The Complete Short Novels

‘‘And so my fate is decided,’’ said my sister when we came home. ‘‘After what has happened, I can’t go back there. Lord, how good that is! I feel easy in my heart.’’

She went to bed at once. Tears glistened on her lashes, but her expression was happy, her sleep was sound and sweet, and you could see that she really did feel easy in her heart and that she was resting. She hadn’t slept like that for a long, long time!

And so we began to live together. She kept singing and saying that she felt very well, and the books we took from the library were returned unread because she could no longer read; all she wanted was to dream and talk about the future. Mending my linen or helping Karpovna at the stove, she either hummed to herself or talked about her Vladimir, about his intelligence, his beautiful manners, his kindness, about his extraordinary learning, and I agreed with her, though I no longer liked her doctor. She wanted to work, to live independently, to support herself, and said she would become a schoolteacher or a doctor’s assistant as soon as her health permitted, and would wash the floors and do the laundry herself. She already passionately loved her little boy; he wasn’t born yet, but she already knew what sort of eyes he would have, what sort of hands, and how he would laugh. She liked to talk about his upbringing, and since Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her reasoning about upbringing came down to the boy turning out as charming as his father. There was no end to this talk, and everything she said aroused a lively joy in her. Sometimes I, too, rejoiced, not knowing why myself.

She must have infected me with her dreaming. I also read nothing and only dreamed; in the evenings, despite my fatigue, I paced up and down the room, my hands thrust into my pockets, and talked about Masha.

‘‘When do you think she’ll come back?’’ I asked my sister. ‘‘I think she’ll come back by Christmas, not later. What does she have to do there?’’

‘‘Since she doesn’t write, she’ll obviously come back very soon.’’

‘‘That’s true,’’ I agreed, though I knew perfectly well that there was no need for Masha to come back to our town.

I missed her terribly, and couldn’t help deceiving myself, and tried to get others to deceive me. My sister waited for her doctor, I for Masha, and the two of us ceaselessly talked, laughed, and didn’t notice that we disturbed the sleep of Karpovna, who lay on her stove²⁶ and kept muttering:

‘‘The samovar hummed in the morning, hum-m-m! Ah, it’s a bad sign, dear hearts, a bad sign.’’

Nobody called on us except the postman, who brought my sister letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who would occasionally come to our room in the evening, look silently at my sister, leave, and, when already in the kitchen, say:

‘‘Every title should remember its learning, and whoever doesn’t wish to understand that in his pride, it’s the vale for him.’’

He liked the word ‘‘vale.’’ Once—this was already at Christmastime—as I was going through the market, he invited me to his butcher shop and, without shaking hands with me, announced that he had to talk with me about a very important matter. He was red from the cold and from vodka; behind the counter next to him stood Nikolka with his robber’s face, holding a bloody knife in his hand.

‘‘I want to express my words to you,’’ Prokofy began. ‘‘This event cannot exist, because you understand yourself that for such a ‘vale’ people won’t praise either us or you. Mama, of course, out of pity cannot say an unpleasantness to you, that your sister should move to other quarters on account of her condition, but I don’t wish it anymore, because I cannot approve of her behavior.’’

I understood him and left the shop. The same day my sister and I moved to Radish’s. We had no money for a cab and went on foot; I carried a bundle of our belongings on my back, my sister had nothing to carry, but she choked, coughed, and kept asking how soon we’d get there.

XIX

AT LAST, A LETTER came from Masha.

‘‘My dear, good M.A.,’’ she wrote, ‘‘kind, meek ‘angel ours,’ as the old housepainter calls you, farewell, I’m going to the exposition in America²⁷ with my father. In a few days I’ll be seeing the ocean—so far from Dubechnya, it’s frightening to think of it! It’s as far and boundless as the sky, and I long to be there, to be free, I’m triumphant, I’m mad, and you see how incoherent my letter is. My dear, my kind one, set me free, quickly break the thread that still holds us, binding me and you. That I met and knew you was a ray from heaven, lighting up my existence; but that I became your wife was a mistake, you understand that, and now the awareness of the mistake weighs on me, and I beg you on my knees, my magnanimous friend, quickly, quickly, before I go off to the ocean, to telegraph that you agree to correct our mutual mistake, to remove this one stone from my wings, and my father, who will take all the bother on himself, promises not to burden you too much with formalities. And so, freedom on all four sides? Yes?

‘‘Be happy, God bless you, forgive me, a sinner.

‘‘I’m alive, I’m well. I squander money, commit many follies, and thank God every moment that such a bad woman as I has no children. I sing and have success, but this isn’t a passion, it is my haven, my cell, where I now withdraw to have peace. King David had a ring with the inscription: ‘Everything passes.’ When one feels sad, these words make one merry, and when one is merry, they make one sad. And I’ve acquired such a ring for myself, with Hebrew lettering, and this charm will keep me from passions. Everything passes, life, too, will pass, therefore there’s no need for anything. Or there is need only for the awareness of freedom, because when a person is free, he needs nothing, nothing, nothing. So break the thread. I warmly embrace you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M.’’

My sister lay in one room, Radish, who had been sick again and was now recovering, in the other. Just as I received this letter, my sister quietly went to the painter’s room, sat down beside him, and began to read. She read Ostrovsky²⁸ or Gogol to him every day, and he listened, staring at the same spot, not laughing, shaking his head and muttering to himself from time to time:

‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s possible!’’

If something unseemly or ugly happened in the play, he would say, as if gloatingly, jabbing his finger at the book:

‘‘There it is, the lie! That’s what it does, the lie!’’

Plays attracted him by their content, by their moral, and by their complex, artful construction, and he was amazed at him, never calling him by name:

‘‘How deftly he put it all together!’’

Now my sister quietly read only one page and couldn’t go on: she didn’t have voice enough. Radish took her by