What to do? Call the family? No, no need. I don’t know what my wife and Liza will do if they come to me.
I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes, and wait, wait … My back is cold, it’s as if it were being drawn into me, and I have the feeling that death will surely come at me from behind, on the sly …
“Kee-wee, kee-wee!” a piping suddenly sounds in the silence of the night, and I don’t know where it is—in my breast, or outside?
“Kee-wee, kee-wee!”
My God, how frightening! I’d drink more water, but I’m scared to open my eyes and afraid to raise my head. The terror I feel is unconscious, animal, and I’m unable to understand why I’m frightened: is it because I want to live, or because a new, still unknown pain awaits me?
Upstairs, through my ceiling, someone either moans or laughs … I listen. Shortly afterwards I hear footsteps on the stairs. Someone hurriedly comes down, then goes back up. A moment later there are footsteps downstairs again; someone stops by my door, listening.
“Who’s there?” I cry.
The door opens, I boldly open my eyes and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes tearful.
“You’re not asleep, Nikolai Stepanych?” she asks.
“What is it?”
“For God’s sake, go and look at Liza. Something’s the matter with her …”
“All right … with pleasure …” I mutter, very pleased that I’m not alone. “All right… this minute.”
I follow my wife, listen to what she tells me, and understand nothing in my agitation. Bright spots from her candle leap over the steps of the stairway, our long shadows quiver, my legs get tangled in the skirts of my dressing gown, I’m out of breath, and it seems to me as if something is pursuing me and wants to seize me by the back. “I’m going to die right now, here on the stairs,” I think. “Right now …” But the stairs and the dark corridor with the Italian window are behind us, and we go into Liza’s room. She’s sitting on her bed in nothing but her nightgown, her bare feet hanging down, and moaning.
“Oh, my God … oh, my God!” she murmurs, squinting at our candle. “I can’t, I can’t …”
“Liza, my child,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
Seeing me, she cries out and throws herself on my neck.
“My kind papa …” she sobs, “my good papa … My dearest little papa … I don’t know what’s wrong with me … I’m so sick at heart!”
She embraces me, kisses me, and babbles tender words such as I heard from her when she was a little girl.
“Calm yourself, my child, God be with you,” I say. “You mustn’t cry. I’m sick at heart, too.”
I try to cover her with a blanket, my wife gives her a drink, the two of us fuss confusedly around the bed; my shoulder brushes her shoulder, and in that moment the recollection comes to me of how we used to bathe our children together.
“Help her, help her!” my wife implores. “Do something!”
But what can I do? I can’t do anything. The girl has some burden on her heart, but I don’t know or understand anything, and can only murmur:
“Never mind, never mind… It will go away… Sleep, sleep …
As if on purpose, a dog’s howling suddenly comes from our yard, first soft and uncertain, then loud, in two voices. I’ve never ascribed any particular significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the hooting of owls, but now my heart is painfully wrung and I hasten to explain this howling to myself.
“Nonsense …” I think. “The influence of one organism on another. My intense nervous strain transmitted itself to my wife, to Liza, to the dog, that’s all … This sort of transmission explains presentiments, premonitions …”
When I go back to my room a little later to write a prescription for Liza, I no longer think I’ll die soon, I simply feel a heaviness, a tedium, in my soul, so that I’m even sorry I didn’t die suddenly. I stand motionless for a long time in the middle of the room, trying to think up something to prescribe for Liza, but the moaning through the ceiling quiets down, and I decide not to prescribe anything, and still I stand there …
There’s a dead silence, such a silence that, as some writer has said, it even rings in your ears. Time moves slowly, the strips of moonlight on the windowsill don’t change their position, as if frozen … Dawn is still far off
But now the gate in the fence creaks, someone steals up and, breaking a branch from one of the scrawny trees, cautiously taps on the window with it.
“Nikolai Stepanych!” I hear a whisper. “Nikolai Stepanych!”
I open the window, and think I’m dreaming: by the window, pressing herself to the wall, stands a woman in a black dress, brightly lit by the moon, gazing at me with big eyes. The moon makes her face look pale, stern, and fantastic, as if made of marble. Her chin trembles.
“It’s me …” she says. “Me … Katya!”
In the moonlight all women’s eyes look big and black, people look taller and paler, which is probably why I didn’t recognize her at first.
“What’s the matter?”
“Forgive me,” she says. “For some reason I felt unbearably sick at heart … I couldn’t stand it and came here … There was light in your window and … and I decided to knock … Excuse me … Oh, if only you knew how sick at heart I am! What are you doing now?”
“Nothing … Insomnia.”
“I had a sort of presentiment. Anyhow, it’s nonsense.”
Her eyebrows rise, her eyes glisten with tears, and her whole face lights up with that familiar, long-absent expression of trustfulness.
“Nikolai Stepanych!” she says imploringly, reaching out to me with both arms. “My dear, I beg you … I implore you … If you don’t disdain my friendship and my respect for you, agree to do what I ask you!”
“What is it?”
“Take my money from me!”
“Well, what will you think up next! Why should I need your money?”
“You’ll go somewhere for a cure … You need a cure. Will you take it? Yes? Yes, my dearest?”
She peers greedily into my face and repeats:
“You’ll take it? Yes?”
“No, my friend, I won’t…” I say. “Thank you.”
She turns her back to me and hangs her head. I probably refused her in such a tone as to prohibit any further discussion of money.
“Go home to bed,” I say. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”
“So you don’t consider me your friend?” she asks glumly.
“I didn’t say that. But your money is of no use to me now.”
“Forgive me …” she says, lowering her voice a whole octave. “I understand you … To be indebted to a person like me … a retired actress … Anyhow, good-bye …”
And she leaves so quickly that I don’t even have time to say good-bye to her.
VI
I’m in Kharkov.
Since it would be useless, and beyond my strength, to struggle with my present mood, I’ve decided that the last days of my life will be irreproachable at least in the formal sense; if I’m not right in my attitude towards my family, which I’m perfectly aware of, I will try to do what they want me to do. If it’s go to Kharkov, I go to Kharkov. Besides, I’ve become so indifferent to everything lately that it makes absolutely no difference to me where I go, to Kharkov, to Paris, or to Berdichev.25
I arrived here around noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. On the train I got seasick and suffered from the drafts, so now I’m sitting on the bed, holding my head and waiting for my tic. I ought to go and see the professors I know here, but I haven’t the urge or the strength.
The old servant on my floor comes to ask whether I have bed linen. I keep him for about five minutes and ask him several questions about Gnekker, on whose account I’ve come here. The servant turns out to be a native of Kharkov, knows it like the palm of his hand, but doesn’t remember a single house that bears the name of Gnekker. I ask about country estates—same answer.