Fifty-Two Stories

At supper Varya argued again, this time with her father. Polyansky ate heartily, drank red wine, and told Nikitin how once in wintertime, during the war, he stood all night up to his knees in a swamp; the enemy was so close that they were not allowed to talk or smoke; it was a cold, dark night, a piercing wind was blowing. Nikitin listened and glanced sidelong at Manyusya. She was gazing fixedly at him, not blinking, as if deep in thought or lost in reverie…For him it was both pleasant and agonizing.

“Why is she looking at me like that?” he agonized. “It’s embarrassing. People may notice. Ah, she’s still so young, so naïve!”

The guests began to disperse at midnight. When Nikitin went out the gate, a window on the first floor banged open and Manyusya appeared.

“Sergei Vassilyich,” she called.

“What are your orders?”

“The thing is…,” Manyusya said, obviously trying to think up what to say. “The thing is…Polyansky has promised to come one of these days with his photography and take a picture of us all. We’ll have to get together.”

“All right.”

Manyusya disappeared, the window banged shut, and at once someone in the house started playing the piano.

“What a house!” Nikitin thought as he crossed the street. “A house where only Egyptian doves moan, and then only because they don’t know how else to express their joy!”

But the Shelestovs were not the only ones who lived merrily. Nikitin had not gone two hundred paces before he heard the sounds of a piano in another house. He went on a little further and saw a peasant in a gateway playing a balalaika. In the garden an orchestra struck up a potpourri of Russian songs…

Nikitin lived half a mile from the Shelestovs, in an eight-room apartment he rented for three hundred roubles a year together with his colleague, the teacher of geography and history, Ippolit Ippolitych. This Ippolit Ippolitych, an older man, with a red beard, pug-nosed, with a coarse and uncultivated face like a workman’s, but good-natured, was sitting at his desk when Nikitin came home, correcting students’ maps. He considered the drawing of maps the most necessary and important thing in geography, and in history the knowledge of chronology. He spent whole nights correcting his students’ maps with a blue pencil, or putting together chronological tables.

“What splendid weather today!” Nikitin said, going into his room. “I’m amazed that you can sit inside like this.”

Ippolit Ippolitych was a taciturn man; he either was silent, or said only what had long been known to everyone. Now he made this reply:

“Yes, fine weather. It’s May now, soon it will be real summer. Summer isn’t the same as winter. In winter we have to light the stoves, but in summer it’s warm without the stoves. In summer you open the windows at night and it’s still warm, but in winter—double-paned windows, and it’s still cold.”

Nikitin sat by the desk for no more than a minute and became bored.

“Good night!” he said, getting up and yawning. “I was about to tell you something romantic concerning myself, but you’re—geography! Someone starts talking to you about love, and you immediately say: ‘What year was the battle of Kalka?’ To hell with you with your battles and your Chukotsky Noses!”¹¹

“Why are you angry?”

“It’s annoying!”

And, annoyed that he still had not proposed to Manyusya and that he now had no one to talk with about his love, he went to his study and lay down on the sofa. The study was dark and quiet. As he lay there and looked into the darkness, Nikitin began for some reason to think about how, in two or three years, he would go to Petersburg for something, how Manyusya would accompany him to the station and weep; in Petersburg he would receive a long letter from her, in which she would beg him to come home quickly. And he would write to her…His letter would begin: “My dearest rat…”

“Precisely, my dearest rat,” he said and laughed.

It was uncomfortable for him lying there. He put his hands behind his head and lifted his left leg onto the back of the sofa. Then it was comfortable. Meanwhile the window became noticeably pale, sleepy roosters started squawking in the yard. Nikitin went on thinking of how he would come back from Petersburg, how Manyusya would meet him at the station, cry out with joy, and throw herself on his neck; or, better still, he would pull a trick: he would come home at night on the quiet, the cook would open the door, he would tiptoe into the bedroom, silently undress, and—plop into bed! She would wake up and—oh, joy!

The air turned completely pale. There was no longer any study or window. On the porch of the brewery, the same one they rode past that day, Manyusya was sitting and saying something. Then she took Nikitin under the arm and went with him to the park. There he saw the oaks and the crows’ nests that looked like hats. One of the nests shook, Shebaldin looked down from it and shouted: “You haven’t read Lessing!”