“Ugh, you pest!”
The old woman did not sleep all night, troubled by thoughts, but she got up at dawn, said her prayers, and went to the station to mail the letter.
The station was seven miles away.
II
The water-curing clinic of Dr. B. O. Moselweiser was open on New Year’s Day, just as on ordinary days, only the doorkeeper Andrei Khrisanfych was wearing a uniform with new galloons, his boots shone somehow specially, and he wished everyone who came in a Happy New Year.
It was morning. Andrei Khrisanfych stood by the door and read a newspaper. At exactly ten o’clock a general came in, a familiar figure, one of the regular clients, and after him the postman. Andrei Khrisanfych helped the general out of his overcoat and said:
“Happy New Year, Your Excellency!”
“Thank you, my good man. And the same to you.”
And, going up the stairs, the general nodded towards a door and asked (he asked every day and then forgot each time):
“What’s in this room?”
“That is the massage room, Your Excellency!”
When the general’s steps died away, Andrei Khrisanfych looked through the mail and found a letter addressed to him. He opened it, read a few lines, then, while looking into his newspaper, went unhurriedly to his room, which was right there, downstairs, at the end of the corridor. His wife Yefimia was sitting on the bed nursing a baby; another child, the eldest, stood beside her, resting his curly head on her lap, and the third was asleep on the bed.
Going into his little room, Andrei handed the letter to his wife and said:
“Must be from the village.”
Then he went out, without taking his eyes off the newspaper, and stopped in the corridor not far from his door. He could hear Yefimia reading the first lines in a trembling voice. She read and could not go on; those lines were enough for her, she dissolved in tears and, embracing her eldest boy and kissing him, began to talk, and it was impossible to tell whether she was crying or laughing.
“It’s from grandma and grandpa …” she said. “From the village … Queen of Heaven, saints above. There’s snow there now, up to the roofs … the trees are all white. Children on tiny sleds … And dear, bald-headed grandpa on the stove … and the little yellow dog … My dear darlings!”
Andrei Khrisanfych, listening to that, remembered that his wife had given him letters three or four times, asking him to send them to the village, but some important business had prevented him: he had not sent the letters and they had gotten lost somewhere.
“There are little hares running in the field,” Yefimia went on chanting, bathed in tears, kissing her boy. “Grandpa is quiet, kind, grandma is kind, too, pitiful. It’s a soulful life in the village, a god-fearing life … And there’s a church there, the peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven, our mother and helper, take us away from here!”
Andrei Khrisanfych went back to his little room to smoke until someone came, and Yefimia suddenly fell silent, quieted down, and wiped her eyes, and only her lips quivered. She was very afraid of him, oh, how afraid! She trembled, she was terrified by his step, his glance; she did not dare say a single word in his presence.
Andrei Khrisanfych lit a cigarette, but just then there came a ring from upstairs. He put the cigarette out and, making a very serious face, ran to his front door.
The general was coming down, pink and fresh after his bath.
“And what’s in this room?” he asked, pointing to a door.
Andrei Khrisanfych drew himself to attention and said loudly:
“Charcot showers,1 Your Excellency!”
JANUARY 1900
IN THE RAVINE
I
The village of Ukleyevo lay in a ravine, so that from the highway and the railroad station all you could see was the belfry and the smokestacks of the cotton mills. When passersby asked what village it was, they would be told:
“The one where the verger ate all the caviar at the funeral.”
Once, at the memorial dinner for the factory-owner Kostiukov, the old verger spotted black caviar among the hors d’oeuvres and greedily began to eat it; they pushed him, pulled him by the sleeve, but he was as if frozen with pleasure; he felt nothing and simply ate. He ate all the caviar, and there were about four pounds of it in the jar. And much time had passed since then, the verger was long dead, but the caviar was still remembered. Either the life there was so poor, or the people were unable to notice anything except this unimportant event that had happened ten years ago, but nothing else was ever told about the village of Ukleyevo.
It was a place of ever-present fever, and there was swampy mud even in summer, especially under the fences, over which old pussywillows hung, casting broad shadows. There was always a smell of factory waste and the acetic acid used in the treatment of the cotton. The factories—three cotton mills and one tannery—were situated not in the village itself but on the outskirts and further away. They were small factories, and in all employed about four hundred workers, not more. The water in the river often stank on account of the tannery; the waste contaminated the meadows, the peasants’ cattle suffered from anthrax, and the factory was ordered closed. It was considered closed, but went on working secretly, with the knowledge of the district police officer and the district doctor, to each of whom the owner paid ten roubles a month. There were only two decent houses in the whole village, brick, with iron roofs: one housed the rural administration; in the other, a two-story house just opposite the church, lived Grigory Petrovich Tsybukin, a tradesman from Epifanyevo.
Grigory kept a grocery store, but that was only for appearances; in reality he traded in vodka, cattle, leather, grain, pigs, traded in whatever there was, and when, for instance, there was a demand abroad for magpie feathers for ladies’ hats, he made thirty kopecks a pair; he bought up woodlots for cutting, lent money on interest, was generally a shrewd old man.
He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, served with the police, in the criminal investigation department, and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, went into trading and helped his father, but no real help was expected of him, because he was of weak health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a beautiful, shapely woman, who went about on Sundays in a hat and with a parasol, got up early, went to bed late, and, with her skirts held up and her keys jangling, raced about all day long, now to the barn, now to the cellar, now to the shop, and old Tsybukin watched her merrily, his eyes glowed, and at such moments he regretted that it was not the elder son who had married her but the younger, the deaf one, who obviously had little understanding of feminine beauty.
The old man had always had an inclination for family life, and he loved his family more than anything in the world, especially his elder son, the detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya had no sooner married the deaf son than she showed an extraordinary business sense and knew at once who could be given credit and who could not, kept the keys herself, not trusting them even to her husband, clicked on the abacus, looked horses in the teeth like a peasant, and was forever laughing or shouting; and, no matter what she did or said, the old man only went soft and murmured:
“Ah, what a daughter-in-law! What a beauty …”
He was a widower, but a year after his son’s wedding he could no longer stand it and got married himself. Twenty miles from Ukleyevo a girl was found for him, Varvara Nikolaevna, from a good family, no longer young, but beautiful, imposing. As soon as she settled in the little upstairs room, everything brightened in the house, as if new glass had been put in the windows. The icon lamps were lit, the tables were covered with snow-white tablecloths, red-eyed flowers appeared on the windowsills and in the front garden, and at dinner they no longer ate from one bowl, but a plate was set in front of each person. Varvara Nikolaevna smiled pleasantly and gently, and it seemed as if everything in the house were smiling. Beggars, wayfarers, and pilgrims began coming into the yard, something that had never happened before; the plaintive, sing-song voices of Ukleyevo peasant women and the guilty coughing of weak, wasted men dismissed from the factories for drunkenness, were heard under the windows. Varvara Nikolaevna helped out with money, bread, old clothes, and later, once she felt at home, also began pilfering from the shop. Once the deaf son saw her take two packets of tea, and that puzzled him.