Forty Stories (31 page)

AT first the weather was fine and it was very quiet. Blackbirds sang, and from the neighboring marshes something living could be heard making a pathetic moaning sound like air being blown in an empty bottle. A solitary woodcock flew up, and someone aimed, and a shot rang out vividly and joyfully on the spring air. Then as the woods grew dark a cold and penetrating wind rose unreasonably from the east, and everything was silent. Needles of ice stretched over the pools; darkness, misery, and loneliness hung over the woods. It smelled of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, a student in the theological seminary and the son of a sacristan, was making his way home from hunting, barefoot, taking the path through the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numbed, and his face burned by the wind. It seemed to him that the sudden fall of temperature had somehow destroyed the order and harmony of the universe, and the earth herself was in agony, and that was why the evening shadows fell more rapidly than usual. All round him there was only emptiness and a peculiar obscurity. The only light shone from the widows’ gardens near the river; elsewhere, far into the distance and close to him, everything was plunged in the cold evening fog, and the village three miles away was also hidden in the fog. The student remembered that when he left home his mother was sitting on the floor in the doorway cleaning the samovar, while his father lay coughing on the stove; and because it
was Good Friday, no cooking had been done in the house and the student was ferociously hungry. Oppressed by the cold, he fell to thinking that just such a wind as this had blown in the time of Rurik and in the days of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and in those days men suffered from the same terrible poverty and hunger; they had the same thatched roofs filled with holes; there was the same wretchedness, ignorance, and desolation everywhere, the same darkness, the same sense of being oppressed—all these dreadful things had existed, did exist, and would continue to exist, and in a thousand years’ time life would be no better. He did not want to go home.

The widows’ gardens were so called because they were kept by two widows, a mother and daughter. There a wood fire was crackling and blazing, throwing a great circle of light over the plowed earth. The widow Vasilissa, a huge, bloated old woman, was wearing a man’s coat. She stood gazing dreamily at the flames while her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid expression, sat on the ground washing a kettle and some spoons. Apparently they had just finished supper. Men’s voices could be heard; they were the local farm workers watering their horses at the river.

“Well, winter’s back again,” the student said, going up to the fire. “Good day to you!”

Vasilissa gave a start, but she recognized him and smiled at him warmly.

“I did not recognize you at first,” she said. “God bless you! You’ll be rich one day!”

They went on talking. Vasilissa was a woman of experience; she had served the gentry first as a wet nurse and then as a children’s nurse, and she expressed herself with refinement. A grave and gentle smile never left her lips. Her daughter Lukerya was a peasant; the life had been crushed out of her by her husband. She screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing. She had a strange expression, like that of a deaf-mute.

“On just such a cold night as this St. Peter warmed himself
by a fire,” the student said, stretching his hands over the flames. “So it must have been very cold! What a terrible night, eh? Yes, it was an extraordinarily long, sad night!”

Saying this, he gazed at the encircling shadows, gave a little convulsive shake of his head, and went on: “Tell me, have you ever attended a reading of the Twelve Gospels?”

“Yes, I have,” Vasilissa answered.

“Then you’ll remember that at the Last Supper, Peter said to Jesus: ‘I am ready to go with thee down into darkness and death,’ and the Lord answered: ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock, the bird of dawning, shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.’ After the supper Jesus suffered the agony in the garden, and prayed, but poor Peter was faint and weary of spirit, and his eyelids were heavy, and he could no longer fight against sleep. So he slept. Then, as you know, Judas came that same night and kissed Jesus and betrayed him to his tormentors. They bound him and took him to the high priest and beat him, while Peter, worn out with fear and anxiety, utterly exhausted, you understand, not yet fully awake, feeling that something terrible was about to happen on earth, followed after him. For he loved Jesus passionately and with all his soul, and he saw from afar off how they were beating him.…”

Lukerya dropped the spoons and looked fixedly in the direction of the student.

