The next day Olga Mikhailovna feels very uncomfortable. First of all, around her husband, who doesn’t suspect a thing— oh well, that doesn’t matter—and secondly around Korobeinikov. It would be better if he didn’t come. It’s uncomfortable to look someone straight in the eye when we’ve treated him like crap for no reason and we can’t admit it. But, on the other hand, he’s been cleared. And now we don’t have to live with that awful feeling of having invited a bastard into the house. Dima behaved badly, of course. But he’s repented—and all on his own, too, no one twisted his arm. It takes guts to do that, whatever you say. That’s courage.
But Korobeinikov does come, of course. And he tries really hard. Why does he try so hard? It’s all over with! And Olga Mikhailovna puts up with him, soiled as he is, and she’s solicitous, emphatically solicitous, as she pours him tea and feeds him pound cake. “Everything they give you in the sanatorium is probably mush—isn’t it? At least here you can eat like a real person.” Korobeinikov is startled, he looks bewilderedly through his thick glasses. He doesn’t understand—what was all that about, last week? What’s going on now? There’s some kind of tension in the air. And does anyone like this tension? No one does. It’s hard to be with him, Korobeinikov. He’s already turned completely yellow. And it would be nice if he’d realize that, since the conflict is resolved and everything’s cleared up now, it would just be better if he didn’t come here anymore. Because it’s hard to be with him. And when he looks closely into their faces, trying to understand, that’s hard too. And there’s no point staring. As it turns out, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s been acquitted and now he can just leave.
Olga Mikhailovna looks at Korobeinikov with hatred. These nightly visits drive her crazy. And they drive everyone else in the house crazy, too. What—don’t we have the right to live like human beings? Among our own friends? Honestly, it would be better if he died. Yes, well, that’s what’ll probably happen soon. That’s no ulcer he’s got, oh no. It’s not an ulcer; see how lemony-looking he is, and he’s aged right before our very eyes. And another sign that the end is near is that insensitivity and tactlessness, that thickheaded stubbornness—when the sick person doesn’t care about proprieties anymore and just clings to life, to people, to whatever there is. Yes, as an honest person, she freely admits it to herself: she wishes he would die. There you have it. Everyone would rest easier.
The nights are cold: she goes out on the porch, offers Korobeinikov a jacket, knowing that he won’t take it; she waits while he lights the flashlight, steps down from the porch; she listens greedily to his feeble feet shuffling through the fallen leaves. She hopes that she’s right about the symptoms. Soon, very soon. It would be nice if it were before the end of the summer. She stands for a long time and watches the flashlight’s pale fire count the hospital-white birch trunks, watches the corridor of light close in, the darkness thicken, the heavenly flame sweep blindly by, searching out its victim.
MOST BELOVED
AT NIGHT spring blows through Leningrad. River wind, garden wind, and stone wind collide, whirl together in a powerful rush, and race through the empty troughs of the streets, shatter the glass of attic windows with a peal and lift the damp, limp sleeves of laundry drying between rafters; the winds fling themselves flat on the ground, soar up again, and take off, speeding the scents of granite and budding leaves out to the night sea where, on a distant ship under a fleet sea star, a sleepless traveler crossing the night will raise his head, inhale the arriving air, and think: land.
But by early summer the city begins to wear on the soul. In the pale evening you stand at the window above the emptying street and watch the arc lamps come on quietly—one moment they’re dead and silent, and then suddenly, like a sick, technological star, a rosy manganese point lights up, and it swells, spills, grows, and brightens until it shines full strength with a dead, lunar whiteness. Meanwhile, outside of town, the grasses have already quietly risen from the earth, and without a thought for us the trees rustle and the gardens change flowers. Somewhere out there are dusty white roads with tiny violets growing along their shoulders, the swish of summer stillness at the summit of century-old birches.
Somewhere out there our dacha is aging, collapsing on one side. The weight of February snows has crushed the roof, winter storms have toppled the double-horned chimney. The window frames are cracking and weakened diamonds of colored glass fall onto the ground, onto the brittle litter of two years’ flowers, onto the dry muddle of spent stems; they fall with a faint chime no one will hear. There’s no one to weed out the stinging nettle and goosefoot, sweep the pine needles from the rickety porch, no one to open the creaky, unpainted shutters.
There used to be Zhenechka for all this. Even now it seems she might be limping along the garden path, in her hand the first bouquet of dill, raised like a torch. Perhaps she actually is somewhere around here right now, only we can’t see her. But the cemetery is definitely not the right place for her—for anyone else in the world, yes, but not for her. After all, she meant to live forever, until the seas dry up. It never even crossed her mind that she could stop living, and, truth be told, we too were certain of her immortality—as we were of our own, for that matter.
Long, long ago, on the far side of dreams, childhood reigned on earth, the winds slept quietly beyond the distant, dark blue woods, and Zhenechka was alive…. And now, from the herbarium of bygone days which grows with every year—green and motley days, dull and brightly colored ones—memory fondly extracts one and the same pressed leaf: the first morning at the dacha.
On the first morning at the dacha, the damp glassed-in veranda still swims in green, underwater shadow. The front door is open wide, cold creeps in from the garden; the pails are in place, empty and resonant, ready for a run to the lake, to the smooth, blinding lake, where the reflected world fell upside down in the early hours of the morning. The old pail gurgles, a distant echo gurgles. You ladle the deep, cold silence, the stilled, smooth surface, and sit for a while on a fallen tree.
Cars will soon start honking outside the gates of the dachas, summer folk will pour out of the automobiles, and, sighing and moaning, a taxi-truck will turn around in the narrow, wooded dead end of the road, scraping on the low branches of maples, breaking off the fragile flowering elder. It will give a gasp of blue smoke and fall quiet. In the returning silence the only sound will be the thunder of the truck’s wood side-panels dropping, and on its high platform strangers’ belongings, crowned with an upturned Viennese chair, will be shamelessly revealed to the eye.
And one automobile will drive straight through the gates, and from the wide-flung door will emerge a firm, elderly hand gripping a walking stick, then a leg in a high-buttoned orthopedic shoe, then a small straw hat with a black ribbon, and finally smiling Zhenechka herself, who will straightaway cry out in a high voice: “Look at the lilacs!” and then, “My suitcases!” But the bored driver will already be standing with the canvas bags in both hands.