The Beauties: Essential Stories Read online

  Our own conductor came into the carriage and began lighting the candles.

  THE MAN IN A BOX

  IT HAD GROWN LATE, and the hunters settled down for the night in a barn belonging to Prokofy, the village elder, on the very edge of the village of Mironositskoe. There were just two of them: Ivan Ivanich the vet, and Burkin, a high school teacher. Ivan Ivanich had a rather strange double-barrelled surname, Chimsha-Gimalaisky, which didn’t suit him in the least, and everyone in the province just knew him as Ivan Ivanich. He lived on a stud farm near the town, and had only come to hunt down here for a breath of fresh air. Burkin the teacher spent every summer as a guest of Count P. and his family, and felt very much at home here.

  They were not asleep. Ivan Ivanich, a tall, thin elderly man with a long moustache, sat just outside the door smoking his pipe in the moonlight. Burkin lay inside on the hay, invisible in the dark.

  They were telling each other stories. One thing they talked about was how the elder’s wife Mavra, a healthy and sensible woman, had never in her life been anywhere outside her native village, never seen a town or a railway, and had spent the last ten years sitting by the stove and only venturing out at night.

  “What’s so surprising about that?” said Burkin. “There are plenty of people like that, solitary people by nature, who do their best to withdraw into their shell, like a hermit crab or a snail. Maybe that’s an atavistic relic, a return to the time when our human ancestors weren’t yet social beings, but each lived in his own lair. Or perhaps it’s just one variant of human nature – who knows? I’m not a naturalist, and not qualified to talk about that sort of thing; all I mean is that people like Mavra aren’t that unusual. In fact you don’t have to look far to find an example: there was a teacher of Greek called Belikov, a colleague of mine, who died in my town a couple of months ago. You’ll have heard of him, of course. The peculiar thing about him was that whenever he went out, even in the finest weather, he always carried an umbrella and wore galoshes and a warm coat lined with wadding. And he carried his umbrella in a case, and his watch in a grey chamois leather case, and if he took out his penknife to sharpen a pencil, the knife was in a little case too; and it looked as if his face was in a case as well, for he was always hiding it behind a raised collar. He wore dark glasses, and an undervest, and plugged his ears with cotton wool, and if he took a cab, he’d tell the driver to put up the roof. In a word, that man showed a constant, overpowering urge to surround himself with a sort of wrapping, to create an outer box for himself, which would isolate him and protect him from outside influences. Reality upset him, frightened him, kept him in a constant state of alarm; and perhaps it was to justify this timidity on his part, his aversion towards the present time, that he always praised the past, and things which had never been. The ancient languages he taught served essentially the same purpose as his galoshes and umbrella – he used them to hide away from real life.

  “‘Oh, how resonant, how splendid is the Greek language!’ he used to say with a sweet smile. And as if to demonstrate the truth of his words, he would screw up his eyes, point a finger in the air, and pronounce ‘Anthropos!’

  “And Belikov tried to hide his thoughts in a case, too. Nothing seemed clear to him except circulars and newspaper articles prohibiting something. If there was a circular forbidding pupils to go out into the streets after nine at night, or if some article proscribed carnal love, that made sense to him. Those things were forbidden, and that was that. Authorizations and permissions, however, always seemed to him to conceal an element of doubt, something vague and not fully expressed. When there were discussions in town about setting up a drama group, or a reading room, or a tearoom, he would shake his head and quietly say:

  “‘Well, that’s all well and good, of course, but it might lead to something…’

