Stories

black dress, brightly lit by the moon, gazing at me with big eyes. The moon makes her face look pale, stern, and fantastic, as if made of marble. Her chin trembles.

“It’s me …” she says. “Me … Katya!”

In the moonlight all women’s eyes look big and black, people look taller and paler, which is probably why I didn’t recognize her at first.

“What’s the matter?”

“Forgive me,” she says. “For some reason I felt unbearably sick at heart … I couldn’t stand it and came here … There was light in your window and … and I decided to knock … Excuse me … Oh, if only you knew how sick at heart I am! What are you doing now?”

“Nothing … Insomnia.”

“I had a sort of presentiment. Anyhow, it’s nonsense.”

Her eyebrows rise, her eyes glisten with tears, and her whole face lights up with that familiar, long-absent expression of trustfulness.

“Nikolai Stepanych!” she says imploringly, reaching out to me with both arms. “My dear, I beg you … I implore you … If you don’t disdain my friendship and my respect for you, agree to do what I ask you!”

“What is it?”

“Take my money from me!”

“Well, what will you think up next! Why should I need your money?”

“You’ll go somewhere for a cure … You need a cure. Will you take it? Yes? Yes, my dearest?”

She peers greedily into my face and repeats:

“You’ll take it? Yes?”

“No, my friend, I won’t…” I say. “Thank you.”

She turns her back to me and hangs her head. I probably refused her in such a tone as to prohibit any further discussion of money.

“Go home to bed,” I say. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”

“So you don’t consider me your friend?” she asks glumly.

“I didn’t say that. But your money is of no use to me now.”

“Forgive me …” she says, lowering her voice a whole octave. “I understand you … To be indebted to a person like me … a retired actress … Anyhow, good-bye …”

And she leaves so quickly that I don’t even have time to say good-bye to her.

VI

I’m in Kharkov.

Since it would be useless, and beyond my strength, to struggle with my present mood, I’ve decided that the last days of my life will be irreproachable at least in the formal sense; if I’m not right in my attitude towards my family, which I’m perfectly aware of, I will try to do what they want me to do. If it’s go to Kharkov, I go to Kharkov. Besides, I’ve become so indifferent to everything lately that it makes absolutely no difference to me where I go, to Kharkov, to Paris, or to Berdichev.²⁵

I arrived here around noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. On the train I got seasick and suffered from the drafts, so now I’m sitting on the bed, holding my head and waiting for my tic. I ought to go and see the professors I know here, but I haven’t the urge or the strength.

The old servant on my floor comes to ask whether I have bed linen. I keep him for about five minutes and ask him several questions about Gnekker, on whose account I’ve come here. The servant turns out to be a native of Kharkov, knows it like the palm of his hand, but doesn’t remember a single house that bears the name of Gnekker. I ask about country estates—same answer.

The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three … These last months of my life, as I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my whole life. And never before was I able to be so reconciled to the slowness of time as now. Before, when I waited at the station for a train or sat at an examination, a quarter of an hour seemed like an eternity, but now I can spend the whole night sitting motionless on my bed and think with perfect indifference that tomorrow the night will be just as long and colorless, and the night after …

In the corridor it strikes five o’clock, six, seven … It’s getting dark.

There’s a dull pain in my cheek—the tic is beginning. To occupy myself with thoughts, I put myself in my former point of view, when I was not indifferent, and ask: why am I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sitting in this small hotel room, on this bed with its strange gray blanket? Why am I looking at this cheap tin washbasin and listening to the trashy clock clanking in the corridor? Can all this be worthy of my fame and my high station among people? And my response to these questions is a smile. The naivete with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the exclusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I’m well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in Niva and World Illustrated,²⁶ I’ve even read my own biography in a certain German magazine—and what of it? I’m sitting all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm … Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway workers, the inconvenience of the passport system,²⁷ expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior—all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives. How, then, does the exclusiveness of my position manifest itself? Suppose I’m famous a thousand times over, that I’m a hero and the pride of my motherland; all the newspapers publish bulletins about my illness, expressions of sympathy come to me by mail from colleagues, students, the public; but all that will not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in anguish, in utter solitude … No one’s to blame for that, of course, but, sinner that I am, I dislike my popular name. It seems to me that it has betrayed me.

Around ten o’clock I fall asleep and, despite my tic, sleep soundly and would go on sleeping for a long time if no one woke me up. Shortly after one o’clock there is a sudden knock at the door.