“Absolutely right,” Burkin agreed.
“We decent Russian people entertain a partiality for these questions that remain without answers. Love is usually poeticized, adorned with roses, with nightingales, but we Russians adorn our loves with these fatal questions, and on top of that choose the most uninteresting of them. In Moscow, when I was still a student, I had a life companion, a nice lady, who, each time I held her in my arms, thought about how much money I’d allow her a month and what was the price of beef per pound. So we, when we love, never stop asking ourselves questions: Is this honorable or dishonorable, intelligent or stupid, what will this love lead to, and so on. Whether it’s a good thing or not, I don’t know, but that it’s disrupting, unsatisfying, annoying—that I do know.”
It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who live alone always have something in their hearts that they are eager to tell about. In town, bachelors purposely go to the public baths and to restaurants just in order to talk, and they sometimes tell very interesting stories to the bath attendants and waiters, while in the country they usually pour out their souls to their guests. Now in the window gray sky could be seen and trees wet with rain, and in such weather there was nothing left for us to do but tell and listen.
“I’ve been living in Sofyino and farming for a long time now,” Alekhin began, “ever since I finished university. By upbringing I’m an idler, by inclination an armchair philosopher, but when I came here, there was a big debt on the estate, and since my father had acquired that debt partly because he spent a lot on my education, I decided I wouldn’t leave and would work until I’d paid off the debt. I made that decision, and started working here not without a certain aversion, I must confess. The local soil yields little, and for the farming not to suffer losses, you have to employ the labor of serfs or hired hands, which is almost the same, or else do your farming as peasants do, that is, work the fields yourself, with your family. There’s no middle ground here. But I didn’t enter into such subtleties at the time. I didn’t leave a single scrap of land in peace, I rounded up all the peasants and their women from the neighboring villages, and the work here boiled furiously. I myself also plowed, sowed, mowed, and despite all that was bored and winced squeamishly, like a village cat that’s so hungry it eats cucumbers in the kitchen garden. My body was in pain, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I could easily reconcile this working life with my cultural habits; for that, I thought, I had only to observe a certain external order in my life. I settled upstairs, in the main rooms, and ordered coffee and liqueurs to be served after lunch and dinner, and at night, lying in bed, I read The Messenger of Europe.3 But our priest came once, Father Ivan, and at one go drank all my liqueurs; and The Messenger of Europe also went to the priest’s daughters, because in summer, especially during the mowing, I never managed to make it to my bed, and fell asleep in a shed, or the sledge, or in a forester’s hut somewhere—who can read there? I gradually moved downstairs, began to have dinner in the servants’ kitchen, and all that remained of the former luxury was this maid, who had served my father and whom it would have been painful for me to dismiss.
“In those first years here I was elected an honorary justice of the peace. Every now and then I had to go to town and take part in the meetings of the assembly and the circuit court, and that distracted me. When you live here without a break for two or three months, especially in winter, you finally begin to pine for a black frock coat. And in the circuit court there were frock coats, and uniforms, and tailcoats, all lawyers, people who had received a general education; you could talk with them. After sleeping in the sledge, after the servants’ kitchen, to sit in an armchair, in a clean shirt, in light shoes, with a chain on your chest—it was such luxury!
“In town they received me cordially, I eagerly made acquaintances. And of these acquaintances the most solid and, to tell the truth, the most agreeable for me was the acquaintance with Luganovich, the associate chairman of the circuit court. You both know him: the dearest person. It was just after the famous case of the arsonists; the trial had gone on for two days, we were exhausted. Luganovich looked at me and said:
“ ‘You know what? Come to my place for dinner.’
“That was unexpected, because I barely knew Luganovich, only officially, and had never once visited him. I stopped at my hotel room for a moment to change clothes, and went to dinner. And here the chance was presented to me of meeting Anna Alexeevna, Luganovich’s wife. She was very young then, no more than twenty-two, and six months earlier her first child had been born to her. It’s a thing of the past, and now I would have a hard time explaining what, in fact, was so extraordinary in her, what it was in her that I liked so much, but then, at dinner, it was all irrefutably clear to me. I saw a young woman, beautiful, kind, intelligent, charming, such as I had never met before. I immediately felt in her a close, already familiar being, as if I had already seen that face, those friendly, intelligent eyes sometime in my childhood, in the album of photographs that lay on my mother’s chest of drawers.
“In the case of the arsonists, the accused were four Jews, declared to be a gang, in my opinion quite groundlessly. At dinner I was very agitated, it was painful, and I no longer remember what I said, but Anna Alexeevna kept shaking her head and saying to her husband:
“ ‘Dmitri, how can it be?’
“Luganovich was a kindly man, one of those simplehearted people who firmly hold the opinion that, once a person winds up in court, it means he’s guilty, and that expressing doubts about the correctness of a sentence cannot be done otherwise than in the legal way, on paper, and never at dinner or in private conversation.
“ ‘You and I haven’t committed arson,’ he said gently, ‘so we’re not on trial, we’re not being sent to prison.’
“And both of them, husband and wife, tried to make me eat and drink more. From certain small details, for instance, from the way the two of them made coffee together, and the way they understood each other at half a word, I was able to conclude that they lived peacefully, happily, and were glad of their guest. After dinner they played piano four hands, then it grew dark and I went home. It was the beginning of spring. After that I spent the whole summer without leaving Sofyino, and had no time even to think about town, but the memory of the slender blond woman stayed with me all those days. I didn’t think about her, but it was as if her light shadow lay on my soul.
“In late autumn there was a charity performance in town. I went into the governor’s box (where I had been invited during the intermission), I look—there next to the governor’s wife is Anna Alexeevna, and again the same irresistible, striking impression of beauty and sweet, tender eyes, and the same feeling of closeness.
“We sat next to each other, then walked in the foyer.
“ ‘You’ve grown thinner,’ she said. ‘Have you been ill?’