Fifty-Two Stories

The best house was just as bad as the worst one. There were the same mirrors and paintings, the same hairstyles and dresses. Looking at the furnishings and costumes, Vassilyev now saw that this was not tastelessness, but something that might be called the taste or even the style of S——v Lane, and that could not be found anywhere else, something of a piece with its ugliness, not accidental but developed over time. After having been in eight houses, he was no longer astonished by the colors of the dresses, or the long trains, or the bright bows, or the sailor suits, or the thick purplish rouge on the cheeks; he realized that here it had to be that way, that if even one of these women were to dress like a human being, or if a decent etching were hung on the wall, the general tone of the whole lane would suffer.

“How ineptly they sell themselves!” he thought. “Can they possibly not understand that vice is captivating only when it is beautiful and hidden, when it wears the cover of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale faces, sad smiles, and darkness have a stronger effect than these gaudy adornments. Stupid women! If they don’t understand it themselves, their visitors might have taught them…”

A girl in a Polish costume with white fur trim came and sat beside him.

“Nice dark-haired boy, why aren’t you dancing?” she asked. “Why are you so bored?”

“Because it’s boring.”

“Just treat me to some Lafite. Then it won’t be boring.”

Vassilyev made no reply. He kept silent, then asked:

“What time do you go to sleep?”

“Towards six.”

“And when do you get up?”

“Sometimes at two, and sometimes at three.”

“What do you do when you get up?”

“We drink coffee, then at six we have dinner.”

“And what do you have for dinner?”

“The usual things…Cabbage soup or some other, beefsteak, dessert. Our madam treats the girls well. Why are you asking all this?”

“Just to make conversation…”

Vassilyev wanted to talk with the girl about many things. He felt a strong desire to find out where she was born, whether her parents were living, and if they knew she was here; how she wound up in this house, whether she was happy and content or sad and oppressed by dark thoughts; and whether she had hopes of ever getting out of her present situation…But he simply could not think up what to begin with and how to formulate the question so as not to appear indiscreet. He thought for a long time and then asked:

“How old are you?”

“Eighty,” the young lady joked, laughing as she watched the capers the dancing artist performed with his arms and legs.

Suddenly she burst out laughing at something and uttered a long, cynical phrase, so loudly that everyone could hear it. Vassilyev was taken aback, and, not knowing what expression to give his face, forced himself to smile. He was the only one to smile; all the others—his friends, the musicians, and the women—did not even glance at his companion, as if they had not heard.

“Treat me to some Lafite,” the girl said again.

Vassilyev felt an aversion to her white fur trim and her voice and walked away from her. It now seemed stuffy and hot to him, and his heart began to pound slowly but hard, like a hammer: one! two! three!

“Let’s leave here!” he said, pulling the artist’s sleeve.

“Wait, let us finish.”

While the artist and the medic were finishing the quadrille, Vassilyev, so as not to look at the women, studied the musicians. The piano was played by a fine-looking old man in spectacles, whose face resembled Marshal Bazaine’s;⁵ the violin by a young man with a brown little beard, dressed in the latest fashion. The young man’s face was not stupid, not wasted, but, on the contrary, intelligent, young, fresh. He was dressed fastidiously and with taste, he played with feeling. A puzzle: how did he and this decent, fine-looking old man wind up here? Why weren’t they ashamed to be here? What did they think about when they looked at the women?

If the people playing the piano and violin had been bedraggled, hungry, gloomy, drunk, with wasted or stupid faces, their presence might have been understandable. Now, though, Vassilyev understood nothing. He recalled a story he had read once about a fallen woman, and he now thought this human image with a guilty smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing here. It seemed to him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some other, totally separate world, alien and incomprehensible to him; if he had seen this world earlier on the stage of a theater or read about it in a book, he would not have believed it…

The woman with the white fur trim burst out laughing again and loudly uttered a repulsive phrase. A squeamish feeling came over him. He blushed and left the room.

“Wait, we’re coming too!” the artist called after him.

IV