The Duel Read online

  “Maria Konstantinovna, good morning!” Samoylenko called out to her, smiling pleasantly. “Have you been for a swim? Ha-ha-ha … My regards to Nikodim Aleksandrich!”

  And he went on, continuing to smile pleasantly, until, seeing that he was about to encounter an approaching military medical assistant, suddenly scowled, stopped him and inquired:

  “Is there anyone at the infirmary?”

  “No one, Your Excellency.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No one, Your Excellency.”

  “Very good, carry on …”

  Majestically swaggering, he turned in the direction of a lemonade stand, where an old, buxom Jewess passing herself off as a Georgian sat behind the counter and said to her loudly, as though commanding a regiment:

  “Please be a dear, give me a soda water!”

  * “Nadezhda” is Russian for “hope.”

  II

  Laevsky’s lack of love for Nadezhda Fyodorovna manifested itself mainly in that everything she said and did seemed a lie to him, or something resembling a lie, and everything that he read disparaging of women and love seemed as though it couldn’t apply better to himself, to Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to her husband. When he returned home she was sitting at the window, already dressed and coiffed, drinking coffee with an anxious expression on her face and flipping through the pages of a fat journal, and he thought to himself that the act of drinking coffee is not such a stupendous event that it should merit an anxious expression, and that she had wasted time in vain on a fashionable hairstyle, as no one here appreciated it and it was all for nothing. And in the pages of the journal he saw a lie. He thought that just as she dressed and coiffed so that she would appear pretty, she read so that she would appear smart.

  “Would it be all right if I went swimming today?” she asked.

  “What? You’ll go or you won’t go, it’s not an earth-shattering event either way, I suppose …”

  “No, that’s why I’m asking, I wouldn’t want the doctor to be upset with me.”

  “Well, go ask the doctor, then. I’m not a doctor.”

  This time what Laevsky disliked most of all about Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her white, exposed neck and the curls of hair on the nape of her neck, and he remembered that when Anna Karenina had fallen out of love with her husband, she began to dislike his ears above all else, and he thought to himself: How true it is! How true! Feeling weak and empty headed, he went into his study, lay down on the divan and covered his face with a handkerchief, so that the flies would not irritate him. Languid, torpid thoughts all about one and the same thing stretched out through his brain like a long wagon train in foul autumnal weather and he fell into a drowsy, dejected state. It seemed to him that he was culpable before Nadezhda Fyodorovna and before her husband, and that her husband’s death had been all his fault. It seemed to him that he was culpable before his life, which he’d ruined, before the world of grand ideas, knowledge and labor, and he imagined that wonder-filled world to be possible and to exist not here on this shore, where hungry Turks and lazy Abkhazians wandered about, but there to the north, where there is opera, theater, newspapers and all sorts of cerebral labor. To be honest, smart, outspoken and pure was only possible there, not here. He blamed himself for not having ideals or a master plan in life, as he dimly realized now what this meant. Two years earlier, when he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, he had been convinced that all he had to do was run off with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to set off with her for the Caucasus, thus he would be spared the banality and emptiness of life; he was now equally convinced that all he had to do was cast off Nadezhda Fyodorovna and set off for Petersburg, thereby attaining all that he required.

  “Run!” he muttered to himself, sitting and gnawing his nails. “Run!”

  His imagination unfurled: there he is boarding a steamship and then sitting down to breakfast, drinking cold beer, chatting with the ladies on deck, then in Sevastopol boarding a train and traveling. Hello, freedom! The stations flicker past one after the other, the air becomes ever colder and harsher, now birch and spruce trees, now Kursk, Moscow … Shchi in the buffets, lamb with kasha, sturgeon, beer—in a word, not the Asiatic, but Russia, the real Russia. The passengers on the train speak of trade, the latest singers, of Franco-Russian affinity; everywhere the feeling of animated, cultured, intelligent, exhilarating life … Faster, faster! Here, at last, is Nevsky, Bolshaya Morskaya, and there’s Kovensky Lane, where he had once lived among students, there’s the dear, gray sky, misty rain, wet coach-drivers …

  “Ivan Andreich!” someone called out from the neighboring room. “Are you home?”

  “I’m here!” Laevsky answered. “What do you need?”

  “Papers.”

  Laevsky rose lazily, with a feeling of dizziness and, yawning, his shoes smacking the floor, went to the neighboring room. There in the street, in front of the open window, stood one of his young colleagues, who laid official papers out on the windowsill.

  “Just a minute, my good man,” Laevsky said softly, and went to find pen and ink. Returning to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: “It’s hot!”

  “Yes sir. Are you coming in today?”

  “Unlikely … I think I’m coming down with something … My good man, tell Sheshkovsky that I’ll come see him after dinner.”

  The clerk left. Laevsky lay down on the divan in his room again and began to think:

  Now then, it’s necessary to weigh all the factors and to figure this out. Before leaving this place, I must pay my debts. I owe nearly two thousand rubles. I have no money … This, of course, isn’t important. I’ll pay half now somehow, and the other half I’ll send from Petersburg. Most important is Nadezhda Fyodorovna … First and foremost, we must determine what our relationship is … Yes.

