” she murmurs, squinting at our candle. “I can’t, I can’t …”

  “Liza, my child,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

  Seeing me, she cries out and throws herself on my neck.

  “My kind papa …” she sobs, “my good papa … My dearest little papa … I don’t know what’s wrong with me … I’m so sick at heart!”

  She embraces me, kisses me, and babbles tender words such as I heard from her when she was a little girl.

  “Calm yourself, my child, God be with you,” I say. “You mustn’t cry. I’m sick at heart, too.”

  I try to cover her with a blanket, my wife gives her a drink, the two of us fuss confusedly around the bed; my shoulder brushes her shoulder, and in that moment the recollection comes to me of how we used to bathe our children together.

  “Help her, help her!” my wife implores. “Do something!”

  But what can I do? I can’t do anything. The girl has some burden on her heart, but I don’t know or understand anything, and can only murmur:

  “Never mind, never mind… It will go away… Sleep, sleep …

  As if on purpose, a dog’s howling suddenly comes from our yard, first soft and uncertain, then loud, in two voices. I’ve never ascribed any particular significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the hooting of owls, but now my heart is painfully wrung and I hasten to explain this howling to myself.

  “Nonsense …” I think. “The influence of one organism on another. My intense nervous strain transmitted itself to my wife, to Liza, to the dog, that’s all … This sort of transmission explains presentiments, premonitions …”

  When I go back to my room a little later to write a prescription for Liza, I no longer think I’ll die soon, I simply feel a heaviness, a tedium, in my soul, so that I’m even sorry I didn’t die suddenly. I stand motionless for a long time in the middle of the room, trying to think up something to prescribe for Liza, but the moaning through the ceiling quiets down, and I decide not to prescribe anything, and still I stand there …