The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

“No, she sometimes sings when you’re out,” Lukerya replied.

I remember everything. I went down the stairs, walked out, and let my feet take me wherever they wanted to go. I walked as far as the corner and began staring somewhere. People were passing by, pushing me, I didn’t feel it. I hailed a cab and told the driver to go to the Police Bridge, I don’t know why. But then I suddenly dropped him and gave him twenty kopecks:

“It’s for having bothered you,” I said, laughing to him senselessly, but in my heart some sort of rapture suddenly began.

I turned toward home, quickening my pace. The cracked, poor, broken little note suddenly began to ring again in my soul. I was breathless. The veil was falling, falling from my eyes! If she’d begun singing with me there, it meant she’d forgotten about me—that’s what was clear and terrible. This my heart felt. Yet rapture shone in my soul and overcame fear.

Oh, the irony of fate! There was and could have been nothing else in my soul all winter except this very rapture, but where had I myself been all winter? Had I been there with my soul? I ran up the stairs in great haste, I don’t know whether I walked in timidly. I remember only that the whole floor was as if undulating and I was as if floating on a river. I walked into the room, she was sitting in the same place, sewing, her head bent, but no longer singing. She gave me a passing, uncurious glance—not a glance, but merely the gesture, ordinary and indifferent, when someone comes into a room.

I went straight over to her and sat down on a chair right beside her, like a crazy man. She gave me a quick look, as if frightened: I took her hand, and I don’t remember what I said to her, that is, wanted to say, because I couldn’t even speak properly. My voice faltered and wouldn’t obey me. And I didn’t know what to say, only I was suffocating.

“Let’s talk… you know… say something!” I suddenly babbled some stupid thing—oh, as if intelligence was the point! She gave another start and drew back in great fright, looking me in the face, but suddenly—stern astonishment showed in her eyes. Yes, astonishment, and it was stern. She was looking at me with big eyes. This sternness, this stern astonishment, all at once demolished me: “So you also want love? Love?”—this astonishment as if suddenly asked, though she was silent. But I could read everything, everything. Everything in me shook, and I simply collapsed at her feet. Yes, I fell at her feet. She quickly jumped up, but with extraordinary strength I held her back by both hands.

And I fully understood my despair, oh, I understood it! But, would you believe, rapture was seething in my heart so irrepressibly that I thought I would die. I was kissing her feet in ecstasy and happiness. Yes, in happiness, boundless and endless, and that while understanding all my hopeless despair! I was weeping, I was saying something, yet I couldn’t speak. Fright and astonishment were suddenly replaced in her by some worried thought, an extraordinary question, and she looked at me strangely, wildly even, she wanted to understand something very quickly, and she smiled. She was terribly ashamed that I was kissing her feet, and she kept pulling them away, but I at once kissed the place on the floor where her foot had been. She saw that and suddenly started laughing from shame (you know how one can laugh from shame). Hysterics were coming, I could see that, her hands twitched—I wasn’t thinking about that and kept mumbling to her that I loved her, that I wouldn’t get up, “let me kiss your dress… let me worship you like this all my life…” I don’t know, I don’t remember—and suddenly she began sobbing and shaking; a terrible fit of hysterics came. I had frightened her.

I carried her over to the bed. When the fit passed, she sat up on the bed, seized my hands with a terribly crushed look, and begged me to calm down: “Enough, don’t torment yourself, calm down!”—and again she started weeping. All that evening I never left her side. I kept telling her I’d take her to Boulogne¹⁰ to swim in the sea, now, at once, in two weeks, that she had such a cracked little voice, I’d heard it that day; that I’d close the shop, sell it to Dobronravov, that everything would begin anew, and, above all, to Boulogne, to Boulogne! She listened and kept being afraid. Kept being more and more afraid. But for me the main thing was not that, but that the desire kept growing greater and more irrepressible in me to lie at her feet again, and again to kiss, to kiss the ground on which her feet stood, and to worship her and—“nothing more, I’ll ask nothing more of you,” I kept repeating every moment, “don’t answer me anything, don’t notice me at all, just let me look at you from the corner, turn me into a thing of yours, into a little dog…” She was weeping.

“And I thought you’d just let me stay like that,” suddenly escaped her involuntarily, so involuntarily that she perhaps didn’t notice at all how she had said it, and yet—oh, this was her most important, her most fatal phrase, the clearest for me that evening, and it was as if my heart was slashed by this phrase as by a knife! It explained everything to me, everything, but as long as she was near, before my eyes, I hoped irresistibly and was terribly happy. Oh, I made her terribly weary that evening, and I understood that, but I was constantly thinking I was going to remake it all right then! Finally, toward nighttime, she became totally strengthless, I convinced her to go to sleep, and she fell asleep at once, soundly. I expected delirium, there was delirium, but very little. During the night I got up almost every minute and went quietly in my slippers to look at her. I wrung my hands over her, looking at this sick being on this poor little cot, the iron bed I had bought for her then for three roubles. I knelt down, but didn’t dare to kiss the sleeper’s feet (without her will!). I’d start praying to God, but would jump up again. Lukerya watched me closely and kept coming in from the kitchen. I went to her and told her to go to bed and that the next day “something quite different” would begin.

And I believed it blindly, insanely, terribly. Oh, rapture, rapture flooded me! I was only waiting for the next day. Above all, I did not believe in any calamity, despite the symptoms. Sense had not fully returned, despite the fallen veil, and it took a long, long time to return—oh, till today, till this very day!! And how, how could it return then: why, she was still alive then, she was right there before me, and I before her: “She’ll wake up tomorrow, and I’ll tell her all this, and she’ll see it all.” That was my reasoning then, simple and clear—hence the rapture! Above all, there was this trip to Boulogne. I kept thinking for some reason that Boulogne was—everything, that Boulogne contained something definitive. “To Boulogne, to Boulogne!…” I waited insanely for morning.

III

I UNDERSTAND ALL TOO WELL

And this was only a few days ago, five days, only five days, last Tuesday! No, no, if she’d only waited a little longer, only a little bit longer, I—I would have dispelled the darkness! And, anyway, didn’t she calm down? The very next day she listened to me with a smile now, despite her bewilderment… Above all, throughout this time, all five days, there was bewilderment or shame in her. She was also afraid, very afraid. I won’t argue, I’m not going to contradict like some insane person: there was fear, but how could she not be afraid? We’d been strangers to each other for so long, had grown so unused to each other, and suddenly all this… But I didn’t consider her fear, the new thing was shining!… True, unquestionably true, I had made a mistake. And maybe even many mistakes. And when we woke up the next day, still that morning (it was Wednesday), I right away suddenly made a mistake: I suddenly made her my friend. I hurried too much, too much, but a confession was needed, was necessary—yes, and much more than a confession! I didn’t conceal from her even what I’d been concealing from myself all my life. I said straight out that all I’d done that whole winter was feel certain of her love. I explained to her that the pawnshop was nothing but the degradation of my will and intelligence, a personal idea of self-castigation and self-exaltation. I explained to her that I had actually turned coward in the buffet that time, owing to my character, to insecurity: I was struck by the surroundings, by the buffet; struck by how I was going to come out in this, and wouldn’t it come out stupid? I turned coward not at the duel, but that it would come out stupid… And afterward I didn’t want to admit it and tormented everyone, and tormented her for it, and that was why I had married her, so as to torment her for it. Generally, I spoke for the most part as if in a fever. She herself took me by the hands and begged me to stop: “You’re exaggerating… you’re tormenting yourself”—and again the tears would start, again all but fits! She