The Undiscovered Chekhov Read online

  “As it is, it’s been three days since I’ve had anything... my cold is so bad... the thing is, vodka increases a baritone’s hoarseness, but hoarseness deepens a baritone’s voice, Kuzma Egorov, which as you know is better... without vodka there is no music... what kind of a singer would I be if I didn’t drink vodka? I would not be a singer, but, to be perfectly honest with you, a joke!... If it were not for my profession I wouldn’t touch a drop of vodka. Vodka is Satan’s blood!”

  “Fine! I’ll give you some powder that you can mix in a bottle and gargle with, once in the morning and once in the evening.”

  “Can I swallow it, too?”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Excellent. It would be bothersome if I couldn’t swallow it. You gargle and gargle... and then you have to spit it out— such a waste! Then there was another thing that, to be perfectly honest with you, I wanted to ask you... you see, I have a weak stomach, and so every month I let some blood and take some herbs. Can I, in my condition, enter into a lawful marriage?”

  Kuzma Egorov thinks for a while, and then says:

  “No, I would advise against it.”

  “Oh, I’m so grateful to you! You are truly a great healer, Kuzma Egorov! Better than any doctor! By God, how many people owe their lives to you! Ooooh! More than you can count!”

  Kuzma Egorov modestly lowers his eyes and boldly writes “Natri bicarbonici”—that is, bicarbonate of soda.

  AN

  UNSUCCESSFUL

  VISIT

  A DANDY ENTERS A HOUSE in which he has never been before. He is paying a social call. In the hall he is met by a girl of about sixteen, wearing a cotton dress and little white apron.

  “Are they home?” he asks her brazenly.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Hm... my little peach! So, and is the missus at home too?”

  “Yes, she is,” the girl answers, blushing for some reason. “Hm... you pretty thing, you! You little vixen! Where can I leave my hat?”

  “Anywhere would be fine. Please don’t! Really!...”

  “Come on! What are you blushing for! Hey! I won’t bite you!” And the young man slaps the girl’s waist with his glove.

  “Hey, not bad! So go ahead, announce me!”

  The girl turns poppy red and runs off.

  “She’s young!” he decides, and walks through to the drawing room. There he meets the lady of the house. They sit down, chat...

  About five minutes later the girl with the little apron enters the room.

  “May I introduce my eldest daughter,” the lady of the house says, pointing at the girl’s cotton dress.

  Tableau vivant.

  A HYPNOTIC

  SEANCE

  THE LARGE HALL WAS LIT with torches and bursting with people. In the center was the hypnotist. Despite his scrawny, unprepossessing physique, he shone, glowed, and sparkled. People smiled, applauded, obeyed his every order; everyone turned pale in his presence.

  He literally performed miracles. Some people he hypno-tized, some he paralyzed, others he had balancing on chairs by their necks and heels; he tied a thin, tall journalist into a knot. In a word, he did whatever he pleased. He had an especially strong effect on the ladies. One glance from him and they dropped like flies. Oh, women’s nerves! If it weren’t for these nerves, how boring life would be!

  Having exercised his demonic art on everyone else, the hypnotist came over to me.

  “You seem to be of a suggestive nature,” he said. “You are so nervous, so overwrought... wouldn’t you like to take a nap?”

  Why not? With pleasure, my good man, let’s try. I sat down on a chair in the middle of the hall. The hypnotist sat on another chair facing me, took hold of my hands, and gazed into my eyes with his terrifying snakelike glare.

  The audience surrounded us.

  “Shh! Please, ladies and gentlemen! Shh... quiet!”

  Silence falls. He and I sit staring at each other. A minute passes, two... Shivers run down my spine, my heart pounds, but I’m not in the least tired!

  We keep sitting there. Five minutes pass, seven minutes...

  “He’s not giving in!” somebody shouted. “Bravo! Good man!

  We sit, we stare. I’m not tired, not even drowsy.... A local council session would have put me to sleep long ago. The audience starts whispering and sniggering. The hypnotist is distracted, and his eyes flicker. Poor man! Nobody likes losing! Save him, O spirits! Come to my eyelids, O Morpheus!

  “He’s not giving in!” the same voice shouted. “That’s enough! Let it be! I said right away that these are nothing but conjuring tricks!”