  “Any kind of infringement, or deviation, or departure from the rules, threw him into gloom, although you might have thought – what business was it of his? If one of his colleagues turned up late for church, or there were rumours about some schoolboy prank, or a schoolmistress was seen walking out with an officer late at night, he’d get very agitated and go on about how it might lead to something. And at the school staff meetings he really got us down, with his caution, his suspicions, his man-in-a-box-like reflections about how the young people in the boys’ and girls’ high schools were so badly behaved, and very rowdy in class – oh, we mustn’t let the authorities hear about it, oh, we must make sure it doesn’t lead to anything; and what about expelling Petrov from the second form, and Yegorov from the fourth, that would be an excellent idea. And what happened? With his sighing and moaning, and his dark glasses on that pale little face – you know, a little face like a polecat’s – he crushed us all, and we gave in to him, and docked marks off Petrov and Yegorov for bad behaviour, and kept them in, and eventually both Petrov and Yegorov got expelled. And he had a peculiar habit of visiting our lodgings. He’d drop in on a teacher and sit there without saying anything, and he seemed to be watching out for something. He’d sit there for maybe an hour or two, in silence, and then go away. He called that ‘keeping up good relations with his colleagues’. And he clearly didn’t at all enjoy visiting us and sitting around; the only reason he did it was because he thought it was his duty as a colleague. We teachers were scared of him. Even the headmaster was scared. Just imagine – all our teachers were an intellectual lot, absolutely respectable, brought up on Turgenev and Shchedrin, and yet that man, who always walked about in galoshes and carried an umbrella, kept the whole school under his thumb for fifteen years on end! And not just the school – the whole town! Our wives would never put on amateur dramatics on Saturdays, for fear he’d find out; and the priests didn’t dare eat meat or play cards in front of him. It was the influence of Belikov and his sort, over the last ten or fifteen years, that’s made everybody in our town afraid of everything now. They’re afraid of talking too loud, or sending letters, or making friends, or reading books; they’re afraid of helping the poor, or teaching people to read and write…”

  Ivan Ivanich coughed and wanted to say something, but first he lit his pipe and looked up at the moon. Then he drawled:

  “Yes. Thinking people, respectable people who read Shchedrin, and Turgenev, and Buckle, and all those – and yet they knuckled under and put up with it… That’s just the trouble.”

  “Belikov lived in the same house as me,” Burkin went on, “on the same floor, in the flat opposite mine. We often saw one another, and I knew how he lived. And when he was at home, it was the same story: dressing gown, nightcap, shutters on the windows, bolts on the doors, a whole string of prohibitions and restrictions, and oh, supposing it leads to something! Lenten food is bad for you, he thought, but you mustn’t eat meat, in case people say that Belikov doesn’t keep the fasts, so he’d eat pike-perch cooked in butter, which wasn’t Lenten food, but you couldn’t call it meat either. He didn’t have a maid, in case people thought ill of him, but he had a cook called Afanasy, an old man of sixty or so, half drunk and half crazy, who had once been an officer’s batman and more or less knew how to cook. This Afanasy would generally stand by the door, arms folded, endlessly muttering the same thing, with a deep sigh:

  “‘There’s a lot of them about these days!’

  “Belikov had a small, box-like bedroom, and curtains round the bed. When he got into bed, he’d cover up his head; it was hot and stuffy, and the wind would be rattling the closed doors and howling down the chimney; and there’d be the sound of sighs from the kitchen, ominous sighs…

  “And under his blanket, he was scared. Scared of something happening, scared of Afanasy cutting his throat, or burglars getting in; and then he’d have frightening dreams all night, and in the morning, when we walked to school together, he was gloomy and pale, and you could see that the school he was going to, with all those people in it, was frightening and repugnant to his whole being, and that with his solitary nature, he found it unpleasant to walk by my side.

&
nbsp; “‘They’re terribly noisy in class,’ he’d say, as if trying to account for his gloom. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  “And would you believe it – that Greek master, that man in a box, almost got married.”

  Ivan Ivanich quickly looked back into the barn and said:

  “You’re joking!”

