Fifty-Two Stories

When the horse was brought, the sun was already rising. The rain stopped, the clouds raced quickly, there were more and more blue spaces in the sky. In the puddles below, the first rays gleamed timidly. The attorney passed through the front hall with his briefcase to get into the tarantass, and at that moment Zhmukhin’s wife, pale, and seeming paler than the day before, tearful, looked at him attentively, without blinking, with a naïve expression, like a little girl’s. It was obvious from her sorrowful face that she envied his freedom—ah, how delighted she would be to leave here herself!—and that she needed to say something to him, probably to ask for advice about the children. And how pitiful she was! Not a wife, not the mistress of the household, not even a servant, but rather a sponger, a poor relation needed by no one, a nonentity…Her husband, bustling about, never stopped talking and kept running ahead, seeing the guest off, and she pressed up against the wall fearfully and guiltily and kept waiting for the right moment to speak.

“You’re welcome to come again!” the old man kept saying all the time. “Whatever we have is yours for the asking, you know.”

The guest hurriedly got into the tarantass, evidently with great pleasure and as if fearful that he might be detained at any moment. As on the previous day, the tarantass bounced, squeaked, the bucket tied behind rattled furiously. The attorney glanced back at Zhmukhin with a peculiar expression; it looked as if he, like the surveyor once, would have liked to call him a Pecheneg, or something similar, but his meekness won out, he restrained himself and said nothing. But in the gateway, he suddenly could not help himself, rose up, and shouted loudly and angrily:

“I’m sick of you!”

And disappeared through the gate.

By the shed stood Zhmukhin’s sons: the older one was holding a rifle, in the younger one’s hands was a gray rooster with a beautiful bright comb. The younger one threw the rooster into the air with all his might; the rooster flew up higher than the house and turned over in the air like a pigeon; the older one fired, and the rooster dropped like a stone.

The old man, embarrassed, not knowing how to explain this strange, unexpected outcry of his guest, unhurriedly went into the house. And, sitting there at the table, he reflected for a long time on the present-day turn of mind, on universal immorality, on the telegraph, the telephone, bicycles, and on how it was all not needed, and he gradually calmed down, then unhurriedly had a bite to eat, drank five glasses of tea, and lay down to sleep.

1897

IN THE CART

THEY DROVE OUT OF TOWN at half past eight in the morning.

The road was dry, the wonderful April sun was very warm, but there was still snow in the ditches and the woods. The fierce, dark, long winter was still so near, spring had come suddenly, but for Marya Vassilyevna, who was now sitting in the wagon, there was nothing new or interesting either in the warmth or in the languid, transparent woods, thawed by the breath of spring, or in the black flocks flying in the field over huge puddles that resembled lakes, or in that sky, wondrous, bottomless, into which it seemed you could go so joyfully. It was already thirteen years that she had been working as a teacher, and there was no counting how many times in all those years she had ridden to town for her salary; and whether it was spring, as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter—for her it was all the same, and she always invariably wanted one thing: to get there quickly.

It felt to her as if she had been living in those parts for a long, long time, a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the way from town to her school. Here was her past, her present, and she was unable to imagine any other future apart from the school, the road to town and back, and again the school, and again the road…

She had already lost the habit of recalling how things had been in the past, before she became a teacher—and had forgotten almost all of it. Once upon a time she had a father and a mother; they lived in a big apartment in Moscow, near the Red Gate, but of all that time there remained in her memory something vague and elusive, like a dream. Her father died when she was ten years old, her mother died soon after…There was an officer brother, with whom she exchanged letters at first, but then her brother stopped answering her letters, he lost the habit. Of former things there remained only a photograph of her mother, but it had faded from the dampness of her room at the schoolhouse, and now nothing could be seen but hair and eyebrows.

When they had gone some two miles, old Semyon, who drove the horse, turned around and said:

“They arrested an official in town. Packed him off. Rumor has it that he and some Germans killed the mayor Alexeev in Moscow.”

“Who told you that?”

“They read it in a newspaper in Ivan Ionov’s tavern.”