I sat down.
‘‘You live opposite us, I believe?’’ she said after some silence.
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘I watch out the window every day, from boredom, and, you must forgive me,’’ she went on, looking into the newspaper, ‘‘I often see you and your sister. She always has such a kind, concentrated expression.’’
Dolzhikov came in. He was wiping his neck with a towel.
‘‘Papa, Monsieur Poloznev,’’ said his daughter.
‘‘Yes, yes, Blagovo spoke to me,’’ he briskly turned to me without offering me his hand. ‘‘But listen, what can I give you? What sort of positions do I have? You’re strange people, gentlemen!’’ he went on loudly, and in such a tone as if he was reprimanding me. ‘‘Twenty men come to me every day, they imagine I’m running a department! I’m running a railway, gentlemen, it’s hard labor, I need mechanics, metal workers, excavators, carpenters, well diggers, and you all can only sit and write, nothing more! You’re all writers!’’
And the same happiness breathed on me from him as from his rugs and armchairs. Full-bodied, healthy, with red cheeks, a broad chest, well scrubbed, in a calico shirt and balloon trousers, like a toy china coachman. He had a rounded, curly little beard—and not a single gray hair—a slightly hooked nose, and dark, clear, innocent eyes.
‘‘What are you able to do?’’ he went on. ‘‘You’re not able to do anything! I’m an engineer, sir, I’m a well-to-do man, but before I got ahead, I worked hard for a long time, I was an engine driver, I worked for two years in Belgium as a simple oiler. Consider for yourself, my gentle one, what kind of work can I offer you?’’
‘‘Of course, that’s so...’ I murmured in great embarrassment, unable to bear his clear, innocent gaze.
‘‘Can you at least manage a telegraph machine?’’ he asked after a little thought.
‘‘Yes, I worked in a telegraph office.’’
‘Hm...Well, we’ll see. Go to Dubechnya, meanwhile. I’ve got a man sitting there already, but he’s terrible trash.’’
‘‘And what will my duties consist of?’ I asked.
‘‘We’ll see about that. Go, meanwhile, I’ll make the arrangements. Only please don’t start drinking, and don’t bother me with any requests. I’ll throw you out.’’
He walked away from me and didn’t even nod his head. I bowed to him and his daughter, who was reading the newspaper, and left. My heart was heavy, so much so that when my sister began asking how the engineer had received me, I couldn’t utter a single word.
In order to go to Dubechnya, I got up early in the morning, with the sunrise. There wasn’t a soul on our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, everybody was still asleep, and my footsteps sounded solitary and muffled. The poplars, covered with dew, filled the air with a delicate fragrance. I felt sad and did not want to leave town. I loved my native town. It seemed to me so beautiful and warm! I loved this greenery, the quiet, sunny mornings, the ringing of our bells; but the people I lived with in this town bored me, were alien and sometimes even repulsive to me. I didn’t love them and didn’t understand them.
I didn’t understand why and from what all these sixty-five thousand people lived. I knew that Kimry subsisted on boots, that Tula made samovars and guns, that Odessa was a seaport, but what our town was and what it did, I didn’t know. Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya and the two other proper streets lived on ready capital and on the salaries the officials received from the treasury; but how the remaining eight streets lived, which stretched parallel to each other for some two miles and disappeared beyond the horizon—that for me had always been an unfathomable enigma. And the way those people lived was shameful to tell about! No park, no theater, no decent orchestra; the town and club libraries were visited only by Jewish adolescents, so that magazines and new books lay uncut for months; rich and educated people slept in stuffy little bedrooms, on wooden beds with bedbugs, the children were kept in disgustingly dirty rooms known as nurseries, and the servants, even old and respected ones, slept on the kitchen floor and covered themselves with rags. On ordinary days, the houses smelled of borscht, and on fast days, of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. The food was not tasty, the water was not good to drink. In the duma,6 at the governor’s, at the bishop’s, in houses everywhere, there had been talk for many years about the fact that our town had no good and cheap water, and that it was necessary to borrow two hundred thousand from the treasury for a water system; very rich people, who numbered up to three dozen in our town, and who chanced to lose entire estates at cards, also drank the bad water and all their lives talked passionately about the loan—and I didn’t understand that; it seemed simpler to me to take the two hundred thousand from their own pockets.
I didn’t know a single honest man in the whole town. My father took bribes and imagined they were given him out of respect for his inner qualities; high school students, in order to pass from grade to grade, boarded with their teachers and paid them big money for it; the wife of the army administrator took bribes from the recruits at call-up time and even let them offer her treats, and once in church was unable to get up from her knees because she was so drunk; the doctors also took bribes during recruitment, and the town physician and the veterinarian levied a tax on the butcher shops and taverns; the district school traded in certificates that provided the benefits of the third category; the dean of the cathedral took bribes from the clergy and church wardens; on the municipal, the tradesmen’s, the medical, and all other boards, they shouted at each petitioner’s back: ‘‘You should say thank you!’’ and the petitioner would come back and give thirty or forty kopecks. And those who didn’t take bribes—for instance, the court administration—were haughty, offered you two fingers to shake, were distinguished by the coldness and narrowness of their judgments, played cards a lot, drank a lot, married rich women, and undoubtedly had a harmful, corrupting influence on their milieu. Only from the young girls came a whiff of moral purity; most of them had lofty yearnings, honest and pure souls; but they didn’t understand life and believed that bribes were given out of respect for inner qualities, and, after marrying, aged quickly, went to seed, and drowned hopelessly in the mire of banal, philistine existence.
III
A RAILWAY WAS being constructed in our parts. On the eves of feast days, the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins who were known as ‘‘railboys’’ and were feared. Not seldom did I happen to see a ragamuffin, hatless, with a bloodied physiognomy, being taken to the police station; and carried behind him, as material evidence, a samovar or some recently washed, still-wet laundry. The ‘‘railboys’’ usually crowded around the pot-houses and markets; they drank, ate, used bad language, and sent a shrill whistle after every woman of light behavior who passed by. Our shopkeepers, to amuse this hungry riffraff, got dogs and cats to drink vodka, or would tie an empty kerosene can to a dog’s tail, give a whistle, and the dog would race down the street squealing with terror, the tin can clanking behind it; believing some monster was chasing at its heels, it would run far out of town, into the fields, till it was exhausted; and we had several dogs in town who trembled constantly, tails between their legs, of whom it was said that they were unable to endure such amusements and lost their minds.
The station was being built three miles from town. It was said that the engineers had asked for a bribe of fifty thousand to have the railway come right to town, but the town administration had agreed to give only forty, a
