My friends write to me from Russia: ‘Don’t come back!’ But as you see I am going back to spite them!… Yes, that’s life as I understand it! That’s what is called life.”
Gusev was not listening: he was gazing out of the porthole. A boat, bathed in a blazing and brilliant sunlight, was swaying on a transparent and delicate turquoise-colored sea. In it naked Chinamen were holding up cages with canaries, and saying: “It sings! It sings!”
Another boat came knocking against the first; a steam pinnace darted by. There came still another boat: in it was a fat Chinaman eating rice with little sticks. The sea rolled languidly, and there were white seagulls hovering lazily in the air.
“I should like to give that fat fellow a punch in the neck,” Gusev meditated, gazing at the fat Chinaman and yawning.
Then he became drowsy, and it seemed to him that all nature was falling asleep. Time flew by. Imperceptibly the daylight faded away, and imperceptibly there came the shadows of evening.… The ship was no longer standing still, but moving again.
IV
Two days passed. Pavel Ivanich was lying down, no longer sitting up. His eyes were closed, and his nose seemed to have grown sharper.
“Pavel Ivanich,” Gusev called to him. “Hey, Pavel Ivanich.”
Pavel Ivanich opened his eyes and moved his lips.
“Are you feeling ill?”
“No,” Pavel Ivanich replied, gasping. “No, on the contrary.… I’m better.… As you see, I can lie down.… I’m a bit easier.”
“Well, thank God, Pavel Ivanich.”
“When I compare myself with you, I’m sorry for you poor fellows.… My lungs are healthy—what I’ve got is a stomach cough. I can stand hell, and that goes for the Red Sea. Also, I take a critical attitude toward my illness and the medicines I take. While you … you are in the dark.… It’s hard for you, very, very hard!”
The ship was no longer rolling, the sea was calm, and the air was as hot and suffocating as a bathhouse: it was hard not only to speak but to listen. Gusev threw his hands round his knees, laid his head on them, and thought of home. My God, what a relief it was to think of cold weather and snow in this suffocating heat! You’re riding in a sleigh, and suddenly the horses take fright at something and bolt.… Careless of roads, ditches and gullies, they tear like mad through the village, and over the pool by the potteries, and then across the fields. Comes the full-throated cry of the factory workers and all the others in the path of the horses: “Stop them!” Why stop them? Let the raw, cold winds beat about your face and bite your hands; let the lumps of snow flung up by the horses’ hoofs fall on your fur cap, your collar, your neck, and your chest; let the runners scream on the snow and let the shafts and traces be smashed to smithereens, devil take them all! How wonderful it is when the sleigh overturns and you are sent flying headlong into a snowdrift, face to the snow, and when you rise you are white all over, no fur cap, no gloves, your belt undone, and icicles clinging to your mustache.… People laugh, and the dogs bark.
Pavel Ivanich half opened an eye, gazed at Gusev, and said softly: “Did your commanding officer go stealing?”
“Who knows, Pavel Ivanich? We never heard about it.”
A long time passed in silence. Gusev meditated, murmured something in his fever, and kept on drinking water. It was hard for him to talk and hard for him to listen, and he was afraid of being talked at. An hour passed, then another, then a third. Evening came down, and then it was night, and he did not notice it. He sat there dreaming of the cold.
There was the sound of someone coming into the sick bay, voices were heard, but five minutes passed, and then there was only silence.
“May he enter the kingdom of Heaven and receive eternal peace,” the soldier with the arm in the sling was saying. “He was a restless man.”
“Eh, what’s that?” Gusev asked. “Who is this?”
“He’s dead. They’ve just taken him up on deck.”
“Oh, well,” murmured Gusev, yawning. “May he enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“What do you think?” the soldier with the sling said after a short silence. “Will he be received into the Kingdom of Heaven or not?”
“Who do you mean?”
“Pavel Ivanich.”
“Yes, he will. He suffered so long. And there’s another thing—he belonged to an ecclesiastical family, and those priests have many relatives. So they’ll pray and he’ll enter the Kingdom.”
The soldier with the sling sat down on the hammock near Gusev and said in an undertone: “You, too, Gusev, you’re not long for this world. You’ll never reach Russia.”
“Did the doctor or the orderly tell you?” Gusev asked.
“They didn’t tell me, but it’s obvious. You know at once when a man is close to death. You don’t eat, you don’t drink, you’re so thin you’re frightening. It’s consumption all right! I’m not saying this to upset you, but because maybe you’d like to receive the sacrament and extreme unction. And too, if you’ve got any money you’d better give it to the senior officer.”
“I haven’t written home,” Gusev sighed. “I’ll die, and they’ll never hear about it.”
“They’ll hear,” the sick sailor said in a deep voice. “When you die, they’ll write it down in the ship’s log, and in Odessa they’ll send a copy to the military authority, and he’ll send it to the parish or somewhere.…”
Such conversations made Gusev uneasy, and he began to be tormented with vague yearnings. He drank water—that wasn’t it; he dragged himself to the small circular window and breathed the hot moist air—that wasn’t it; he tried to think of home and the cold—it wasn’t that either.… At last it occurred to him that if he remained another minute in the sick bay, he would suffocate to death.