“They came to the house of the high priest,” he went on, “and they began to interrogate Jesus, while the workmen lit a fire in the courtyard because it was cold, and they warmed themselves round the fire, and Peter stood close by the fire, and he too warmed himself, just as I am doing now. There was a woman who recognized him and said: ‘This man also was with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for interrogation. And all the workmen who were standing round the fire must have looked at him searchingly and suspiciously, for he was troubled and said: ‘I do not know him.’ After a while someone recognized him as one of the disciples of Jesus, and said: ‘You were one of them.’
And again Peter denied it. And then for the third time someone turned toward him and said: ’Did I not see thee with him in the garden?” And again Peter denied it, and at that very moment the cock crew, and Peter gazing from afar off at Jesus remembered the words spoken to him earlier in the evening.… He remembered and suddenly recovered his senses and went out from the courtyard and wept bitterly. The Gospels say: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ And so I imagine it—the garden was deathly still and very dark, and in the silence there came the sound of muffled sobbing.…”

The student sighed and fell into deep thought. Though her lips still formed a smile, Vasilissa suddenly gave way to weeping, and the heavy tears rolled down her cheeks, and she hid her face in her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, while Lukerya, still gazing motionlessly at the student, flushed scarlet, and her expression became strained and heavy as though she were suffering great pain.

The farm workers returned from the river, and one who was on horseback came near them, and the light from the fire glittered on him. The student bade good night to the widows and went on his way. Once again the shadows crowded close around him, and his hands froze. A cruel wind was blowing, winter had settled in, and it was hard to believe that Easter was only the day after tomorrow.

The student fell to thinking about Vasilissa. It occurred to him that because she had been weeping, everything that happened to Peter on the night of the Last Supper must have a special meaning for her.…

He looked round him. He could see the solitary fire gleaming peacefully in the dark, but there was no longer anyone near it. Once more the student thought that if Vasilissa gave way to weeping, and her daughter was moved by his words, then it was clear that the story he had been telling them, though it happened nineteen centuries ago, still possessed a meaning for the present time—to both these women, to the desolate village, to himself,
and to all people. The old woman wept, not because he was able to tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was close to her and because her whole being was deeply affected by what happened in Peter’s soul.

And suddenly his soul was filled with joy, and for a moment he had to pause to recover his breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events all flowing from one to the other.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain, and when he touched one end the other trembled.

When he took the raft across the river, and afterward when he was climbing the hill and looking back in the direction of his native village and toward the west, where the cold purple sunset was no more than a thin streak of light, it occurred to him that the same truth and the same beauty which reigned over humankind in the garden and in the courtyard of the high priest had endured uninterruptedly until the present time, and always they were the most important influences working on human life and everything on the earth; and the feeling of youth, health, and vigor—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of an unknown and secret happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life suddenly seemed to him ravishing, marvelous, and full of deep meaning.

April 1894

AFTER the wedding not even a light lunch was served. The young couple drank their champagne, changed their clothes, and set off for the station. Instead of attending a gay ball and a wedding supper, instead of music and dancing, they went off on a pilgrimage to a place a hundred and fifty miles away. There were many who approved of this, saying that Modest Alexeich was a fairly high-ranking official and no longer young, and that a noisy wedding would not have been altogether proper: music would obviously bore the fifty-two-year-old official married to a girl who had just turned eighteen. They said that Modest Alexeich, being a man of principle, really arranged this journey to a monastery so that his young bride would clearly understand that in marriage the first place must be given to religion and morality.

The couple was seen off at the station. Crowds of relatives together with the groom’s colleagues stood there with champagne glasses in their hands, waiting to shout “hurrah” when the train pulled away. Pyotr Leontyich, the bride’s father, stood there wearing a top hat and the frock coat of a schoolmaster, already drunk and very pale, and he kept peering up at the window with a glass in his hand, saying in an imploring voice: “Anyuta! Anna! Anna, just one last word …”

Anna leaned out of the window while he whispered something
to her, enveloping her in the smell of brandy, blowing in her ear—she understood nothing at all—and he made the sign of the cross over her face, her breast, and her hands, his breath coming in gasps and tears shining in his eyes. Anna’s brothers, the schoolboys Petya and Andryusha, were pulling at his coat-tails and whispering shamefacedly: “Papa, that’s enough.… Papa, don’t do it …”

When the train started, Anna saw her father running a little way after the carriage, staggering and spilling wine, and it seemed to her that his face was pitiful, guilty, and very kind.

