“Maybe you have a toothache?”
In town maman and Volodya lived with Marya Petrovna, a gentlewoman who rented a big apartment and took in tenants. Maman rented two rooms: in the one with windows, where her bed stood and two paintings in gilt frames hung on the walls, she herself lived; and in the other, adjacent, small and dark, lived Volodya. Here stood the sofa he slept on, and there was no other furniture; the whole room was taken up by hampers full of clothes, hat boxes, and all sorts of junk that maman kept for some reason. Volodya did his homework in his mother’s room or the “common room”—so the large room was called where the tenants all gathered at dinnertime and in the evenings.
Returning home, he lay down on the sofa and covered himself with a blanket to calm his trembling. The hat boxes, hampers, and junk reminded him that he had no room of his own, no shelter where he could hide from maman, from her guests, and from the voices that were now coming from the common room; the satchel and books scattered in the corners reminded him of the examination he had not taken…For some reason, quite beside the point, he recalled Menton, where he had lived with his late father when he was seven years old; he remembered Biarritz and two little English girls he used to run with in the sand…He wanted to refresh his memory of the color of the sky and the ocean, the height of the waves, and his mood at that time, but he did not succeed; the little English girls flashed in his imagination as if alive, but all the rest became confused and dissolved in disorder…
“No, it’s cold here,” Volodya thought, got up, put on his overcoat, and went to the common room.
In the common room they were having tea. Three people were sitting by the samovar: maman; a music teacher, a little old lady in tortoiseshell pince-nez; and Avgustin Mikhailych, an elderly, very fat Frenchman, who worked at a perfume factory.
“I had no lunch today,” maman was saying. “We’ll have to send the maid for bread.”
“Douniache!” the Frenchman cried.
It turned out that the landlady had sent the maid somewhere.
“Oh, that signifies nothing,” the Frenchman said with a big smile. “I’ll go myself right now for bread. Oh, it’s nothing!”
He laid his strong, stinking cigar in a conspicuous place, put on his hat, and left. On his departure, maman started telling the music teacher how she had visited the Shumikhins and how well she had been received there.
“Lily Shumikhin is my relative…,” she said. “Her late husband, General Shumikhin, was my husband’s cousin. She herself was born Baroness Kolb…”
“Maman, that’s not true!” Volodya said irritably. “Why lie?”
He knew perfectly well that maman was telling the truth: there was not a single lying word in her story about General Shumikhin and the born Baroness Kolb, but nonetheless he still felt she was lying. The lie was felt in her manner of speaking, in the expression of her face, in her gaze, in everything.
“You’re lying!” Volodya repeated and pounded on the table so hard that all the china trembled and maman’s tea splashed out. “Why do you go telling about generals and baronesses? It’s all lies!”
The music teacher was taken aback and coughed into her handkerchief, making it look as if she was choking, and maman burst into tears.
“Where can I go?” thought Volodya.
He had already been outside; he was ashamed to go to his school friends. Again, beside the point, he remembered the two little English girls…He walked up and down the common room and went into Avgustin Mikhailych’s room. Here it smelled strongly of essential oils and glycerine soap. On the table, in the windows, and even on the chairs stood a multitude of bottles, little tumblers, and shot glasses with liquids of various colors. Volodya took a newspaper from the table, unfolded it, and read the title: Figaro. The newspaper had a strong and pleasant smell. Then he took a revolver from the table…
“Enough now, don’t pay any attention!” The music teacher was comforting maman in the next room. “He’s still so young! At his age men always allow themselves excesses. You must reconcile yourself to that.”
“No, Evgenia Andreevna, he’s too spoiled!” maman said in a singsong voice. “There’s no older man over him, and I’m weak and can’t do anything. No, I’m unhappy!”
Volodya put the muzzle of the revolver into his mouth, felt something like a trigger or catch, and pressed it with his finger…Then he felt some other sort of protuberance and pushed that as well. Taking the muzzle out of his mouth, he wiped it on the skirt of his overcoat and studied the lock; never before in his life had he held a weapon in his hands…
“Seems it should be raised…,” he figured. “Yes, it seems so…”
Avgustin Mikhailych came into the common room and laughingly began telling about something. Volodya again put the muzzle into his mouth, clenched it with his teeth, and pressed something with his finger. A shot rang out…Something struck Volodya in the back of the head with terrible force, and he fell onto the table, face down on the glasses and bottles. Then he saw his late father, in a top hat with a wide black band, dressed in mourning for some lady in Menton, suddenly embrace him with both arms, and they both fell into a very dark, deep abyss.
Then everything became confused and disappeared…
1887
LUCK
To Y. P. Polonsky1
BY THE WIDE STEPPE ROAD known as the highway a herd of sheep was spending the night. It was watched over by two shepherds. One, an old man of around eighty, toothless, with a quivering face, was lying on his stomach just by the road, resting his elbows on the dusty leaves of a plantain; the other, a young fellow with bushy black eyebrows and no moustache, dressed in the burlap from which cheap sacks are made, lay on his back, his hands behind his head, looking up into the sky, where, just over his face, the Milky Way stretched and stars were drowsing.
The shepherds were not alone. Some two yards from them, in the darkness that covered the road, loomed the dark outline of a saddled horse, and beside it, leaning against the saddle, stood a man in high boots and a short jacket, by all appearances a landlord’s overseer. Judging by his erect and motionless figure, his manners, his treatment of the shepherds, the horse, he was a serious, reasonable man and knew his own worth; even in the darkness traces of military bearing were discernible in him and that grandly condescending expression which is acquired from frequent dealing with masters and stewards.
The sheep were sleeping. Against the gray background of the dawn, which was already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of those that were not asleep could be seen; they stood with their heads lowered, thinking about something. Their thoughts, long, drawn-out, evoked only by impressions of the wide steppe and the sky, of days and nights, probably astonished and oppressed them to the point of stupefaction, and, standing now as if rooted to the spot, they noticed neither the stranger’s presence nor the restlessness of the dogs.
In the sleepy, static air hung a monotonous noise, without which there could be no summer steppe night; grasshoppers chirred incessantly, quails sang, and a half mile or so from the herd, in a ravine, where a brook flowed and pussywillows grew, young nightingales whistled languidly.
The overseer had stopped to ask the shepherds for fire to light his pipe. He silently lit up, smoked the whole pipe, then, without saying a word, leaned his elbow against the saddle and fell to thinking. The young shepherd paid no attention to him; he went on lying there and looking at the sky, but the old man studied the overseer for a long time and then asked: