Fifty-Two Stories

Next to old Semyon he looked trim, vigorous, but in his gait there was something barely noticeable that betrayed him as being already poisoned, weak, close to ruin. And it was as if the forest suddenly smelled of drink. Marya Vassilyevna became frightened and felt sorry for this man, who was perishing no one knew why, and it occurred to her that if she were his wife or sister, she might give her whole life to save him from ruin. To be a wife? Life was so arranged that he lived alone in a big manor house, she lived alone in a remote village, but for some reason even the notion that he and she could be close and equal seemed impossible, absurd. In fact, all of life was so arranged, and human relations had become complicated to such an incomprehensible degree, that once you thought about it, you felt eerie and your heart sank.

“And it’s incomprehensible,” she thought, “why God gives this beauty, this affability, these sad, sweet eyes to weak, unhappy, useless people, and why they’re so attractive.”

“We turn right here,” Khanov said, getting into his carriage. “Goodbye! All the best!”

And again she began to think about her pupils, about the examination, the caretaker, the school board; and when the wind from the right brought the sound of the carriage driving away, these thoughts mixed with the others. She wanted to think about beautiful eyes, about love, about the happiness that was never to be…

To be a wife? In the morning it is cold, there is no one to light the stove, the caretaker has gone off somewhere; the pupils come at the crack of dawn, bring in snow and mud, make noise; everything is so uncomfortable, uninviting. Her apartment is one room, plus a little kitchen. Every day after classes she has a headache, and after dinner she has heartburn. She has to collect money from the pupils for firewood, for the caretaker, and give it to the custodian, and then beg that well-fed, insolent peasant for God’s sake to send the firewood. And at night she dreams about examinations, peasants, snowdrifts. And she has grown old and coarse from such a life, become unattractive, angular, awkward, as if she were filled with lead; and she is afraid of everything; and she stands up and does not dare to sit down in the presence of a member of the board or the custodian; and when she speaks about any of them, it is in deferential terms. And no one likes her, and her life goes by dully, with no gentleness, no friendly concern, no interesting acquaintances. In her situation, how terrible it would be if she fell in love!

“Hold tight, Vassilyevna!”

Again they climbed steeply uphill…

She had become a teacher out of necessity, without any sense of vocation; and she never thought about the vocation, about the usefulness of education, and it always seemed to her that the main thing in what she was doing was not the pupils and not the education, but the examinations. And when was she to think about the vocation, about the usefulness of education? Teachers, poor doctors, medical aides, with their enormous workload, do not even have the comfort of thinking they are serving an idea, or the people, because their heads are always crammed with thoughts about a crust of bread, firewood, bad roads, illnesses. It is a hard, uninteresting life, and only silent dray horses like this Marya Vassilyevna could bear it for long; the lively, high-strung, impressionable ones, who talked about their vocation, about serving an idea, soon became tired and dropped out.

Semyon kept choosing the drier and shorter way to go, across meadows, over back roads; but here the peasants would not let them pass, there it was a priest’s land and couldn’t be crossed, elsewhere Ivan Ionov had bought a plot from his master and surrounded it with a ditch. They kept having to turn back.

They arrived at Nizhny Gorodishche. Carts stood by a tavern, where the lingering snow was covered with dung: they carried big glass jugs full of oil of vitriol. There were many men in the tavern, all coachmen, and there was a smell of vodka, tobacco, and sheepskin. There was loud talk, the slamming of the door on its pulley. In a shop on the other side of the wall, someone was playing a concertina without stopping for a moment. Marya Vassilyevna sat and drank tea, but the peasants at the next table, steamed up by tea and the stifling tavern air, were drinking vodka and beer.

“Listen here, Kuzma!” disorderly voices rang out. “Never mind! God bless! I could do it for you, Ivan Dementyich! Watch it, lad!”

A short peasant with a black beard, pockmarked, long since drunk, suddenly got surprised at something and poured out some foul abuse.

“Why do you go badmouthing! You!” Semyon, who was sitting to one side, responded angrily. “Look, there’s a young lady here!”

“A young lady…,” someone said mockingly in another corner.

“A swiny crow!”

“Never mind us…” The little peasant became embarrassed. “Beg your pardon. We’re spending our money, the young lady’s spending hers…Hello there!”

“Hello,” replied the schoolteacher.