“Hu-hu-hurrah!” he shouted.

Then the young couple were left alone. Modest Alexeich looked round the compartment, arranged their things on the racks, and sat down opposite his young wife. He was an official of medium height, rather stout, puffy, well fed, with long whiskers but no mustache, and his round, clean-shaven, and sharply outlined chin resembled the heel of a foot. The most characteristic thing about his face was the absence of a mustache, his freshly shaven and naked upper lip merging imperceptibly into the fat cheeks, which quivered like jelly. His deportment was dignified, his movements unhurried, his manner suave.

“At this particular moment,” he said, smiling, “I cannot help recalling a certain incident. It happened five years ago when Kosorotov received the Order of St. Anna, second class, and accordingly went to proffer his thanks to His Excellency. His Excellency expressed himself in the following manner: ‘So now you have three Annas,’ he said. One in your buttonhole, and two round your neck.’ I have to tell you that this incident occurred at the time when Kosorotov’s wife had just returned to him—she was a quarrelsome and lightheaded woman—and, of course, her name was Anna. I hope that when the time comes for me to receive my Anna of the second class, His Excellency will have no occasion to speak to me in the same way.”

He smiled with his small eyes. She, too, smiled, for she was
troubled by the thought that any moment he might kiss her with his full, moist lips, and now she no longer had the right to refuse him. The sleek movements of his fat body frightened her: she was terrified and disgusted. He got up, slowly removed the order he was wearing round his neck, removed his frock coat and waistcoat, and put on a dressing gown.

“That’s better,” he said, sitting down beside Anna.

Anna remembered the agony of the wedding, when it seemed to her that the priest, the guests, and everyone else in the church were gazing at her sorrowfully: why, why, was this dear, charming girl marrying that elderly and uninteresting gentleman? Only that morning she was in raptures because everything had been settled so well, but during the wedding ceremony and now in the carriage she felt guilty, cheated, and ridiculous. Now she had married a rich man, but still she had no money at all, her bridal dress had been bought on credit, and when her father and brothers were saying good-by, she saw from their faces that not one of them had a kopeck to his name. Would they have any supper tonight? And tomorrow? And for some reason it seemed to her that her father and the boys were suffering from hunger and they knew the same misery that weighed down upon them on the evening of their mother’s funeral.

“Oh, how unhappy I am,” she thought. “Why am I so unhappy?”

With the awkwardness of a man of dignity, unaccustomed to dealing with women, Modest Alexeich touched her waist and petted her on the shoulder while she continued to think of money, of her mother, and of her mother’s death. When her mother died, her father, Pyotr Leontyich, a teacher of calligraphy and drawing in the high school, took to drinking and knew real poverty; the boys were without boots or galoshes; her father was brought before the magistrate; a court officer came and seized the furniture for debt.… What a disgrace! Anna had to look after her drunken father, darn her brothers’ stockings, do the marketing, and when she was complimented on her
youth, her beauty, her elegant manners, then it seemed to her that the whole world was only looking at her cheap hat and the holes in her shoes which she concealed with ink. At night she wept, troubled by the persistent thought that her father would soon, very soon, be dismissed from the high school because of this weakness of his, and he would be unable to endure his dismissal, and he would die as her mother had died. But then some ladies of their acquaintance began to take an interest in her and began to look for a good husband for her. Soon they found this Modest Alexeich, who was neither young nor handsome—but he had money. He had in fact a hundred thousand rubles in the bank and a family estate which he had rented to a tenant. He was a man of principles and His Excellency thought highly of him; and Anna was told that nothing would be easier than to arrange for His Excellency to send a note to the principal or to the trustee of the high school, so that Pyotr Leontyich would not be dismissed …