Forty Stories (41 page)

And then Anna Sergeyevna came in. She sat in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart seemed to stop, and he understood clearly that the whole world contained no one nearer, dearer, and more important than Anna. This slight woman, lost amid a provincial rabble, in no way remarkable, with her silly lorgnette in her hands, filled his whole life: she was his sorrow and his joy, the only happiness he desired for himself; and to the sounds of the wretched orchestra, with its feeble provincial violins, he thought how beautiful she was. He thought and dreamed.

There came with Anna Sergeyevna a young man with small side whiskers, very tall and stooped, who inclined his head at every step and seemed to be continually bowing. Probably this was the husband she once described as a flunky one day in Yalta when she was in a bitter mood. And indeed in his lanky figure, his side whiskers, his small bald patch, there was something of a flunky’s servility. He smiled sweetly, and in his buttonhole there was an academic badge like the number worn by a waiter.

During the first intermission the husband went away to smoke, and she remained in her seat. Gurov, who was also sitting in the orchestra, went up to her and said in a trembling voice, with a forced smile: “How are you?”

She looked up at him and turned pale, then glanced at him again in horror, unable to believe her eyes, tightly gripping the fan and the lorgnette, evidently fighting to overcome a feeling of faintness. Both were silent. She sat, he stood, and he was frightened by her distress, and did not dare sit beside her. The violins and flutes sang out as they were tuned. Suddenly he was afraid, as it occurred to him that all the people in the boxes were staring down at them. She stood up and walked quickly to the exit; he followed her, and both of them walked aimlessly up and down the corridors, while crowds of lawyers, teachers,
and civil servants, all wearing the appropriate uniforms and badges, flashed past; and the ladies, and the fur coats hanging from pegs, also flashed past; and the draft blew through the place, bringing with it the odor of cigar stubs. Gurov, whose heart was beating wildly, thought: “Oh Lord, why are these people here and this orchestra?”

At that moment he recalled how, when he saw Anna Sergeyevna off at the station in the evening, he had told himself it was all over and they would never meet again. But how far away the end seemed to be now!

Anna paused on a narrow dark stairway which bore the inscription: “This way to the upper balcony.”

“How you frightened me!” she said, breathing heavily, pale and stunned. “How you frightened me! I am half dead! Why did you come? Why?”

“Do try to understand, Anna—please understand …” he said in a hurried whisper. “I implore you, please understand …”

She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love, intently, to retain his features all the more firmly in her memory.

“I’ve been so unhappy,” she went on, not listening to him. “All this time I’ve thought only of you, I’ve lived on thoughts of you. I tried to forget, to forget—why, why have you come?”

A pair of schoolboys were standing on the landing above them, smoking and peering down, but Gurov did not care, and drawing Anna to him, he began kissing her face, her cheeks, her hands.

“What are you doing? What are you doing?” she said in terror, pushing him away from her. “We have both lost our senses! Go away now—tonight!… I implore you by everything you hold sacred.… Someone is coming!”

Someone was climbing up the stairs.

“You must go away …” Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. “Do you hear, Dmitry Dmitrich? I’ll come and visit you in Moscow. I have never been happy. I am miserable now,
and I shall never be happy again, never! Don’t make me suffer any more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow! We must separate now. My dear precious darling, we have to separate!”

She pressed his hand and went quickly down the stairs, all the while gazing back at him, and it was clear from the expression in her eyes that she was miserable. For a while Gurov stood there, listening to her footsteps, and then all sounds faded away, and he went to look for his coat and left the theater.

And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Every two or three months she would leave the town of S––, telling her husband she was going to consult a specialist in women’s disorders, and her husband neither believed her nor disbelieved her. In Moscow she always stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel, and the moment she arrived she would send a red-capped hotel messenger to Gurov. He would visit her, and no one in Moscow ever knew about their meetings.

One winter morning he was going to visit her as usual. (The messenger from the hotel had come the evening before, but he was out.) His daughter accompanied him. He was taking her to school, and the school lay on the way to the hotel. Great wet flakes of snow were falling.

“Three degrees above freezing, and it’s still snowing,” he told his daughter. “That’s only the surface temperature of the earth—the other layers of the atmosphere have other temperatures.”

“Yes, Papa. But why are there no thunderstorms in winter?”

He explained that, too. He talked, and all the while he was thinking about his meeting with the beloved, and not a living soul knew of it, and probably no one would ever know. He was living a double life: an open and public life visible to all who had any need to know, full of conventional truth and conventional lies, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which followed a secret course. And by one of those
Strange and perhaps accidental circumstances everything that was to him meaningful, urgent, and important, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself, everything that went to shape the very core of his existence, was concealed from others, while everything that was false and the shell where he hid in order to hide the truth about himself—his work at the bank, discussions at the club, conversations about women as “an inferior race,” and attending anniversary celebrations with his wife—all this was on the surface. Judging others by himself, he refused to believe the evidence of his eyes, and therefore he imagined that all men led their real and meaningful lives under a veil of mystery and under cover of darkness. Every man’s intimate existence revolved around mysterious secrets, and it was perhaps partly for this reason that all civilized men were so nervously anxious to protect their privacy.

Leaving his daughter at the school, Gurov went on to the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel. He removed his fur coat in the lobby, and then went upstairs and knocked softly on the door. Anna Sergeyevna had been exhausted by the journey and the suspense of waiting for his arrival—she had in fact expected him the previous evening. She was wearing her favorite gray dress. She was pale, and she looked at him without smiling, and he had scarcely entered the room when she threw herself in his arms. Their kisses were lingering and prolonged, as though two years had passed since they had seen each other.

“How were things down there?” he said. “Anything new?”

“Please wait.… I’ll tell you in a moment.… I can’t speak yet!”