  A little later on, he thought: Wouldn’t it be better to go to Samoylenko for advice?

  It’s easy enough to go, he thought, but what’s the use of it? I’d just start telling him malapropos about the boudoir, about women, about what is or isn’t fair. Damn it, how can there be any question of what is or isn’t fair, when my life requires saving, and fast, when I’m suffocating in this damned captivity and killing myself? … It must, finally, be understood, that to continue a life like mine is underhanded and unrelenting, in the face of which all else is petty and insignificant. Run! he muttered, sitting down. Run!

  The emptiness of the seashore, the insatiable swelter and the monotony of the dusky, lilac mountains, eternally the same and silent, eternally lonely, bore on his melancholy and, seemingly, sedated and looted him. It may well have been that he was a very smart, talented, remarkable straight-shooter; it may well have been that were he not surrounded by sea and mountains on all sides, a first-class regional director, a government man, an orator, a public figure, an ascetic would have emerged from within him. Who knows! What if a gifted and industrious man—a musician or an artist, for instance—were to escape captivity by tearing down a wall and tricking his jailers, isn’t it foolish to then expound on what’s fair and what’s not? In such a situation, everything that man does is fair.

  At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the scullery maid had served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:

  “It’s the same thing every day. Is there any reason why we can’t have shchi?”

  “There’s no cabbage.”

  “Strange. If they cook shchi with cabbage at Samoylenko’s, and there’s shchi at Maria Konstantinovna’s, it must just be me that’s supposed to eat this sweetish slop for some reason. This isn’t right, my dove.”

  As is the case among the vast majority of married couples, before neither Laevsky nor Nadezhda Fyodorovna could get through a dinner without caprices and a scene, but since Laevsky decided that he no longer loved her, he tried to yield to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in all matters, speaking to her gently and politely, smiling at her, and calling her a dove.

  “The taste of this
soup reminds me of licorice,” he said, smiling; he was straining himself so as to appear amicable, but couldn’t hold back and said: “No one is taking care of this household … If you’re too sick or too busy with your reading, then allow me, I’ll attend to our kitchen.”

  Earlier, she would have answered with So attend to it or I see you want to make a scullery maid out of me, but now she merely glanced at him sheepishly and turned red.

  “Well, how do you feel today?” he asked tenderly.

  “Today is not so bad. There is only a touch of weakness.”

  “You need to take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly worried about you.”

  Something ailed Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Samoylenko said that she had remittent fever and fed her quinine. Another doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, spindly, misanthropic man, who sat at home by day and strolled quietly along the embankment coughing with his hands folded behind him and his cane stretched lengthwise down his back by night, found that she had a female ailment, and prescribed warm compresses. Before, when Laevsky still loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s illness would arouse feelings of sympathy and fear in him, but now he considered even her illness to be a lie. The jaundiced, sleepy face, the faded expression and the yawning that would occasionally seize Nadezhda Fyodorovna after an onset of fever, and that she, while in the midst of the onset, would lie beneath a plaid blanket and resembled a boy, more than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled bad—all this, in his opinion, destroyed any illusion and was a protest against love and marriage.

  For the second course he was served spinach with hard-boiled eggs, but Nadezhda Fyodorovna was served kissel and milk, like an invalid. When she, with an anxious expression, first touched her spoon to the kissel and then began to lazily eat it, washing it down with milk, and he heard her swallows, he was overcome by such an intense feeling of hatred that his head began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would have been insulting even in the society of dogs, although he was not aggravated with himself but with Nadezhda Fyodorovna for having aroused such a feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their beloved. He couldn’t kill her himself, of course, but if he ever found himself serving on a jury, he would exonerate the murderer.

  “Merci, my dove,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.

  Retiring to his study, he spent about five minutes pacing the room from corner to corner, cast a sidelong glance at his boots, then sat down on the divan and began to mutter:

  “Run! Run! I must determine what our relationship is and run!”

  He lay down on the divan and again remembered that the death of Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband could have been his fault.

  It’s foolish to accuse a man of falling in or out of love, he convinced himself, leaning back and lifting his legs to put on his boots. It’s not in our power to control love and hate. As for the husband, it’s possible that I may have been, in a circumstantial sense, one of the reasons for his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife and the wife with me?

  At that he rose and, having located his service cap, set off in the direction of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where the civil servants would gather every day to play Vint and drink cold beer.

  My indecision is reminiscent of Hamlet, thought Laevsky en route. How astute Shakespeare’s observation was. Oh, how astute.

  III

  To keep from getting bored and to accommodate the basic needs of new arrivals and those without families who had nowhere to dine due to the lack of hotels in town, Dr. Samoylenko held a kind of table d’hote at his home. At the time this was written, he had only two diners: the young zoologist Von Koren, who had traveled to the Black Sea this summer to study the embryology of jellyfish; and Deacon Pobedov, recently released from seminary and assigned to town to carry out the duties of an elderly deacon who had left to pursue medical treatment. They both paid twelve rubles per month for dinner, and Samoylenko had made them give their word of honor that they would report for dinner precisely at two o’clock.

