Fifty-Two Stories

In the restaurant she had also become convinced that there was not even a spark of the former feeling left in her heart. To her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhailych, or simply Volodya, whom still yesterday she had loved to the point of madness, of despair, she now felt herself totally indifferent. All that evening he had seemed listless to her, sleepy, uninteresting, insignificant, and this time the coolness with which he usually avoided paying the check in restaurants had outraged her, and she had barely kept herself from saying to him: “If you’re poor, stay home.” The colonel alone had paid.

Maybe because trees, telegraph poles, and snowdrifts kept flashing by her eyes, the most varied thoughts came into her head. She thought: a hundred and twenty to pay the check in the restaurant, and a hundred for the Gypsies, and tomorrow, if she likes, she can throw even a thousand roubles to the wind, yet two months ago, before the wedding, she didn’t have even three roubles to her name, and had to turn to her father for every trifle. What a change in life!

Her thoughts were confused, and she recalled how, when she was around ten years old, Colonel Yagich, now her husband, had paid court to her aunt, and everyone in the house said he ruined her, and in fact the aunt often came to dinner with tearful eyes and kept driving somewhere, and people said that the poor thing didn’t know what to do with herself. He was very handsome then and had extraordinary success with women, so that the whole town knew him, and the story went that he visited his lady admirers every day, the way a doctor visits his patients. And even now, despite the gray hair, the wrinkles, and the spectacles, his lean face sometimes looked very handsome, especially in profile.

Sofya Lvovna’s father was an army doctor and had once served in the same regiment with Yagich. Volodya’s father was also an army doctor and had also served in the same regiment with her father and Yagich. In spite of love adventures, often very complex and troublesome, Volodya was an excellent student; he finished his studies at the university with great success, chose foreign literature as his specialization, and is now said to be writing his dissertation. He lives in the barracks with his father, the army doctor, and has no money of his own, though he is already thirty. In childhood he and Sofya Lvovna lived in different apartments, but under the same roof, and he often came to play with her, and they took dancing and French lessons together. But when he grew up and became a slim, very handsome young man, she began to feel bashful with him, then fell madly in love with him, and loved him until quite recently, when she married Yagich. He, too, had extraordinary success with women, almost since the age of fourteen, and the ladies who were unfaithful to their husbands with him excused themselves by saying that Volodya was little. Not long ago someone told of him that, supposedly, when he was a student, he lived in furnished rooms close to the university, and each time someone knocked on his door, his footsteps would be heard and then a low-voiced apology: “Pardon, je ne suis pas seul.”² Yagich went into raptures over him, gave him his blessing for the future, as Derzhavin had Pushkin,³ and apparently loved him. For hours at a time they silently played billiards or blackjack together, and if Yagich went somewhere in a troika, he took Volodya with him, and Volodya initiated Yagich alone into the mysteries of his dissertation. Earlier, when the colonel was younger, they often wound up in the position of rivals, but they were never jealous of each other. In society, where they appeared together, Yagich was called big Volodya and his friend little Volodya.

Besides big Volodya, little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was one more person in the sledge—Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as everyone called her, Rita, Madame Yagich’s cousin, a girl already over thirty, very pale, with black eyebrows, in a pince-nez, who chain-smoked cigarettes, even outside in freezing weather. Her breast and knees were always covered with ashes. She spoke nasally, drawing out each word, was cold-tempered, could drink any quantity of liqueurs and cognac without getting drunk, told off-color jokes flatly, insipidly. At home she read intellectual journals from morning till night, sprinkling them with ashes, or else ate frozen apples.

“Sonya, stop acting up,” she said in a singsong voice. “It’s really stupid.”