“Hee-hee-hee,” he laughed. “Such merry gentlemen! God bless them!”
“Driver, are you married?” one of the tall men asked.
“Me, am I married? Hee-hee-hee. You’re all such merry gentlemen. There’s only one wife left to me now—the damp earth. Hee-ho-ho. The grave, that’s what’s left for me. My son is dead, and I’m alive. Strange how death comes by the wrong door. It didn’t come for me, it came for my son.…”
Iona turned round to tell them how his son died, but at that moment the hunchback gave a little sigh of relief and announced that, thank God, they had come to the end of the journey. Having received his twenty kopecks, Iona gazed after the revelers for a long time, even after they had vanished through a dark gateway. Once more he was alone, once more silence fell on him. The grief he had kept at bay for a brief while now returned to wrench his heart with still greater force. With an expression of anxiety and torment, he gazed at the crowds hurrying along both sides of the street, wondering whether there was anyone among those thousands of people who would listen to him. But the crowds hurried past, paying no attention to him or to his grief. His grief was vast, boundless. If his heart could break, and the grief could pour out of it, it would flow over the whole world; but no one would see it. It had found a hiding place invisible to all: even in broad daylight, even if you held a candle to it, you wouldn’t see it.
There was a doorman carrying some kind of sack, and Iona decided to talk to him.
“What time is it, my dear fellow?” he asked.
“Ten o’clock. What the devil are you standing there for? Get a move on!”
Iona drove along the street a bit. His body was bent, and he was surrendering to his grief. He felt it was useless to turn to people for help, but in less than five minutes he had straightened himself up, shaking his head as though he felt a sharp pang of pain, and then he pulled at the reins. He could bear it no longer.
“Back to the stables,” he thought. “Back to the stables.”
The little mare, as though she read his thoughts, started off at a trot.
An hour and a half later Iona was sitting by a large dirty stove. On the stove, on the floor, on benches, men were snoring. The air was noisome, suffocating. Iona found himself gazing at the sleeping people. He scratched himself, and he was sorry he had come back so early.
“I haven’t earned enough even for the hay,” he thought. “There’s grief for you. But a man who knows his work, and has a full belly, and a well-fed horse besides, he’s at peace with the world all his days.”
From one of the corners a young driver rose, grunting sleepily as he reached for the water bucket.
“You thirsty?” Iona asked him.
“Reckon so.”
“Well, it’s a good thing to be thirsty, but as for me, brother, my son is dead. Did you hear me? This week, at the hospital.… Such a lot of trouble!”
Iona looked to see whether the words were producing any effect, but saw none—the young man had covered up his face and was asleep again. The old man sighed and scratched himself. Just as the young man wanted to drink, so he wanted to talk. Soon it would be a week since his son died, and still no one had let him talk about it properly. He would have to tell it slowly, very carefully. He would tell them how his son fell ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died. He would have to describe the funeral, and how he went to the hospital to collect his son’s clothes. His daughter Anissya was still in the country. He wanted to talk about her, too. Yes, there was so much to talk about. And the listener would have to gasp and sigh and bewail the fate of the dead man. And maybe it would be better to talk about it to women. Even though women are so foolish, you can bring the tears to their eyes with a few words.
“Now I’ll go and look at my horse,” Iona thought to himself. “There’s always time for sleep—nothing there to be afraid of.”
He threw on his coat and went down to the stable to look after her, thinking about such things as hay, oats, and the weather. Alone, he dared not let his mind dwell on his son. He could talk about him to anyone, but alone, thinking about him, conjuring up his living presence, no—no, that was too painful for words.
“Filling your belly, eh?” he said, seeing the mare’s shining eyes. “Well, eat up! We haven’t earned enough for oats, but we can eat hay. Oh, I’m too old to be driving. My son should be driving, not me. He was a real cabdriver, and he should be alive now.…”
Iona was silent for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s how it is, old girl. My son, Kuzma Ionich, is no more. He died on us. Now let’s say you had a foal, and you were the foal’s mother, and suddenly, let’s say, the same little foal departed this life. You’d be sorry, eh?”
The little mare munched and listened and breathed on his hands.
Surrendering to his grief, Iona told her the whole story.
A
IN one of those very cheap rooms in the Lisbon rooming house, Stepan Klochkov, a third-year medical student, was pacing up and down as he applied himself zealously to cramming from a medical textbook. The strain of memorizing the words made his mouth dry, and sweat dampened his forehead.
Anyuta, who roomed with him, sat on a stool by the window, where the edges were white with icy tracery. She was a small, thin brunette, twenty-five years old, very pale, with gentle gray eyes. Head bent, she was embroidering the collar of a man’s shirt with red thread. She was working hurriedly, against time. It was afternoon, and the clock in the passageway outside drowsily struck two o’clock, but the room was still in disorder. Rumpled bedclothes, pillows scattered everywhere, books, clothes, a large filthy washbasin filled with soapy slop water in which cigarette butts were floating, filth on the floor—everything seemed to have been hurled down in a heap, crumpled, deliberately thrown into confusion.
“The right lung consists of three lobes …” Klochkov recited. “Boundaries! Upper lobe on anterior wall of the chest reaches fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib … behind up to the
