Fifty-Two Stories

Zina fell to thinking: the story of the seminarian and the beautiful French girl carried her far away in her imagination. It seemed to Pyotr Mikhailych that externally she had not changed at all in the last week, only become a little more pale. She looked calm and the same as ever, as if she had come to visit Vlasich along with her brother. But Pyotr Mikhailych felt that some sort of change had taken place in himself. Indeed, before, when she lived at home, he could talk to her about decidedly anything, while now he could not bring himself to ask even the simple question: “How do you like living here?” The question seemed awkward and unnecessary. The same change must have taken place in her as well. She was in no hurry to talk about their mother, about home, about her affair with Vlasich; she did not justify herself, did not say that civil marriage was better than religious, was not nervous, and calmly pondered the story of Olivier…And why had they suddenly started talking about Olivier?

“You’ve both got wet shoulders from the rain,” Zina said and smiled joyfully. She was touched by this slight resemblance between her brother and Vlasich.

And Pyotr Mikhailych felt all the bitterness and all the horror of his situation. He remembered his now empty house, the closed grand piano, and Zina’s bright room, which no one went into anymore; he remembered that there were no small footprints on the garden paths now, and that no one went swimming now, laughing loudly, before evening tea. What he had been so attached to since early childhood, what he had liked to think about when he sat in a stuffy classroom or lecture hall—brightness, purity, joy—all that had filled the house with life and light, was gone irretrievably, vanished, and mixed up with a crude, uncouth story of some battalion commander, a magnanimous lieutenant, a depraved woman, a grandfather who had shot himself…And to start talking about their mother, or thinking that the past could come back, meant not to understand what was clear.

Pyotr Mikhailych’s eyes filled with tears, and his hand, resting on the table, trembled. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her eyes also turned red and glistened.

“Grigory, come here!” she said to Vlasich.

They walked over to the window and started discussing something in a whisper. And by the way Vlasich bent towards her and the way she looked at him, Pyotr Mikhailych realized once again that everything was already irretrievably finished and that there was no need to talk about anything. Zina went out.

“So it goes, brother,” Vlasich began after some silence, rubbing his hands and smiling. “I just called our life happiness, but that was to obey literary requirements, so to speak. As a matter of fact, there has been no sense of happiness yet. Zina has been thinking all the time about you, about her mother, and she’s suffered. Looking at her, I suffered, too. She has a free, bold nature, but when you’re unaccustomed, you know, it’s hard, and besides she’s young. The servants call her ‘miss’; it seems like a trifle, but it upsets her. So it goes, brother.”

Zina brought a bowl of strawberries. She was followed by a little maid, who looked meek and downtrodden. The maid put a jug of milk on the table and made a very low bow…She had something in common with the old furniture, just as torpid and dull.

There was no more sound of rain. Pyotr Mikhailych was eating strawberries, and Vlasich and Zina silently watched him. The time of the needless but inevitable conversation was drawing near, and it already weighed on the three of them. Pyotr Mikhailych’s eyes again filled with tears; he pushed the bowl aside and said it was time he went home, or else it would be late and it might well rain again. The moment came when Zina, out of propriety, ought to say something about home and her new life.

“How are things at our place?” she asked quickly, and her pale face quivered. “How is Mama?”

“You know Mama…,” Pyotr Mikhailych replied without looking at her.

“Petrusha, you’ve long been thinking about what’s happened,” she said, taking her brother by the sleeve, and he realized how hard it was for her to speak. “You’ve long been thinking. Tell me, can we count on Mama reconciling with Grigory some day…and generally with this situation?”

She stood close to her brother, face to face, and he was astonished that she was so beautiful and that he seemed not to have noticed it before; and that his sister, whose face resembled their mother’s, pampered, refined, was living in Vlasich’s house, and with Vlasich, along with the torpid maid, along with the six-legged table, in a house where a living man had been flogged to death, and that she would not ride home with him now, but would stay here for the night—that struck him as incredibly absurd.

“You know Mama…,” he said without answering the question. “In my opinion, you ought to observe…to do something, to ask her forgiveness, or whatever…”