  “No, he almost did get married, strange as it seems. They had sent us a new teacher of history and geography, a man called Kovalenko, Mikhail Savvich, a Little Russian. He didn’t arrive on his own – he brought his sister Varenka. He was a tall, young, swarthy-faced man with enormous hands, and just to look at his face you could tell that he would talk with a deep voice. And so he did – it sounded like a voice from the bottom of a barrel – boom-boom-boom… And she was past her first youth, about thirty, but tall and graceful as well, with dark eyebrows and pink cheeks; in a word, not a young thing, but a sweetie-pie, and so saucy and noisy, always singing Little Russian songs and giggling. At the slightest thing, she’d burst out in a great laugh – Ha-ha-ha! We first got to know the Kovalenkos properly, I remember, at the headmaster’s birthday party. In the midst of all those grim-faced, tense and boring teachers, who wouldn’t even have attended a birthday party if they hadn’t been obliged to, we suddenly saw this new Aphrodite rising from the foam, walking with her arms akimbo, laughing, singing, dancing… She sang ‘The Winds are Blowing’, sang it with feeling, and then another song, and another one, and she enchanted us all – everyone, even Belikov. He sat down next to her, simpered in a sugary way and said:

  “‘The Little Russian language, with its softness and pleasant resonance, is reminiscent of Ancient Greek.’

  “She felt flattered, and in a voice full of earnest feeling she started telling him about her farm in Gadyach district, and her mama who lived there, and how it grew such pears, and such watermelons, and such ‘kabaks’! The Little Russians call their squashes ‘kabak’, and what we call ‘kabak’ – a tavern – they call ‘shinka’; and they make a borsch with red and blue squashes, and it’s ‘so delicious, so delicious, it’s simply – terrible!’

  “We listened on and on, and suddenly we were all struck by the same thought.

  “‘What a good idea it would be to get them married,’ the headmaster’s wife said quietly to me.

  “For some reason we all recalled that our Belikov wasn’t married, and now we found it strange that we had so far never noticed this important detail of his life, never taken it into account. And what was his attitude to women anyway, how did he approach this vital question for himself? Previously that had never interested us in the least; perhaps we hadn’t even admitted the idea that a man who went out wearing galoshes in all weathers, and slept behind bed curtains, could be in love.

  “‘He’s well past forty, and she’s thirty…’ said the headmaster’s wife, expanding on her idea. ‘I have a feeling she’d take him.’

  “What a lot of things get done out of pure boredom, in the provinces – unnecessary, pointless things! And that’s because the necessary things aren’t done. I mean, why did we have to marry off Belikov all of a sudden, when you couldn’t even imagine him married? The headmaster’s wife, the inspector’s wife, and all our high school ladies perked up, even their looks improved, as if they’d suddenly discovered their aim in life. The headmaster’s wife would take a box at the theatre, and we’d look and see Varenka there, holding some kind of fan, glowing with happiness, and by her side there’d be Belikov, a little hunched-up creature, looking as if he’d been extracted from his home with pincers. Or I’d give a party, and straight away the ladies would insist on my inviting Belikov and Varenka. In short, the machine got going. It turned out that Varenka wasn’t averse to getting married. She didn’t have a very happy life with her brother – all they did was quarrel and shout at one another for days on end. Here’s a typical scene: Kovalenko is walking along the street, a tall, healthy young beanpole in an embroidered shirt, his forelock peeping out over his forehead from under his cap, with a pile of books in one hand and a thick knotty stick in the other. His sister is following on behind, also carrying books.

  “‘But Mikhailik, you’ve never read this!’ she insists loudly. ‘I’m telling you, I swear to you, you’ve never read it at all!’

  “‘And I’m telling you I have!’ shouts Kovalenko, thumping his stick on the pavement.

  “‘Oh my goodness, Minchik! What are you getting so cross for? This is just a question of principle.’

  “‘And I tell you I have read it!’ Kovalenko shouts even louder.

  “And at home, if anybody dropped in, they’d start squabbling. I expect she got fed up with that kind of life, and wanted a place of her own. Besides, you have to remember her age – too late to pick and choose, you’d marry whoever you could, even a Greek master. That’s how it is with most of our young ladies – they’ll marry anyone, just so long as they get married. Anyway, Varenka obviously began to look kindly on our Belikov.

  “And Belikov himself? He used to visit Kovalenko the way he visited us. He’d come in, sit down and say nothing. And while he sat there saying nothing, Varenka would sing him ‘The Winds are Blowing’, or gaze pensively at him with her dark eyes, or suddenly burst out laughing:

  “‘Ha-ha-ha!’