  Then, just as I heard my friends voice in the crowd and moved to get up, my hand felt a strange object in its palm. My sense of touch responding, I realized that the object was a piece of paper. My father was a doctor, and doctors can sniff out a bank note at a touch. According to Darwin’s theory, I must have inherited this superb faculty, along with many other talents, from my father. The bill, I could tell, was a five- ruble note, so I immediately nodded off.

  “Bravo! Bravo!”

  The doctors present in the hall rushed up, walked around me, prodded me, and proclaimed: “Hmm, yes... he’s asleep....” The hypnotist, pleased at his success, waved his hands over my head, and I, in a trance, began walking about the room.

  “Tetanize his arm!” someone suggested.

  “Yes, can you do that? Can you paralyze his arm?”

  The hypnotist (not a timid man!) pulled at my right arm and started doing his machinations over it: rubbing it, blowing on it, slapping it. But my arm wouldn’t obey. It just hung there dangling, and refused to become rigid.

  “He’s not tetanized! Wake him up! This is dangerous! He’s a sensitive, high-strung boy!”

  Suddenly my other palm, the left one, felt a five-ruble note brush against it. A reflex shot from my left hand to my right, and miraculously my arm went rigid.

  “Bravo! Look how rigid and cold his hand is! Like a corpse!”

  “We have full anesthesia, the lowering of bodily temperature and weakening of the pulse,” the hypnotist announced.

  The doctors checked my wrist.

  “Yes, his pulse is still weak,” one of them remarked.

  “We have complete rigidity. His temperature is much lower...”

  “How do you explain it?” one of the ladies asked.

  A doctor shrugged his shoulders portentously, sighed, and said, “All we can give you is the facts! Rational explanations? Alas, there are none!”

  You have the facts, and I have two fivers in my pocket, and all thanks to hypnotism—I don’t need any rational explanations! Poor hypnotist! It was just your luck to tangle with a viper like me!

  P.S.: Damn, what a mess!

  It was only afterward that I realized it wasn’t the hypnotist but my boss, Peter Fedorovitch, who slipped me the five-ruble bills.

  “I did it to test your honesty,” he told me.

  Damn.

  “This is terrible,” Peter Fedorovitch said.

  “Disgraceful.... I would never have expected this from you!”

  “But sir, I have children! A wife... a mother... and things are so expensive nowadays!”

  “This is disgusting! And you want to publish your own newspaper... you who cry at sentimental dinner speeches... A disgrace!... I thought you were an honest man, and it turns out that you... you are worse than... haben Sie gewesen!”

  So I had to return the two fivers. What else could I do? One’s reputation is, after all, more precious than money.

  “It’s not you I’m angry at!” my boss said. “You can go to hell for all I care—that’s what you’re like! But how could she have fallen into the same trap! She, of all people! She who is so gende, so innocent, all rice pudding! She was tempted by money too! She ‘fell asleep’ too!”

  By “she,” my boss was referring to his wife, Matryona Nikolayevna...

  THE

  CROSS

  THE POET ENTERS THE drawing room
filled with people.

  “Well,” the hostess turns to him, “how did your dear little poem do? Did they print it? Was there an honorarium?” “Oh, don’t ask.... I got a cross!”

  “You were awarded a cross? You, a poet? I didn’t know poets were awarded crosses.”

  The host shakes his hand. “My sincerest congratulations! Is it a Stanislav cross or a St. Anne medal? I am so happy for you... so happy... is it a Stanislav?”

  “No, a red cross!”

  “Oh, you sacrificed your honorarium in aid of the Red Cross!”

  “I didn’t sacrifice anything!”

  “The medal will definitely suit you. Do show it to us!” The poet reaches into his side pocket and takes out his manuscript.

  “Here it is!”

  Everyone looks at the manuscript and sees a large red cross... but it’s not the kind of cross you can pin on your lapel.

  THE

  CAT

  BARBARA PETROVNA WOKE UP and listened. Her face went white, her large black eyes became even larger and burned with terror, when she realized she wasn’t dreaming. She covered her face in horror, raised herself on her elbow, and woke her husband. Her husband curled up and, gently snoring, breathed onto her shoulder.

