"someone else in a very beautiful hand."
It is curious that when he arrives home one day and there is something about him suggesting that he has been dismissed from the police force, nobody bothers about it. On the contrary, the occasion seems festive, encouraging ideas of marriage.
Says Varvara, Grigori's wife and Anisim's stepmother:
'How is this, my goodness!' she said. 'The lad's in his twenty-eighth year, and he is still strolling about a bachelor. . . .' From the adjacent room her soft, even speech continued to sound like a series of sighs. She began whispering with her husband and Aksinia, and their faces, too, assumed a sly and mysterious expression as though they are conspirators. It was decided to marry Anisim."
Child Theme : This is the transition to the main character of the story, the girl Lipa (pronounced Leepa). She was the daughter of a working widow, charwoman, and helped her mother in her various chores. "She was pale, thin, and frail, with soft, delicate features, tanned from working in the open air; a shy, melancholy smile always hovered about her face, and there was a childlike look in her eyes, trustful and curious. She was young, still a child, her bosom still scarcely perceptible, but she could be married because she had reached the legal age [eighteen]. She really was beautiful, and the only thing that might be thought unattractive was her big masculine hands which hung idle now like two big claws."
Mask Six: This refers to Varvara, who though pleasant enough, is but a hollow shell of superficial kindness beneath which there is nothing.
Thus Grigori's whole family is a masquerade of deceit.
Now comes Lipa, and with Lipa a new theme starts —the theme of trust, childish trust.
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The second chapter ends with another glimpse of Anisim. Everything about him is false: there is something very wrong, and he conceals it not too well. "After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed. Anisim kept walking about the rooms at home whistling, or suddenly remembering something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly, silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth. He expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so soon, the week of St. Thomas [after Easter], nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on whistling through his teeth. And it was evident that he was only getting married because his father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was a country custom to marry off the son in order to have a woman to help in the house. When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether not as he had done on previous visits; he was unusually jaunty and said the wrong things."
In the third chapter observe Aksinia's green and yellow print dress for the wedding of Anisim and Lipa. Chekhov is going to describe her consistently in the terms of a reptile. (A kind of rattlesnake is found in eastern Russia called the yellow belly.)
"The dressmakers were making for Varvara a brown dress with black lace and glass beads on it, and for Aksinia a light green dress with a yellow front, and a train." Although these dressmakers are described as belonging to the Flagellant Sect, this did not mean much by 1900—it did not mean that the members actually whipped themselves—it was just one of the numerous sects in Russia, as there are numerous sects in this country. Grigori even practices a deception on the two poor girls: "When the dressmakers had finished their work Grigori paid them not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed, carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the open country they sat down on a hillock and cried."
"Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new togs from top to toe. He wore glistening rubbers, and instead of a tie a red metal cord with little balls hanging on it, and on his shoulders, loosely, its sleeves empty, hung a short overcoat, also new. After crossing himself sedately before the icon, he greeted his father and gave him ten silver rubles and ten half-rubles; to Varvara he gave as much, and to Aksinia twenty quarter-rubles. The chief charm of the present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched, were new and glittered in the sun." These were counterfeit coins. An allusion is made to Samorodov, Anisim's friend and co-faker, a dark little man with the beautiful handwriting in which Anisim's letters home were written. It becomes gradually clear that Samorodov is the mastermind in this counterfeiting business, but Anisim tries hard to puff himself up, boasting of his wonderful powers of observation and of his talents as a detective. As a detective, and a mystic, he knows, however, that "anybody can steal but there is no place to hide stolen goods." A streak of curious mysticism runs through this strange character.
You will enjoy the delightful description of the wedding preparations and then of Anisim's mood in church during the wedding is worth noting. "Here he was being married, he had to take a wife for the sake of doing the proper thing, but he was not thinking of that now, he had somehow forgotten his wedding completely. Tears dimmed his eyes so that he could not see the icons, he felt heavy at heart; he prayed and besought God that the misfortunes that threatened him, that were ready to burst upon him tomorrow, if not today, might somehow pass him by as storm-clouds in time of drought bypass a village without yielding one drop of rain. [He knew how good detectives were, being one himself.] And so many sins were heaped up in the past, so many sins, and getting out of it all was so beyond hope that it seemed incongruous even to ask forgiveness. But he did ask forgiveness, and even gave a loud sob, but no one took any notice of that, since they supposed he had had a drop too much."
For a moment the child theme appears: "There was the sound of a fretful childish wail. 'Take me away from here, mamma darling!' 'Quiet there!' cried the priest."
Then a new character is introduced; Yelizarov (nicknamed Crutch), a carpenter and contractor. He is a childish person, very gentle and naive, and a little cracked. He and Lipa are both on the same level of meekness, simplicity, and trust —and he and she are real human beings despite their not having the cunning of the evil characters in the tale. Crutch, who seems vaguely to be endowed with second sight, might be trying intuitively to avert the disaster which the wedding itself will result in: " 'Anisim and you, my child, love one another, lead a godly life, little children, and the Heavenly Mother will not abandon you. . . . Children, children, children,' he muttered rapidly. 'Aksinia my dear, Varvara darling, let's all live in peace and harmony, my dear little hatchets. . . .' " He calls people by the pet names of his pet tools.
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Mask Eight : Yet another mask, another deception, relates to the elder of the rural district and his clerk, "who had served together for fourteen years, and who had during all that time never signed a single document for anybody or let a single person out of the office without deceiving him or doing him harm. [They] were sitting now side by side, both fat and replete, and it seemed as though they were so steeped in injustice and falsehood that even the skin of their faces was of a peculiar, thievish kind." "Steeped in falsehood" — this is one of the two main notes of the whole story.
You will notice the various details of the wedding: poor Anisim brooding over his predicament, over the doom that is closing upon him; the peasant woman who shouts outside "You've sucked the blood out of us, you monsters; a plague on you!"; and the wonderful description of Aksinia: "Aksinia had naive gray eyes which rarely blinked, and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelike; all in green, with the yellow front of her bodice and the smile on her lips, she looked like a viper that peers out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by, stretching itself and lifting its head. The Khrymins were free in their behavior to her, and it was very noticeable that she had long been on intimate terms with the eldest of them. But her deaf husband saw nothing, he did not look at her; he sat with his legs crossed and ate nuts, cracking them with his teeth so loudly that it seemed he was shooting a pistol.