Years passed, he was sent to another province, past forty by now, and he still read those advertisements in the newspapers and went on saving. Then I heard he got married. For one simple reason, to buy his country place with the gooseberries, he married an old and unattractive widow with no family, and only because she came with a bit of money. He lived on the cheap with her too, kept her hungry, and her money was put in the bank in his name. Before this, she had lived with the postmaster and with him was accustomed to pies and brandies, but with her second husband she didn’t see even black bread in any abundance; as a result of that kind of life she began to waste away; she endured three years then gave up her soul to God. And of course my brother didn’t think for a moment that he was to blame for her death. Money’s like vodka, it can make a man strange. Among us in the city a merchant died. Just before his death he demanded a plate of honey and ate all his cash and his lottery tickets along with the honey, so nobody could get at them. Sometimes I examine cattle at the railway station, and one time a young gentleman fell under a locomotive, and it cut off his leg. We took him into the waiting room, blood flying around – a terrible thing, and there he is, frantic, asking if they’ve found his leg; in the boot on the leg that’s been cut off is twenty roubles and he doesn’t want them to be lost.”
“But that’s from another opera,” Burkin said.
“After the death of his wife,” Ivan Ivanych continued after a moment’s thought, “my brother began to look around for an estate. Of course even if you search for five years, in the end you can still get it wrong, and buy something that’s not at all what you dreamed of. Through a broker and with a mortgage transfer my brother Nikolai bought a hundred and twenty tenths, with a gentleman’s house, servants’ quarters, a park, but neither an orchard nor gooseberries, nor a pond with ducks; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour of coffee because on one side of the property was a brickworks, and on the other a glue factory. But my Nikolai Ivanych didn’t gripe; he ordered himself twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them and settled in as lord of the manor.
The next year I went to see him. Travel there, think, observe how things are going on. In his letters my brother called his estate The Chumbaroklov Wasteland, now Himalaiskoe. I arrived at this now Himalaiskoe after noon. It was hot. Everywhere ditches, fences, hedges, barriers, tool handles, rows of fir trees – and I can’t figure out how to get into the yard or where to tie my horse. I walk toward the house, and there to meet me is a red-coloured dog, fat and looking like a pig. He wants to bark, but he’s too lazy. Out of the house came the cook, bare-legged, fat, also looking like a pig, and she said that the gentleman was taking a nap after lunch. I go in to my brother, he’s sitting in bed, his knees covered with a blanket; he’s aged, got fat, flabby, his cheeks, nose and lips bulging – looks as if he’ll give a grunt under the blanket.
We embraced and shed a few tears, out of gladness and the sad thought that once we were young and now were both grey-haired and soon enough to die. He dressed and took me out to show me his estate.
Well, and how is life going for you here?’ I asked.
‘Not bad at all. I swear to God I live happily.’
This was no longer the poor timid devil of a functionary, but the present-day landowner, a gentleman. He’d already made himself at home here, settled in and starting to enjoy it all; he ate a lot, soaped himself in the bathhouse, put on weight, had gone to law against the community and both factories, and he took great offense when the peasants didn’t call him ‘Your Excellency.’ He dealt with spiritual matters firmly, in the grand manner, and he performed his acts of charity, not simply but with a flourish. What acts of charity? He treated the peasants for every illness with soda and castor oil, and on the afternoon of his name day he offered public prayers in the middle of the village and afterwards he set out a gallon of vodka as he thought he should. Oh those terrible gallons of vodka! Today a fat landowner drags the peasants to an assembly to account for the crop damage by their cattle, and tomorrow, on a festival day, he stands them a full gallon, and they drink and shout ‘Hurray,’ and drunk, they bow at his feet. A change for the better in his life, a full stomach and idleness, create a self-importance in a Russian, a towering insolence. Nikolai Ivanych, a clerk in the finance department afraid even to see with his own eyes, now spoke only truisms in the tone of a cabinet minister: ‘Education is necessary, but for the people it is premature,’ ‘Corporal punishment is harmful in general, but in some cases it is wholesome and indispensible.’
‘I know the people and am able to deal with them,’ he said. ‘The people love me. I have only to wave a finger, and the people will do anything I wish.’
And all this, of course, is said with a wise, kindly smile. He repeated twenty times, ‘we of the gentry,’ ‘I as a gentleman’: obviously he didn’t remember that our grandfather was a peasant and our father only a soldier. Even our family name, Chimsha-Himalaiski, absurd as it is, seemed to him sonorous, distinguished and very pleasing.
But what I have to say is not about him, but about me. I want to tell you the change that took place in me during those few hours when I was at his country estate. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a whole plate of gooseberries. These were not bought but home grown, the first gathered since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanych laughed, then for a moment he stared silently at the gooseberries, tears in his eyes – he couldn’t speak for emotion – then he placed one berry in his mouth, gazed at me with the solemnity of a child who has at last received a toy he’s set his heart on, and he said: ‘How delicious!’
And he ate it greedily and said over again:
‘Oh how delicious. You try one.’
It was hard and sour, but as Pushkin said, ‘Deception that exalts is dearer than thousands of truths.’ I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had come true, who had achieved his goal in life, received what he wished for, who was contented with his country estate, with what he had become. To me, for some reason, the idea of human happiness is always tinged with melancholy, and right now at the sight of a happy man I was oppressed, felt something like despair. As usual I was depressed in the night. They made up a bed for me in a room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he didn’t sleep, how he got up and went to the plate of gooseberries and took some. I pondered it, how many people are by and large happy and contented. What an overpowering force that is! Take a look at our life: the insolence, effrontery and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and animal squalor of the weak – all around uncontrolled poverty, narrowness, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies . . . Meanwhile in every home and on the streets, peace, tranquility; out of fifty thousand living in the city not one to cry out, grow loud and indignant. We see them shop for groceries, eat by day, sleep at night, talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their deceased to the churchyard; but we don’t see and don’t hear what they suffer, the terrible things that take place behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful, calm, and only certain mute statistics protest: how many lose their minds, how many drink by the gallon, how many children die of hunger . . . The order of things is what it must be; it’s obvious that the happy man feels good only because the unhappy carry their burden in silence, and without this silence happiness would be impossible. We’re in a hypnotic trance. What do we need? Someone to stand with a little hammer at the door of every satisfied, happy man, the tapping a constant reminder that the unhappy exist, that though he may be happy, life will sooner or later show him its claws, misfortune befall him – sickness, poverty, loss, and no one will see or hear, as now he doesn’t see or hear the others. But there is no man with a little hammer; the happy man lives for himself with only small worldly anxieties to disturb him a little, like wind in the aspens – and all goes well.