  “Alyosha, darling! Wake up! Sweetheart! Oh, how awful!” Alyosha stopped snoring and stretched his legs. Barbara Petrovna prodded his cheek. He stretched, sighed deeply, and woke up.

  “Alyosha, darling! Wake up—someone’s crying!”

  “Who’s crying? You’re just imagining things!”

  “Listen! Can’t you hear? Someone’s moaning.... Someone must have left: a baby on our doorstep! Oh, I can’t bear the sound!”

  Alyosha raised himself up and listened. Outside the wide-open window the night was gray. Along with the fragrance of lilacs and the quiet whispering of the lime trees, a weak breeze wafted a strange sound toward the bed. You couldn’t tell right away what kind of a sound it was: a child’s crying, the song of Lazarus, or just wailing. You couldn’t tell. But one thing was clear: the sound came from right below the window, and not from one throat but from many—there were trebles, altos, tenors.

  “Barbara—they’re cats!” Alyosha said. “My silly darling!”

  “Cats? It can’t be! What are those bass notes?”

  “That’s a sow grunting. Don’t forget we’re at a dacha here. Can’t you hear? Yes, that’s what it is, cats! Come on, calm down. Go back to sleep now.”

  Barbara and Alyosha lay down and pulled the blankets over their ears. The morning freshness had begun seeping through the window, and a slight chill hung in the air. Husband and wife curled up and closed their eyes. Five minutes later Alyosha turned round to the other side.

  “They don’t let you get any sleep, damn them! With all that screeching!”

  In the meantime the feline song was reaching a crescendo. Powerful new voices were joining in, and what had started as a light rustle beneath the window gradually turned into a hubbub, then a rumpus, and finally a hullabaloo. What had begun as a sound tremulous as aspic jelly had finally reached a full fortissimo, and soon the air was full of ghastly notes. Some of the cats let out curt yelps, others rollicking trills—and exactly in rhythm, in octaves and alexandrines! Others sounded long sustained notes. One cat, it must have been the oldest and most passionate, sang in an unnatural voice, not a cat’s voice, but at times in bass, at times in tenor.

  “Meouw-meouw—tu tu tu—carrrrriou!”

  If it hadn’t been such a donnybrook, you would never think it was cats howling. Barbara turned over and muttered something. Alyosha jumped up, sent a few curses flying through the air, and closed the window. But windows are meager barriers: they let in sound, light, even electricity.

  “I have to get up at eight to go to work,” Alyosha shouted, “and these damn cats are howling! They won’t let you sleep! Can’t you at least shut up, woman? Whimpering like this in my ear! Whining at me like that! Is it my fault? They’re not my cats!”

  “Please, darling, chase them away!”

  Her husband swore, jumped out of bed, and marched over to the window. Night was turning into morning.

  Looking up at the sky, Alyosha saw only one little star. It barely flickered in the mist. Sparrows chattered in the lime tree, startled by the sound of the opening window. Alyosha looked down into the garden and saw some ten cats. Their tails in the air, hissing and treading delicately on the grass, they howled, proceeding like a group of dromedaries around a pretty little cat who was sitting on an overturned washtub. It was hard to decide which was stronger: their love for the little cat or their self-importance. Had they come out of love, or just to show off? Their attitude betrayed the most refined scorn for each other. On the other side of the garden gate the sow with her piglets chafed against the grille, trying to get in.

  “Shoo!” Alyosha hissed. “Shoo, you devils! Pshhh! Shoo!”

  But the cats paid no attention. Only the cat in the middle looked in his direction, but even then casually, in passing. The cat was ecstatic; she didn’t care about Alyosha.

  “Shoo! Shoo! Damn you! Shoo, I wish you’d all go to hell! Barbara, give me that carafe there! I’ll throw water on them! The devils!”

  Barbara jumped out of bed and brought him not the carafe but a pitcher from the washstand. Alyosha leaned with his chest over the windowsill and tilted the pitcher out of the window.

  “Gendemen! Gendemen!” he heard a voice above his head. “Young people nowadays! How can you do such a thing, huh? Ohhhhhh! The young people nowadays!”

