Fifty-Two Stories

Having made a lot of money, he went to Moscow and bought all sorts of merchandise for five thousand roubles, in cash and on credit. There were filters, and exquisite desk lamps, and guitars, and hygienic underwear for children, and pacifiers, and wallets, and zoological collections. Besides that he also bought five hundred roubles’ worth of exquisite china, and was glad to have bought it, because beautiful objects develop refined taste and soften morals. On returning home from Moscow, he started placing the new merchandise on the shelves and on stands. And it somehow happened that, when he climbed up to clear an upper shelf, there was some sort of tremor, and ten volumes of Mikhailovsky fell from the shelf one after another. One volume hit him on the head, the rest fell down right on the lamps and broke two glass spheres.

“Anyhow, that’s…heavy writing!” Andrei Andreevich murmured, scratching himself.

He gathered up all the books, tied them with string, and hid them under the counter. A couple of days later he was informed that his neighbor the grocer had been sentenced to a penal battalion for torturing his nephew, and that his shop was for rent. Andrei Andreevich was very happy about it and asked to rent the shop himself. Soon a doorway was broken through the wall, and the two shops, united into one, were chock-full of merchandise. Since the customers who came to the other half of the shop were in the habit of asking for tea, sugar, and kerosene, Andrei Andreevich, without thinking twice, introduced groceries as well.

Nowadays he is one of the most prominent shopkeepers in our town. He sells china, tobacco, tar, soap, pretzels, fabric, haberdashery and chandlery, guns, hides, and hams. He has rented a wine cellar at the market, and they say he is going to open a family bathhouse with private rooms. The books that used to stand on his shelves, including volume three of Pisarev, were sold long ago at one rouble five kopecks per thirty pounds.

At birthday parties or weddings, former friends, whom Andrei Andreevich now mockingly styles “Americans,” occasionally start talking to him about progress, literature, and other lofty matters.

“Have you read the latest issue of The Messenger of Europe?”³ they ask him.

“No, sirs, I haven’t…,” he replies, narrowing his eyes and playing with a heavy watch chain. “That doesn’t concern us. We’re taken up with more positive things.”

1892

NEIGHBORS

PYOTR MIKHAILYCH IVASHIN was badly out of sorts. His sister, a young girl, had gone off to Vlasich, a married man. To rid himself somehow of the oppressive, dejected mood that never left him either at home or in the fields, he called upon the help of his sense of justice, his good, honorable convictions—for he had always stood for free love!—but that did not help, and each time he involuntarily arrived at the same conclusion as the stupid nanny, that is, that his sister had behaved badly, and Vlasich had stolen her away. And that was painful.

Their mother spent whole days without leaving her room, the nanny spoke in a whisper, the aunt was at the point of leaving each day, and her suitcases were first carried to the front hall, then back to her room. In the house, in the yard, and in the garden there was a hush, as in the house of a dead person. It seemed to Pyotr Mikhailych that the aunt, the servants, and even the peasants looked at him mysteriously and with perplexity, as if they wanted to say: “Your sister has been seduced, why don’t you do something?” And he reproached himself for not doing something, though he did not know what, in fact, the something should consist in.

Six days went by this way. On the seventh—it was on Sunday after lunch—a mounted messenger brought a letter. The address was written in a familiar woman’s handwriting: “To Her Excel. Anna Nikolaevna Ivashina.” For some reason it seemed to Pyotr Mikhailych that there was something challenging, feisty, liberal in the look of the letter, the handwriting, the abbreviated word “Excel.” And women’s liberalism was stubborn, implacable, cruel…

“She’d sooner die than show indulgence to her poor mother by asking for her forgiveness,” Pyotr Mikhailych thought, going to his mother with the letter.

His mother was lying in bed, fully dressed. Seeing her son, she got up impetuously and, tucking back the gray hair that had strayed from under her bonnet, quickly asked:

“What is it? What is it?”

“This was sent…,” the son said, handing her the letter.

Zina’s name, and even the word “she,” was not pronounced at home; they spoke of Zina impersonally: “was sent,” “left”…The mother recognized her daughter’s handwriting, and her face became unattractive, unpleasant, and her gray hair again strayed from under the bonnet.

“No!” she said, drawing her hands back as if the letter had burned her fingers. “No, no, never! Not for anything!”