The mere thought that he and she might be close to one another and equals seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding, that when one thought about it one felt uncanny, and one’s heart sank. “And it is beyond all understanding,” she thought, “why God gives beauty, this graciousness, and sad, sweet eyes to weak, unlucky, useless people— why they are so charming.”
Hanov turns off and Marya’s obsessions again take over her thoughts. Her bare life, Chekhov notes, “was making her grow old and coarse, making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead. . . . No one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances.” The journey itself is as vexing as the life:
Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow, then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants would not let them pass, in another, it was the priest’s land and they could not cross it, in another, Ivan Ivonov had bought a plot from the landowner and had dug a ditch around it. They kept having to turn back.
Eventually, they stop at a rough tavern; outside, wagons filled with large bottles of crude sulfuric acid stand on ground covered with snow and dung. The peasants drinking within show small respect for the schoolteacher. She is practically one of them. On the last leg of the journey the travelers have to cross a river. Semyon chooses to go through the water rather than over a bridge a few miles away. When they enter the river, the horse goes in up to his belly, and Marya’s skirt and sleeve get soaked, and so do the sugar and flour she bought in town. On the other side, at a railway crossing, they find the barrier down. The schoolmistress gets out of the cart and stands shivering on the ground. The end of the story is less than a page away. Chekhov writes:
[The village] was in sight now, and the school with its green roof, and the church with its crosses flashing in the evening sun; and the station windows flashed too, and a pink smoke rose from the engine . . . and it seemed to her that everything was trembling with cold.
Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing, and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard the sound of the piano, her father’s voice; she felt as she had been then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstasy, and called softly, beseechingly:
“Mother!”
At this moment Hanov and his carriage arrive at the crossing, “and seeing him she imagined happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her triumph, was flowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, it had been a long, tedious, strange dream and now she had awakened . . .”
The vision abruptly vanishes, like the sun going down in winter. Marya gets back into the cart and proceeds to the village and to her dismal life. The long, tedious, strange dream goes on.
The previous year, Chekhov had written Uncle Vanya. (Or probably had; he was extremely secretive about its composition, perhaps because of its relationship to The Wood Demon, a bizarrely poor play he wrote in 1889 and wished to disown but from which Uncle Vanya unquestionably derives.) The schoolmistress’s brief fantasy about marriage to the handsome, depressed, alcoholic Hanov is a kind of shorthand version of Sonya’s deep, hopeless love for the handsome, depressed, alcoholic Astrov. At the end of the play, after the professor and Elena and Astrov have gone and Sonya and Vanya are left to live out their lives as silent, patient cart horses, Sonya, too, has an ecstatic vision. She has abandoned hope of earthly happiness, but imagines an afterlife “that is bright, lovely, beautiful. We shall rejoice and look back at these troubles of ours with tenderness, with a smile—and we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle; I have fervent, passionate faith.” We do not know whether Marya Vassilyevna has faith, but the church, with its crosses flashing in the setting sunlight, is the fulcrum of her ecstasy. (Chekhov used this image in several other stories, including “Three Years” and “Lights.”) A Finkean or perhaps a Jacksonian reading of “The Schoolmistress” would also take note of Marya’s baptism in the river and of the fish in the Moscow apartment. As always, Chekhov’s allusions to religion are inconclusive. They mark important moments, but they are written in pencil. As always, and unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov leaves the question of what it all means unanswered. He raises it, but then—as if remembering that he is a man of science and a rationalist—seems to shrug and walk out of the room.
Ten
The second day of my stay in cold, idle St. Petersburg had been scheduled to begin with a visit to one of Catherine the Great’s palaces, but when I told Nelly that palaces didn’t especially interest me, she—unlike Sonia when I balked at the Armory—simply asked what I wanted to do instead. As with Nina, I felt an immediate rapport with Nelly. She was younger than Nina—she had a fresh, round face, and short, wavy brown hair, and looked to be in her fifties. She was not poor, and was more sophisticated, and more reserved. When I asked her about herself, she told me just so much and no more: that she was a widow (her husband had died of cancer two years earlier); that she had recently remodeled her apartment; that she had a tomcat; that she had been a university teacher of languages, and then had gone into the travel business, originally working for Intourist and now for a private agency called Esperance; that she bought her clothes abroad. She performed her job as guide and translator with beautiful precision, as if it were a piano sonata; throughout my stay in the city, she seemed to know exactly when to explain and when to be silent; when to be present and when to vanish.
She and the driver, Sergei, met me at the St. Petersburg airport, a place that time seems to have forgotten. The terminal, of an early totalitarian-modern style, is worn and faded, leached of all menace. It was empty and silent. Here and there along the stone-floored corridor leading to passport control, a spindly potted palm inclined toward a dusty window. No other flight had come in—perhaps ours was the flight of the day or week—and it took no time to get through the formalities. Sergei picked up my suitcase, and he and Nelly led me to the car, which was parked in a small lot directly in front of the terminal. Was I in Mother Russia or at the Brewster, New York, train station?
Driving in from the airport, we passed ugly, flimsy housing projects, which grew less ugly and more substantial as we neared the city. Nelly said that the apartments in the outlying projects, built post-Khrushchev, were incredibly tiny. The projects closer to the city, which had been built in the Stalin period, had decent-size apartments and were much coveted. My hotel, the Astoria, built in the late nineteenth century and recently renovated, was as empty as the airport. Normally, American tourists fill the city’s hotels and restaurants, but fear that anti-American feeling had been aroused by our recent mindless bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had kept them away. (I, in fact, encountered no anti-American feeling during my stay in Russia.) My handsome room was furnished with imperial-style antiques and looked out on the dull-gold dome of St. Isaac’s cathedral, which was designed by an Italian architect and has a beautiful Florentine austerity. During the Soviet period, the cathedral housed a Museum of Atheism, but now it had resumed Russian Orthodox services, as churches throughout the former Soviet Union were doing. Nelly told me that under Communism belief was tolerated among those willing to remain in society’s lowliest positions; but to rise in the hierarchy it was necessary to be an atheist. Atheism was the “official religion,” she said. On the way to the hotel, she had pointed out a church in which the Soviets had dug a swimming pool—now being filled in.