“Ivan Andreich!” someone called out from the neighboring room. “Are you home?”
“I’m here!” Laevsky answered. “What do you need?”
“Papers.”
Laevsky rose lazily, with a feeling of dizziness and, yawning, his shoes smacking the floor, went to the neighboring room. There in the street, in front of the open window, stood one of his young colleagues, who laid official papers out on the windowsill.
“Just a minute, my good man,” Laevsky said softly, and went to find pen and ink. Returning to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: “It’s hot!”
“Yes sir. Are you coming in today?”
“Unlikely … I think I’m coming down with something … My good man, tell Sheshkovsky that I’ll come see him after dinner.”
The clerk left. Laevsky lay down on the divan in his room again and began to think:
Now then, it’s necessary to weigh all the factors and to figure this out. Before leaving this place, I must pay my debts. I owe nearly two thousand rubles. I have no money … This, of course, isn’t important. I’ll pay half now somehow, and the other half I’ll send from Petersburg. Most important is Nadezhda Fyodorovna … First and foremost, we must determine what our relationship is … Yes.
A little later on, he thought: Wouldn’t it be better to go to Samoylenko for advice?
It’s easy enough to go, he thought, but what’s the use of it? I’d just start telling him malapropos about the boudoir, about women, about what is or isn’t fair. Damn it, how can there be any question of what is or isn’t fair, when my life requires saving, and fast, when I’m suffocating in this damned captivity and killing myself? … It must, finally, be understood, that to continue a life like mine is underhanded and unrelenting, in the face of which all else is petty and insignificant. Run! he muttered, sitting down. Run!
The emptiness of the seashore, the insatiable swelter and the monotony of the dusky, lilac mountains, eternally the same and silent, eternally lonely, bore on his melancholy and, seemingly, sedated and looted him. It may well have been that he was a very smart, talented, remarkable straight-shooter; it may well have been that were he not surrounded by sea and mountains on all sides, a first-class regional director, a government man, an orator, a public figure, an ascetic would have emerged from within him. Who knows! What if a gifted and industrious man—a musician or an artist, for instance—were to escape captivity by tearing down a wall and tricking his jailers, isn’t it foolish to then expound on what’s fair and what’s not? In such a situation, everything that man does is fair.
At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the scullery maid had served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:
“It’s the same thing every day. Is there any reason why we can’t have shchi?”
“There’s no cabbage.”
“Strange. If they cook shchi with cabbage at Samoylenko’s, and there’s shchi at Maria Konstantinovna’s, it must just be me that’s supposed to eat this sweetish slop for some reason. This isn’t right, my dove.”
As is the case among the vast majority of married couples, before neither Laevsky nor Nadezhda Fyodorovna could get through a dinner without caprices and a scene, but since Laevsky decided that he no longer loved her, he tried to yield to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in all matters, speaking to her gently and politely, smiling at her, and calling her a dove.
“The taste of this soup reminds me of licorice,” he said, smiling; he was straining himself so as to appear amicable, but couldn’t hold back and said: “No one is taking care of this household … If you’re too sick or too busy with your reading, then allow me, I’ll attend to our kitchen.”
Earlier, she would have answered with So attend to it or I see you want to make a scullery maid out of me, but now she merely glanced at him sheepishly and turned red.
“Well, how do you feel today?” he asked tenderly.
“Today is not so bad. There is only a touch of weakness.”
“You need to take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly worried about you.”
Something ailed Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Samoylenko said that she had remittent fever and fed her quinine. Another doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, spindly, misanthropic man, who sat at home by day and strolled quietly along the embankment coughing with his hands folded behind him and his cane stretched lengthwise down his back by night, found that she had a female ailment, and prescribed warm compresses. Before, when Laevsky still loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s illness would arouse feelings of sympathy and fear in him, but now he considered even her illness to be a lie. The jaundiced, sleepy face, the faded expression and the yawning that would occasionally seize Nadezhda Fyodorovna after an onset of fever, and that she, while in the midst of the onset, would lie beneath a plaid blanket and resembled a boy, more than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled bad—all this, in his opinion, destroyed any illusion and was a protest against love and marriage.
For the second course he was served spinach with hard-boiled eggs, but Nadezhda Fyodorovna was served kissel and milk, like an invalid. When she, with an anxious expression, first touched her spoon to the kissel and then began to lazily eat it, washing it down with milk, and he heard her swallows, he was overcome by such an intense feeling of hatred that his head began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would have been insulting even in the society of dogs, although he was not aggravated with himself but with Nadezhda Fyodorovna for having aroused such a feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their beloved. He couldn’t kill her himself, of course, but if he ever found himself serving on a jury, he would exonerate the murderer.
“Merci, my dove,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.
Retiring to his study, he spent about five minutes pacing the room from corner to corner, cast a sidelong glance at his boots, then sat down on the divan and began to mutter:
“Run! Run! I must determine what our relationship is and run!”
He lay down on the divan and again remembered that the death of Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband could have been his fault.
It’s foolish to accuse a man of falling in or out of love, he convinced himself, leaning back and lifting his legs to put on his boots. It’s not in our power to control love and hate. As for the husband, it’s possible that I may have been, in a circumstantial sense, one of the reasons for his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife and the wife with me?
At that he rose and, having located his service cap, set off in the direction of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where the civil servants would gather every day to play Vint and drink cold beer.
My indecision is reminiscent of Hamlet, thought Laevsky en route. How astute Shakespeare’s observation was. Oh, how astute.
III
To keep from getting bored and to accommodate the basic needs of new arrivals and those without families who had nowhere to dine due to the lack of hotels in town, Dr. Samoylenko held a kind of table d’hote at his home. At the time this was written, he had only two diners: the young zoologist Von Koren, who had traveled to the Black Sea this summer to study the embryology of jellyfish; and Deacon Pobedov, recently released from seminary and assigned to town to carry out the duties of an elderly deacon who had left to pursue medical treatment. They both paid twelve rubles per month for dinner, and Samoylenko had made them give their word of honor that they would report for dinner precisely at two o’clock.