We decided it was no longer possible for us to stay in this town, and that when I earned a little money, we would move somewhere else. In some houses people were already asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these houses, feared them, and spoke of the fanaticism, the coarseness of heart, the nonentity of these respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we frightened so much, and I asked how these stupid, cruel, lazy, dishonest people were better than the drunken and superstitious Kurilovka muzhiks, or how they were better than animals, which are also thrown into consternation when some incident disrupts the monotony of their instinct-bound lives. What would become of my sister now, if she went on living at home? What moral suffering would she experience, talking with father, meeting acquaintances every day? I pictured it to myself, and at once people came to my memory, all people of my acquaintance, who were slowly being pushed out of this world by their families and relations, I recalled tortured dogs driven insane, living sparrows plucked bare by little boys and thrown into the water—and the long, long series of obscure, protracted sufferings I had been observing in this town uninterruptedly since childhood; and it was incomprehensible to me what these sixty thousand inhabitants lived by, why they read the Gospel, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What benefit did they derive from all that had been written and said so far, if there was in them the same inner darkness and the same aversion to freedom as a hundred or three hundred years ago? A building contractor builds houses in town all his life, and yet till his dying day he says ‘‘galdary’’ instead of ‘‘gallery,’’ and so, too, these sixty thousand inhabitants for generations have been reading and hearing about truth, mercy, and freedom, and yet till their dying day they lie from morning to evening, torment each other, and as for freedom, they fear it and hate it like an enemy.
‘‘And so my fate is decided,’’ said my sister when we came home. ‘‘After what has happened, I can’t go back there. Lord, how good that is! I feel easy in my heart.’’
She went to bed at once. Tears glistened on her lashes, but her expression was happy, her sleep was sound and sweet, and you could see that she really did feel easy in her heart and that she was resting. She hadn’t slept like that for a long, long time!
And so we began to live together. She kept singing and saying that she felt very well, and the books we took from the library were returned unread because she could no longer read; all she wanted was to dream and talk about the future. Mending my linen or helping Karpovna at the stove, she either hummed to herself or talked about her Vladimir, about his intelligence, his beautiful manners, his kindness, about his extraordinary learning, and I agreed with her, though I no longer liked her doctor. She wanted to work, to live independently, to support herself, and said she would become a schoolteacher or a doctor’s assistant as soon as her health permitted, and would wash the floors and do the laundry herself. She already passionately loved her little boy; he wasn’t born yet, but she already knew what sort of eyes he would have, what sort of hands, and how he would laugh. She liked to talk about his upbringing, and since Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her reasoning about upbringing came down to the boy turning out as charming as his father. There was no end to this talk, and everything she said aroused a lively joy in her. Sometimes I, too, rejoiced, not knowing why myself.
She must have infected me with her dreaming. I also read nothing and only dreamed; in the evenings, despite my fatigue, I paced up and down the room, my hands thrust into my pockets, and talked about Masha.
‘‘When do you think she’ll come back?’’ I asked my sister. ‘‘I think she’ll come back by Christmas, not later. What does she have to do there?’’
‘‘Since she doesn’t write, she’ll obviously come back very soon.’’
‘‘That’s true,’’ I agreed, though I knew perfectly well that there was no need for Masha to come back to our town.
I missed her terribly, and couldn’t help deceiving myself, and tried to get others to deceive me. My sister waited for her doctor, I for Masha, and the two of us ceaselessly talked, laughed, and didn’t notice that we disturbed the sleep of Karpovna, who lay on her stove26 and kept muttering:
‘‘The samovar hummed in the morning, hum-m-m! Ah, it’s a bad sign, dear hearts, a bad sign.’’
Nobody called on us except the postman, who brought my sister letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who would occasionally come to our room in the evening, look silently at my sister, leave, and, when already in the kitchen, say:
‘‘Every title should remember its learning, and whoever doesn’t wish to understand that in his pride, it’s the vale for him.’’
He liked the word ‘‘vale.’’ Once—this was already at Christmastime—as I was going through the market, he invited me to his butcher shop and, without shaking hands with me, announced that he had to talk with me about a very important matter. He was red from the cold and from vodka; behind the counter next to him stood Nikolka with his robber’s face, holding a bloody knife in his hand.
‘‘I want to express my words to you,’’ Prokofy began. ‘‘This event cannot exist, because you understand yourself that for such a ‘vale’ people won’t praise either us or you. Mama, of course, out of pity cannot say an unpleasantness to you, that your sister should move to other quarters on account of her condition, but I don’t wish it anymore, because I cannot approve of her behavior.’’
I understood him and left the shop. The same day my sister and I moved to Radish’s. We had no money for a cab and went on foot; I carried a bundle of our belongings on my back, my sister had nothing to carry, but she choked, coughed, and kept asking how soon we’d get there.
XIX
AT LAST, A LETTER came from Masha.
‘‘My dear, good M.A.,’’ she wrote, ‘‘kind, meek ‘angel ours,’ as the old housepainter calls you, farewell, I’m going to the exposition in America27 with my father. In a few days I’ll be seeing the ocean—so far from Dubechnya, it’s frightening to think of it! It’s as far and boundless as the sky, and I long to be there, to be free, I’m triumphant, I’m mad, and you see how incoherent my letter is. My dear, my kind one, set me free, quickly break the thread that still holds us, binding me and you. That I met and knew you was a ray from heaven, lighting up my existence; but that I became your wife was a mistake, you understand that, and now the awareness of the mistake weighs on me, and I beg you on my knees, my magnanimous friend, quickly, quickly, before I go off to the ocean, to telegraph that you agree to correct our mutual mistake, to remove this one stone from my wings, and my father, who will take all the bother on himself, promises not to burden you too much with formalities. And so, freedom on all four sides? Yes?
‘‘Be happy, God bless you, forgive me, a sinner.
‘‘I’m alive, I’m well. I squander money, commit many follies, and thank God every moment that such a bad woman as I has no children. I sing and have success, but this isn’t a passion, it is my haven, my cell, where I now withdraw to have peace. King David had a ring with the inscription: ‘Everything passes.’ When one feels sad, these words make one merry, and when one is merry, they make one sad. And I’ve acquired such a ring for myself, with Hebrew lettering, and this charm will keep me from passions. Everything passes, life, too, will pass, therefore there’s no need for anything. Or there is need only for the awareness of freedom, because when a person is free, he needs nothing, nothing, nothing. So break the thread. I warmly embrace you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M.’’