  “In matters of love, and especially marriage, suggestion plays a big part. Everyone – both his colleagues and the ladies – began assuring Belikov that he had to get married, that there was nothing left for him in life but marriage; we all congratulated him, put on serious faces and mouthed all sorts of platitudes, telling him that marriage was a serious step, and that sort of thing. Besides, Varenka was quite good-looking, interesting, the daughter of a state councillor, with her own farm – and above all, she was the first woman to treat him gently and affectionately. All that put him in a whirl, and he decided that he really did have to get married.”

  “That would have been the moment to take away his galoshes and umbrella,” said Ivan Ivanich.

  “Believe it or not, that turned out to be impossible. He stood a portrait of Varenka on his desk, and kept coming round to my place to talk about Varenka, and family life, and how marriage was a serious step; and spent a lot of time visiting the Kovalenkos; but he didn’t change his way of life in the least. On the contrary – his decision to get married had a sort of morbid effect on him: he lost weight, became pale, and seemed to retreat even further into his box.

  “‘I like Varvara Savvishna,’ he told me with a faint, twisted little smile, ‘and I know that everybody ought to get married, but… all this, you know, has happened rather suddenly… it has to be thought over.’

  “‘What is there to think about?’ I said. ‘Just get married, and that’s it.’

  “‘No, marriage is a serious step; one has to weigh up one’s obligations and responsibilities… to make sure nothing happens. That worries me such a lot, I no longer sleep at night. And I have to admit that I’m anxious: she and her brother have a strange way of looking at things; they talk, you know, somehow strangely, and she has a very boisterous nature. I might get married, and then, you never know, I could suddenly find myself in some sort of awkward situation.’

  “And he didn’t propose to her; he kept putting it off, to the great disappointment of the headmaster’s wife and all our ladies. He kept weighing up his obligations and responsibilities, and meanwhile he walked out with Varenka almost every day. Perhaps he thought that was what one had to do in his position. And he’d come round to see me and talk about family life. And in all probability, he’d have ended up proposing to her, and that would have led to one of those stupid, unnecessary marriages that happen by the thousand among us, out of boredom and idleness, if there hadn’t suddenly been a kolossalische Skandal. I have to explain that Varenka’s brother, Kovalenko, had taken an instant dislike to Belikov on the very first day they met, and loathed him.

  “‘I can’t understand,’ he’d say to us, shrugging his shoulders, ‘I can’t understand h
ow you can stomach that sneak, with his ugly mug. Oh, my friends, how can you manage to go on living here? The atmosphere all around you is stifling, it’s poisonous. Call yourselves schoolmasters, teachers? You’re office clerks! It’s not a temple of knowledge you have here, it’s a department of correct behaviour, and it stinks as sour as a police box. No, my friends, I’ll stay with you a little bit longer, and then I’ll be off to my farm, to catch crayfish and teach the Little Russian children. I’ll go, and you can stay here with that Judas of yours, God rot him!’

  “Or else he’d laugh and chortle till the tears came to his eyes, now in his deep bass voice, now in a thin, shrill squeak, throwing out his arms wide and asking me:

  “‘Why’s he always sitting around at my place? What does he want? Sitting and gawping…’

  “He even gave Belikov a nickname, The Bloodsucker or The Spider. Obviously we avoided talking to him about how his sister Varenka was going to marry this Bloodsucker or Spider. And when the headmaster’s wife suggested to him one day that it would be a good idea to marry his sister off to such a sound, universally respected man as Belikov, he scowled and grumbled:

  “‘Not my business. She can marry a viper if she wants; I don’t like meddling in other people’s affairs.’

  “Now listen to what happened next. Some joker drew a caricature of Belikov, walking along in his galoshes, with his trousers rolled up and his umbrella over his head, arm in arm with Varenka; and the caption under the picture was ‘Anthropos in Love’. The artist had captured his expression, you know, extraordinarily well. He must have worked on it several evenings on end, because all the teachers at the boys’ and girls’ high schools, and the ones at the seminary, and the officials – every one of them got a copy. Belikov got one too. That caricature upset him dreadfully.