She could not speak because she was crying. She turned away from him, pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

“Let her have her cry,” he thought. “I’ll sit down and wait.” And he sat down in an armchair.

Then he rang and ordered tea, and while he drank the tea she remained standing with her face turned to the window.… She was crying from the depth of her emotions, in the bitter
knowledge that their life together was so weighed down with sadness, because they could only meet in secret and were always hiding from people like thieves. And that meant surely that their lives were shattered!

“Oh, do stop crying!” he said.

It was evident to him that their love affair would not soon be over, and there was no end in sight. Anna Sergeyevna was growing more and more passionately fond of him, and it was beyond belief that he would ever tell her it must one day end; and if he had told her, she would not have believed him.

He went up to her and put his hands on her shoulders, intending to console her with some meaningless words and to fondle her; and then he saw himself in the mirror.

His hair was turning gray. It struck him as strange that he should have aged so much in these last years, and lost his good looks. Her shoulders were warm and trembling at his touch. He felt pity for her, who was so warm and beautiful, though probably it would not be long before she would begin to fade and wither, as he had done. Why did she love him so much? Women had always believed him to be other than what he was, and they loved in him not himself but the creature who came to life in their imagination, the man they had been seeking eagerly all their lives, and when they had discovered their mistake, they went on loving him. And not one of them was ever happy with him. Time passed, he met other women, became intimate with them, parted from them, never having loved them. It was anything you please, but it was not love.

And now at last, when his hair was turning gray, he had fallen in love—real love—for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergeyevna and he loved one another as people who are very close and dear love one another: they were like deeply devoted friends, like husband and wife. It seemed to them that Fate had intended them for one another, and it was beyond understanding that one had a wife, the other a husband. It was as though they were two birds of passage, one male, one
female, who had been trapped and were now compelled to live in different cages. They had forgiven one another for all they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs changed them both.

Formerly in moments of depression he had consoled himself with the first argument that came into his head, but now all such arguments were foreign to him. He felt a deep compassion for her, and desired to be tender and sincere.…

“Don’t cry, my darling,” he said. “You’ve cried enough. Now let us talk, and we’ll think of something.…”

Then they talked it over for a long time, trying to discover some way of avoiding secrecy and deception, and living in different towns, and being separated for long periods. How could they free themselves from their intolerable chains?

“How? How?” he asked, holding his head in his hands. “How?”

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found and a lovely new life would begin for them; and to both of them it was clear that the end was still very far away, and the hardest and most difficult part was only beginning.

1899

VESPERS were being sung on the eve of Palm Sunday in the Old Petrovsky convent. When they began distributing the pussy willows, it was nearly ten o’clock, the candles were shedding only a dim light and the wicks wanted snuffing out: it was like being in a fog. In the twilight of the church the crowd heaved like a sea, and to His Eminence Bishop Peter, who had been ill for three days, it seemed that all those faces—men and women, old and young—were exactly the same, and all those who came up to receive the pussy willows had the same expression in their eyes. He could not see the doors through the haze, the crowd kept moving, and it looked as though there was no end to it and there would never be an end to it. A choir of women’s voices was singing, and a nun was reading the prayers of the day.

How hot and close the air was! The service seemed interminable. The Bishop was tired. His breathing was labored, dry, and rapid, his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were trembling. He was also unpleasantly disturbed by one of God’s fools who kept screaming from the gallery. Suddenly, as though in a dream or in delirium, the Bishop thought he saw Maria Timofeyevna, his own mother, whom he had not seen in nine years, coming up to him in the crowd, or perhaps it was only an old woman who resembled his mother. She took a pussy willow
from him, gazing joyfully after him, a sweet and gentle smile on her lips, until she was lost in the crowd. For some reason tears began to flow down his cheeks. His soul was at rest, everything was at peace, while he kept gazing fixedly at the choir on the left, where the prayers were being read and where amid the evening shadows it was impossible to distinguish any human beings at all; and as he looked, he wept. The tears glistened on his cheeks and on his beard. Soon someone near him began to weep, and then someone farther away, and then still others wept, and gradually the whole church was full of the soft sound of weeping. After about five minutes the nuns’ choir began singing, there was no more weeping, and everything went on as before.

Soon afterward the service came to an end. The Bishop got into his carriage and drove home, listening to the joyous and harmonious chimes of the heavy church bells, which he loved and which filled the whole garden in the moonlight. White walls, white crosses on the tombs, white birches and black shadows, and the moon afar off, yet hanging directly over the convent roof—all these things seemed to be living their own lives, remote and incomprehensible, and very close to mankind. It was early in April, but it had turned chilly after the warm spring day, with a light frost falling. The breath of spring could still be felt in the soft cool air. The road from the convent to the town was sandy, and the horses were obliged to go at a walking pace. Bathed in a clear and peaceful moonlight, the pilgrims were trudging home through the sand on both sides of the carriage. All were silent, deep in thought. Everything around looked familiar and friendly and young—trees and sky and even the moon itself—so that one longed to believe it would endure forever.

At last the carriage drove through the town, rumbling along the main street. All the stores except Yerakin’s were shut. Yerakin was a millionaire who was trying out the new electric lamps, and these flickered so brilliantly that a crowd had
gathered round the store. There followed wide, dark, deserted streets in endless procession; then came the highway, the fields, and the smell of pines. Suddenly there rose before the Bishop’s eyes a white crenelated wall, behind it a tall bell tower flanked by five large golden cupolas on fire with moonlight. This was the Pankratievsky Monastery, where the Bishop lived. Here, too, high above the monastery there floated a silent moon lost in thought. The carriage drove through the gates, crunching over sand. Here and there dark monastic shapes hovered in the moonlight, and footsteps rang out over the flagstones.…