Fifty-Two Stories

Then for a long time Nikitin did not touch his diary. In early August there were repeat examinations and entrance examinations, and after the Dormition classes started.¹³ He usually went to work by eight o’clock, and by nine he had already begun to pine for Manya and his new house and kept glancing at his watch. In the lower grades he would make one of the boys dictate, and while the youngsters were writing, he would sit on the windowsill with his eyes shut, dreaming; whether he dreamed of the future or remembered the past, it all came out equally beautiful, like in a fairy tale. In the higher grades they read Gogol or Pushkin’s prose aloud, and that made him drowsy; people, trees, fields, saddle horses rose up in his imagination, and he said with a sigh, as if admiring the author:

“How good!”

During the noon recess Manya sent him lunch wrapped in a snow-white napkin, and he ate it slowly, with pauses, to prolong the pleasure, and Ippolit Ippolitych, who usually lunched on nothing but a roll, watched him with respect and envy and said something well-known, like:

“Without food people cannot exist.”

From school Nikitin went to give private lessons, and when, after five o’clock, he was finally on his way home, he felt both joy and anxiety, as if he had not been home for a whole year. He ran up the stairs, out of breath, found Manya, embraced her, kissed her, swore that he loved her, could not live without her, assured her that he had missed her terribly, and in fear asked her if she was well and why her face was so cheerless. Then they both had supper. After supper he lay on the divan in his study and smoked, and she sat beside him and talked in a low voice.

The happiest days for him now were Sundays and holidays, when he stayed home from morning till evening. On those days he partook of a naïve but extraordinarily pleasant life, which reminded him of pastoral idylls. He ceaselessly observed how his sensible and positive Manya was making their nest, and, wishing to show that he was not superfluous in the house, he did something useless—for instance, he rolled the charabanc out of the shed and examined it all over. With three cows Manyusya started a veritable dairy farm, and had many jugs of milk and pots of sour cream in the cellar and cold pantry, and all of it she kept for making butter. Occasionally, as a joke, Nikitin would ask for a glass of milk; she would get frightened, because it was against the rules, but, laughing, he would hug her and say:

“Now, now, I was joking, my treasure! Joking!”

Or else he would chuckle at her punctiliousness, when, for instance, she would find a forgotten scrap of sausage or cheese in the cupboard, hard as a rock, and say pompously:

“They will eat it in the kitchen.”

He would point out to her that such a small scrap was good only for a mousetrap, and she would start insisting hotly that men understand nothing about housekeeping, and that servants are surprised at nothing, even if you send a hundred pounds of snacks to them in the kitchen, and he would agree and embrace her rapturously. What was right in her words seemed to him extraordinary, amazing; and what went against his convictions was, in his opinion, naïve and touching.

Occasionally a philosophical mood came over him, and he would start reflecting on an abstract subject, and she would listen and look into his face with curiosity.

“I’m endlessly happy with you, my joy,” he would say, playing with her fingers or undoing her braid and braiding it again. “But I don’t look upon this happiness of mine as something that has fallen upon me accidentally, as if from the sky. This happiness is a wholly natural phenomenon, consistent, logically correct. I believe that man is the creator of his own happiness, and now I am taking precisely what I myself have created. Yes, I say it without affectation, I created this happiness and I own it by right. You know my past. Orphanhood, poverty, unhappy childhood, dreary youth—all that struggle was the path I was laying down to happiness…”

In October the school suffered a heavy loss: Ippolit Ippolitych fell ill with erysipelas of the head and died. For the two last days before his death he was unconscious and delirious, but even in delirium he said only what was known to everyone:

“The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea…Horses eat oats and hay…”

On the day of his burial there were no classes at the school. Colleagues and students carried the lid and the coffin, and the school choir sang “Holy God” all the way to the cemetery.¹⁴ In the procession there were three priests, two deacons, the entire boys’ school, and the archbishop’s choir in festive caftans. And, looking at the solemn funeral, passersby crossed themselves and said:

“God grant everyone such a death.”

On coming home from the cemetery, the deeply moved Nikitin found his diary in his desk and wrote:

“Just lowered Ippolit Ippolitovich Ryzhitsky into his grave.