Fifty-Two Stories

“Why don’t you really get married?” he asked. “How much does your wife want for a divorce?”

“Seventy-five thousand.”

“That’s a bit steep. What if you bargain?”

“She won’t yield a kopeck. She’s a terrible woman, brother!” Vlasich sighed. “I never told you about her before, it was disgusting to recall, but since there’s now an occasion, I will. I married her under the influence of a good, honest impulse. In our regiment, if you want the details, a battalion commander took up with an eighteen-year-old girl, that is, he simply seduced her, lived with her for a couple of months, and abandoned her. She ended up in the most terrible situation. She was ashamed to go back to her parents, and they wouldn’t take her; her lover had abandoned her—so go and sell yourself at the barracks. The comrades in the regiment were indignant. They weren’t saints themselves, but the baseness here was too offensive. Besides, everyone in the regiment detested this battalion commander. And, to do him dirt, you see, the indignant lieutenants all started a subscription to raise money for the unfortunate girl. Well, so, when we young subalterns met together and started laying out five or ten roubles, I suddenly had a brainstorm. The situation seemed all too suitable for a heroic deed. I hurried to the girl and in ardent phrases expressed my commiseration to her. And while going to her and then talking to her, I loved her ardently, as someone humiliated and insulted.² Yes…Well, it so happened that a week after that I proposed to her. My superiors and my comrades found my marriage incompatible with the dignity of an officer. That inflamed me still more. So, you see, I wrote a long letter in which I asserted that my action ought to be written down in the history of the regiment in golden letters, and so on. I sent the letter to my commander and copies to my comrades. Well, of course, I was agitated, and did not do it without some sharpness. I was asked to leave the regiment. I put the draft away somewhere, I’ll give it to you to read some day. It’s written with great feeling. You’ll see what honorable, bright moments I lived through. I handed in my resignation and came here with my wife. My father left some debts, I had no money, and my wife made acquaintances from day one, started dressing up and playing cards, so I had to mortgage the estate. She led a bad life, you see, and of all my neighbors you alone were not her lover. A couple of years later I gave her smart money—all I had then—and she left for the city. Yes…And now I pay her twelve hundred a year. A terrible woman! There’s a fly, brother, that sticks a larva on a spider’s back, so that it can’t shake it off; the larva attaches itself to the spider and drinks its heart’s blood. In just the same way this woman is attached to me and drinks my heart’s blood. She hates and despises me for doing such a stupid thing, that is, marrying a woman like her. She finds my magnanimity pathetic. ‘An intelligent man dropped me,’ she says, ‘and a fool picked me up.’ In her opinion, only a pathetic idiot could act as I did. It’s unbearably painful for me, brother. Generally, brother, I’ll say parenthetically, fate weighs me down. It really weighs me down.”

Pyotr Mikhailych listened to Vlasich and asked himself in perplexity: How could Zina like this man so much? None too young—he was already forty-one—skinny, gangly, narrow-chested, with a long nose and some gray in his beard. His talk is like humming, his smile is sickly, and when he talks he waves his arms awkwardly. No health, no handsome masculine manners, no social grace, no gaiety, and on the outside something lackluster and indefinite. He dresses tastelessly, his furniture is depressing, he doesn’t acknowledge poetry or painting, because “they don’t respond to the needs of the day,” meaning he doesn’t understand them; music doesn’t touch him. He is a bad landowner. His estate is in total disorder and is mortgaged; he pays twelve percent on his second mortgage, and on top of that owes about ten thousand in promissory notes. When the time comes to pay interest or send money to his wife, he begs loans from everybody with a look as if his house is burning down, and at the same time he rushes headlong to sell his entire winter stock of kindling for five roubles, or a haystack for three roubles, and then orders that they stoke the stoves with garden fencing or old hotbed frames. His meadows are destroyed by pigs, in the woods peasant cattle eat the young growth, and with every winter there are fewer and fewer old trees; beehives and rusty buckets lie about in his garden and vegetable patch. He has no talents or gifts, nor even the ordinary ability to live as people live. In practical life he is a naïve, weak man, whom it is easy to deceive and offend, and it’s not for nothing that his peasants call him “a bit simple.”