  A sigh followed. Alyosha looked up and saw a pair of shoulders in a calico dressing gown with a large flower pattern, and withered, sinewy fingers. From the shoulders protruded a small, gray-haired head with a nightcap, and the fingers were pointing down at him threateningly. The old man sat by the window without taking his eyes from the cats. His eyes were sparkling with longing, as if he were watching a ballet.

  Alyoshas mouth fell open. He went white, and smiled.

  “Are you resting well, Your Excellency?” he asked weakly.

  “This is terrible! You are going against nature, young man! You could say, you are... hm, yes... actually sabotaging the laws of nature! This is terrible! How could you! These are... hm, yes... organisms. How do you say, yes, organisms! One must understand! Contemptible!”

  Alyosha stepped back from the window, tiptoed to bed, and lay down meekly. Barbara curled up next to him and held her breath.

  “That was our...” Alyosha whispered. “In person... he’s not asleep. He loves cats. Damn! There’s nothing worse than living with one’s boss!”

  “Young man!” Alyosha heard the old man’s voice a minute later. “Where are you? Come out here please!”

  Alyosha went to the window and looked up at the old man.

  “Do you see that white cat there? What do you think of it? It’s my cat! What carriage it has, what carriage! What a gait! Just look at that! Meow, meow, Vaska! Vaska, darling! You naughty little thing, you! He’s a pure Siberian. From far away... ha, ha, that little lady-cat over there—she’d better watch herself! My cat is always triumphant—you’ll see what I mean! What carriage! What carriage!”

  Alyosha replied that he found the animal’s fur fabulous. The old man began talking about the life of the cat and all the things it did. Getting carried away, he spoke till sunrise, extolling every detail, smacking his lips and licking his sinewy fingers... so there was no going back to sleep.

  The following night, at one in the morning, the cats again struck up their song, and again woke Barbara. Alyosha could not chase the cats away; His Excellency’s cat was among them. Alyosha and Barbara listened to the cat concert till morning.

  HOW

  I CAME

  TO BE

  LAWFULLY

  WED

  AFTER WE HAD FINISHED the punch, our parents murmured a few words to each other and left us alone.

  “Go ahead!” my father whispered to me on his way out. “Say the words!”
/>
  “But how can I declare my love,” I whispered back, “if I don’t love her?”

  “No one’s asking what you want to do, you idiot!”

  My father gave me an angry stare and left the garden pavilion. Then, after everyone had gone, a woman’s hand reached in the half-open door and snatched the candle from the table. We sat in the dark.

  “Well, there’s no escaping now!” I thought, and with a discreet cough I said briskly: “I see that circumstances favor me, Zoe Andreyevna! At last we are alone, and darkness comes to my aid, for it covers the shame written on my face... the shame pouring from the feelings with which my soul is ablaze.”

  Suddenly I stopped. I could hear Zoe Andreyevna’s heart beating and her teeth chattering. Her whole organism was trembling—I could hear and feel it from the way the bench was shaking. The poor girl didn’t love me. She hated me, the way a dog hates the suck that beats it. She despised me, you could say, as only an idiot can. Suddenly I feel like an orangutan, ugly—even though I’m covered in medals and honors— no better than a beast, fat-faced, pimply, covered with stubble; alcohol and a perpetual cold have made my nose red and bloated! A bear has more grace than I do. And don’t even mention my intellectual qualities! With her, with Zoe, I had pulled an immoral trick before she became my bride. I stopped in mid-sentence, because suddenly I felt deeply sorry for her.

  “Let us go out into the garden,” I said. “It’s stifling in here.”

  We went out and walked down the garden path. Our par-ents, who had been listening by the door, had managed to scamper into the bushes just before we appeared. The moonbeams played on Zoe’s face. Idiot though I was, I thought I could read in that face all the sweet pain of bondage. I sighed and continued:

  “The nightingale sings for its sweetheart... and I, all alone in this world, who can I sing to?”

  Zoe blushed and lowered her eyes. She was acting to perfection the role she was expected to play. We sat on a bench by the stream, beyond which a church glimmered white. Behind the church towered Count Kuldarov’s mansion, in which his clerk lived, Bolnitsin, the man Zoe loved. As she sat down on the bench she fixed her gaze on the mansion. My heart sank and shriveled with pity. My God, my God! May heaven smile on our parents... but they should be sent down to hell, for a week at least!