  Von Koren was typically the first to arrive. He would silently have a seat in the drawing room, and taking an album from the table, would begin to attentively survey the faded photographs of certain unidentified men in wide pants and top hats and ladies in crinoline and bonnets. Samoylenko remembered only a few of them by name, but of those he had forgotten he would sigh and say: “A splendiferous man, of superior intellect!” Having finished with the album, Von Koren would take a pistol from the shelf-stand and, squinting his left eye, aim it at a portrait of Prince Vorontsov for a long time, or he would stand before the mirror surveying his own swarthy complexion, his large forehead and his hair, black and woolly as a Negro’s, and his shirt of lackluster chintz with blossoming flowers that resembled a Persian rug, and the wide leather belt he wore instead of a waistcoat. He derived nearly as much satisfaction from scrutinizing himself as looking over the photographs or the pistol in its expensive case. He was not only very happy with his face but also with his attractively trimmed facial hair, and his broad shoulders that clearly served as a visible declaration of his good health and his solid build. He was happy with his dandyish outfit, beginning with the necktie, picked to match the color of his shirt and ending in his yellow booties.

  As he was surveying the album and standing in front of the mirror, Samoylenko was in the kitchen and the vestibule beside it all the while, with no frock-coat or waistcoat on, his chest bared, worrying and drenched in sweat, fussing near the tables, preparing the salad, or some sort of sauce, or meat, cucumbers and onion for the okroshka, and still managing to angrily glare at the assisting valet and brandishing either a knife or a spoon at him.

  “Bring the vinegar!” he ordered. “Or, I mean, not vinegar, olive oil!” he yelled, stomping his feet. “Where are you going, you swine?”

  “For the oil, Your Excellency,” said the dumbfounded valet in a cracked tenor.

  “Hurry! It’s in the cupboard! Yes, and tell Darya to add dill to the jar of pickles! Dill! Cover the sour cream, you scatterbrain, or flies will get into it!”

  It seemed that the whole house shook when he yelled. When there were only ten or fifteen minutes remaining before two o’clock, the deacon would arrive, a young man, around twenty-two years of age, lanky, long-haired, sans beard and with barely detectable whiskers. Entering the drawing room he crossed himself before the icon, and then, smiling, extended his hand to Von Koren.

  “Hello,” the zoologist coldly replied. “Where have you been?”

  “Fishing for gobies on the pier.”

  “Well, of course … From the look of it, Deacon, you’re never going to get to work.”

  “Why say that? Work’s not a bear, it won’t wander off into the woods,” said the deacon, smiling and inserting his hands into the deep pockets of his white cassock.

  “There’s no one here to whip you!” sighed the zoologist.

  Another fifteen to twenty minutes passed, but dinner had still not been served, they could hear the valet running from the hall to the kitchen and back, his boots knocking as Samoylenko yelled:

  “Put it on the table! Where are you sticking it? Go wash it first.”

  The deacon’s and Von Koren’s hunger growing, they began to knock their heels on the floor, expressing their impatience as audience members in a theater box would. Finally, the door opened and the tortured valet announced: “Food’s ready!” They were met in the dining room by an angry Samoylenko, who was scarlet and had been thoroughly steamed by the stifling kitchen. He glared at them furiously and with an expression of horror on his face lifted the soup tureen from the pot of soup and poured them each a bowl, and only when he was certain that they were eating heartily, and that the food was to their liking, did he sigh relief and sit down in his own deep armchair. His face became languid, buttery … Not rushing, he poured himself a small glass of vodka and said:

  “To the health of the younger generation.”

  After h
is conversation with Laevsky, Samoylenko constantly felt something weighing in the depths of his soul, from morning right up to dinner, regardless of his excellent mood. He felt sorry for Laevsky and wanted to help him. Drinking his small glass of vodka before having the soup, he sighed and said:

  “I saw Vanya Laevsky today. The man’s having a hard time of it. The material half of his life doesn’t bode well, but more importantly his psychological state is getting the best of him. I feel sorry for the fellow.”

  “If there’s anyone that I don’t pity!” said Von Koren. “If that gentle man were drowning, I’d get a stick to help him along: drown, brother, drown …”

  “Not true. You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why do you think I wouldn’t?” The zoologist shrugged his shoulders. “I’m just as capable of doing a good deed as you are.”

  “And drowning a man is a good deed?” the deacon asked, laughing.

  “If it’s Laevsky? Yes.”

  “I think the okroshka is missing something …” said Samoylenko, trying to change the subject.

  “Words can’t describe how malevolent Laevsky is, he’s as malevolent to society as the cholera microbe,” continued Von Koren. “To drown him would be a service.”

  “You’re not winning accolades by venting like that about your fellow man. Tell me: why do you hate him?”