Sasha started going to school. His mother went to Kharkov to visit her sister and did not come back; his father went somewhere every day to inspect the herds, and sometimes was away from home for three days, and it seemed to Olenka that Sasha was completely abandoned, that he was not wanted in the house, that he was starving to death; and she moved him to her wing and set him up in a little room there.
And for six months now Sasha has been living with her in the wing. Each morning Olenka goes into his room; he is fast asleep, his hand under his cheek, breathing lightly. She is sorry to wake him up.
“Sashenka,” she says sadly, “get up, dear heart! It’s time for school.”
He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, then sits down to tea. He drinks three cups of tea and eats two big bagels and half a French roll with butter. He has not quite recovered from sleep and is therefore cross.
“You haven’t learned your fable well, Sashenka,” says Olenka, looking at him as if she were seeing him off on a long journey. “You worry me so. You must do your best, dear heart, study … Listen to your teachers.”
“Oh, leave me alone, please!” says Sasha.
Then he marches down the street to school, a little boy, but in a big visored cap, with a satchel on his back. Olenka noiselessly follows him.
“Sashenka-a!” she calls.
He turns around, and she puts a date or a caramel in his hand. When they turn down the lane where his school is, he gets embarrassed that this tall, stout woman is following after him; he turns around and says:
“Go home, auntie, I can get there myself now.”
She stops and looks after him without blinking, until he disappears through the doors of the school. Ah, how she loves him! Of all her former attachments, none was so deep, never before had her soul submitted so selflessly, so disinterestedly, and with such delight as now, when the maternal feeling burned in her more and more. For this boy who was not her own, for the dimples on his cheeks, for his visored cap, she would give her whole life, give it joyfully, with tears of tenderness. Why? Who knows why?
Having seen Sasha off to school, she slowly returns home, so content, so calm, so full of love; her face, which has grown younger in the last six months, smiles and beams; meeting her, looking at her, people feel pleasure and say to her:
“Good morning, darling Olga Semyonovna! How are you, darling?”
“School studies are getting difficult nowadays,” she says at the market. “It’s no joke, yesterday they gave the first-year students a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation, and a problem … It’s hard for a little boy!”
And she starts talking about teachers, lessons, textbooks—saying all the same things that Sasha says about them.
Between two and three they have dinner together, in the evening they do his homework together and weep. As she puts him to bed, she spends a long time making the cross over him and whispering a prayer. Then, going to sleep, she dreams of the far-off, misty future when Sasha has finished his studies, has become a doctor or an engineer, has his own big house, horses, a carriage, gets married, has children … She falls asleep and keeps thinking about the same thing, and from her closed eyes tears flow down her cheeks. And the little black cat lies beside her and purrs:
“Purr … purr … purr …”
Suddenly there is a loud knocking at the gate. Olenka wakes up, breathless with fear; her heart pounds hard. Half a minute goes by and there is more knocking.
“It’s a telegram from Kharkov,” she thinks, beginning to tremble all over. “Sasha’s mother wants him in Kharkov … Oh, Lord!”
She is in despair; her head, her feet, her arms go numb, and it seems that no one in the whole world is unhappier than she. But another minute goes by, she hears voices: it is the veterinarian coming home from the club.
“Well, thank God,” she thinks.
The weight gradually lifts from her heart, she feels light again; she lies down and thinks about Sasha, who is fast asleep in the next room and occasionally murmurs deliriously:
“I’ll sh-show you! Get out! No fighting!”
JANUARY 1899
ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS
The acting coroner and the district doctor were driving to the village of Syrnya for an autopsy On the way they were caught in a blizzard, wandered in circles for a long time, and reached the place not at noon, as they had wanted, but only towards evening, when it was already dark. They put up for the night in the zemstvo1cottage. And right there in the zemstvo cottage, as it happened, also lay the corpse, the corpse of the zemstvo insurance agent Lesnitsky, who had come to Syrnya three days earlier and, having settled in the zemstvo cottage and ordered a samovar, had shot himself, quite unexpectedly for everyone; and the circumstance that he had put an end to his life somehow strangely, over the samovar, with food laid out on the table, gave many the occasion to suspect murder; an autopsy became necessary.
The doctor and the coroner stamped their feet in the front hall, shaking off the snow, and the beadle Ilya Loshadin, an old man, stood beside them holding a tin lamp and lighted the place for them. There was a strong smell of kerosene.
“Who are you?” asked the doctor.
“The biddle …” answered the beadle.
He also signed it that way at the post office: the biddle.
“And where are the witnesses?”
“Must’ve gone to have tea, Your Honor.”
To the right was the clean room, the “visiting” or master’s room, to the left the black room, with a big stove and a stove bench. The doctor and the coroner, followed by the beadle holding the lamp above his head, went into the clean room. There on the floor, by the legs of the table, the long body lay motionless, covered with a white sheet. Besides the white sheet, a pair of new rubber galoshes was clearly visible in the weak light of the lamp, and everything there was disturbing, eerie: the dark walls, and the silence, and the galoshes, and the immobility of the dead body. On the table was a samovar, long cold, and around it were some packets, probably of food.
“To shoot oneself in a zemstvo cottage—how tactless!” said the doctor. “If you’re so eager to put a bullet in your head, shoot yourself at home, somewhere in the barn.”
Just as he was, in his hat, fur coat, and felt boots, he lowered himself onto the bench; his companion, the coroner, sat down facing him.
“These hysterical and neurasthenic types are great egoists,” the doctor went on bitterly. “When a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he makes a scene with his wife, not embarrassed by your presence; and when he decides to shoot himself, he goes and shoots himself in some village, in a zemstvo cottage, to cause more trouble for everybody. In all circumstances of life, these gentlemen think only of themselves. Only of themselves! That’s why the old folks dislike this ‘nervous age’ of ours so much.”
“The old folks dislike all sorts of things,” said the coroner, yawning. “Go and point out to these old folk the difference between former and present-day suicides. The former so-called respectable man shot himself because he’d embezzled government funds, the present-day one because he’s sick of life, in anguish … Which is better?”
“Sick of life, in anguish, but you must agree, he might have shot himself somewhere else than in a zemstvo cottage.”
“Such a dire thing,” the beadle began to say, “a dire thing—sheer punishment. Folks are very upset, Your Honor, it’s the third night they haven’t slept. The kids are crying. The cows need milking, but the women won’t go to the barn, they’re afraid … lest the master appear to them in the dark. Sure, they’re foolish women, but even some of the men are afraid. Once night comes, they won’t go past the cottage singly, but always in a bunch. And the witnesses, too …”