He made no proposal, everything was put off, to the great disappointment of the headmistress and all our ladies; he weighed up all his future duties and responsibilities, and meanwhile almost every day he went for a stroll with Varenka – perhaps he thought it was required in this situation – and he came to my place to discuss his domestic life. In all likelihood he would in the end have made a proposal, and there would have occurred another of those unnecessary, foolish marriages which take place among us in thousands, out of tedium or for no reason at all, if suddenly there hadn’t occurred a kolosalische Scandal. It has to be said that Varenka’s brother, Kovalenko, had conceived a dislike for Belikov from the very first day of meeting him, and by now he couldn’t stand him.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said to us, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I don’t understand how you can stand this informer, this loathsome bug. Oh gentlemen, how can you all live like this? The atmosphere around you is suffocating, foul. Really, are you pedagogues, teachers? You’re servile. Yours is no temple of knowledge, but a worship of authority, and it stinks like a police cell. No, brothers, I’m here with you for a little while, then I’m off to the farm to catch crayfish, back where they laugh at learning. I’m going away, and you can stay here with your Judas, brooding on your sins.’
Or he’d laugh, laugh in a deep bass voice until tears came to his eyes and his voice grew thin and scratchy, and he’d ask me, his hands spread: ‘What’s he sit at my place for? What’s he need? Sitting and staring.’
He even gave Belikov a nickname, ‘the damned little spider.’ Obviously we avoided mentioning to him that his sister Varenka was keeping company with the ‘damned spider.’ When one day the headmistress dropped a hint that it would be a fine thing to settle his sister permanently with a man as sound and widely respected as Belikov, he frowned and muttered: ‘It’s not my business. Let her marry the viper. I don’t choose to interfere in what’s someone else’s affair.’
Now listen to what came next. Some mischief-maker drew a caricature: Belikov was walking in his galoshes with hitched-up trousers and an umbrella, his arm around Varenka; underneath was the inscription: ‘Anthropos in Love.’ His expression captured, you must understand, perfectly. The artist must have worked for days, since all the teachers of the boys’ school and the girls’ school, the teachers at the seminary, the school officials – all received a copy. Belikov received one too. The caricature had a very serious effect on him.
We were leaving our building together – it was on the very first day of May, a Sunday, and all of us, teachers and students, had arranged to meet at the school and afterwards go together on foot to a grove outside town. We were setting out, and he was looking quite green, his expression dark and clouded.
‘How unpleasant they are, angry people,’ he said, and his lips trembled.
He had become pitiable to me now. We’re walking along together, and then, just imagine, Kovalenko rides past on a bicycle, and behind him Varenka, also on a bicycle, red-faced, breathless, but happy and cheerful.
‘We’re on our way,’ she cries out. ‘Such lovely weather, so lovely that it’s simply scary.’
And they both passed out of sight. My Belikov had gone from green to white, as if frozen solid. He stopped and looked at me.
‘If you’ll permit me to ask, just what is all this?’ he said. ‘Or perhaps my eyes deceive me. Is it really decent for a teacher or a woman to go about on a bicycle?’
‘Just what isn’t decent about it?’ I said. ‘Let them ride around to their hearts’ content.’
‘No, how can you?’ he wailed, amazed at my tranquility. ‘What are you saying?’
He was so stricken that he didn’t want to go on any further and returned home.
The next day he couldn’t stop nervously rubbing his hands, and wincing, and one could see on his face that he was unhappy. He left work early for the first time in his life. And he didn’t eat dinner. During the evening he dressed himself very warmly, although outdoors it was still perfect summer weather, and he set out to Kovalenko’s. Varenka wasn’t home. Only her brother was there.
‘I humbly beg you to sit down,’ Kovalenko said coldly, a frown on his brow, his face sleepy. He’d been napping after dinner and was dozy and out of spirits.
Belikov sat in silence for ten minutes and then started to speak.
‘I came to see you in order to relieve my mind. This is very, very hard for me. Some vengeful person drew myself and another person of high rank in a ridiculous manner, and intimately close together – but I consider it my duty to put my trust in you, and I am not here about all that . . . I gave no sort of cause for this ridicule – just the opposite, as I have always conducted myself as an entirely decent man.’
Kovalenko sat quietly sulking. Belikov waited for a little while and continued softly in a mournful voice.
‘I have something else to say to you. I have been in the profession for a long time, but you are only just beginning your service, and I have been considering, as an older colleague, how to put you on your guard. You ride a bicycle, and this amusement is absolutely improper for a teacher of young people.’
‘And just why?’ asked Kovalenko in his deep voice.
‘But really, does this still need an explanation, Mikhail Savvich, isn’t it perfectly clear? If a teacher goes by bicycle, what about the students? The only thing left is to go upside down! Since yours is not a prescribed means of transport, it can’t be accepted. Yesterday I was horrified. When I observed your younger sister my eyes grew clouded. A woman or a girl on a bicycle – it’s terrible.’
‘Just what exactly is it you want?’
‘I would like just one thing – to put you on your guard, Mikhail Savvich. You’re a young man, you have your future in front of you. You must behave yourself very, very carefully, and you are so careless, oh how careless. You go out in an embroidered shirt, always out in the street with your books, and now there’s this bicycle. When the principal learns that you and your younger sister were riding bicycles, and when it reaches the trustee . . . what then?’
‘That I and my sister ride bicycles is nobody’s business,’ Kovalenko said and grew red in the face. ‘And anyone who goes about to interfere in my family and domestic affairs, well, he can go to the bitches of the devil.’
Belikov grew pale but did not move.
‘If you speak to me in such a tone, then I can’t go on,’ he said. ‘And I ask that you never express yourself in that way about your superiors in my presence. You ought to have due regard for authority.’
‘And what if I say that your authority is evil?’ Kovalenko asked, looking at him spitefully. ‘Please leave me in peace. I am an honest man, and I don’t wish to converse with such gentlemen as you. I don’t like tattletales.’
Belikov began to fidget nervously, then quickly began to dress himself, an expression of shock on his face. It was the first time in his life, you see, that he had heard such rude words.
‘You may say whatever you like,’ he said, starting out onto the stair landing. ‘I must only give you notice that it may be someone has heard us, and in order that our conversation not be misunderstood and something come of it, I will feel it necessary to make a report to our gentleman principal of the content of our conversation . . . the ‘devils’ in particular. I am bound to do so.’
‘Make a report? Then go and report.’