Old Sergei sat alone in the living-room, his trembling veined old hands clasping and unclasping limply between his knees. Anna came to the door, mixing some egg and flour in a bowl, and said: “You horrid old man … you wearisome old man … running about honoring strangers and then coming home to break my heart. That kid was given to me—it was. …”
“God knows whether it was or not,” said Old Sergei, but under his breath, thus satisfying his honor as a Husband with a Righteous Grievance without speaking loud enough to provoke the violence of his wife. Anna sighed petulantly and noisily and returned to the stove. Old Sergei sat drooping, opening and shutting his blind eyes to remind himself that he could not see. He laid his hand on his throbbing throat, for he craved to feel life always under his hand in order to titillate his fancy about death. He swallowed; his Adam’s apple moved under his hand, and his vague thoughts floated round and round the strangeness of life and death.
He was old, he thought; he was not loved. He loved no one. He felt the breath climbing foolishly up and down the unsteady shaft that was his body, like an imprisoned bird never losing hope of escape. Some day the prisoner would find the loophole and fly from his lips. The sooner the better, thought Old Sergei—or rather he thought that he thought so; life was a curse without serenity. Who could be serene by Anna’s side? He felt as homesick for serenity as though he had once enjoyed it. He believed he had left it behind him in old lost Russia. He believed he would find it again in heaven, which was the only province of lost Russia left to him to visit now.
“To die—to die—to die …” whispered Old Sergei, enjoying the feeling of tears brimming over the quivering skin of his eye-sockets. He stroked and stroked his too living throat; in his sightless eyes he saw the sad picture of his lovelessness. Clasping his hands together, he laid this sad picture before his God, hoping to soften God’s heart by a prostrate-spirited humility. “I have sinned, O God,” he thought, for his vanity felt defiled by Anna’s reproaches. “I have sinned, I am reproached, so let me die. I am cursed; I am found out … all life is too difficult for me, for I belong to a cursed race … wretched Russia—exiled and despoiled—a dying race—a reproach to all the nations of the earth among whom we are dispersed. … Here am I, a wretched sinner, a reproached sinner, member of a wretched and reproached race. O God, let me die. It’s the only way to make people sorry for me instead of angry with me. …” He thought of oblivion as a revenge; death, not penitence, seemed to him the apposite answer to a justified reproach; he had no courage for penitence. He would refuse to be anything more responsible than a pitiful memory in Anna’s mind, and in God’s. “Let my spirit be taken from me … let me be dissolved and become earth. … Let me go into the everlasting place,” he implored of his God, as a man faced by the irritation of shaving on a cold morning almost decides to go back to bed and sleep the day out.
He was interrupted in this limp ecstasy by hearing Seryozha’s peaceful “Yoodle-doodle-doo,” outside in the yard. He had heard it for some time, but it had not come to the forefront of his attention till now, suddenly, in a pause in Anna’s kitchen clatter.
“Seryozha,” called Old Sergei, “bring me that kid.”
Seryozha, whistling very softly between his teeth, brought the kid, more than half asleep, huddled in a length of sacking, and put it on the floor between his father’s feet. Old Sergei’s hands—tense, as though they expected to find something new—stroked the kid’s hard little brow, the thin ridge of its neck, the harsh hair on its narrow shoulders, the heaving bulging ribs, the upturned hoofs tipping the awkwardly kneeling legs. … Old Sergei’s fingers ran up and down the sleepy little animal’s backbone, as though it were an ecstatic instrument.
“Seryozha,” said Old Sergei, turning his face down toward the kid as though he could see it, “if I should die …”
Emotion checked his speech, and so long was the pause that Seryozha, who was tapping with his foot the already flat corpse of a cockroach in cold abstraction, as though it deserved to die a hundred deaths, was obliged to say, “Oh, nonsense, papa! There’s no reason why you should die …”
“There is every reason,” said Old Sergei, feeling a little baffled as Seryozha began again whistling, almost in a whisper, through his teeth—an unsuitable obbligato to a talk on death. “No one values my presence here—still less do I value it myself. I am a weariness to those around me and to myself. …”
“You don’t really think that, papa,” said Seryozha. His father, with some surprise, took this as an affectionate filial disclaimer of his proposition. Really Seryozha meant his remark quite literally. He knew that his father did not mean his statement that the necessity for him to remain in the world was now at an end. “Nobody believes that,” thought Seryozha, “however much they may say so. Papa’s world wouldn’t be there if he weren’t there. My world wouldn’t if I weren’t. This cockroach’s isn’t, now it’s dead. So none of us really thinks our world can do without us. I’m sure it had never before occurred to this cockroach that its world could do without it—that anybody could wish it dead. Its vanity was all comfortable inside itself—it felt valuable. When it saw my foot
