He scratched his head irritably, waved his arm as if to wash his hands of the whole matter and left the room.
Afterwards he came back several times, sitting on the bed and talking a great deal, gently and angrily in turn. But Olga hardly heard a thing. The sobs alternated with terrible pains, each new one sharper and more prolonged than the last. At first she held her breath and bit the pillow during the spasms, but then she began to produce ear-splitting, obscene shouts. Once, when she saw that her husband was near, she remembered that she had insulted him and without asking herself if she was being delirious or if it really was Pyotr, she seized his hand in both of hers and started kissing it.
‘Both you and I lied…’ she began, trying to excuse herself. ‘Please understand, please. They’ve tormented the life out of me, I’ve no more patience…’
‘Olga, we’re not alone!’ Pyotr said.
She raised her head and saw Barbara kneeling by the chest of drawers, taking the lower drawer out – the top ones had already been removed. When she had done this, Barbara stood up, flushed from her efforts, and started opening a small chest with a cold, solemn look on her face.
‘Marya, I can’t open it,’ she whispered. ‘Perhaps you can do it for me.’
The maid Marya, who was digging out some wax from a candlestick with some scissors to make room for a new candle, went over to Barbara and helped her open the chest.
‘I don’t want anything left shut,’ Barbara whispered. ‘Open that little box as well.’ She turned to Pyotr and said, ‘You should send for Father Mikhail, sir, to open the altar doors. You must!’
‘Do what you like,’ Pyotr said between short gasps, ‘only get a doctor or midwife as soon as you can, for God’s sake. Has Vasily gone? Send someone else as well. Send your husband!’
‘I’m in labour,’ Olga realized. ‘Barbara,’ she groaned, ‘it will be stillborn.’
‘It’ll be all right, ma’am, it’ll be all right,’ Barbara whispered. ‘With God’s help it’ll live.’ (It seemed she was incapable of saying ‘it will’.)
When Olga came to, after another stab of pain, she was no longer sobbing or tossing about, but moaning instead. She could not help moaning, even in the intervals between the pains. The candles were still burning, but daylight was already breaking through the shutters. Most likely it was about five o’clock. A strange, very meek-looking woman in a white apron was sitting at a round, bedroom table. From her posture it was obvious that she had been there a long time. Olga guessed that she was the midwife.
‘Will it soon be over?’ she asked and detected a special, unfamiliar note in her own voice which she had never heard before. ‘I must be dying in labour,’ she thought.
Pyotr came gingerly into the bedroom in his day-time clothes and stood at the window with his back to his wife. He raised the shutters and looked out.
‘How it’s raining!’ he said.
‘What’s the time?’ Olga asked, just to hear that unfamiliar tone in her voice again.
‘A quarter to six,’ the midwife answered.
‘But what if I really am dying?’ Olga wondered as she looked at her husband’s head and at the windows with the rain beating against them. ‘How will he live without me? Who will he drink tea with, dine with, talk to in the evenings, sleep with?’
And he struck her as a little orphan. She felt sorry for him and wanted to tell him something pleasant, affectionate, comforting. She remembered that he was intending buying some hounds in the spring but she had stopped him as she thought hunting was a cruel and dangerous sport.
‘Pyotr, go and buy those hounds,’ she groaned.
He lowered the blind and went over to the bed, meaning to say something, but at that moment Olga had a spasm and she produced an obscene, piercing shriek.
She was numb from all the pain and the repeated shouting and groaning. She could hear, see, speak at times, but she understood little and was aware only of feeling pain or that she was about to feel it. She had the impression that the party was long ago, not yesterday, but a whole year, that this new life of pain had lasted longer than her childhood, high school days, courses of lectures and marriage put together, and that it would carry on like that for ages and ages, without end. She saw them bring the midwife her tea, call her to lunch at noon and then to dinner. She saw how used Pyotr had become to entering, standing for a long time by the window and leaving, how some strange men, her maid and Barbara had taken to coming in and out. All Barbara could say was ‘it’ll be, it’ll be’, and she became very angry whenever anyone closed the drawers in the chest. Olga saw the light change in the room and at the windows – at times there was twilight, then it was dim, as in a mist; at others, there was bright daylight, as at dinner the day before, then twilight once again. And each of these changes appeared to last as long as her childhood, her high school days, the university courses…
In the evening two doctors – one bony, bald, with a wide reddish beard, the other swarthy and Jewish-looking, with cheap spectacles – performed an operation on Olga. She was completely indifferent to those strange men touching her body: no longer did she feel any shame, she had lost her willpower, and anyone could do what he liked with her. If at that moment someone had attacked her with a knife or insulted Pyotr, or deprived her of her right to that little creature, she would not have said one word.
She was given chloroform for the operation. Afterwards, when she woke up, she still had the pains and they were unbearable. It was night. Olga remembered a similar night, with its peace, icon-lamp, midwife sitting motionless by the bed, the chest with its drawers pulled out, Pyotr standing at the window, but that was long, long ago…
V
‘I haven’t died,’ Olga thought when she became aware of her surroundings again and the pains had gone.
A bright summer’s day looked in through the two wide-open bedroom windows. Sparrows and magpies chattered incessantly in the garden outside.
The drawers in the chest were shut now; her husband’s bed had been made. There was no midwife, no Barbara, no maid in the bedroom, only Pyotr standing motionless as before at the window, looking into the garden. There was no crying child, no congratulations or rejoicing, and clearly the small creature had been stillborn.
‘Pyotr!’ Olga called out to her husband.
Pyotr looked round. A long time must have passed since the last guest had left and Olga had insulted her husband, since Pyotr had become noticeably thinner and pinched-looking.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, going over to the bed.
He looked away, twitched his lips and smiled like a helpless child.
‘Is it all over?’ Olga asked.
Pyotr wanted to reply, but his lips trembled and his mouth twisted like an old man’s – like toothless Uncle Nikolay’s.
‘Olga,’ he said, wringing his hands, and suddenly large tears gushed from his eyes. ‘Olga! I don’t need your money, courts…’ (here he sobbed) ‘differing opinions, those guests, your dowry… I don’t need anything! Why did we lose our child? Oh, what’s the use of talking!’
He waved his arm in defeat and left the bedroom.
But Olga did not care about anything now. Her head was muzzy from the chloroform, she felt spiritually drained. The dull indifference to life that had come over her when the two doctors were performing the operation still had not deserted her.
A Dreary Story
(FROM AN OLD MAN’S MEMOIRS)
I
There lives in Russia an eminent Professor Nikolay Stepanovich Such-and-Such, a Privy Councillor and a man of great distinction. He has so many decorations, both Russian and foreign, that whenever he wears them his students call him the ‘icon-stand’. He moves in the very best circles: at least, over the past twenty-five–thirty years he has been on the most intimate terms with every single famous Russian scholar. Nowadays he has no one to make friends with. But if we turn to the past we’ll find that the long list of his celebrated friends ends with such names as Pirogov,1 Kavelin2 and the poet Nekrasov3 who bestowed on him their most sincere and warmest friendship. He’s a member of all Russian and three foreign universities. And so on… All this – and a lot more might be added – makes up my so-called ‘name’.