the hand and, moving his dry lips, said barely audibly, in a husky voice:
‘‘The soul of the righteous man is white and smooth as chalk, but the sinner’s is like pumice. The soul of the righteous man is clear oil, but the sinner’s is coal tar. We must labor, we must grieve, we must feel pain,’’ he went on, ‘‘and whichever man does not labor or grieve, his will not be the Kingdom of Heaven. Woe, woe to the sated, woe to the strong, woe to the rich, woe to the moneylenders! They will not see the Kingdom of Heaven. Worm eats grass, rust eats iron...’
‘‘And lying eats the soul,’’ my sister finished and laughed.
I read over the letter once more. At that moment the soldier came into the kitchen who, twice a week, on the part of some unknown person, brought us tea, French bread, and hazel grouse that smelled of perfume. I was out of work, had to spend whole days at home, and the person who sent us these loaves probably knew we were in need.
I heard my sister talking with the soldier and laughing merrily. Then, lying down, she ate some bread and said to me:
‘‘When you refused to get a job and became a housepainter, Anyuta Blagovo and I knew from the very beginning that you were right, but we were afraid to say it aloud. Tell me, what power keeps us from confessing what we think? Take Anyuta Blagovo. She loves you, she adores you, she knows you’re right; she loves me, too, like a sister, and she knows I’m right, and most likely envies me in her soul, yet some power keeps her from coming to us, she avoids us, fears us.’’
My sister folded her hands on her breast and said with passion:
‘‘How she loves you, if you only knew! She has confessed this love to me alone, and that secretly, in the dark. She used to lead me to a dark alley in the park and start whispering to me how dear you were to her. You’ll see, she’ll never marry, because she loves you. Are you sorry for her?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘It’s she who sent the bread. Funny girl, really, why hide herself? I was also funny and stupid, but now I’ve left that behind, and now I’m not afraid of anybody, I think and say aloud whatever I like—and I’ve become happy. While I lived at home, I had no notion of happiness, but now I wouldn’t change places with a queen.’’
Dr. Blagovo came. He had received his doctor’s degree and was now living in our town with his father, resting and saying he would soon leave for Petersburg again. He wanted to work on vaccines against typhus and, I think, cholera; he wanted to go abroad in order to advance himself, and then take a university chair. He had abandoned military service and wore loose Cheviot jackets, very wide trousers, and excellent neckties. My sister was in raptures over his pins, shirt studs, and the red silk handkerchief he wore in the breast pocket of his jacket, probably out of foppishness. Once, having nothing else to do, she and I started counting up all his outfits we could remember, and decided he must have at least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister, but he never once said, even jokingly, that he would take her with him to Petersburg or abroad, and I could not picture clearly to myself what would become of her if she remained alive, or what would become of her child. But she only dreamed endlessly, without thinking seriously of the future; let him go wherever he liked, she said, let him even abandon her, so long as he himself was happy, and she would be content with what had been.
Usually, when he came to see us, he auscultated her very attentively and demanded that she drink milk with drops in his presence. And this time it was the same. He auscultated her and made her drink a glass of milk, and after that our rooms smelled of creosote.
‘‘There’s a good girl,’’ he said, taking the glass from her. ‘‘You mustn’t talk too much, yet lately you’ve been chattering away like a magpie. Please keep quiet.’’
She laughed. Then he came to Radish’s room, where I was sitting, and patted me gently on the shoulder.
‘‘Well, how’s things, old man?’’ he asked, bending over the sick man.
‘‘Your Honor...’ Radish pronounced, slowly moving his lips, ‘‘Your Honor, I venture to declare... we all walk under God, we’ll all have to die... Allow me to tell you the truth... Your Honor, there’ll be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!’’
‘‘No help for it,’’ the doctor joked, ‘‘somebody has to be in hell as well.’’
And suddenly something happened to my consciousness; as if I was dreaming, it was winter, night, I was standing in the yard of the slaughterhouse, and beside me was Prokofy, who smelled of pepper vodka; I tried to pull myself together and rubbed my eyes, and it immediately seemed to me that I was going to the governor’s for a talk. Nothing like it has ever happened to me either before or since, and I explained this strange, dreamlike remembrance by overexhausted nerves. I experienced the slaughterhouse and the talk with the governor, and at the same time was vaguely aware that it was not real.
When I came to my senses, I saw that I was no longer at home but in the street, and standing with the doctor near a streetlamp.
‘‘It’s sad, sad,’’ he was saying, and tears flowed down his cheeks. ‘‘She’s gay, she’s forever laughing, hoping, but her condition is hopeless, dear heart. Your Radish hates me and wants to bring it home to me that I acted badly with her. He’s right, in his own way, but I also have my point of view, and I don’t regret in the least what has happened. We must love, we all should love—isn’t that so?—without love there would be no life; anyone who fears and avoids love is not free.’’
He gradually passed on to other themes, talked about science, about his thesis, which was liked in Petersburg; he spoke with enthusiasm and no longer remembered my sister, or his grief, or me. He was carried away by life. That one has America and a ring with an inscription, I thought, and this one has his doctoral degree and a scholarly career, and only my sister and I are left with the old things.
After taking leave of him, I went over to the streetlamp and read the letter once more. And I remembered, vividly remembered, how in spring, in the morning, she came to me at the mill, lay down, and covered herself with a sheepskin jacket—she wanted to be like a simple peasant woman. And when, another time—this was also in the morning— we pulled the creel out of the water, and big drops of rain poured down on us from the willows on the bank, and we laughed...
It was dark in our house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya. I climbed over the fence and, as I used to do in former times, went through the back entrance to the kitchen, to take a lamp there. There was no one in the kitchen; the samovar was hissing by the stove, waiting for my father. ‘‘Who pours tea for father now?’’ I wondered. Taking a lamp, I went to the shed, improvised a bed for myself there out of old newspapers, and lay down. The spikes in the walls looked stern, as before, and their shadows wavered. It was cold. I fancied that my sister was to come now and bring me supper, but I remembered at once that she was ill and lying in Radish’s house, and I thought it strange that I had climbed over the fence and was lying in the unheated shed. My mind was confused, and I fancied
