Fifty-Two Stories

“I didn’t die…,” thought Olga Mikhailovna, when she began to recognize her surroundings again and there was no longer any pain.

A bright summer day looked through the two wide-open windows of the bedroom; in the garden outside the windows, sparrows and magpies chattered without stopping for a second.

The drawers of the chest were now closed, her husband’s bed was made. The midwife, Varvara, and the maid were not in the bedroom; only Pyotr Dmitrich stood motionless at the window as before, looking out into the garden. No baby’s crying was heard, no one offered congratulations or rejoiced: evidently the little person had not been born alive.

“Pyotr!” Olga Mikhailovna called to her husband.

Pyotr Dmitrich turned to look. It must have been a very long time since the last guest had left and Olga Mikhailovna had insulted her husband, because Pyotr Dmitrich had grown noticeably haggard and thin.

“What is it?” he asked, going to the bed.

He looked aside, moved his lips, and gave a childishly helpless smile.

“Is it all over?” Olga Mikhailovna asked.

Pyotr Dmitrich wanted to reply, but his lips trembled, and his mouth twisted like an old man’s, like her toothless uncle Nikolai Nikolaich’s.

“Olya!” he said, wringing his hands, and big tears suddenly welled up in his eyes. “Olya! I don’t need any qualifications, or court sessions” (he sobbed) “…or special opinions, or guests, or your dowry…I don’t need anything! Why didn’t we take care of our baby? Ah, what’s there to talk about!”

He waved his hand and left the bedroom.

But for Olga Mikhailovna nothing mattered anymore. There was a fog in her head from the chloroform, her soul was empty…That dull indifference to life, which she had felt when the two doctors performed the operation, still had not left her.

1888

A BREAKDOWN

I

Mayer, a medical student, and Rybnikov, studying in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, went one evening to their friend, the law student Vassilyev, and invited him to go with them to S——v Lane. Vassilyev first protested for a long time, then got dressed and went with them.

He knew of fallen women only by hearsay and from books, and never once in his life had been in the houses where they lived. He knew that there were such immoral women, who, under the pressure of fatal circumstances—milieu, bad upbringing, poverty, and so on—were forced to sell their honor for money. They do not know pure love, have no children, no legal rights; their mothers and sisters lament over them like the dead, science treats them as evil, men speak familiarly to them. Yet, despite all that, they do not lose the image and likeness of God.¹ They are all conscious of their sin and hope for salvation. They could employ the means leading to salvation on the most vast scale. It is true that society does not forgive people their past, but for God Saint Mary of Egypt is considered no lower than the other saints.² Whenever Vassilyev happened to recognize a fallen woman in the street by her dress or manners, or saw one portrayed in a satirical magazine, he remembered a story he once read somewhere: a certain young man, pure and self-sacrificing, fell in love with a fallen woman and offered to make her his wife, and she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, poisoned herself.

Vassilyev lived in one of the lanes off Tverskoy Boulevard. When he and his friends left the house, it was about eleven o’clock. The first snow had fallen a little earlier, and everything in nature was under the sway of this young snow. The air smelled of snow, snow softly crunched underfoot, the ground, the roofs, the trees, the benches on the boulevards—everything was soft, white, young, and that made the houses look different than the day before, the lamps shone brighter, the air became more transparent, the clatter of the carriages was muffled, and a feeling that resembled this white, young, fluffy snow asked to enter one’s soul along with the fresh, light, frosty air.

“ ‘Without my will to these sad shores,’ ” the medic began to sing in a pleasant tenor, “ ‘a mysterious force doth draw me…’ ”³

“ ‘Behold the mill…,’ ” the artist joined in. “ ‘Already ’tis in ruin…’ ”

“ ‘Behold the mill…Already ’tis in ruin…,’ ” repeated the medic, raising his eyebrows and sadly shaking his head.

He fell silent, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, then sang loudly and so well that the passersby turned to look at him:

“ ‘Here once I would freely meet with my free love…’ ”

The three men stopped at a restaurant and, without taking off their overcoats, drank two glasses of vodka each at the bar. Before drinking his second, Vassilyev noticed a piece of cork in his vodka, brought the glass up to his eyes, and looked at it for a long time, frowning nearsightedly. The medic misunderstood his expression and said:

“Well, what are you staring at? Please, no philosophy! Vodka’s given us to be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked on. Live for at least one evening as a human being!”