ABOUT LOVE
3 STORIES BY
ANTON CHEKHOV
TRANSLATED BY DAVID HELWIG
DESIGNED & DECORATED BY SETH
BIBLIOASIS
2012
Contents
1 A man in a Shell
2 Gooseberries
3 About Love
Postscript
1 A man in a Shell
They weren’t asleep. Ivan Ivanych, a tall, lean old man with long whiskers, sat outside by the doorway and smoked a pipe; the moon cast its light on him. Burkin lay inside on the hay; he could not be seen in the darkness.
They were telling all sorts of stories. They got to talking about how the elder’s wife, Mavra, a healthy woman and no fool, had never in her whole life gone beyond her native village, had never seen a city or a railroad, and for the last ten years just sat by the stove and never went out into the street except at night.
“How very strange that is!” Burkin said. “People of a solitary nature, who try to withdraw into a shell, without a bit of light, like a hermit crab or a snail. It could be that this atavistic phenomenon goes back to a time when our ancestors were not yet social creatures and lived alone, each in his own lair, or it could be that this is simply one of the varieties of human character – who knows? I’m not a scientist and it’s not my business to deal with these questions; I just want to say that the occurrence of people like Mavra is not uncommon. Not at all. Not to look far from home, two months ago there was a death among us in the city, a certain Belikov, a teacher of Greek and a friend of mine. You’ve heard all about him, of course. He was conspicuous because he’d always go out, even in fine weather, in galoshes and with an umbrella, and without fail wearing a warmly lined overcoat. And his umbrella was in an umbrella case, and his watch in a watch case of grey chamois, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, the knife was in a little case, and even his face seemed to be encased because he always concealed it in a high collar. He wore dark glasses, a sweater, stuffed his ears with cotton wool, and when he sat in a cab, he wanted the top up. In a word, the man showed a constant and insuperable yearning to enclose himself inside a shell, to wrap himself up you might say in a way that would isolate him, protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in a state of constant alarm, and it may have been out of his timidity, his aversion to the present, that he always praised the past – and as it never was; the ancient languages he taught were in essence more galoshes and umbrellas in which he hid from the reality of life.
‘Oh how sonorous, how heartfelt is the Greek language,’ he’d say with a sweet expression, and as if in proof of his words he’d screw up his eyes and lifting his finger he’d articulate – ‘Anthropos.’
And Belikov tried to contain and control his very thoughts. For him the only comprehensible items in newspapers and circulars were those that forbid something. When some document circulated forbidding schoolchildren to go out in the street after nine in the evening or some item denounced carnal love, that was intelligible to him, definite; it was forbidden, basta! But any permission or authorization always concealed some dubious element, something shadowy and unspoken. When the city permitted a dramatic society or a reading room or a tea room he would rock his head back and forth and say softly, ‘Of course that’s so, and all very fine, but nothing can come of it.’
Any kind of disruption, evasion, digression from the rules led him into despondency, although it might seem to have nothing to do with him. If one of his comrades was late for a church service or if some schoolboy trick reached his ears, or if he saw a lady teacher with some officers late in the evening, he was very upset and told everyone – whatever might come of it. At the teachers’ councils, he oppressed us with his prudence, his mistrustfulness and his tidy all-encompassing judgments about the young people, the students, boys and girls – Look how they behave badly, making a lot of noise in class – and as if they didn’t understand the rules, oh as if it didn’t matter – and if Petrov was excluded from the second class and Yegorov from the fourth, it would be a very good thing. And then? What with his sighs, his whining, his dark eyes in his pale little face, you know, a little face like a weasel’s, he wore us down, and we gave in, reduced Petrov’s marks for behaviour and Yegorov’s, made them sit apart from the others, and in the end we took Petrov and Yegorov and suspended them both. He had a strange habit of coming into our apartments. He’d arrive at a teacher’s place and sit in silence, as if he was spying out something. He’d sit like that for a while in silence and the next minute he’d leave. He called it ‘encouraging good relations among his colleagues,’ and it was obviously hard for him to come in and sit there, and he came only because he considered it his duty as a colleague. We teachers were afraid of him. Even the principal was frightened. Just imagine our teachers, thoughtful people, profoundly decent, brought up on Turgenev and Shchedrin, and yet this man – going about in galoshes and with an umbrella – held the entire school in his grip for all of fifteen years. Did I say the school? The whole town. Our ladies didn’t arrange performances in their homes on the Sabbath; they were afraid he would hear about it, and in his presence the clergy were ashamed to eat meat and play cards. Under the influence of people like Belikov, over the last ten or fifteen years people in our town became afraid of everything. Afraid to speak aloud, to send letters, to visit, to read books, afraid to help the poor, to teach reading and writing . . .”
Ivan Ivanych, searching for something to say, coughed, gave a puff on his pipe, stared at the moon and only then said in a measured voice: “Yes, intellectuals, decent people, they read Shchedrin and Turgenev, and others read H.T. Buckle and so on, but look how they take orders and suffer . . . That’s just how it is.”
“Belikov lived in the same building as I did” – Burkin continued – “on the same floor, one door facing the other, and we often saw each other. I knew about his domestic life. At home it was the same story: dressing gown, nightcap, shutters, bolts, a whole list of all the prohibitions and restrictions – oh, just in case something might happen. Fasting food didn’t agree with him, but with animal flesh forbidden, lest it be said that Belikov didn’t observe the fasts, he ate pike in butter – not the usual fasting food, but you couldn’t say it was meat. He didn’t keep a servant girl out of fear for his reputation, but he kept a cook, Aphanasy, an old man of sixty, drunk and half-demented, who at one time had served as a military orderly, and who knew how to dish up this and that. This Aphanasy usually stood by the door crossing his arms and always muttering the same thing, with deep sighs.