He thought, “How spiteful and crafty women are!” Natasha acted as if she had married him out of passionate love, and every week she had sent him tender letters in Tver.
“Oh, the snake!” Schwei thought as he walked down the street. “Oh, why did I marry a Russian person? Russian persons are bad! Barbarian, peasant! I wish to secede from Russia, damn me!”
Then he thought, “And what’s really surprising is that she exchanged me for some red-haired bastard! If it were Funk & Co. she fell in love with, well, that I could forgive! But to be falling in love with the dog who doesn’t have ten kopecks in his pocket! Oh, wretch that I am!”
Schwei dried his eyes and went into a tavern.
“Give me pen and papers,” he told the barkeep. “I wish to write!”
With a trembling hand he first wrote a letter to his wife’s parents, who lived in Serpukhov. He wrote that a respectable and learned foreman like himself did not wish to live with a tramp of a woman, that they, her parents, were swine, that their daughters were swine, that as far as he was concerned, they could all, they knew what... In conclusion, he demanded that they come and remove their daughter along with the redheaded bastard whom he hadn’t killed only because he did not wish to soil his hands!
He left the tavern and dropped the letter in a mailbox. He wandered through the streets until four in the morning, thinking of his sorrow. He looked gaunt and haggard, and came to the conclusion that life, that bitter mockery of fate—that being alive—was foolish and not worthy of a decent German.
He decided not to take revenge on his wife or on the red-headed man. The best thing would be to punish her with a show of great magnanimity.
“I shall go and say to her all I have to say,” he thought as he walked home, “and then I’ll take my own life! May she be happy with her redheaded man! I shall not stand in their way!”
He imagined how he would die, and how his wife would be tormented by her guilty conscience.
“Yes, I shall leave her my worldly possessions!” he muttered, ringing his doorbell. “The redhead is a better man than I, maybe he earns 750 rubles a year too!”
This time, when Marya the cook opened the door, she was surprised to see him.
“Call Natalia Petrovna,” he said, not taking his coat off. “I wish to converse!”
Within minutes his young wife stood in front of him barefoot and in her nightgown, with a startled look on her face. Weeping, throwing his arms in the air, the deceived husband said to her, “I know everything! You can’t trick me! With my own eyes I saw the redheaded brute with the long mustache!”
“You’re out of your mind!” his wife shouted. “Stop yelling! You’ll wake up our boarders!”
“The redheaded bastard!”
“I told you, stop yelling! Look at you, you’re drunk out of your mind and yelling your head off! Go to bed immediately!”
“I have no wish to sleep in the same bed with the redhead! Farewell!
“You’ve gone completely insane!” his wife shouted furiously. “I told you I’ve taken in boarders! A locksmith and his wife have moved into what used to be our bedroom!”
“Huh... huh? What locksmith?”
“A red-haired locksmith with his wife! I’ve rented out the room for four rubles a month! So stop yelling, you’ll wake them up!”
The German’s eyes bulged as he stared at his wife; then he lowered his head.
“Oh,” he whispered.
Soon Ivan Karlovitch’s German soul revived again, and he was in a splendid mood.
“For me, you’re my little Russian,” he muttered. “The cook’s a Russian, I’m a Russian, we all have our Russian languages. The locksmith, he’s a good locksmith, and I wish to embrace him. Funk & Co. is also a good Funk & Co.! Russia is magnificent land! I wish to secede from Germany!”
FIRST
AID
“MAKE WAY!MAKE WAY! Here comes the sergeant major with his clerk!”
“The compliments of the season, Gerasim Alpatitch!” the crowd shouts. “Let us pray, Gerasim Alpatitch, that the Lord will bless, not you, not us—but whomever he chooses!”
The tipsy sergeant major tries to say something but can-not. He vaguely waves his fingers, goggles his eyes, and forcefully puffs out his fat red cheeks as if he were about to blast the highest note on a trumpet. His clerk, a squat little red-nosed man in a peaked jockey cap, assumes an energetic expression and plunges into the crowd.
“Which of you here is the drowned man?” he asks. “Where’s the drowned man?”
“Here! Here!”
The peasants have just pulled a gaunt old man in a blue shirt and bast shoes out of the water. The man is soaked from head to toe and sits on the meadow babbling, his arms spread out and his legs apart. “O saints in heaven! O Christian countrymen of the province of Ryzan and the district of Zaraysk. I’ve given all I own to my two sons, and now I’m working for Prokor Sergeyev... as a plasterer! Now, as I was saying, he gives me seven rubles and says, ‘You, Fedya,’ he says, ‘you must now worship me like a father!’ May a wolf eat him alive!”
“Where are you from?” Egor Makaritch, the clerk, asks him.
“‘Like a father!’ he says. ‘May a wolf eat him alive! And that for seven rubles!”’
“He’s babbling! He doesn’t even know what language he’s talking!” Anisim the squadron leader shouts in a cracked voice, soaked to the waist and obviously upset by the event. “Let me tell you what happened, Egor Makaritch! Come on now, let’s have some quiet! I want to explain everything to Egor Makaritch. So the old man’s walking over from Kurnevo—come on now, boys, quiet!—Well, so there he is walking over from Kurnevo, and the devil made him cross the river, there where it’s shallow. The old man, being a bit tipsy and out of his mind, walked, like an idiot, right into the water, and the current knocked him off his feet and he rolls over like a top! Next thing he starts shouting like crazy. So there I am with Lyksander—what the hell’s going on? Why is this man shouting? We look—he’s drowning! What are we to do! ‘Hey, Lyksander!’ I shout, ‘Holy Mother of God! Dump that goddamn harmonica and let’s go save that peasant!’ So we both throw ourselves right into the water, and by God, it’s churning and swirling, churning and swirling—O save us, Holy Mother of Heaven! So we get to where it’s swirling the most, Lyksander grabs him by the shirt, I by the hair. Then the others here present, who saw what happened, come running up the bank, shouting—all eager to save his soul—what torture, Egor Makar- itch! If we hadn’t gotten there in time, the old man would have drowned completely, never mind the holiday!”
“What’s your name?” the clerk asks the drowned man. “And what is your domicile?”
The old man stares dully into the crowd.
“He’s out of his mind!” Anisim says. “And how can you expea him not to be! Here he is, his belly hill of water! My dear man, what’s your name—no answer! He has hardly any life left in him, only a semblance thereof! But half his soul has already left his body! What a calamity, despite the holiday! What do you want us to do now? He’ll die, yes he very well might! His mug is all blue!”
“Hey! You!” the clerk shouts, grabbing the drowned man by the shoulders and shaking him. “You! I’m talking to you! Your domicile, I said! Say something! Is your brain waterlogged? Hey!”
“Ha, for seven rubles, can you believe that?” the drowned man mumbles. “So I say to him, a dog upon you! We have no wish, thank you very much, no wish...!”
“No wish to do what? Answer clearly!”
The drowned man is silent and begins to shiver with cold, his teeth chattering.
“You can call him alive if you want,” says Anisim, “but if you take a good look at him, he doesn’t even look like a human being any more! Maybe some drops might help!”