Marfa

Yakov Ivanov's wife of fifty-two years, who falls suddenly ill and dies early in the story. Habitually pale, timid, and unhappy in life -- she performs the household's daily labor in near-total silence, forbidden even tea by Yakov's frugality -- Marfa's face turns strangely joyful as she is dying, which Yakov reads, with a chill, as her relief at finally escaping him. On her deathbed she recalls a baby daughter the couple had and lost fifty years before, a memory Yakov cannot summon himself; her death, and his walk home from her funeral, triggers the story's central reckoning with the tenderness he never showed her.