I began saying good-bye. . . . A great deal had been said in the night, but I carried away with me no answer to any question, and in the morning, of the whole conversation there remained in my memory, as in a filter, only the lights and the image of Kisotchka. As I got on the horse, I looked at the student and Ananyev for the last time, at the hysterical dog with the lustreless, tipsy-looking eyes, at the workmen flitting to and fro in the morning fog, at the embankment, at the little nag straining with its neck, and thought:
'There is no making out anything in this world.'
And when I lashed my horse and galloped along the line, and when a little later I saw nothing before me but the endless gloomy plain and the cold overcast sky, I recalled the questions which were discussed in the night. I pondered while the sun-scorched plain, the immense sky, the oak forest, dark on the horizon and the hazy distance, seemed saying to me:
'Yes, there's no understanding anything in this world!'
The sun began to rise. . . .
NOTES
Amalekites or the Philistines: two groups of peoples in the Old Testament who came in conflict with the Hebrews
Saul or David: both kings of the Hebrews; Saul committed suicide after his defeat by the Philistines (I Samuel)
'descent into the vale of years':
Solomon's 'vanity of vanities': Ecclesiastes 1:2-5
Darwin or Shakespeare: examples of a great scientist and a great writer
Tatar: the Tatars were a group of Turkic peoples known for their violence
denouement: outcome
war: the Russo-Turkish war ended in 1878
Sahalin: Sakhalin, in Siberia, was Imperial Russia's most oppressive prison; Chekhov visited it in 1890
Kant: the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Little Russian: Ukranian
second bell: train passengers were given 3 warning bells: the first (single) ring indicated 15 minutes until departure; the second (2 rings) indicated 5 minutes; and the third bell (3 rings) sounded as the train left the station
Yakut: a member of the people inhabiting a region in eastern Siberia
Hegel: the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831)
Mount Ararat: a mountain in extreme eastern Turkey
* * *
The Beauties
by Anton Chekhov
I
I REMEMBER, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I was driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshoe Kryepkoe in the Don region to Rostov-on-the-Don. It was a sultry, languidly dreary day of August. Our eyes were glued together, and our mouths were parched from the heat and the dry burning wind which drove clouds of dust to meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy driver, a Little Russian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses and lashed me on my cap, I did not protest or utter a sound, but only, rousing myself from half-slumber, gazed mildly and dejectedly into the distance to see whether there was a village visible through the dust. We stopped to feed the horses in a big Armenian village at a rich Armenian's whom my grandfather knew. Never in my life have I seen a greater caricature than that Armenian. Imagine a little shaven head with thick overhanging eyebrows, a beak of a nose, long gray mustaches, and a wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chibouk sticking out of it. This little head was clumsily attached to a lean hunch- back carcass attired in a fantastic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers. This figure walked straddling its legs and shuffling with its slippers, spoke without taking the chibouk out of its mouth, and behaved with truly Armenian dignity, not smiling, but staring with wide-open eyes and trying to take as little notice as possible of its guests.
There was neither wind nor dust in the Armenian's rooms, but it was just as unpleasant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road. I remember, dusty and exhausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a green box. The unpainted wooden walls, the furniture, and the floors colored with yellow ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun. Wherever I looked there were flies and flies and flies. . . . Grandfather and the Armenian were talking about grazing, about manure, and about oats. . . . I knew that they would be a good hour getting the samovar; that grandfather would be not less than an hour drinking his tea, and then would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that I should waste a quarter of the day waiting, after which there would be again the heat, the dust, the jolting cart. I heard the muttering of the two voices, and it began to seem to me that I had been seeing the Armenian, the cupboard with the crockery, the flies, the windows with the burning sun beating on them, for ages and ages, and should only cease to see them in the far-off future, and I was seized with hatred for the steppe, the sun, the flies.. . .
A Little Russian peasant woman in a kerchief brought in a tray of tea-things, then the samovar. The Armenian went slowly out into the passage and shouted: 'Mashya, come and pour out tea! Where are you, Mashya?'
Hurried footsteps were heard, and there came into the room a girl of sixteen in a simple cotton dress and a white kerchief. As she washed the crockery and poured out the tea, she was standing with her back to me, and all I could see was that she was of a slender figure, barefooted, and that her little bare heels were covered by long trousers.
The Armenian invited me to have tea. Sitting down to the table, I glanced at the girl, who was handing me a
