Fifty-Two Stories

She lay down again. She heard ringing, maybe from the same convent, she again recalled the side chapel and the dark figures, in her head wandered thoughts about God and inevitable death, and she covered her head with the blanket so as not to hear the bells. She reflected that, before the arrival of old age and death, there would drag out a long, long life, and day after day she would have to reckon with the intimacy of an unloved man, who had already come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and to stifle in herself a hopeless love for another—young, charming, and, as it seemed to her, extraordinary. She glanced at her husband and was about to wish him good night, but instead she suddenly began to cry. She was vexed with herself.

“Well, here comes the music!” said Yagich, stressing the mu.

She calmed down, but late, only by ten o’clock in the morning; she stopped crying and trembling all over, but instead she was beginning to have a bad headache. Yagich was hurrying to the late liturgy and grumbled at his orderly, who was helping him to dress in the next room. He came into the bedroom once, softly jingling his spurs, and took something, then once more, already in his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and for some reason it seemed to Sofya Ivanovna that he walked and looked like a predator.

She heard Yagich make a telephone call.

“Please connect me with the Vassilyevsky Barracks!” he said, and a minute later: “Vassilyevsky Barracks? Please call Doctor Salimovich to the phone…” And after another minute: “Who is that on the phone? You, Volodya? Very glad. My dear boy, ask your father to come to the phone now. My spouse has gone quite to pieces after last evening. Not home, you say? Hm…Thank you. Excellent…much obliged…Merci.”

Yagich came into the bedroom for a third time, bent down to his wife, made a cross over her, let her kiss his hand (women who loved him kissed his hand, and he was used to it), and said he would be back for dinner. And he left.

Sometime after eleven o’clock the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailych had come. Sofya Lvovna, reeling from fatigue and the headache, quickly put on her astonishing new mauve housecoat trimmed with fur and hurriedly did up her hair somehow. She felt an inexpressible tenderness in her soul, and trembled from joy and the fear that he might leave. She wanted at least to have a look at him.

Little Volodya had come to visit, properly dressed in a tailcoat and white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in, he kissed her hand and said he sincerely regretted that she was not well. Then, when they sat down, he praised her housecoat.

“Yesterday’s meeting with Olya upset me,” she said. “At first I was terrified, but now I envy her. She’s an indestructible rock, she can’t be moved from her place; but can it be, Volodya, that she had no other way out? Can it be that to bury yourself alive is to resolve the question of life? It’s death, not life.”

At the mention of Olya, tenderness appeared on little Volodya’s face.

“Look, Volodya, you’re an intelligent person,” said Sofya Lvovna. “Teach me to act just as she has. Of course, I’m an unbeliever, and I wouldn’t go into a convent, but I could do something tantamount. My life isn’t easy,” she went on after a brief pause. “Do teach me…Say something persuasive to me. Say at least one word.”

“One word? All right: tararaboomdeay.”

“Why do you despise me, Volodya?” she asked quickly. “You speak to me in some sort of peculiar—forgive me—foppish language, such as one doesn’t use with friends and respectable women. You’re a success as a scholar, you’re fond of learning, why don’t you ever talk to me about your learning? Why? Am I not worthy?”

Little Volodya winced peevishly and said:

“Why do you suddenly want learning? Maybe you want a constitution? Or maybe sturgeon with horseradish?”

“Well, all right, I’m worthless, trashy, without principles, and none too bright. I’ve made no end of mistakes, I’m a psychopath, I’m spoiled, and I ought to be despised for it. But you’re ten years older than me, Volodya, and my husband is thirty years older. I grew up in your presence, and if you wanted, you could have made whatever you like out of me, even an angel. But you…” (her voice quavered) “behave terribly with me. Yagich married me when he was already old, but you…”

“Well, enough, enough,” said Volodya, sitting close to her and kissing both of her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, but we will kiss these little hands.”

“You despise me, and if you only knew how I suffer from it!” she said hesitantly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. “And if you only knew how I want to change, to start a new life! I think of it with rapture,” she said, and she actually shed a few tears of rapture. “To be a good, honest, pure human being, not to lie, to have a goal in life.”