“Do whatever you like,” said Pyotr Dmitrich, gasping for breath, “only, for God’s sake, quickly bring a doctor or a midwife! Has Vassily gone? Send someone else. Send your husband!”
“I’m giving birth,” Olga Mikhailovna realized. “Varvara,” she moaned, “but he won’t be born alive.”
“It’s all right, it’s all right, ma’am…,” Varvara whispered. “God willing, he’ll be borned alive!” (That was how she said it.) “Borned alive.”
The next time Olga Mikhailovna recovered from pain, she no longer sobbed and thrashed, but only moaned. She could not keep from moaning even in the intervals when there was no pain. The candles were still burning, but morning light was already breaking through the blinds. It was probably about five o’clock in the morning. In the bedroom, at a round table, sat an unknown woman in a white apron and with a very modest physiognomy. By the way she was sitting, one could see that she had been there for a while. Olga Mikhailovna guessed that she was the midwife.
“Will it be over soon?” she asked, and in her voice she heard a sort of special, unfamiliar note, such as had never been there before. “I must be dying in childbirth,” she thought.
Pyotr Dmitrich, dressed for daytime, warily came into the bedroom and stood by the window, his back to his wife. He raised the blind and looked out the window.
“Heavy rain!” he said.
“What time is it?” Olga Mikhailovna asked, in order to hear the unfamiliar note in her voice again.
“A quarter to six,” the midwife answered.
“What if I really am dying?” Olga Mikhailovna thought, looking at her husband’s head and at the window panes, against which the rain was beating. “How will he live without me? With whom will he drink tea, have dinner, talk in the evening, sleep?”
And he looked small to her, orphaned; she felt sorry for him and wanted to say something nice, gentle, comforting. She remembered that in the spring he had intended to buy some hounds, and that she, considering hunting a cruel and dangerous pastime, had prevented him from doing it.
“Pyotr, buy yourself those hounds!” she moaned.
He lowered the blind and went to the bed, was about to say something, but just then Olga Mikhailovna felt pain and cried out in an indecent, rending voice.
The pain, the frequent cries and moans, stupefied her. She could hear, see, she sometimes spoke, but she understood little, and only knew that she was in pain, or was about to be in pain. It seemed to her that the name-day party was long, long past, not yesterday, but maybe a year ago, and that her new life of pain had lasted longer than her childhood, boarding school, studies, marriage, and would still go on for a long, long time, endlessly. She saw how the midwife was served tea, how she was invited to have lunch at noon, and then to have dinner; she saw how Pyotr Dmitrich got accustomed to coming in, standing by the window for a long time, then going out; saw how some unknown men, the maid, Varvara got accustomed to coming in…Varvara just repeated “borned alive,” and got angry when somebody closed the drawers. Olga Mikhailovna saw how the light changed in the room and in the windows: it would be twilight, then murky, like fog, then bright daylight, as it had been the day before at dinner, then twilight again…And each of these changes lasted a long time, like childhood, studies at boarding school, the institute…
In the evening two doctors—one bony, bald, with a broad red beard, the other with a Jewish face, swarthy and in cheap spectacles—performed some sort of surgery on Olga Mikhailovna. She remained totally indifferent to the fact that strange men were touching her body. She no longer had any shame, any will, and people could do whatever they wanted with her. If at that time someone had attacked her with a knife, or insulted Pyotr Dmitrich, or taken away her right to the little person, she would not have said a word.
During the operation she was given chloroform. When she woke up later, the pain still went on and was unbearable. It was night. And Olga Mikhailovna remembered that there had already been exactly such a night, with silence, with an icon lamp, with a midwife sitting motionless by her bed, with open drawers, with Pyotr Dmitrich standing by the window, but sometime very, very long ago…
V
“I didn’t die…,” thought Olga Mikhailovna, when she began to recognize her surroundings again and there was no longer any pain.
A bright summer day looked through the two wide-open windows of the bedroom; in the garden outside the windows, sparrows and magpies chattered without stopping for a second.
The drawers of the chest were now closed, her husband’s bed was made. The midwife, Varvara, and the maid were not in the bedroom; only Pyotr Dmitrich stood motionless at the window as before, looking out into the garden. No baby’s crying was heard, no one offered congratulations or rejoiced: evidently the little person had not been born alive.
“Pyotr!” Olga Mikhailovna called to her husband.
Pyotr Dmitrich turned to look. It must have been a very long time since the last guest had left and Olga Mikhailovna had insulted her husband, because Pyotr Dmitrich had grown noticeably haggard and thin.
“What is it?” he asked, going to the bed.
He looked aside, moved his lips, and gave a childishly helpless smile.
“Is it all over?” Olga Mikhailovna asked.
Pyotr Dmitrich wanted to reply, but his lips trembled, and his mouth twisted like an old man’s, like her toothless uncle Nikolai Nikolaich’s.
“Olya!” he said, wringing his hands, and big tears suddenly welled up in his eyes. “Olya! I don’t need any qualifications, or court sessions” (he sobbed) “…or special opinions, or guests, or your dowry…I don’t need anything! Why didn’t we take care of our baby? Ah, what’s there to talk about!”
He waved his hand and left the bedroom.
But for Olga Mikhailovna nothing mattered anymore. There was a fog in her head from the chloroform, her soul was empty…That dull indifference to life, which she had felt when the two doctors performed the operation, still had not left her.
1888
A BREAKDOWN
I
Mayer, a medical student, and Rybnikov, studying in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, went one evening to their friend, the law student Vassilyev, and invited him to go with them to S——v Lane. Vassilyev first protested for a long time, then got dressed and went with them.
He knew of fallen women only by hearsay and from books, and never once in his life had been in the houses where they lived. He knew that there were such immoral women, who, under the pressure of fatal circumstances—milieu, bad upbringing, poverty, and so on—were forced to sell their honor for money. They do not know pure love, have no children, no legal rights; their mothers and sisters lament over them like the dead, science treats them as evil, men speak familiarly to them. Yet, despite all that, they do not lose the image and likeness of God.1 They are all conscious of their sin and hope for salvation. They could employ the means leading to salvation on the most vast scale. It is true that society does not forgive people their past, but for God Saint Mary of Egypt is considered no lower than the other saints.2 Whenever Vassilyev happened to recognize a fallen woman in the street by her dress or manners, or saw one portrayed in a satirical magazine, he remembered a story he once read somewhere: a certain young man, pure and self-sacrificing, fell in love with a fallen woman and offered to make her his wife, and she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, poisoned herself.
Vassilyev lived in one of the lanes off Tverskoy Boulevard. When he and his friends left the house, it was about eleven o’clock. The first snow had fallen a little earlier, and everything in nature was under the sway of this young snow. The air smelled of snow, snow softly crunched underfoot, the ground, the roofs, the trees, the benches on the boulevards—everything was soft, white, young, and that made the houses look different than the day before, the lamps shone brighter, the air became more transparent, the clatter of the carriages was muffled, and a feeling that resembled this white, young, fluffy snow asked to enter one’s soul along with the fresh, light, frosty air.